CNet's five reasons for Palm's slide

[Colin Dunstan]

CNET News is pointing out five reasons why Palm has fallen from grace as the market leader for handhelds:

• Palm executives were slow to see the convergence of cellular phones and personal digital assistants.
• Palm has had a hard time making its corporate customers happy.
• The separation of Palm's hardware and software units failed to boost Palm's prospects.
• Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky took their knack for innovation with them when they left in 1998 to start Handspring.
• Palm had a costly product-planning snafu that stalled its fast-growing sales.

Related: How Microsoft and Palm Got Together Over Software (NYT) (thanks to PalmAddict for the link)

[Pride Of Lions]

It sounds about right. I don't know about the unhappy corporate customers or the costly product-planning snafu, but the rest of it seems true.

The Palm exec's who stayed/replaced Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky dropped the ball. And I never understood the seperation of the Palm companies until being asked to by the SEC (or something). It seemed like it was a move to placate licensees who ended up leaving the OS anyway. The Palm companies could've saved a lot of money, time and energy trying to keep the company and the OS together to weather the flight of the licensees.

It's a company in dire straits now and I wouldn't be surprised to see them disappear from the PDA landscape at some point in the near future.

[Laurens]

CNET article is here.

[johnsoax]

"Nobody buys traditional handhelds anymore," said Sam Bhavnani, an analyst at research firm Current Analysis. "The entire market underwent a paradigm shift. The mass adoption of cell phones eliminated the need for basic PIM (personal information management) functionality from a Palm Pilot."

Any Analyst that uses the term Palm Pilot has no idea of anything in the market. Plus the fact that he is WRONG. How many Dell Axim x50's have been sold? Tons of them. In other words, I think the CNET article is a load of bunk.

I hate analysts

[derekweb]

Originally Posted by Colin Dunstan

CNET News is pointing out five reasons why Palm has fallen from grace as the market leader for handhelds:

• Palm executives were slow to see the convergence of cellular phones and personal digital assistants.
• Palm has had a hard time making its corporate customers happy.
• The separation of Palm's hardware and software units failed to boost Palm's prospects.
• Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky took their knack for innovation with them when they left in 1998 to start Handspring.
• Palm had a costly product-planning snafu that stalled its fast-growing sales.

Related: How Microsoft and Palm Got Together Over Software (NYT) (thanks to PalmAddict for the link)

If Palm Executives were slow to see the convergence of the Mobile Phone and PDA, (Handspring got it moving with the initial Treo), they were quicker on the uptake in purchasing Handspring to fill out their product line. They were STILL ahead of *any* Windows Mobile OS on handsets. Further, the OS on the Treo is the same OS on the Palm T3 in general, so it *runs* the same applications without needing yet another recompile by developers. Can't say the same for the Windows Mobile camp.

Can't make a customer happy when they're clueless to technology and don't know what they want. Most IT departments didn't want the headache of supporting a handheld device and tried to "outlaw" them from attaching to work computers.

Jeff and Donna were great innovators. 'Nuff said.

Product snafu's hit everyone. What hurt Palm more was the split. I thought it was a silly idea then, and it's borne out worse fruit than I thought it would. It's depressing.

To think that I'll soon be stuck in a world of ONLY Microsoft powered PDAs is sickening. That Palm has pooched up their great ideas with the T5 and LifeDrive leaves me in despair. Their next product can save them, or doom them. It's up to them (Palm), however.

Almost time to ante up. I hope Palm can stick it out.