New York Times interviews Palm CEO

[Colin Dunstan]

New York Times scored an extended interview (reg req.) with Palm CEO Ed Colligan. The highlights:

• Ed doesn't believe BlackBerry service will be discontinued
• Though he believes RIM-NTP battle could benefit his company to grab more market share
• Palm's competitive advantage over RIM is the wide range of available applications
• Ed confuses "open platforms" with "well-supported industry standard platforms"
• He avoids to directly answer whether his company has looked into open-source
• He implies that the current status quo of mobile open-source suffers from bad user experience
• Apple iPod is a competitor in the sense that people often weigh their purchases of handhelds against MP3 players
• Music applications won't necessarily converge with phone and organizers
• Phone-capable handhelds is a bigger growth area than dedicated organizers
• "When you see our next-gen product, it has a high-speed radio in it, literally bringing kind of broadband connection speeds to the device. It totally changes the dynamic of how accessible the Internet is as an information access point wherever you are and whenever you want to get access to it."

[Bob Russell]

Quite interesting to hear the tone and perspective of his comments. I'm a fan of Colligan's and I think he's doing a great job with Palm and some tricky maneuvering with the inclusion of Windows Mobile. What everyone wants to know, of course, is whether his support of PalmOS is temporary PR out of necessity due to existing product lines, or whether he is going to do his best to be a bit PalmOS proponent and customer even through the shift to Linux. I wouldn't expect him to blindly lead the company into PalmOS for Linux even if Access makes it difficult for Palm, or even if PalmOS for Linux ends up with difficulties. But I do hope very much that he hasn't already decided to abandon PalmOS in the future Palm Inc roadmap even if it could be profitable for Palm.

My expectation is that Ed is a PalmOS supporter as far as he can be while not hurting Palm Inc as a business. That is surely all we can expect from him, even if we're big Palm fans. And it doesn't hurt that the company is full of PalmOS diehards, including people like Jeff Hawkins. I can't imagine that they would want to say goodbye to PalmOS unless absolutely necessary, or unless they have something new and better up their sleeves.

But one comment was a bit disappointing to me..."So when you get a Microsoft-based Treo, it’s going to have a whole Palm kind of shell around it, the way you navigate, with the benefits of that underlying Microsoft platform -- compatibility on Word and Excel and Internet Explorer and other things like that that are critical to the Microsoft environment."

Isn't that perpetuating the same fallacy against PalmOS? I.e. "Win Mobile is better than PalmOS partly because it is more compatible with desktop Windows and MS Office." But the DocsToGo app that ships with PalmOS devices is clearly a better solution than the built-in Win Mobile apps that come with Win Mobile devices, and are actually more compatible. His statement, I suppose, is technically true in the sense that the OS compatibility (of Office apps as opposed to add-in apps), the nearness of development teams to Windows development teams (in the same company), and the inclusion of Pocket IE, would sort of seem to give MS the edge in terms of strict OS compatibility.

But in terms of the user experience including differentiation by add-on software (which he is always very careful to focus on rather than a simple OS platform), then I think you could argue that PalmOS is actually more compatible with MS Office (and outlook), which is what people usually mean when they talk about desktop compatibility. It concerns me that Ed was making that statement because if he was intending to keep PalmOS strong, I don't think that is the sort of thing he would play up. It would seem to hurt PalmOS at the expense of misleading claims for Win Mobile. On the other hand, giving Ed the benefit of the doubt, it could also simply be that it's a great sound-bite that plays to the mentality of the potential customers and corporate decision makers that he is trying to appeal to. I guess it makes sense to play that up if it can drive (naive) customers to Palm.

I guess we'll know for sure once we hear what Access' direction for PalmOS will be. Even the soon-to-come new name for PalmOS may be a big clue. And when PalmOS for Linux is available, we'll really see what kind of commitment Palm has to PalmOS. But don't forget that there is that new third line of business coming up. Maybe they will feel that resources are better spent there than supporting PalmOS devices and being dependent on Access?

But my money is on the fact that Ed is going to take PalmOS as far as he can. I think he wants to make it work for his company along with Win Mobile. Remember, Palm was one of the companies rumored to have bid for purchasing PalmSource.

And as long as Access can provide what Palm needs, Palm fans will stay happy. But make it a hazardous business approach, and he'd be a fool to continue on. (E.g. by late delivery, bad product, bad contract terms, lack of commitment to future products, bad competitive position due to future Access plans, lack of full support for existing PalmOS software or the full platform, etc et.)

It's just hard to wait so long for clues, so all we have are guesses based on impressions of the wording of comments from people like Ed Colligan!

[Antoine of MMM]

Q. What’s the next killer application in handhelds?

A. Well, I think the Web has not been exploited to the level that it’s going to be on these devices. When you see our next-gen product, it has a high-speed radio in it, literally bringing kind of broadband connection speeds to the device. It totally changes the dynamic of how accessible the Internet is as an information access point wherever you are and whenever you want to get access to it.

Everything from looking up the meaning of words, booking a table at OpenTable.com, to doing a Google search on my family history in Ireland as I’m driving through the Irish coast when we’re opening our center over there. It is going to become so much more accessible as the performance of those networks continues to improve that a whole new set of applications are going to be delivered via that. I believe you will suddenly see some of the promise — like not only information access, but commerce, and other functionalities — that had been promised a while back relative to cell phones finally come to fruition.

I like the new device already. But I have to say that if the browser aint up to snuff and the resolution is less than VGA, this item will have a hard time.