palmOne Back to Palm Inc

Now, that I know it is Palm, I am in big time. I am going out today and buying one of each.....No, I'm headed to the Palm website right now to buy a Palm 31, 21, 72, TE2, T5 AND a brand new Palm LifeDrive.

I am so relieved. I now know what to buy.

Wow... so the world stops at Europe now? How international of you... ... short-sighted americans.

JLM.

... like giving PalmSource that $30m they needed to survive?

Oh my God.

This can only mean one thing: the next LifeDrive will have a hard DISCO in it!

And can it be? -- yes, the newest handheld is code-named Nixon!

Remember though that the WinMob division has been reorganised several times in the last few years (change of management, new marketing spin, etc). How much longer before the beancounters at M$ get tired of that illusion and consign WinMob to its grave?

M$ is a business. They did not get to where they are by throwing moneys at loss-making ventures. The WinMob division has been bleeding money for many years. Even with the cut-backs to head count (and the delays in the timetable for release of WinMob 5.0), they did not manage to break even last year.

If 'winning' means working for years and years without ever making a profit (as is the case with the WinMob division), then I'm a monkey's uncle.

WinCE/PPC/WinMob/whatever has been struggling since its inception. It has been bleeding money from day 1. It has been restructured again and again, but the read ink still flows.

The latest spin from the restructured WinMob division is to focus on smartphones. But all the devices produced by the OEMs to date have been underwhelming (to say the least).

The latest 'great white hope' is the HP 6550 - but reviews of pre-production models have not been good. I have no idea what the carriers think of it, but Sprint (for one) will likely be very cautious given the problems they had with earlier HP models.

Will HP proceed to launch this model given their own financial problems? Probably (I guess), but they may not be able to throw enough money at on-going R&D for this unit - enough, that is, to get it right.

There is, of course, the rumour about Motorola's RAZR-type model. Whether this ever goes beyong the drawing board is open to doubt, particularly given Moto's chequered history of announcing a new unit and not following through with it.

This is all against the background of RIM's improving performance. They seem to be going from strength to strength. While they are a niche player, their little niche is doing very well. (Eg, over the last six months, the geeks in our IT department have been dumping their cell phones / palmpilots and adopting Blackberry's instead.) The Blackberry is (in so many ways) a crude device, but it has struck a chord with customers. RIM are slowly strangling the handheld computer market (and the smartphone sub-set of that market).

Anyway, the bottom line is this: Forget all the nice video presentations, power-point slides and press releases which are conjured-up by the marketing department as part of the launch of a new product. If the product losses money it WILL be terminated - terminated, with extreme prejudice, and regardless of how many upward-sloping charts marketing can dream up. It would be naive to believe otherwise.

Company X is already running Microsoft Exchange Server http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/default.mspx along with a dozen other Microsoft apps.

Suddenly, along comes Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2) featuring the functional equivalent of "push" email, remote device deletion, etc.

Company X decides to give mobile email service to its employees.

Which will it choose?

a) Microsoft Exchange-ready Windows Mobile phones
b) Proprietary RIM hardware + software (expensive and potentially difficult to scale up to support large companies)
c) PalmOS phones with Good's or a few other companies' cobbled-together packages
d) Gamble and roll their own solution with any combination of phones + commercial software (ChatterEmail, SnapperMail, VersaMail, etc., etc.) hoping no tech support nightmares will ensue.

Most people will pick "a". A smash hit with a design like the HTC-Universal could rapidly catalyze the adoption of the Microsoft platform.

Feel free to bet against Microsoft ultimately winning this one. No doubt sue-happy RIM (AKA "Lawsuits In Motion") and Palm are already preparing their "We got our a$$es kicked by Microsoft so we're demanding compensation for our inability to compete" lawsuit.

Can't wait. Yawn.

------------------------
Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.
------------------------

The Palm Economy = Communism™
The Great Palm Swindle: http://www.palminfocenter.com/comment_view.asp?ID=7864#108038

Nothing could make less sense than the bottom line on both statements.

1. MS kept changing the name of their product when it was not getting anywhere. Now, that it has cut off Palm, I expect it to stop trying to sound like a Palm competitor. On the other hand, as you point out, RIM IS getting somewhere and may become MS's next target.

2. MS couldn't care less about losing money or about innovating in any area except its cash cow. The desktop OS. MS has never, ever produced a successful, innovative product. From mice, to mounded keyboards, from word processors, to browsers. The words innovative and successful are not in their vocabulary. Even that cash cow desktop OS was a copy of CPM, later Apple, and now Unix. No innovation, none of the time. The only reason MS is in the mobile OS area at all is because people were offered the Palm/US Robotics Aubry and MS was afraid customers might use it to get to the WWW instead of a WinTel system. They are now on to the phone OS deal for the same reason. If people got all their information processing work done on a Nokia/Symbian model, they might stop putting up with all the grief they get from their desktop/laptop.

Nope, sorry, Palm changing names on the way down in its one and only market vs. MS changing names to go up in a market it may no longer need anyway are not the same things at all.

Dear Whiners, the recently announced restructuring/lay-offs mean that HP is now dead-in-the-water. (And judging by the performance of HP's CEO while he was at NCR, these lay-offs will be the first of a series.) WinMob has effectively lost its largest licensee. How are you going to explain that away?

Ouch! That one stung all the way over here, and I was not even on Svrontis' side of the point.