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Originally Posted by Ed Hansberry
It is interesting to me that as time marches on, the Microsoft way of doing mobile devices, once ridiculed and shunned in the late 90's and even for the first few years of 2000 is proving to be the best way to manage a true mobile platform. If you give each licensee enough wiggle room to do much more than surface customization, you run into the API nightmare that PalmOS has fostered for the last few years where developers are getting sick and tired of guessing and rewriting code for each new device and users have had it with buying a new device and finding out that their favorite software doesn't work right on it. Contrast that to Windows Mobile where it is the norm that once an app works on a given OS, say Windows Mobile 2003SE, it is a very safe bet it will work on all WM2003SE devices.
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I agree 100%, and yet, Mike Mace - Chief Competitive Officer (is that even a legitimate title? :bangin: ) for PalmSource has this to say about standardized apps:
>> Do you believe the Palm OS is at a disadvantage from a license's point of view that does not ship with built-in standardized applications compared to MSFT Mobile's OS which does ship with MSFT applications to allow the manipulation of MSFT files?
Most of the licensee requests we're getting are for more phone-related apps being a standard part of the OS, and we're working on it. Beyond that, most of our licensees are glad that we give them flexibility in the software they choose to bundle. It's one of the reasons they do business with us.
This was quoted in a recent Q&A Mace did at the allaboutpalm message boards:
http://www.allaboutpalm.com/forum/sh...4&page=2&pp=10
It seems PalmSource still doesn't really understand all the problems caused by non-standardization, or even worse, doesn't care. This would seem to explain at least part of the reason they are losing market share. They have an extremely difficult time understanding and delivering what their customers want. It's almost as if they think they still own 80% of the market and can tell customers what they need. Very frustrating for those of us who want real choices in our handhelds!