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Originally Posted by lapchinj
With Palm I get the impression that they're just rolling along on their installed base. But one moment they were in front and the next they're behind. The peculiar thing about this is that they keep saying that they're doing it the right way and the way MS is doing it is all wrong. We see that there's nice hardware (Treo, Tungston etc.) and software apps for the palm so the only thing that people must dislike has to be the OS or rather the core OS behavior. To fix up the Palm OS wouldn't be easy or cheap but if they don't fix up the OS I'll be able to tell my grandchildren about the time "I also had one of those Palm's" while we go strolling through the Smithsonian. Or how about the 25cent gallon of gas my father used to tell me about. Or the horse that .........
Jeff-
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You've got it.
Its called the Tyrany of the installed base and its killed more than a few companies/products. (Word Perfect, Lotus, Ashton-tate come to mind...)
(It is also what the article that started it all was alluding to.)
Palm's problem is that they failed to obsolete their product before somebody else did it to them.
From 1995 to 2002 they did virtually nothing to update the platform and instead chose to milk the (large) customer base for all it was worth.
Try this:
- First color PDA? Not Palm
- first arm-based PDA? Not Palm
- first expandable PDA? Not Palm
- First stereo PDA? Not Palm
- first multimedia PDA? Not Palm
- first wi-fi PDA? Not Palm
Whether it be Casio, Compaq, HP, Toshiba, or whoever, Palm hardware has been lagging somebody in the market for over 5 years. And the Palm followers pooh-pooh'ed because Palm had the dominant market share.
Well, any serious analyst can tell you,nobody that lags their competitors that consistently, that long, endures.
All that the large early share and customer devotion did was mask the underlying flaws of the architecture and the product until it was too late.
The way Palm made the Pilot a success was by building it on trailing-edge, dirt cheap technology (1970's-vintage cpu, minimal ram, etc) and tailoring the software to what the hardware allowed (graffitti instead of handwriting recognition, no file system, single threading software environment, tiny apps, no real os). Which is to say, they optimized for the original hardware.
The nature of such optimization is that it is not easily undone.
Palm has been paying for that optimization to this day.
The dirty secret of Palm OS is that the application environment is not an OS at all but an emulator for the old 68k environment.
The Palm platform desperately needs to evolve on the software side; it needs modern APIs that map to modern hardware directly, not through a kludged-up emulator of an architecture that was tired when it was new. Yet it can't because it can't (or won't) let go of the boat anchor of dragonball compatibility.
WinCE doesn't have that problem because Microsoft has slowly migrated the customers and developers from the original CE implementation to the most recent one by gradually obsoleting its own product, bit by bit. Every release breaks a few apps. Every release is incompatible with *some* older hardware. But Never so much that the users or developers go away. The platform stays fresh, the platform evolves, and Microsoft never waits for its enemies to obsolete its product.
On the desktop, MS has shephered its customer base from DOS to Windows 3.x to Win9x to Win2000/xp. That is three generational shifts, all successful.
Palm, on the other hand, is still struggling to complete the transition from single-tasking 68k cpus to multitasking ARM, and has in the process lost the edge in market share it once had so that it now lags in hardware, software, and sales rate.
It still has the loyalty of its existing customers but it is not gaining new ones fast enough to keep up with the competition.
If this keeps up, they will face even bigger problems...
And, like many pepole facing serious real-world problems, the first step is admitting they have a problem.
Proclaiming the superiority of Palm in the face of its past and present failures to adapt does nothing to help PALM and a lot to help its enemies.
So guys, keep whistling past the graveyard if you want to, but that light at the end of the tunnel?
Its a train coming at you...
Re: Each serves their own market
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