Comments on: Palm CEO Carl Yankowski Has Resigned

What in the world could Sony do for Palm except slap a Clie' sticker on all the devices and rip out the SD slot and throw in a mem stick slot.

Scott

I have a mono S320. I'd like Sony to produce a 160x160 color unit as an upgrade path (that 320x320 mono T415 is a mistake, I think). But I doubt they will.

Of course, all this would be moot if Palm would do what most of us want: go 240x320 with Soft Graffiti.

It combines a 230KBps serial port, a device-side USB port, charging pins, device detection pins, and a compact hardware connector along with a standard set of connecting hardware. Its pretty good engineering, and it should serve Palm devices well for the next few years, at least until they decide they need USB 2.0 or Firewire support.

Better screen, almost as small.

Get a life. As for sensitivity: It's a business. And the Keebler Elf ran it into the ground. Yankerkowski is gone because he messed with investors, employees, and customers. I'm all for sensitivity if it doesn't affect others but in the case of the ELF, he messed with everyone. And with the bucks he was making $667K I don't have any sympathy. So, take your new age "beliefs" elsewhere.

TANX.

Sony sure as hell would wrech Palm though.

Innovation (according to Webster): "the introduction of something new"

Then who is? Palm? Well, it's pretty evident by their recent introductions that they have rested on their PAST innovations too much. For example:
- m505: crappy screen and old V/Vx casing (SD slot/card pretty much useless until more products enter the market. memory stick can do NOW what SD promises in the "future"
- m500: old V/Vx casing with SD slot
- m125: why even bother commenting
- i705 is not even out, so can't really comment there because anyone can leak product information 6 months ahead of time and claim that it will have everything under the sun)

Handspring? Besides the 16-bit color support, they really haven't done much. Sure they integrated the Springboard, but they're not the ones producing the modules. It's the third party guys. If anything, HS is assuming all the glory for the innovation of these companies.
Visor Prism: 16-bit color screen that's useless outdoors
Visor Edge: thinnest? V/Vx retains that title.
Treo products: (same as i705), plus Samsung and Kyocera already have products in the market that do the same thing, so there's no innovation there.

"They have a color screen that simply blows up the pixels to 320X320"
Sony is the FIRST to introduce the NEW 320x320 resolution. Their color screen is the best in the Palm OS camp. iPaq's screen has been praised to no end that its color screen is the best, but you know what? It's a Sony screen!

"and glued a MP3 player to it with barely any integration of the OS at all!"
what's the other options? add-ons like HS and Palm's? You're right, there's a real winning combination. While the idea of putting an mp3 player on a palm handheld is nothing new, Sony is the FIRST to integrate it. (keep in mind, i'm talking about Palms. PPCs have their innovations too, but i don't have the time to get into them). Plus, the 710/760 units get a decent battery life (11 hours). To put this into perspective the new iPod goes for 10 hours and costs $400, and all it does is play mp3s.
And how much integration to the OS do you need? You can run other apps while listening to music. Isn't that the purpose of an integrated mp3 player?

VFS - it tall started in their S300

MS Import (aka AudioPlayer->Transfer) - direct connection from your computer to your expansion memory

4.0 to 4.1 fix - isn't it ironic Sony was the first to use it?

Innovation - Introduces a new idea
Innovation in technology - Not only Sony brings a 320x320 screen in Palm (Note: Sony didn't introduces this 320x320 idea.), but also Sony introduces a new form of hardware accelerator that gives its refresh rate four times higher than other PalmOS products.

Of course, Kodak went to the other extreme: Leave the card AND the USB alone, then adapt their old technology to the universal connector, but use only the serial lines. I took mine back to the store for that, and the image quality problem.

Kodak couldn't do a PalmPix to the m500 series using the USB signal lines because USB simply can't handle it at all.

That situation was entirely logical, because of way the spin-off happened. When the mighty network hardware giant 3Com bought US Robotics, the Palm Computing division was little more than an afterthought in the merger. However, by the time of the spin-off, market commoditization had killed both 3Com's core NIC business and USR's modem business, but the PDA market had exploded, making the source of the majority of 3Com's revenues and assets in Palm. So, when the much-awaited spin-off happened, Palm took the lion's share of not only the assets, but also the stock price. Sure, after that, Palm's stock went through the roof (irrational exuberance). But, if 3Com hadn't spun-off Palm, 3Com's worsening situation would have continued to bring down Palm, and the COMS stockholders wouldn't have been happy. As it was, the tanking economy brought both stocks down, but not after a lot of stockholders sold both PALM and COMS at their height, and ended up making a lot of money.

Carl wasn't responsible for the stock price of PALM tanking, not exactly anyway. Carl WAS responsibile for having no good new products (the m505 was overhyped, the m125 useless, the i705 still nonexistent), for flubbing the introduction of the new products they did have, and (Palm's real on-going problem) for not having an operating system robust enough to support the applications its current and prospective user base needs. While I understand things like a new OS take time, ARM-based Palm OS should have shipped in July 2001, which means it should have been a #1 prioity for the company 6 months to a year before it was announced. Instead, under CEO Carl's direction, the company appears to have been focused on Michael Jordan Palms, slick marketing campaigns for product line-ups with obsolete PDAs, and schlepping R&D from licensees rather than generating any useful R&D of their own. So, when the economy did Tank Bigtime, everyone realized Palm had no direction, which caused it's stock price to sink even further than it would have otherwise.

Congrats, Carl: through your almost complete lack of vision, you ran a very profitable company almost in the ground and have (probably) turned it into yet another source of dog chow for the mighty three-headed Microsoft. Red Hat Software, a company that has never turned a profit, but does have a clear vision, closed today at more than twice PALM's price today. Yeah, Carl, don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Palms are still popular and still selling. But "power" Palm users are still frustrated. We want Soft Graffiti -- and 240x320. I hope this is in the works.

And as for pricing... they must come down. Hasn't anyone noticed the gap in Palm's line? There's room for a *slotless* m505 in it. (Don't laugh -- the slotless Vs are still selling!)

Cheap mono units are fine to broaden the market -- but color prices should come down some too.

Sorry No - about one year to late - now the christmastree is rotten for good...

The real market is, was, and forevermore shall be, low cost PDAs. Is there a market for expensive multimedia hi-res with everything-but-the-kitchen-sink thrown in? Yes, but it's a significantly smaller market. Does that mean that Palm should ignore this market? Of course not, it makes good business sense to offer products to this market as well. Still, their biggest market is in low-cost devices. If they forge ahead thinking that "what they really want" is the latest high-tech gadget to compete with the PPC OS and the low-cost market suffers as a result, that's when they'll really lose.

Their stock plummeted because they jumped on the IPO bandwagon a couple of years ago and found themselves with a grossly overinflated stock value which later came down to reality. Every company (and investor) that played this game looking for lots of free money ended up losing.

They also made a mistake in overestimating the growth of their high-end devices for 2001, without accurately estimating how much their licensees would cut into this and without giving enough credit to the new (at the time) PPC OS. One of the things about Palm devices which is great for end users and not so great for Palm the company is that they can be low-cost yet last for a few years. So, to sell new devices you have to sell to new buyers (most of which want something inexpensive) and previous owners (who want something more advanced or, atleast, with more memory). The m505 had difficulty selling at the levels they had hoped because it was introduced into a market with some serious competition.

Palm stuck with the concept of keeping things small, light, easy to use, and with great battery life. We've all benefited from this. They relucantly released colorful gizmos at the cost of several of these factors because a small market of people said that they wanted them, despite the size/battery life. Now, I fear, the investors are convinced that the stock plummeted because of Carl and his vision (or perhaps the former Hawkins' vision). Most of the so-called technology "journalists" have declared that the PPC is the future and will overtake the Palm OS within a couple of years, and everyone seems to believe it. Well, not so fast. The recent sales reports have shown Compaq's sales fall significantly.

If Palm jumps head-first into OS5 and sacrifices backwards compatibility and the necessary tweaks, improvements, and cost-cutting to the "simpler" Palm devices, that's when they'll go bankrupt. Should they work on OS5? By all means. I want high-res color and all the gizmos, too. And I want it in a device with the usability level of the current Palms. But don't put all of your eggs into this basket, because it's a small basket.

Scott

Well written commentary. Its nice to hear a shade of grey in here every once in a while instead of black and white rhetoric.

Scott is dead-on. Most of the semi-tekkies I know have m series, III series, or at most, V series Palms. They look at my 330 like its a mutant, and they've never even heard of it.

"Who makes that?"
"Handera."
"Oh, it's got a slot. That's a Handspring."
"No, Handera."
"Right, by Handspring."
"No, its a totally different company..."
"Hey, Jim. Check this out. Brian's got a Handspring..."
"Sigh..."

We, the gadgeteers and gizmo lovers, are still the minority. Even in the world of Palm.

...In accordance with the prophecy...

Quik_Fix
quikfix@hotmail.com

Watch most of Palm's first-time users now start upgrading to Sonys. All Palm will have left is the bargain basement $50 - $99 m100 class to fight over. How sad.