

New apps for new Palm Pre (150k downloads) - bensummers
http://blog.palm.com/palm/2009/06/new-apps-for-new-palm-pre.html

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DenisM
150k apps in the first day, annualized rate of 50m. Apple's annualized rate is
about 1b, or 20x that. Not bad.

Like any other platform this one will face chicken and egg problem -
developers will not develop until there is profit motive (a big user base
willing to use apps and willing to pay for them). Users will not buy until
there is a compelling reason - visiclalc for mac, word for wintel etc. This is
the assymetric network effect.

Apple side-stepped the problem by offering iTunes integration (so music was
the platform-driving "app" for iPod and then the iPhone), slick UI and a sence
of elitness that comes standard with white earbuds. This allowed them to build
6m of users over the first year and use that as bait to lure developers in. In
all, a non-trivial amount of effort to jumpstart the virtous cycle of platform
adoption.

Even having spent as much time on this, Apple had to lean on the iPod
franchise to get into the ne market. What can Palm use? I see two things -
their exisiting palm app catalog and webkit apps. This isn't cofidence
inspiring as it's too late for old apps and too early for the html5.

I guess we'll see.

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bensummers
I was wondering how they were going to handle backwards compatibility on the
Pre.

Turns out they left it to a third party; see the last paragraph. Quite
sensible if you ask me. Supporting the crufty old Palm OS with it's ancient
APIs and 68000 segmented memory space is someone else's problem.

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keltecp11
I'm amazed how fast Ulocate gets from one platform to the next so fast...
weren't they also one of the first on the Iphone?

