

Ars on failure of Palm Pre - suraj
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/03/rip-palm-its-over-and-heres-why.ars

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mattmaroon
Business is a lot like politics. Things are never as bad as they seem, and
they're never as good as they seem either.

Palm's down a lot from $17 because they should have never been at $17. (I
bought in around $6 so am a little underwater, but hanging in).

I really think it's their marketing. Palm's never been very good at this, and
now they're competing with Apple, a company whose ads have been case studies
in college programs for over a quarter century. And the Motorolas and Nokias,
who have much more clout with carriers, which still counts for a lot because
most people still get a phone (even a smart one) by deciding what carrier they
like then going to the store and seeing what looks good.

They seem to have had a fire lit under their ass. I don't know if they'll make
something work, but I do know they've got hands-down the best OS on the phone
market. Unfortunately as a shareholder I'm a lot more confident in their
ability to produce great phones than their ability to sell them lately. Their
turbulent period before WebOS pretty much ceded what little control they had
of the

"One thousand apps is peanuts compared to the iPhone, which has well over
100,000 apps on offer, or Android's 10,000+ apps."

How many fart apps do you really need? 100x the apps is not 100x as good. In
fact, it's probably not even 2x as good. The main thing I do on my Pre is
listen to a podcast app that will not be allowed to exist on an iPhone. I'd
rather have that one app than 100,000 others. I'm a special case, certainly,
but the point is that it's not just a numbers game, and even if it were it
would not scale linearly.

~~~
adolph
The article makes the "long tail" case that the number of fart apps within a
phone's application catalog signals to potential buyers of the phone that they
will likely find the fart app that is just right for them.

~~~
mattmaroon
It's certainly better from a marketing perspective to say "We have 100,000
apps" than 1,000. I'd be curious to know what a prospective first-time
smartphone buyer thinks, perhaps their conception might be that it's 100x
better.

They won't think that when buying their second smartphone though.

~~~
megaman821
There are nearly 1,800 apps available for download on my Pre. It is not
100,000 but it is not small either. From what I have seen the vast majority of
the 100,000 iPhone apps are spam apps (useless or glorified rss readers), but
even if only 5% of the apps not spam, 5,000 quality apps is a good thing to
have. Palm's 1,800 is more than Windows Mobile Marketplace.

~~~
mattmaroon
Well to be fair a lot of Pre apps are spam too. I see 5 a day that are just
some public domain book.

~~~
megaman821
For sure a lot are spam apps. If people just submitted 5,000 public domain
books and 20,000 feed readers it wouldn't make their app store any better.
Throwing around large app numbers is meaningless, people should be talking
about the apps that they think are quality and aren't available elsewhere.

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rbanffy
It's really weird.

They made a bet-the-company phone for "busy people" that mostly works only in
the US and that is locked to a single carrier.

This is incredibly stupid.

Had they decided to sell unlocked GSM phones since day one, I bet they would
have a a lot more of them in the hands of their users.

~~~
jbellis
Even Google + Nexus One hasn't sold more than about 100K phones with the
"unlocked, GSM" strategy. So, whatever Palm's mistakes, it doesn't look like
this was one of them.

~~~
rbanffy
> So, whatever Palm's mistakes, it doesn't look like this was one of them.

Having a GSM phone would, if not help selling them abroad, at least not
prevent them from doing so.

As for the Nexus One, why would Google want to pose a threat to its licensees?
The Nexus One is not meant to compete with Motorola's or HTC's offerings: it's
there to show what a pure Android phone is. It's a showcase.

~~~
jmtulloss
Palm sells GSM phones outside of the US, and just announced that they'll be
coming to AT&T later this year.

~~~
rbanffy
They do now. The save-the-company Pre was CDMA-only until about last week.

------
meowzero
Palm did very well with the OS, but they screwed up everything else. The
hardware is crappy, the performance is sluggish and unresponsive, too many
bugs, their marketing sucked, etc.

I think the only solution for Palm is for Google to buy them. Then Google can
incorporate some WebOS stuff into Android.

~~~
wvenable
You can't just bolt code from one platform onto another. Google shouldn't buy
them; they offer nothing that Google needs. However, if there are any
struggling phone manufacturers, buying Palm for WebOS to distinguish
themselves from the competition might be a good idea.

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threepointone
Any idea why Palm doesn't take its (arguably) strongest asset, the webOS, and
license it out to other phone makers? Apple wouldn't mess with Palm/the phone
makers because Palm still holds a considerable chunk of patents, and that'd
get _some_ cash flowing into Palm again.

~~~
roc
What's the upside of paying money to a shaky company to license a struggling
webOS, as compared to paying nothing to a huge stable company for healthy
Android or paying money to a huge stable company for interesting-if-unproven
Phone7?

As the article states: the market has largely spoken on webOS. Customers
aren't choosing it based on its strengths. And when they choose its
competitors, they do so for reasons that correlate strongly with webOS's
weaknesses.

~~~
pkulak
I'd say WebOS's weaknesses are 100% hardware. App store, sure, but that's
because no one has a Pre or Pixi because they are cheap pieces of plastic
crap. Put WebOS on the HTC Supersonic and just try to keep that thing in
stock.

~~~
roc
You don't think the media experience pales in comparison to the iPhone?

Or the customisability/flexibility pales in comparison to Android?

~~~
megaman821
The default music playing app is much better on the iPhone. Other than that
you can get videos from Youtube and break.com. You can play music in the
background with Pandora, Grooveshark, Slacker Radio, or Radio Time. You can
upload photos and video to Youtube, Facebook, Flickr.

As for a flexibility, look at the WebOS hacking community. WebOS is running on
a Linux that isn't very far away from stock (closer than Android for sure).
Just last week they got the QT framework running on it.

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frou_dh
I was super impressed when I saw their demonstration video of WebOS from an
event, but as of present I've never sought out or even seen a Pre in real
life. iPhone is evidently 'good enough' for me.

~~~
chops
I've got a buddy with one, and I've seen at least two out in the wild around
Milwaukee, not including my own Pre, and my wife's Pixi (both of us love our
phones and for different reasons).

I find this whole "Palm doing poorly" thing to be rather odd. I really hoped
Palm would return to it's rightful place, and I'm disappointed to see Palm on
the way out again.

I sincerely hope WebOS survives. I think it's a great OS.

------
eli
For what it's worth, my wife really liked those Pre ads.

Anyway, I used to work in the cell phone industry and the suits at Palm have
been disconnected with reality for years. Their VP of Marketing was once
bragging to me of their growing dominance in the PDA market, long after it was
clear that smartphones were about to destroy the unconnected PDA market.
What's that joke about buggy whips?

~~~
jmtulloss
The suits at Palm have changed in the past 2 years.

~~~
eli
Fair point.

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upinsmoke
I definitely prefer WebOS over Android.

~~~
fnid2
Why? I have to get a new phone soon and really don't know which one to get.

~~~
pkulak
Don't get a WebOS phone because the hardware blows. Plastic screens and tiny
hardware keyboards are no fun at all. However, I agree that WebOS is hands
down the best mobile OS out there. In terms of ease of use, multitasking
interface, notifications system, and even development, it's not even close.

~~~
mattmaroon
I wouldn't say the hardware blows. It's not perfect by any means, but I think
it's comparable to the competition. The screen is nice, but I apply a Skinomi
plastic skin to any phone so it's all the same to me. The keyboard's not bad,
better by far than a virtual one, but it's not really good like a Treo or
Blackberry either. The battery/usb compartment door is hilariously shoddy. No
idea how that one got in the finished product.

There are some great things about it too though, like the slider up top to
mute the phone (standard Palm feature). And whatever flaws it may have with
hardware are made up for tenfold by the Touchstone. As far as user experience
goes, that simple item makes phone ownership so much better than you'd
intuitively think. Before I got it I thought "do I really need to spend money
on something that makes me not have to plug my phone in once a day? How hard
is that really?" Now I think I'd gag if I ever had to plug a phone in again.

But really, the joy of using that OS is worth almost anything. I can't really
explain it other than to compare it to owning a Lexus. It's a total experience
that's greater than the sum of its parts.

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mikecane
Asus should buy Palm. There is room for a non-iPad tablet and webOS has the
capability to corner that market over Android. Asus is an aggressive and smart
company. They could do very low-priced tablets and have another big win, as
they have with netbooks. I also wonder how blazing fast webOS would be on a
Tegra2 CPU.

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jsz0
I was an unhappy owner of a Pre for a few months. The software they shipped on
the Pre could generously be called beta quality. After 6 months of slow
speeds, lack of features, and almost no third party apps I gave up and got
something else. I think Palm in retrospect should have tried to hold off
releasing WebOS until it was ready. I realize there may have been some
business realities that made that impossible but it looks like they're going
to suffer either the consequences either way. Early Pre hardware and software
destroyed Palm's reputation among a lot of loyalists.

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allenbrunson
seems like only yesterday that the tech world was giddy with excitement over
the possibility that palm could come back from the dead, apple-style. now i've
read a couple of articles that say they are as good as gone.

i personally wouldn't have ever used a pre, but increased competition is
always good, so i'm sorry to see them go.

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cookiecaper
Sad.

The lack of apps is what really killed the Pre. I think that everything else
listed here except maybe the faulty (as in defective) hardware is a relatively
minor point. If the Pre had cool, unique applications, or even just a
reasonably-sized selection of average applications, the awkwardness of the
clamshell, the mirror on the back, the cramped keyboard, etc., all could have
been fixed in a new hardware revision.

A more aggressive, general-purpose ad campaign could have helped too.
Targeting women is fine, but kind of silly since in my experience women
already have a high attraction to Apple's designs, and should not have been
the only focus of their marketing.

If they'd taken more of a Google approach and licensed webOS to other hardware
makers, that would have helped a lot too, but in the end the Pre was killed by
its lack of developer support and that's the long and short of it.

There's a much larger selection of competent HTML/JavaScript/CSS developers
than there are Objective C developers, and the fact that one didn't need a Mac
to develop applications would have drawn a lot more devs in that way, I think.
It was a good idea.

Word is that the process for Pre development was contrived and horrible. jwz
wrote about it a bit. This is mysterious because Palm really made overtures
like they "got it", but the actual implementation of the app submittal and
review process was basically unusable even for the contingent that wanted to
provide apps.

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ableal
The Ides of March were brutal - I saw elsewhere echoes of one analyst setting
Palm's stock price target at zero ...

