Palm Who?

As a loyal Palm user of many years, it pains me to write that WebOS and Palm may become the CP/M or Betamax of the current smartphone wars.  For the youthful among the readers, back before the invention of the internet by Al Gore (Yes, he really claimed to be its inventor.  He continues his delusional thinking in his current crusades) and when dinosaurs roamed the shopping malls, CP/M was the competing operating system to Microsoft DOS (MS-DOS) in the days before Windows, and Betamax was the competitor to VHS in the video tape world.  In those days, CP/M and Betamax were considered the better systems in their respective fields, but the power of branding and the marketing of MS-DOS and VHS caused the “better” systems to fall by the wayside. 

I fear the same will happen to Palm and its much vaunted WebOS.  Even as this is written, Palm shares have begun their descent from highs of $15+ to less than $13 and falling since the introduction of the iPhone 3G S.  International print and visual media here in Europe gave 24 hour every half hour coverage to the release of the iPhone 3G S and the new iPhone 3.0 operating system, but hardly any covered the release of the Palm Pre.  Those that did stopped any coverage as quickly as they had started their cursory mentions.  Certainly Pre reviews were published and most were favorable, but the introduction of iPhone 3.0 and the subsequent introduction of the iPhone 3G S sucked all the oxygen out of the room leaving the Pre to hope that long suffering Palm users will wait for a probably-will-be-coming-and-hope-it-will-be-worth-the-wait GSM model.

If sales figures to date and chatter on a number of the Palm blogs are any indication, people are not waiting.  They are jumping to the iPhone, and people will be lined up around the block once again when the iPhone 3G S hits another raft of countries later this month and throughout the summer.  The first weekend saw over a million units sold, and that was in a more limited release when compared to the original iPhone;  higher sales numbers but in less countries than the original iPhone release.  To top it off, Apple has substantially lowered the price of the original iPhone.  All this news does not bode well for the Pre.

So what does Web OS and the Pre offer?  Better interface?  Certainly looks and feels better by most accounts.  Better speed?  Maybe.  Less applications?  Certainly.  Less storage?  Painfully, yes.  No way to use the one feature that made Palm stand out above the rest all these years:  its built-in PIM and desktop sync feature?  Absolutely.  And yet Palm is charging the same as their main competitor.  (Sigh)

The only bright spot has been the recent appointment of Jon Rubinstein as Palm’s CEO.  Maybe the “podfather” can help turn around the fortunes of Palm just as he did Apple, but I wouldn’t want to bet on it at this point.  This is not a question of his skills, but an appraisal based on current market conditions.   
 
Apple has been pitch perfect in their marketing and brand creation.  In fact, if some enterprising developer designed a way for the iPhone to sync with the Palm desktop, he’d make a bundle of cash and put the final nail in Palm’s coffin.  Rubinstein can only hope that his former colleagues don’t take this easily accomplished route before he has a chance to work his magic at Palm.  Even barring that, once WebIS (the company behind Pocket Informant) finishes providing a way to sync their well designed Pocket Informant PIM to Outlook, it could remove one of the last reasons for users to wait on Palm’s promised desktop sync without going through the cloud.
 
So, will Palm and its WebOS continue, or will it become the CP/M or Betamax of our day?
 
[John v. Hollande]