Palm: Dying by self-inflicted wounds

Today, Engadget ran a long post about what Palm needs to do in order to survive. The article reads more like a list of things not to do when you launch a product. Most people agree that when the Palm Pre was first shown at CES in January 2009, it had an innovative operating system and a decent, if not great, hardware platform. However, from CES forward, Palm made one major mistake after another. Here's the summarized list from the Engadget article:

1. Palm waited six months to ship the Pre after it showed it at CES; by that time, much of the initial interest had cooled.
2. Palm shipped the Pre only days before Apple announced the iPhone 3GS, which immediately stole most of the Pre's thunder.
3. Palm's exclusive partner for the Pre launch was Sprint, probably the weakest of the major US wireless carriers. Palm should have done whatever it had to do to get the Pre into AT&T, Verizon or both.
4. There was no Software Development Kit available for the Palm Pre when it shipped. It took a long time for Palm to ship the SDK, so only a handful of applications were available while the iPhone and Android were gaining apps tens or hundreds of times faster. Also, Palm has only recently gotten around to shipping a PDK that enables access to the low-level functions of the Pre and Pixi.
5. Palm had awful marketing at launch, especially an incomprehensible advertising campaign that told buyers nothing about what made the Pre special or why they should buy it.
6. When Verizon finally got the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus, it advertised the phone as suitable only for housewives from the 70s. Palm should have done everything it could to nix Verizon's campaign, but whatever it did wasn't enough.
7. Rather than develop its own content management application or license something from a third party, Palm deliberately broke USB compatibility rules in order to make the Pre look like an iPhone to iTunes. Apple promptly retaliated, closed off iTunes and got the USB Implementers Forum to order Palm to stop masquerading as Apple.
8. The Palm Pixi makes no sense--it can't compete with other phones at its price point, and it was deliberately underpowered by Palm so as not to compete with the Pre.
9. The Pre had lots of hardware problems, most of which Palm refused to acknowledge or take responsibility for.

I'm going to stop there. My point isn't that Palm shouldn't fix these problems, but rather that it never should have had these problems in the first place. Everyone makes mistakes when they launch new products; we're all human. Palm, however, made so many disastrous mistakes that the company is now probably too far gone for any survival guide. Writing a survival guide for Palm is like telling the deceased at a funeral home to stop smoking. It's already too late.

Is Jobs's "Reality Distortion Field" fading away?

Today's "big" announcement by Apple just ended--new versions of the iPod Nano and Touch, and a new version of iTunes, plus some new headphones and a lot of chest beating about the App Store. Almost everything had been leaked weeks ahead of the presentation, and even if Apple had kept a lid on it all, there would have been nothing all that exciting.

The new pricing for the iPod touch isn't going to drive sales (if you're even mildly interested in the 3G iPhone, you're crazy not to buy one of those rather than an iPod Touch.) The revisions of the iPod Nano are nice, but no one is going to be lining up to buy one; at best, it'll be a good replacement for previous-generation Nanos. Apple seems to think that the new "Genius" feature in iTunes (a ripoff of Pandora) is going to generate more sales, but I disagree.

The net of all of this is somewhere between "feh" and "so?". Any other company would have made these announcements with a press release, and perhaps, a press conference. With an announcement like this one, the very fact that Jobs was involved actually increases the disappointment level.

The last really important announcement that Apple did was the original iPhone; compared to that one, today's announcement doesn't even merit a footnote.

Apple: Human, After All

Ever since the launch of the 3G iPhone, Apple has been showered with decidedly mixed news. One the one hand, iPhone sales took off much faster than sales of the original iPhone, but who can forget the lines, delays and frustration of buyers when Apple's iTunes-based authorization system failed? In the U.S., the 3G iPhone is still subject to inventory shortages and a long purchase and approval process.

Now, 3G iPhone users from around the world are complaining of poor 3G reception and speeds little better than the EDGE 2G service of the original iPhone. In the U.S., AT&T and Apple maintained a stony silence about the problems, but in other countries, service providers laid the problem at the feet of Apple. An industry analyst conjectured that the Infineon chipset that Apple used for the 3G iPhone was to blame, a Swedish engineering magazine confirmed the problem (though not necessarily the source), and a Business Week article appears to substantiate that conclusion.  While Richard Windsor, the Nomura Securities analyst who wrote the original report, believes that the problem is in hardware, the BusinessWeek article indicates that the parties involved think that the problem can be fixed in firmware. None of this matters to customers, who just want a phone that works as advertised.

The iTunes Application Store has been a grand success, generating a million dollars in sales a day for Apple and still growing. On the other hand, developers are complaining about Apple's slow (and seemingly capricious) approval process for adding their software to the Store--an approval process that nonetheless let through a program called "I Am Rich," which cost $999 and did nothing except flash a red icon on the iPhone's screen. According to reports, eight people actually bought the package before Apple took it down.

mobileMe, Apple's replacement for .mac, was launched well before it was ready, which caused millions of .mac users who were forced to switch over to mobileMe to lose access to their email and be unable to synchronize their devices for long stretches of time. The problems caused The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg, who's usually an Apple champion, to warn users to stay away from mobileMe until the service matures.

Let's not forget AppleTV, which even in its second version has failed to gain market traction. Roku's Netflix Player sold out quickly, and the company has had a hard time catching up with demand, but AppleTVs gather dust on store shelves around the U.S.

These glitches indicate that there are some serious problems in Apple's product review and release process, as well as its online infrastructure. How Apple responds to these problems, and how long they persist, will indicate whether or not the company has gotten too big for its own good. In any event, Apple is human, after all.

The Real News from Apple

Today's announcement of the iPhone 3G at Apple's Worldwide Developers' Conference has been rehashed and dissected by reporters and news anchors all day. However, the iPhone announcement itself was fairly anticlimactic; the new features had been well-covered in leaked reports prior to the announcement. (In fact, the lack of new features beyond 3G and GPS was somewhat surprising.) Even the dramatic price drop had been foreshadowed by widely-publicized reports.

I think that the real news wasn't the iPhone announcement, but what came before: A slew of application demos, plus the announcement of Apple's MobileMe service. Let's take the applications first: While they were being demonstrated, some of the live bloggers griped that they were tedious and just went on and on, but that was the point: In just a few months, Apple has built a bigger, more productive developer ecosystem than Symbian has been able to do in years, and no one else (including RIM, which just recently launched its own developers' program) is even in the same ballpark. Even Microsoft's smartphone platform can't deliver applications with the quality of experience of those designed for the iPhone.

Over and over again, the story was: "We've covered all the bases." Enterprise applications? Check. Exchange integration? Check. Desktop application support? Check. Location-based applications? Check. Games? Check. All of this was on top of the basic capabilities of the iPhone, now fortified with sufficient 3G speed to make heavily data- and media-centric applications work.

The other part of the story is MobileMe. At its heart, MobileMe is a centralized storage and synchronization application that allows iPhones, Macs and PCs to be synced to a single, central database that's managed by Apple. Now, all of the capabilities of MobileMe are available in some form from a variety of vendors, but they don't necessarily work very well. As a long-time ActiveSync user, I can tell you that getting my PC notebook to stay in sync with my old Windows Mobile PDA and current Windows Mobile Smartphone (let alone my MacBook) can be an exercise in frustration.

MobileMe is aimed at two targets: The large body of Windows Mobile users who are frustrated to death with ActiveSync, and everyone who has held off on buying an iPhone because it doesn't have the "it just works" syncing capabilities of RIM's Blackberry. It's far too early to tell just how well Apple has implemented MobileMe, and it may very have its own frustrations and limitations. However, it has the potential to be a very appealing alternative to Microsoft's and RIM's offerings.

The one big frustration that I have with the announcements is that the iPhone 3G still doesn't have video camera capabilities. A 3G iPhone with the video capabilities of, say, a Nokia N95, would be a multimedia killer product, and I'm still not giving up hope that Apple with do something in this space in the future.