Thursday, June 5, 2003
The Sound Of One Palm Clapping
Posted by Ed Hansberry in "ARTICLE" @ 04:00 PM
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2913931,00.html
The Pocket PC has been, from day one, a PDA that is meant to push technology to its limits and be a device that can win the enterprise market. Palm has taken the opposite approach by keeping the device and operating system relatively simple. Palm Source's Chief Competitive Officer Michael Mace told columnist David Berlind that "the Pocket PC is too big, too complex, and requires too many pit stops at the recharging station to be appreciated by anybody but the techno-elite who are typically willing to make such sacrifices to own a pocket rocket. "Handheld technology is immune to Moore's Law," he says. "The situation is not about to improve for Pocket PC any time soon."
Whoops! :oops: "Two years later, Palm is eating Mace's words as PocketPC-based devices continue to eat away at Palm's share of the handheld OS pie. While handheld technologies were becoming more capable and Microsoft's PocketPC OS in particular took advantage of those capabilities, Palm remained true to its original convictions."
Microsoft has also remained true to its original convictions. It has kept the Win32 API. It has emphasized the enterprise. It has designed the .NET concept from the beginning with mobile devices based on Windows CE being an integral part of it. Developing for the Pocket PC (and Smartphone) is a matter of using the exact same Visual Studio.NET platform. The .NET Compact Framework is available for client machines now and will be in the ViewSonic V37's ROM. I am sure other devices will follow suit. Mobile Information Server, once a pet project of the Mobile Device group has been swallowed whole and integrated deep into Exchange 2003.
Meanwhile, Palm is still facing some OS4 vs OS5 compatibility issues on the developer front, and developing for the PalmOS is unlike anything else, so you have to specifically target the platform, something corporate developers are not likely to do. Developing for Windows and perhaps Java is enough. Palm abandoned its Tungsten Mobile Information Management Solution, a product that would have competed with Exchange 2003's integrated Mobile Information Server bits.
Tying this all back to the Handspring acquisition, where is Palm going? As columnist Berlind points out, what is Palm getting besides distribution, a customer list and the Treo brand? Distribution is only good if you can hang on to marketshare, something Palm hasn't been doing lately and Sony hasn't made matters easier for them. Ditto the customer list. I don't see the Treo giving Palm any inroads to the enterprise either. It certainly hasn't given Handspring any. Do you think PalmSpring matters makes a more formidable opponent than did Palm Solutions and Handspring did separately?
The Pocket PC has been, from day one, a PDA that is meant to push technology to its limits and be a device that can win the enterprise market. Palm has taken the opposite approach by keeping the device and operating system relatively simple. Palm Source's Chief Competitive Officer Michael Mace told columnist David Berlind that "the Pocket PC is too big, too complex, and requires too many pit stops at the recharging station to be appreciated by anybody but the techno-elite who are typically willing to make such sacrifices to own a pocket rocket. "Handheld technology is immune to Moore's Law," he says. "The situation is not about to improve for Pocket PC any time soon."
Whoops! :oops: "Two years later, Palm is eating Mace's words as PocketPC-based devices continue to eat away at Palm's share of the handheld OS pie. While handheld technologies were becoming more capable and Microsoft's PocketPC OS in particular took advantage of those capabilities, Palm remained true to its original convictions."
Microsoft has also remained true to its original convictions. It has kept the Win32 API. It has emphasized the enterprise. It has designed the .NET concept from the beginning with mobile devices based on Windows CE being an integral part of it. Developing for the Pocket PC (and Smartphone) is a matter of using the exact same Visual Studio.NET platform. The .NET Compact Framework is available for client machines now and will be in the ViewSonic V37's ROM. I am sure other devices will follow suit. Mobile Information Server, once a pet project of the Mobile Device group has been swallowed whole and integrated deep into Exchange 2003.
Meanwhile, Palm is still facing some OS4 vs OS5 compatibility issues on the developer front, and developing for the PalmOS is unlike anything else, so you have to specifically target the platform, something corporate developers are not likely to do. Developing for Windows and perhaps Java is enough. Palm abandoned its Tungsten Mobile Information Management Solution, a product that would have competed with Exchange 2003's integrated Mobile Information Server bits.
Tying this all back to the Handspring acquisition, where is Palm going? As columnist Berlind points out, what is Palm getting besides distribution, a customer list and the Treo brand? Distribution is only good if you can hang on to marketshare, something Palm hasn't been doing lately and Sony hasn't made matters easier for them. Ditto the customer list. I don't see the Treo giving Palm any inroads to the enterprise either. It certainly hasn't given Handspring any. Do you think PalmSpring matters makes a more formidable opponent than did Palm Solutions and Handspring did separately?
