Jon Rubenstein is supposed to work magic at Palm, bringing along with him some ex-Apple employees and having us all excited about the rebirth of Palm. But has anyone asked the simple question: Who on this planet is going to buy whatever they come up with in 2009? Lets take a look at potential customers.
Corporate/Enterprise Customers
No secret hear, only a minuscule amount of companies deploy Treos for their employees and Blackberry is now the standard.
Current New Treo Users
You know, not to long ago, the Treo was a hot name and lead to many new users. Even Jack Bauer was using it. Heck, I got at least 7 of my friends and company investors to get Treos. That was the good news. Here is the sad news. They are all now migrating to Blackberries and iPhones.
Wooohooo, we already have 1 million new Centro Users!!!!
Well
maybe there is hope here, but at the measly price of $99, am not sure
if Palm is getting the kind of customers that will upgrade to the
upcoming high end Palm Smartphone coming out in 2009, particularly if
those folks down the highway at Cupertino keep evolving the iPhone and
even build a nano like iPhone before then.
Diehards
There is a smaller( and getting smaller) group called the diehards. If you are still a Palm diehard like me, you either deserve a standing ovation for tolerating all the crap Palm has been feeding us these past 4 -5 years or you are just too dumb to see the light.
I was forced to use the iPhone because it was a business opportunity for my company, but even with all it's glamour, my 755p has never left my side, probably due to the keyboard and key third party apps like ( pdanet, treomemo, etc)
But even diehards like me have gotten wary, particularly since it just feels like Palm has been treating us like..( only if i could say exactly the word)..Simple things like releasing an OS Update, they totally screwed it up. Apple has released 5 updates to the iPhone in less than a year while our friends at Sunnyvale can’t even fix fundamental flaws in the Palm OS and it’s not like we are asking for new features.
Even worse, The Treo online forums in the early to mid 2000s was filled with passionate users and developers voicing and sharing super amazing ideas that could have revolutionized the Treo line up. Heck, if Ed Colligan had just read a few TreoCentral forums back then, he would have figured out that a multimedia Treo should have been built. Something we were screaming for. Now due to the colossal miscalculation by Palm Executives, the whole company is on the brink of fading away. This ain’t funny men, I own a good amount of Palm Stock.
In all, am a diehard, so I must root for Palm, but then again, I ain’t stupid and am really wondering if its time to dump all my Palm Stock cause this supposed Rubenstein miracle might be too little to late.
In summary, forget all the analysis, there are just no good vibes coming from Palm. Nothing seems right. Even Product code names like zeppelin( treo 800w ) depict catastrophic future failure . How can you code name your product after something that was bogusly big and slow when the current trend is all about being super fast and super sleek. I mean, are these people thinking backwards??? If they can’t even get the product code name right, how can they even build something credible?
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