Palm has hired Todd Bradley, former executive vice president of global operations at Gateway Inc., to be executive vice president and chief operating officer. The company also announced that it is laying off 300 employees, and tried to allay investor fears by saying that its m500 series is selling well in the United States and has just begun selling internationally.
Comments
You mean like an Apple buyout?
Very unlikely. Steve killed off Newton because he didn't want to deal with two operating systems. It's bad enough to get developers to switch to Mac OS X let alone Mac OS X and (place your favoriate PDA OS here).
OS X running on a PDA? Now that's an idea.
Yeah, I was kind of hoping that perhaps Handspring would have considered switching to a scaled version of OS X, but considering that they just re-licensed Palm OS until 2006 it seems rather unlikely.
Frankly, I think Apple should steer clear of the PDA market altogether. Palm's problems are a good indicator of why.
And for everyone screaming for Apple to license PC clone makers, take a good, hard look at Palm. Here we have a company that made a proprietary hardware device with killer proprietary software. So they licensed the software, hoping to make money on both hardware and software. Now look ... Handspring is killing Palm in the hardware market, and Palm isn't making it up in licensing revenue...
Food for thought.
testing new version of Omniweb
Old MacNN site is back at last. Comments stopped working again!
Sort of why Apple stopped licensing the first place. Where PowerComputing is analogous to Handspring.
It isn't licensing that hurt Palm, it is their slow response to market needs and oversaturating the market with very similar devices -- most of which fell short of, again, meeting the needs of their customers. Their competition, on the other hand, really made an effort to come up with worthwhile alternatives. Palm failed to react thereby limiting their platform. Without much innovation, their market share dropped.
Palm did not learn the same lesson Apple never learned that licensing serves at least two purposes: expand your market and spark innovation. Think about it. At the time Apple dumped its licensing program, they were doing very poorly. But they also had the worst line up of Macintoshes ever. Licensees offered a little better innovation for slighlty less money. So customers went to licensees more often than to Apple. The fault was Apple's -- not that they licensed their platform. Had they been more innovate and responded to customer needs, licensing may have worked for the Macintosh.
I feel licensing gives a platform more opportunties. However, if you are going to license you have to focus on increasing your customer base. Otherwise, it's like dividing up your existing customers among your licensees.
But they also had the worst line up of Macintoshes ever.
Sorry, but that's nonsense. Apple had the 7600/8600/9600 range out with 604e's, which was about the last time Macs were on MHz parity with PCs (in fact the first G3s came in at slower clock speeds than the 604e - I'm not making "power" comparisons here), it was also the last batch of Macs with more than three expansion slots (until the latest G4s) and the precursor for the "pop it open and see the guts" ease of maintenance and upgrades that came with the El Capitan (B&W G3) case.
I'm not sure what really killed licensing (apart from "Steve"), but it wasn't that Apple had a poor range, though maybe they feared for the immediate future (with Power Computing threatening an imminent PPC750/G3, which never shipped).
It's fair to say that Apple's pricing has been a lot "sharper" (ie cheaper) since that point.
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Satjiv strikes again
Palm is in some serious trouble here. They need a miracle and fast.