Palm Reports Tumbling Revenues – What I Think Could Turn Them Around
Posted on 21 March 2008, at 4:45 am, by Wayne Schulz
Yesterday Palm reported an earnings decline of 24% from last year. Their press release say’s sales of their popular but apparently low profit Centro are doing well. Is Palm a relic of the 1980s destined to become but a story we tell our grandchildren? Or could there be another trick left up their sleeves? Here’s what I think that Palm needs to do in order to leap back to the top. And if they nail this strategy it will happen faster than you think.
So what can turn Palm around?
They need one thing.
Kick Ass Web Browsing.
Everything productive that you or I want to do while on the road can generally be done from a web browser.
Email, Web Browsing, Google Apps.
If a program doesn’t run in a browser – I spend less and less time using it. This is a trend we’ll see more of. Less software loaded onto computer hard drives. More software run through a web browser.
Here lies Palm’s window of opportunity.
Nail the market with an affordable portable keyboard driven machine that nails true web browsing (not some lame cut down implementation) and they could reverse their slipping fortunes.
Apple’s iPhone is starting to own the market for smartphones (at least on the personal side).
Why is that?
Web Browsing – a huge portion of the iPhone purchasers state that their key use for the phone is web browsing. Now imagine a screen that was larger, and had usable web browsing like the iPhone – but with a keyboard and affordable price.
It’s more than just a hunch on my part – check out this March 18, 2008 story from the New York Times titled iPhone Users Love That Mobile Web.
In part, the New York Times article say’s:
Tuesday, M:Metrics, a measurement firm that studies mobile media, has released a survey of iPhone users six months after the device was released to long lines and nearly unending fanfare.
The results, from a January survey of more than 10,000 adults, are somewhat dramatic. 84.8 percent of iPhone users report accessing news and information from the hand-held device. That compares to 13.1 percent of the overall mobile phone market and 58.2 percent of total smartphone owners – which include those poor saps with BlackBerries and devices that run Windows.
The study found that 58.6 percent of iPhone users visited a search engine on their phones, compared with 37 percent of smartphone users in general and a scant 6.1 percent of mobile phone users.
The market for mobile video once seemed like a nonstarter in the United States. Well, 30.9 percent of iPhone users have tuned into mobile TV or a video clip from their phone, more than double the percentage that have watched on a smartphone.
Finally, 74.1 percent of iPhone users listen to music on their iTunes-equipped devices. Only 27.9 percent of smartphone users listen to music on their phones and 6.7 percent of the overall mobile-phone-toting public listens to music on their mobile devices.
This article shows there is a market for web browsing – so long as the browser provides a desktop-like experience.
As cute as Windows Mobile is – the browser still stinks (and no, I haven’t found Opera a heck of a lot better). The Blackberry web browser is even sicker.
It’s my opinion that the Foleo as displayed by Jeff Hawkins on May 30, 2007 was an incomplete “proof of concept”.
What if the REAL Foleo had these attributes:
- Web browser that provides access to all the same sites that your desktop does (Apple got this right with their iPhone and there’s not reason to think that Palm cannot). This includes video and audio as well as support for Flash and all major plug-ins that you have access to on the desktop.
- Embedded Google Apps – which provides Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Mail – these are all available in offline versions via Google Gears (or rumored to be coming shortly).
- Dual WIFI and WLAN (Wireless High Speed Cellular)
- 4 hour battery life
- Full synchronization of your Foleo documents to your desktop (see what Evernote has done to get an idea of the way one company has made this seamless).
Would a device with the above features tweak your interest? Even if you are a die hard Microsoft Office user, couldn’t you see yourself using Google Apps knowing that you could always import the work you did on the road from your (fully synched) Google Apps Web account?
This is step one of getting Palm back on the road to profitability. Now if only they price this thing properly. I’m thinking $599 without any carrier contract and I’m in for one.
How about you? What features would Palm have to include to regain their market leadership? And more importantly, how much would you be willing to pay?
Related posts:
- Blackberry Kickstart Pictures Exposed – Here’ s My Wish List
- Blackberry Meltdown Coming Soon – Five Reasons RIM Popularity Will Peak This Year
- Engadget has the Blackberry Bold with a quaint 1990’s era WAP looking browser
- Goodbye Blackberry, It’s Not Me – It’s You – Here’s 10 Reasons I Left
- Is Google Apps a Microsoft Office Killer?
March 21st, 2008 at 7:23 am
Wayne,
Since I have been using 2 Foleo’s for the last 4-6 months, let me add some more to what you just wrote about:
The Web Browser works fine, granted, it does need things like Flash and a few other things added to it, but this is why they call it Linux or a fashion there of. A little developing and bang!
Google Apps would be a nice addition.
The device already has dual wifi and wwan, granted not built in, which would be really nice, it does have 802.11 built in, but if you want to use WWAN, you have to connect to a Bluetooth phone that supports it.
4-hour battery life – of constant use? The battery life in the Foleo is actually better then I thought it would be.
And granted something like Evernote would make it quite interesting.
TT
March 21st, 2008 at 12:04 pm
So basically Palm should build $599 notebook, with Linux and ARM CPU with “desktop grade” browser and Google Apps embeded?
Why?
I’m sorry but I don’t understand what would be the attraction of such device compared to EEE’s and other cheap ultra portable devices, that run on more powerfull Intel CPUs and can do all this for less?
Palm’s problem is that they haven’t come up with anything new for years. They are stuck with their old POS5, they are working on new OS for too long without any results (I don’t believe that a small company like Palm can develop, deliver and support a competing mobile OS) and their HW is just rehashing of original Treo 600 that they had bought not delivered. They should face the fact that they are not industry leader anymore but just a small niche player with limited resources and declining sales in very competitive market.
What I think Palm could do to survive, is drop it’s Linux and go with Android, they can build stuff like thin Treo, maybe small MID or even Foleo type device around Android and save a bunch on resources, since all that was sugested (decent browser, Google integration should allready be built in)…
March 21st, 2008 at 12:16 pm
the part that is missing in the “does the world need another mini pc” is the synch and seamless web capabilities….when I say seamless capabilities I mean full boat — JAVA, Flash, etc — and the power under the hood to make it all happen.
Synching documents to a web ala Evernote would be hot.
March 21st, 2008 at 3:17 pm
I think a decent mobile web experience would help but it requires more than just a good browser.
They also need a better display – browsing at 320 by 320 isn’t going to be high enough resolution. You also need more memory and more processor speed to support that web browsing.
Part of the reason the iPhone works isn’t just the decent browser. That browser wouldn’t work very well if it didn’t also have excellent hardware specs to back the experience. That is hugely important.
The Foleo, even with the additions you suggest, still wouldn’t cut it for me. I’m not excited about the whole UMPC/MID thing. I’d rather have something in a Palm/iPhone/WM Pocket PC form factor with decent specs. The UMPC sized devices aren’t pocketable anyway so I’d rather carry a small laptop instead. The big problem with the Foloe was that it was marketed as a Palm accessory – one that cost MORE than most of the devices it was accessorizing. That didn’t make sense to anyone. Maybe as a stand-alone device it would have had more traction, but just not for me.
March 22nd, 2008 at 6:34 pm
Palm needs so much help it’s hard to know WHERE to begin. I am under the opinion that they are milking the Treo as a cash cow, going to get all the money they can for it, then fold up.
We heard about Cobolt, didn’t happen. We heard about their UMPC; didn’t happen.
In an area that they pioneered, the smartphone, nothing really new has come from then since the inception of the Treo. Yes, we have seen a Windows Version of it, an upgrade to the Palm operating system, but no real upgrades to anything meqaningful as far as usability and the Iphone is going to finish them off, alas. They had it all, but have done nothing to keep it, does one really think at this juncture in time they are going to change anything?
Nada