Palm yesterday announced its forward-looking statements for their third quarter, saying that their bottom line would suffer on account of slow consumer adoption.
“Palm webOS is recognized as a groundbreaking platform that enables one of the best smartphone experiences available today, and our work to evolve the platform and bring industry-leading technology to market continues. However, driving broad consumer adoption of Palm products is taking longer than we anticipated,” said Jon Rubinstein, Chairman and CEO. “Our carrier partners remain committed, and we are working closely with them to increase awareness and drive sales of our differentiated Palm products.”
Predictions for Palm’s upcoming third quarter ascribe the company revenues of $285-320 million. The company went on to say that the slower than expected consumer adoption would impact revenues for the year, as lower order volumes and carrier order deferrals would work to put Palm well below the $1.6-1.8 billion in revenue that had been previously forecasted.
Final sales figures for Palm’s third quarter will be announced via conference call on Thursday, March 18 after 4 PM.
What’s wrong with Palm?
In the not-so-distant past, Palm commanded a lion’s share of Internet hype–the kind of hype that, if leveraged correctly, can lead to outstanding sales (see Apple). The problem with Palm, however, is that it woefully mismanaged the launch of their reinvention in two major ways: A poor developer ecosystem and horrible advertising.
Let’s start with the advertising, which can best be described as uninformative and creepy, as the following advertisement illustrates.
Aiming for the outer planets with lofty discussions of reincarnation would work well if your customer base lived in Tibet, but the American view of reincarnation typically runs a spectrum that starts at amusement, speed bumps on hubris and ends in sin.
Not every advertisement is a winner, however, so we’ll give Palm the benefit of the doubt and look at the next advertisement in this campaign of theirs.
Never mind the fact that Palm just pitched a mind reading bizarrophone, the company once again told us nothing about the actual merits of their device. The advertisement is also delivered in a peculiar rhyming scheme, which leaves me wondering who brought the special brownies in for the writers.
No bother, though. Perhaps the third advertisement in the series offers redemption.
Swing and a miss. Even as Palm finally shows customers something that matters, webOS’ excellent “cards” interface, it’s washed away by a weird story about a crusty juggler and her balls.
Seriously. Why would anyone buy a phone pitched by Powder? A Powder that admits to being crazy, sympathizes with jugglers and contends to have lived and be living multiple lives? More importantly, who in Palm believed that eerie and uninformative advertisements would be a great way to introduce the reinvention of their company to the world?
Recent attempts at advertising have fared no better, and I doubt that your average smartphone buyer can cite five merits Palm’s devices have over the likes of Android or iPhone.
Development ecosystem
Moving along, we have come to the point in the smartphone industry where the quality of a device and its base software is not enough to move product. You need an amazing app store, which can only be had by creating an inviting environment for developers. An inviting development environment is one that gives broad access to the phone’s hardware and software resources, which enables developers to create exciting and robust apps.
Sadly, Palm launched its flagship Pre smartphone with no such capabilities; the company decreed at launch that all apps would have to be written in web languages per their Mojo SDK. Palm forbade OpenGL access (the Pre has a robust OpenGL chip) and limited accelerometer use beyond worth, both of which are a staple in some of the most popular applications for the Android and iPhone markets, which continue to grow by leaps and bounds.
That’s all to say nothing of Palm’s application submission system, which was once described by an early-invite developer as a “Kafka-esque nightmare.” Can you imagine any company attracting a solid set of developers when the privileged few granted exclusive first access to the beta SDK were repulsed by the stipulations Palm enforced? I can’t.
Continuing to prove that the company was out of touch with the desires of developers, the company introduced the Ares SDK about six months after it launched Mojo and the Pre. Ares enabled people to drag’n’drop their way to webOS applications, but still didn’t address the basic need–and the high demand–for an SDK that enabled developers to create rich and intensive multimedia applications.
Finally, nearly eight months after the launch of the Pre, and certainly well outside the time frame where Palm could have built that all-important early momentum, the company released the Palm Development Kit (PDK), which empowered developers with C++ language support and OpenGL access.
Considerations
Palm didn’t just shoot itself in one foot, it shot itself in both feet. Through uninformative and inexplicably weird advertising, Palm had no chance of luring average consumers away from the glossy, simple and happy world of Apple, whose advertisements leverage simplicity to highlight the strengths of the iPhone. And through a terrible development environment, Palm turned off legions of smartphone aficionados who know well the frustrations of a smartphone with weak apps, few developers and a bleak future outlook.
Advertising and development aside, the modernity of the hardware is now a point of contention. Like the iPhone, the Pre’s display features a disappointingly low resolution of just 320×480. That’s a resolution the Android ecosystem now reserves for budget or mid-range devices, as the flagship devices rock screens with resolutions as high as 854×480–that’s higher than DVD resolution!
Whereas web text on devices like the Motorola Droid and the Nexus One can be easily read without zooming in, the same cannot be said of the Pre. Webpages are frustratingly blurry if you don’t commit to at least one zoom level. Worse yet, the screen density (pixels per inch, or PPI) is low enough on the Pre that individual pixels can be seen by anyone with a good pair of eyes. Did I mention that webpages often don’t fit well on the screen?
Finally, with outdated hardware and a too-little-too-late platform, Palm is just now trying to broaden its reach through a deal with Verizon and, perhaps, AT&T in May. Color me unsurprised that things aren’t going as planned.
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