Gameboy70
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Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Metro Station, Hollywood and Highland
Posts: 1018 |
foo fighter wrote:
Agreed. But I'm not calling him an idiot. On the contrary, Hawkins is really the father of the PDA industry. I just think that his track record over the past two years has been very lackluster. And he hasn't demonstrated anything truly new to the PDA market. A few interesting ideas, but nothing groundbreaking.
There hasn't been a groundbreaking PDA since the Newton. Every PDA since then has been an incremental improvement: more memory, more screen resolution, better form factors, etc. Breaking new ground isn't what makes a PDA successful; it's leveraging one or more of those incremental improvements. The Palm V offered nothing new in terms of memory or processor speed, but it sported a superior form factor -- only one innovation, but the right one.
An acceptably small cell phone with an acceptably large screen (for a cell phone), an alphanumeric keypad and email/web/sms capability may not seem revolutionary within the ubergeek sewing circles of VC, PDABuzz, Slashdot and the like; nongeeks, on the other hand, will immediately "get it." My own mother, after seeing a picture of the Treo, asked me when it was coming out. She's usually bored by discussions of PDAs and cell phones.
Yes, but [Hawkins' alleged opposition to features is] also what will rob Handspring of its success. The market has changed dramatically over the past 2-3 years, but the Palm platform hasn't changed with it. It has pretty much remained stagnant for over 5 years. Consumers want more from thier PDA than just a basic PIM.
The market has changed dramatically over the past 2-3 years -- on the supply side. Palm has a surfeit of licensees cannibalizing its market share. And as the PDA market grows, the number of power users demanding luxury features grows with it, even if their proportion remains the same; and a more vocal minority is still a minority.
One of the biggest problems for PDA manufacturers is consumer satisfaction, not dissatisfaction. Talk to any owner of the lowly m100 series. I have yet to find a single owner of one who's unhappy with it, despite its pedestrian feature set. Why? Because it's a basic, inexpensive, uncomplicated PIM. Unfortunately, besides being boring, it's also a low-margin device that helping to commoditize the industry. It's becoming clear that without the resources of companies like Sony or Microsoft, R&D needs to be approved more judiciously than ever. Psion recently concluded that it wasn't worth the effort, and has ended a great product line.
Just look at the sudden success of SONY. They had virtually no marketshare with the original Clie, it was a flop. But SONY listened to its customers and released innovative new devices. The result: Sony went from .1% marketshare to over 10% in less than 5 weeks, and they are still growing...because they gave consumers what they wanted.
The Cli�, part deux, is a great product. But rather than attribute Sony's current success to some rare ability to receive public input, I submit that the jump in the company's market share has more to do with the fact that the first Cli� sucked (@ $400).
Most of the real innovations will have to come from Palm, through a new OS. That's coming. But both Palm and Handspring are equally guilty of dictating to its customers, rather than listening to them. Palm has resolved this by pushing hard to add long requested features to its new OS, but I believe that HS is still playing the same old song and dance routine. There's nothing new under the sun.
Except the Treo 
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11-14-2001 10:10 PM
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