Remember Palm?

I do.  Some of my first mobile smart phone experiences as an independent developer and as a user were on the Palm platform.

Look around, though, and you’ll barely see any Palm devices, and the carriers are having trouble giving the devices away.  A friend of mine has a conference coming up this summer, and she wants to give away smartphones at the door to all conference goers. She wants to use Android phones, but the carrier sponsoring the give-a-way is trying to push onto her Palm Pre’s.

Of course, she says “Nothin’ doin’” to that.

It’s puzzling, since the device is a decent piece of kit, all things considered.  After reading an interview with Palm CEO Jon Rubenstein, I get the sense he’s a bit puzzled as well, but still has fight left in him and the company:

Clearly we’ve hit a speed bump. No question about it. It’s really disappointing, and it’s frustrating. But, the company has tremendous assets.  We’ve got a great team we’ve built over the last couple of years.  Remember this whole thing was a transformation story.  It  wasn’t like we took something that was working and didn’t run it well.  We started off with a company that had no future, and we have been transforming it. We have arguably the best mobile operating system out there. It’s clearly the easiest to use and has the most intuitive user interface.

We’ve got all those things going for us, and what we need to do is get more commercial success and get to scale.  And that’s going to take longer than we’d hoped, obviously, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get there.  We do have $590 million in the bank, and we have a plan that carries this company forward. Now, we need to be frugal and we need to invest in those areas that have the best return for us, but when I read that we’re going out of business or our stock is worth zero or those kinds of things, it defies logic to me.

The interviewer apologizes for asking so many “downer questions.” Rubenstein responds:

That’s okay, go ahead.  I’m bummed out too, by things like not taking off at Verizon.  One of the analysts on our earnings call asked if we had launched when Droid launched, and Droid launched when [we] launched at Verizon, would the story have been opposite?  I said I think we have a better product than Droid, and customers would have been happier with it.

The Palm Pre has 2,200 apps in their store.  Apple and Android apps (and even the Windows Mobile app store) all dwarf that number. He talked about user choice in the App stores, and makes a very strong point.

…we really focus on the quality of apps, right?  I mean, if you look at the long tail of the 150,000 or 180,000, or whatever number Apple has got these days, it’s an amazing number. The reality is that it’s the first thousand or so that matter and the rest of it is long tail.

Now, that doesn’t mean there aren’t specialty apps that people want. But there’s also a lot of junk out there. So we’ve tried to do two things. One is we’ve really tried to focus on getting quality apps on the platform.  We’ve also given users an alternate approach to discovery, which we think is really interesting, and developers really like. We have our unique URL mechanism, which gives developers a URL they can Tweet, or Facebook or e-mail or message or build a Web site that has a directory of apps that are particularly interesting to them.  And then you click on that URL, it asks you for your phone number, and you get a notification on your device that says, ‘Would you like to download this app?’

It’s interesting to see Palm touch on all these very interesting topics, and it harkens back to a recurring conversation I’ve had with a number of early adopters lately along the same lines.

Why Ignore Entire Markets?

Another of the many reasons I resent Apple and all the hype surrounding the iPad is the fact that it focuses all innovation on the top 2% (or often, less) of users.  For the past nine months, the trendsetters in the tech world have been focused (to the point of diagnosable mental illness, just about) on the iPad.

Take a look at this infographic from MSDN and iStrategy.

Let’s extrapolate some numbers. According to the charts here, compiled from multiple sources, Palm accounts for 6% of a market of the nearly 38 million smartphones Gartner said are sold each year. Six percent.  Of 38 million.

That means that when we focus all our collective attention on the iPad, which at best guesses may have about 300,000 devices in present total circulation, we’re ignoring 2.2 million users.  Similarly, by discounting the present Microsoft app world (which, incidentally, is worlds easier to develop for than the iPhone. I speak from experience), we discount another 3.4 million users worldwide.

Don’t think this is happening?  Head over to Gowalla, Foursquare or even Facebook and see if you find an app for WinMo or Palm.  The only reason you find a Facebook app there is because Microsoft put one together for the WinMo platform. Even though it has an open API, not a single third party developer has taken the time to put one together for it.  Not our buddies over at Seesmic or Tweetdeck, either (who, by the way, don’t even have WinMo compatible Twitter clients).

Talk about leaving money on the table.