Palm Treo is fighting iPhone: and losing
The Palm Treo is much like the iPhone. But the iPhone is sexier, better marketed and of its time. As a result the Palm Treo is up against the wall. Do not bet on its long-term future.
Being a journalist you sometimes meet people who change the way you look at things. For me, one of these people was Donna Dubinsky.
She is an amazing person. On September 27, 2007, Donna Dubinsky was conferred the Harvard Business School’s highest honor, the Alumni Achievement Award. (Incidentally, at the same time it was awarded to Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala whom I had met under different circumstances.)
Donna Dubinsky was one of the three people who effectively invented the Palm Pilot personal organizer — which I would argue was the godfather of the iPhone — in 1997.
(Donna also taught me the phrase, ‘reality check’ when referring to a flight of fancy by a PR. It is a term which I find immensely useful.)
Palm Computing was founded by Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan. The first Palms were pretty primitive yet sold like gangbusters. It took some time before you could upgrade them to one meg of RAM. By the time of the Palm III series there were external memory slots and firmware-upgradeable flash memory.
The original founders eased out of the company and the company moved over to making personal organizers which were also mobile phones. As opposed to the Apple iPhone which is mobile phone which is also a personal organizer.
Now the Palm Treo 700w combines a Palm handheld with mobile phone, e-mail, SMS, and instant messaging and, fatally in my opinion, uses Windows Mobile. It has slimmed down considerable from the early models and pretty much has everything built in.
But it is up against the Apple iPhone and the Blackberry and simply does not sell enough.
The company is up against the wall but had a much-needed vote of confidence from its largest shareholder in the form of a $100m investment.
The injection of cash, from private equity firm Elevation Partners, calmed some of the concerns that had blown up on Wall Street in recent weeks following news of a dramatic fall-off in sales of Palm’s existing line of PDAs and smartphones.
The bet is that Palm’s promised launch of a new generation of devices before the middle of next year will bring the company in out of the cold. I doubt it. I honestly doubt it.
The Palm was the pioneer. You can tell pioneers. They are the ones with arrows in their front.
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