[Homo Erectus]

When you read this does it sound familiar to Blackberry situation

You be the judge

Can Palm even survive 2010, let alone a decade? And what exactly happened to put Palm in this precarious state? The pundits have weighed in, and here are their thoughts:

"But for Palm, a 6-month exclusive launch with Sprint as the carrier struggled with subscriber churn didn't help. And that exclusive window meant that the other CDMA carrier in the U.S. � Verizon Wireless � had time to pump $100 million into a marketing blitz to promote the Motorola Droid, not Palm phones."

"No one expected Palm to dominate the smartphone market overnight. But with a little shy of 1 million handsets shipped in the third quarter and more than half of that product still sitting on shelves, its "iPhone-killing" Pre and the cheaper Pixi are anything but, hobbled by supply problems, stiff competition, poor timing and marketing missteps. The advertising was flawed in that it didn't create an overall image for Palm, nor did it hammer home the products' features."

"But Palm might be the first casualty of the iPhone. Palm's software, stagnant for years even by 2007 standards, immediately looked pedestrian against the iPhone. And it simply took too long for the company to come up with its answer--WebOS--which even if it was perfect might have been too late.
Palm backers will surely point to other proud companies--such as CEO Jon Rubenstein's former employer, Apple--which dusted themselves off when the world thought they were dead and came back even stronger. The difference is that Apple resurrected itself by changing the game it wished to play, from legacy computers to music, media, and mobile, while Palm is fighting desperately to maintain relevance in a game it practically invented."

"Palm is facing a crisis of confidence that is eerily reminiscent of what the financial institutions faced just a year ago. It doesn't really matter if the loss of confidence is just external to Palm and not internally, because if the carriers, developers and consumers don't think they are going to make it, they likely won't, unfortunately.
Some may think the announcement of the Pre and Pixi Pluses for AT&T is a big positive, but maybe not. This implies that it's unlikely they are going to ship a new phone soon. Given the impending launch of the Nexus One for Verizon, Sprint and AT&T, as well as a likely significant iPhone upgrade this summer, it looks like a lost cause for Palm now. WebOS may have a lot of potential but their current products have been eclipsed in hardware terms and new competitor hardware is on the horizon. No amount of marketing is going to make the products sell well against the coming competition."

[ccbs]

I just hope someone shows up and makes an offer that was as generous as HP to Palm.

[Bla1ze]

This is relevant - http://forums.crackberry.com/site-ne...ml#post9005251

As some have already mentioned, we (as in Mobile Nations) run the webOS site as well and you see that those forums still exist in some capacity. CrackBerry as a site will live on for as long the community needs us to exist, should BlackBerry disappear at some point.

While it's easy to draw some comparisons to webOS, you also need to realize that webOS didn't have the install base that BlackBerry does either. Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, haters abound, BlackBerry cannot just up and disappear as quickly as what webOS did. You can't simply just turn off BlackBerry.

Sure, we all hear about how government operations are turning against BlackBerry and switching from the platform but the fact remains, the government(s) is still a MASSIVE part of BlackBerry's clientele. Aside from that, the Canadian government itself is, some would say, heavily invested in BlackBerry outside of just using their devices and infrastructure.

Comparing the two is a bit off base. Not entirely off base but still.. off base.

[rodan01]

Someone said in this forum that Enterprise and Government represent only 15 million of the 72 million users. If this is true, clearly 15 million users is not enough to pay the cost of development of a mobile platform. They would have to move to Android or iOS.

[yellowhammer]

Comparing the two is a bit off base. Not entirely off base but still.. off base.

Totally agree - somewhat relevant but still a world of difference between the two situations. Palm was circling the drain in a far worse financial position. Broke and with a much weaker legacy OS base, Palm needed hundreds of millions of dollars in investments from Elevation Partners in 2007 and 2008 just to keep the company afloat and get webOS out the door. In just a few months BlackBerry sold more BB10 phones than Palm/HP ever sold in the over two years that webOS was on the market. BlackBerry is far from where Palm was in late 2009/early 2010.

Posted via CB10

[m1kr0]

Totally agree - somewhat relevant but still a world of difference between the two situations. Palm was circling the drain in a far worse financial position. Broke and with a much weaker legacy OS base, Palm needed hundreds of millions of dollars in investments from Elevation Partners in 2007 and 2008 just to keep the company afloat and get webOS out the door. In just a few months BlackBerry sold more BB10 phones than Palm/HP ever sold in the over two years that webOS was on the market. BlackBerry is far from where Palm was in late 2009/early 2010.

Posted via CB10

Fully agree. BB will be around next Christmas holidays, my opinion.

[kevets]

I hope you are right sir!

[m1kr0]

Well we can't see the future, but we can try to maintain a positive outlook. Heck, only time will tell. But I still think they can make it - there's a lot of good things they've got going.

[richc3]

I was actually invested in Palm during their rise and fall (came out ahead though since I got in really early).

There was actually quite a bit of hype about the product early on (much more than BB10) and virtually every review out there highly praised webOS. However, most of their issues really stemmed from hardware in terms of quality (slider, keys, etc all breaking) resulting in numerous returns/exchanges -- this stressed their relationship Sprint and soured the consumer over time. Next was Palm's obsession with the river rock design -- people were screaming at them for a full screen bar phone, but it never came to be. Palm also suffered from carrier exclusivity in that the hardware was only available on Sprint & Bell (Canada) for the longest time and they never really branched out outside of North America.

From there forward, Palm really started working on improving the hardware problems they were having and they did quite well. However, they still never came around to getting that full screen phone. Additionally, when they came out with the Touchpad they had similar issues to what Microsoft is having right now. All in all, HP / Palm gave up early on the platform as their CEO at the time wanted to shift away from hardware -> a software/services companies -- he wouldn't last long before being replaced.

For the most part, I wouldn't say Palm or BlackBerry are particularly similar outside of the issue of attracting customers, even then, you can attribute that to different reasons.

[Dgree03]

This is relevant - http://forums.crackberry.com/site-ne...ml#post9005251

Comparing the two is a bit off base. Not entirely off base but still.. off base.

Umm I do not know about that....

WebOS was and update to Palm OS.... Just like BB10 was an update to BBOS
Palm OS had a large userbase and they thought that userbase would translate to WebOS sales.. Just like Blackberry

All the same adjectives that are used to describe BB10, were used to describe WebOS... even several functions and user interactions were the same...

Palm stock price went from a low of $4 to $18 Following the announcement of WebOS and releasing of handsets then they sold to HP for about $6 dollars per share... sounds like BBRY

I can go on but... yea much closer than most people think.

[Vorkosigan]

My goodness. How do people ever manage to get out of bed if the outcomes to their days are all going to be the same. 'gosh. I had toast for breakfast again. I know how my whole day will unfold '

Yawn. The water will find its level. I think BlackBerry will hit it's stride and do just fine, whether that's as a privately held company or a partnership. If it doesn't and the worst, to me, happens and it's dissolved it won't be an overnight thing.

Posted via CB10

[qwerty4ever]

Comparing the two is a bit off base. Not entirely off base but still.. off base.

The similarities are too close to be coincidental making the comparison on target not off base. I hope BlackBerry survives as a viable company in private hands other than a hedge fund, venture capitalist, or whatever Watsa calls himself and Fairfax Financial. Prime Minister Stephen Harper could order BlackBerry placed under government control / stewardship on the grounds of national security thereby clipping the vultures' wings.

[RubberChicken76]

Someone said in this forum that Enterprise and Government represent only 15 million of the 72 million users. If this is true, clearly 15 million users is not enough to pay the cost of development of a mobile platform. They would have to move to Android or iOS.

By what metric? They seemed to be doing a fine job of it in 2007 when they only had 8 million customers ...

[RubberChicken76]

I can go on but... yea much closer than most people think.

It's similar in that they're both former leaders that fell out of favour, made a platform transition to a new platform that had fans but struggled to catch on.

It's also different. Palm with "several million users" is not the same as BlackBerry with several "tens of millions of users". Nor is Palm with no money the same as BlackBerry with rising cash. Nor is Palm with heavy debt the same as BlackBerry with no debt. Nor is the competitive environment the same.

Who knows how this will play out, but I find the Palm - BlackBerry comparison to be old, cliched, superficial and unoriginal.

[katiepea]

palm is a great example of an extraordinary OS and an extraordinary failure. That's by far the best mobile OS I've ever used, or at least, it should have been. I feel the same way about BB10, but it's just not there yet, we'll see with 10.2, but there's no reason to expect a turnaround for BB anymore, it's not very likely. A sale of IP is the most likely scenario. It happens, it sucks, nothing much you can do about it, I just hope the 10.2 update actually sees the light of day so the device can last a while longer.

[jeffydude05]

I wish Palm had the money, they had the best team in the valley. What they did in that short amount of time from scratch was pretty incredible. Verizon backing out, Mark Hurd scandal...what could of been. Hopefully it isn't the same for Blackberry. Whether they go private or partner, they need to re-brand the Blackberry name.

[stringhetta]

Posted via CB10

[kevinnugent]

I wish Palm had the money, they had the best team in the valley. What they did in that short amount of time from scratch was pretty incredible. Verizon backing out, Mark Hurd scandal...what could of been. Hopefully it isn't the same for Blackberry. Whether they go private or partner, they need to re-brand the Blackberry name.

Look out for the Fairfaxfone Q124.

[keypad]

When you read this does it sound familiar to Blackberry situation

You be the judge

Can Palm even survive 2010, let alone a decade? And what exactly happened to put Palm in this precarious state? The pundits have weighed in, and here are their thoughts:

"But for Palm, a 6-month exclusive launch with Sprint as the carrier struggled with subscriber churn didn't help. And that exclusive window meant that the other CDMA carrier in the U.S. — Verizon Wireless — had time to pump $100 million into a marketing blitz to promote the Motorola Droid, not Palm phones."

"No one expected Palm to dominate the smartphone market overnight. But with a little shy of 1 million handsets shipped in the third quarter and more than half of that product still sitting on shelves, its "iPhone-killing" Pre and the cheaper Pixi are anything but, hobbled by supply problems, stiff competition, poor timing and marketing missteps. The advertising was flawed in that it didn't create an overall image for Palm, nor did it hammer home the products' features."

"But Palm might be the first casualty of the iPhone. Palm's software, stagnant for years even by 2007 standards, immediately looked pedestrian against the iPhone. And it simply took too long for the company to come up with its answer--WebOS--which even if it was perfect might have been too late.
Palm backers will surely point to other proud companies--such as CEO Jon Rubenstein's former employer, Apple--which dusted themselves off when the world thought they were dead and came back even stronger. The difference is that Apple resurrected itself by changing the game it wished to play, from legacy computers to music, media, and mobile, while Palm is fighting desperately to maintain relevance in a game it practically invented."

"Palm is facing a crisis of confidence that is eerily reminiscent of what the financial institutions faced just a year ago. It doesn't really matter if the loss of confidence is just external to Palm and not internally, because if the carriers, developers and consumers don't think they are going to make it, they likely won't, unfortunately.
Some may think the announcement of the Pre and Pixi Pluses for AT&T is a big positive, but maybe not. This implies that it's unlikely they are going to ship a new phone soon. Given the impending launch of the Nexus One for Verizon, Sprint and AT&T, as well as a likely significant iPhone upgrade this summer, it looks like a lost cause for Palm now. WebOS may have a lot of potential but their current products have been eclipsed in hardware terms and new competitor hardware is on the horizon. No amount of marketing is going to make the products sell well against the coming competition."

How uncanny

[Taigatrommel]

Maybe Thor still has the big "iWin-Button" (Android switch) beneath his desk - at least according to multiple CB members around here, switching to Android and release such devices would turn BBRY into a cash-cow. So there is no need to worry about anything.

Seriously, there has been enough discussions about BBRYs future around here already. Comparisions with both Palm and even Nokia might not be *that* far off, but like Bla1ze said, they are still off. Especially for BBRY, which is still quite integrated into government/company infrastructures, you can't simply pull the plug here.

[jegs2]

Palm at one time made smart phones, couldn't keep up with ongoing innovation, and they went the way of the Dodo.

BlackBerry makes smart phones, have been slow to keep up with ongoing innovation, and they're in danger of going the way of the Dodo.

In that way, the two are similar.

[kevets]

Everyone on this board should read this, if they have the stomach for it.

Pre to postmortem: the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS | The Verge

A couple of choice quotes that have an uncanny similarity...

I know of another older OS that has been hanging around, maybe for longer than it needs to...

By 2007, iterating on Palm OS 5 was akin to squeezing blood from a stone: even though it had been re-engineered to function on newer ARM processors, the user interface bore an eerie resemblance to Palm devices from ten years prior and still shared some of its limitations.

We have seen a lot of updates this year. Catching up the Android API compabitility, adding features like multiple alarms, fixing OS reboot bugs.

The launch, in some respects, was only the beginning. "We ****ed up a lot of things" in the early releases, one source says. 1.0.3, 1.2, 1.2.1, 1.3.1, 1.3.2, and 1.3.5 all came before the end of 2009, closing gaps and fixing bugs that the team had left open in its breathless race to launch the Pre on time.

"10.2 is what should have shipped on day one" comment

Toward the end of 2009, focus on iterating Albacore � which had started to become a major drain on morale � shifted to Blowfish, better known as webOS 2.0. In some respects, Blowfish is what Palm engineers had wanted to release on day one

I would be weary of any company saying they are "doubling down" on BlackBerry.

The deal was announced in late April of 2010, and closed on July 1st, for roughly $1.2 billion. HP famously noted at the time that it planned on "doubling down" on webOS � a buzzphrase that has been used countless times in reference to a product that's gotten off to a slow start and necessitates a public show of renewed commitment from its owner.

... and so on from there. After the purchase, a tablet was put on the front burners from HP... and I'm sure if BB gets picked up, the tablet talk will not be too far behind. My only hope in all this is that they don't focus too much on getting devices out and focus more on the ecosystem and sharpshooting apps. As Steve Ballmer once said: "DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS."

[the_sleuth]

People enjoy parallels and generalization to keep the story simple to understand. But Palm and BlackBerry have traveled different paths.

Palm was kept alive by Elevation Partners for a couple of years. BlackBerry has a much stronger balance sheet than Palm ever had. Palm depended on one carrier in the U.S.--Sprint.exclusivity initially. Palm had hardly any presence outside of N. America.

In contrast, BlackBerry has two large investors, Prem Watsa and Mike Lazaridis (together control about 16% of BBRY), both are very motivated to save their investment either through private sale or outright purchase from another competitor.

[BoldPreza]

Umm I do not know about that....

WebOS was and update to Palm OS.... Just like BB10 was an update to BBOS
Palm OS had a large userbase and they thought that userbase would translate to WebOS sales.. Just like Blackberry

All the same adjectives that are used to describe BB10, were used to describe WebOS... even several functions and user interactions were the same...

Palm stock price went from a low of $4 to $18 Following the announcement of WebOS and releasing of handsets then they sold to HP for about $6 dollars per share... sounds like BBRY

I can go on but... yea much closer than most people think.

At the same time here are some differences.

BlackBerry launched a class competitive phone in terms of hardware. Not leading but competitive.

BlackBerry went after not just their niche markets with a qwerty or a slider but they also launched first a slab phone which is what the masses wanted and aim to launch their second one within the next few months. Palm never did that even after two years it was barely a prototype.

The BlackBerry App World is much further along than palm or hp ever got with the catalogue.

The phone didn't launch with just one carrier but with just about every carrier unlike palm who tried to be sprints iPhone. BlackBerry realized that would cripple them.

BlackBerry has a large international fan base which has been buying the phones to this point that has been demonstrated in their quarterly numbers I might add. It's the USA that they are hurting mainly.

BlackBerry did the smart thing with their lineup as well. They acknowledged that a lot of people wouldn't want to switch immediately to their new line especially ad they still have to add things too it so they continued OS 7 with a low end product like the 9720 which is to keep legacy buyers happy. Palm disregarded their supposedly loyal fan base by ditching all their old stuff and focusing solely on WebOS products.

Am I saying they are perfect? No. Do I completely ignore some parallels I see between the two? No I have been saying the same for the past two years. But I will say that given BlackBerry's fundamental strengths and convertible user base and outside businesses that they still control I think their is a lot more fight in them still.

Posted via CB10

[FFR]

Someone said in this forum that Enterprise and Government represent only 15 million of the 72 million users. If this is true, clearly 15 million users is not enough to pay the cost of development of a mobile platform. They would have to move to Android or iOS.

Government blackberry subscribers are down to 1 million.