Back in the mid 90s, Palm was a star, their products were "must have" with yuppies, in particular the cute Palm V.
But gradually, Palm lost its magic touch, its products were less and less "in", and to compensate they had to acquire Handspring, maker of the successful Tréo, but then those ones also lost their appeal and leave much to be desired at that. At the beginning, the 600 had a 100% return ratio with numerous hardware issues, then the 650 was full of software bugs, then came the 680 which is fine but hardly a big jump vs the 650, and its battery life is simply a shame : less than a day.
Frankly, great brand name, full of promises, but so so products, at best. The recently launched Foleo looks like a joke to me : 3 years ago, it would have been terrific. Now, it's already out of tune with the market.
Obviously, something is going wrong inside Palm, their innovation capabilities seem to have vanished. Ring a bell this situation, a great brand with uninspiring products ? Yes, that's it, Apple in the mid 90s, before the come back of Magic Steve, the guy who propelled Apple's market cap from 5 to $110bn in just a decade !
Jon Rubinstein, the ex Apple VP in charge of the iPod division, is now the CEO of Palm. And private equity has come in (Elevation Partners), injecting $240M for a 25% stake. No wonder, Palm's market cap is a pale $1.8bn, maybe a 10th of what it was a few years ago, so there's potentially some good money to be made here.
Will Jon Rubinstein succeed in turning around aisling Palm like his former boss wonderfully turned Apple around ? Focussing R&D teams on developing great new inspiring high tech products, that's his challenge.
But tough job for Jon, his ex Boss is launching on the 29th something that pretty much looks like a Tréo killer : the iPhone !
Palm Inc today is a great brand name one can buy for little money, but its future still looks very blurry. Potentially a great reward if things go well, but very high risk !
It could become Atari.
Posted by: Tillerman | June 17, 2007 at 08:50 PM
Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant Sramana Mitra, reviews Foleo, a Linux laptop replacement device by Palm. Link: http://sramanamitra.com/blog/1072
Posted by: Sumitra Menon | June 19, 2007 at 03:45 PM