Palm CEO brushes off Apple cell phone threat

Pretty smug, Ed.

But the people at apple are not just "PC guys"

PC guys... that's scary; he has no idea what is about to happen.

Ed's right though, even if the expectation in and of itself is unreasonable. Apple isn't going to make the end-all, be-all cellphone on day one. It didn't even happen with the iPod and mp3 players in general. Apple will make a competent product with shortcomings that'll be addressed in future revisions or shortcomings they'll stick with because the Apple fanbase can tolerate it.

Thats funny especially due to the fact that the Treo 600 and 650s FLOPPED with Sprint. I know, I went through four and still ended up going back to my old phone.

Just wondering... is it completely necessary to put 'the Cupertino, Calif.-based company' in every single article? Same thing for windoze's 'Redmond based company'? I Honestly don't see the point...


And by PC guys, I think they meant personal computers, ie mac & windows & linux & (insert here)

I think the funniest thing about Ed's comments is that everyone said the exact same thing about the iPod.

he has no idea. what did people say about the ipod? they figured that out after just 'walking in'

Bravado for the shareholders. I imagine they are shitting themselves.

Considering the only changes that the Treo has offered in the past couple of years are a model without an antenna and a version that runs Windows Mobile, I'm sure they are.

It was a good phone. Three or four years ago.

I've often thought that. I understand they're trying to remain professional, and if it were an ordinary News source that reported on everything, I could understand. But this is APPLEinsider, the audience here probably doesn't need to be reminded where Apple is located in every article.

Let's change the name to "The Cupertino, Calif.-based company Insider".

I should register that domain right now!

Do we even know for sure that Apple are going to deliver a "smartphone" (i.e., one with PDA-like abilities)? We've heard all sorts of different reports:

• The iPhone will be a 3G "smartphone".
• The iPhone will be a 3G "normal" (i.e. with camera and music player, but no PDA-like stuff) phone.
• The iPhone will be a 2G "smartphone".
• The iPhone will be a 2G (GSM) "normal" phone.
• There will actually be two iPhones released at once: one "normal" 2G and one "smartphone" 3G.
• The first iPhone will be a "normal" 2G, to be quickly followed by a "smartphone" 3G.
• There is no iPhone

Personally, I'm hoping for and expecting a 2G iPhone with camera and music player, which won't be competing directly with any Palm phones anyway.

I believe that this CEO honestly doesn't get it. Look at all the players in the cell phone market. Have any of them in all of their market research and R&D come up with a phone that people truly "love"? No. But people "love" their macs, and they "love" their iPods. I think they'll "love" their iPhones too.

Whatever the specs will be I'm sure they wanna make the phone all about the experience. They will focus on software, navigation and usability like no other "phone guys" in the neighbourhood. Probably with some small clever functions like spotlight search etc. and the phone guys will go "dang... we gotta do that too!"

I remember another huge company who blew off Apple as a potential threat.

Micheal Dell back in 1997 remarked that if he were President of Apple he would close the company and give the money back to the stockholders.

He's since learned to shut up. Mr. Ed Colligan might well learn to do the same.

Of course he's not going to conceed, but a more appropriate response could have suggested, that Palm welcomes competition to market but is confident their products and services will prevail.

Oh who cares about Palm anymore. It's becoming just another Windows/Linux vendor.

Bingo.

Totally. Palm was hot in 1998-2003. After that, fracked. Palm is very marginalised at this stage, like Creative

Pretty much all PDA Phones need WindowsMobile5 and above to be relevant... Whether it's Palm, HP, Dell, whatever. I tried a Windows Mobile Dell Axim in 2004. *sigh* Rubbish compared to the heydays of HandSpring and what an awesome though simple PDA it was. And the Windows Mobile crashing about once or three times a day, mmmm..... sucktastic.

It's very very messy at the moment, the rumours, that is. And the amount of stock hype built up into this and people "not wanting to miss out on THE NEXT iPOD" -- it's going to be a roller-coaster ride the next few months.

Damn Apple and their consumer electronics! If they just stuck to PCs(Macs) we could be wasting our time talking more about Intel and the latest OSX update and firmware and benchmarks and stuff instead of cell phones and 3g and all this other low-brow mass-market consumer stuff.

Yeah in the meantime, pal, Palm got p*wnd by other players in the PDA-Phone market.

..lol

Really? I thought they were dropping their Access Linux Platform licence at the end of the year and forking PalmOS v5 (again) because Access haven't hit their development milestones.

If there's an example of a company that had a market pretty much to itself and then totally blew it all by themselves then Palm is it. Their OS was ok back in 1999 but needed a modern replacement so they buy the hottest OS company going - Be - badly manage their hardware, screw up the OS through mismanagement and piss off most of their technical staff who all go back to Apple.

Meanwhile they split the company, give each half of it a stupid name, sell their remaining OS to a browser company with a browser nobody uses or cares for and then buy back their own company name. And then they launch Palm devices running Windows!

Really Ed, it's not the 'PC guys' who don't get it.

Heh. That's an excellent summary of a company that didn't survive the dot-com bust very well. 1999 was their high point and they jacked it up majorly after that. Quite tragic really... In 2003, I was like, WTF is happening with Palm???? Since then, it's like, meh....... whatever

Isn't/wasn't Palm former Mac people?

I'm not sure on this point, someone mentioned it earlier. It was hella crazy times 1999-2002 in the SF Bay Area, I was there 2000-2002. People were all over the place - hired, fired, jumped ship, laid-off, rehired under contract, and so on......... Anyone remember RedSky Interactive in SF city? It did well until 2001/2002 (?) when I was walking by and they were clearing out the whole warehouse/studio. Maybe they just moved, but I'm not sure. The company I was in was talking about shifting to bigger offices at one time, then later laying off people.

I think those "established" during the 90s took various chances moving to different companies as the economic boom in the Bay Area and US heated up. Some made the right choices, others not so, others survived, some still survive to today.

But yeah, I'm not sure in terms of numbers/top management how many at Palm were from Apple, How many from Palm (I guess quite a number) went to HandSpring, and in the past few years, how many went/ are going back to Apple.

Hawkins (the founder) was never an Apple guy. He started from GRID and Intel. The people Palm bought from Be were comprised of many Apple people (Be's CEO Jean Luc Gassee was ex VP at Apple) but most of those left and went back to Apple including Steve Sakoman, Be co-founder with JLG, BeOS's software and technology guy and the guy that headed up the Newton at Apple. He's recently retired though according to wikipedia.

Oddly the two 'Mac guys' on the board are Ed there (ex of Radius) and John Hartnett (ex-Metacreations and Claris/Applesoft) but those are both marketing. You'd think they'd be paying attention to the 'PC Guy v Mac Guy' marketing Apple is pursuing before coming out with stupid comments like calling Apple 'PC Guys'. I bet the remaining ex-Apple tech employees at Palm cringed and then polished up their CVs before mailing them off to Apple.

Ed took over in 2003 just before Sakoman decided to leave to go back to Apple. Coincidence ?

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It's weird. I always idolised the Bay Area with all the enormous wonderful multimedia/ computing/ handheld/ tech/ art/ whatever that came out of it. But the on-the-ground experience with getting, changing and keeping jobs in such a fluid market, inspiring but friggin' scary at times. I guess that's what drives innovation and continues to keep a powerful economy like California going. Yet in Cali there's a lot of people that have "dropped out" of the rat race and are surviving in their own ways.

Good run-down anyways Aegis

They should subtitle the smartphone Newton… "We invented this market in the 90's—look what a damn mess you guys made. Do we have to do everything for ¥ou? Get out of the way, we'll take over from here thanks."

But seriously, if Handspring was able to make the transition from PDA to mobile, I have little doubt Apple can (not to say that it will be easy). As far as smart functionality, with Windows Mobe looking like a color Newton that has been upgraded to play some games and video, I'm not terribly concerned about Apple's ability to gain headway in that regard.

Its possible that he is just brushing off Apple, but it seems that corporate executives (and politicians) all spin PR propaganda and FUD to support their agenda or best interests, even though they know its not the truth. They claim that everything they're doing is the greatest thing and the other guy is a loser.

That'd be an interesting line for Steve Jobs to take being as it was one of the first things he killed when he went back to Apple. Even Fake Steve wouldn't claim to have invented the friggin thing.

I wonder what Apple did with all the Newton tech though and what Sakoman was doing back at Apple from 2003 till he recently retired. It's probably not relevant at all today in the same way PalmOS 5 isn't but it'd be interesting to see Jobs on stage saying "Remember last year when we told you we had a secret lab maintaining OSX on Intel? Well, we've another one - Welcome to the new Newton."

I wonder if it's got too much bad baggage though, even if the Newton 2000 was actually quite good, people remember the Newton jokes from the first MessagePad. And PDAs are almost entirely irrelevant today unless they're part of your phone like a Treo, Blackberry, S60/UIQ or WinMo.


I'd think they'd lean on their Mac/PC software side more to offer iTunes levels of integration that none of the others do well and concentrate more on the feature phone end of the market rather than the smartphone/PDA market. If they do that they can a) create a much simpler phone and b) use exiting phone tech off the shelf, maybe even an existing phone OS like Symbian underneath, c) rapidly develop software and integrate it into MacOS. I still wonder what they'll do on Windows though unless one of the secret things to be launched with Leopard is Cocoa for Windows.

Am I the only one who thinks this Apple cell-phone idea make little-to-no sense? Like the movie download thing, this seems more analyst-driven rather than consumer-demand-driven.

Frankly, I was skeptical of the iTunes movie thing...still am.

I'm in the outright "WFT" camp on the cell-phone idea. Most people--not tech geeks--get the cell phone that comes free-or-damn-close-to-it from their provider. Ordinary folk don't even really think of the cell phones as "theirs." It's more like the physical extension of their contract with a certain provider. When my students get their cell phones confiscated during the school day, a good many of them don't even bother to come back for them.

I can't see people laying out $300-$500 bucks for a cell phone, even if it does match their iPod.

I'm UK based and was working for a UK company at the time in the UK equivalent of the valley, but we had US offices in Pao Alto. I had a pretty stable job but even in the UK, all around me there were people with jobs that changed every 3-6 months as companies were bought up or changed focus, particularly if your company was American. One of my friends worked for Macromedia (eventually) here after multiple mergers. They paid well but he was never sure what he'd be doing month to month.

The 90s were also pretty fierce if you were an experienced programmer as back then the tech was changing rapidly enough that many companies just brought in fresh graduates, trained them up on whatever the latest tech was (Java, VB, Delphi, MFC) and paid them peanuts. Being new, they'd work stupid hours and turn out mostly crap. Then they'd move companies leaving their crap behind them and taking their training with them. Eventually us experienced programmers got fed up of cleaning up the mess or nursemaiding junior programmers and dropped out too.

It wasn't until BeOS and MacOSX came along that I'd consider writing software again. Windows sapped all my enthusiasm in the 90s for programming. MacOS was icky. I don't know how many Californian dropouts are up in the hills drained in a similar way but they should get a Mac as I did. It's nice up here in the hills.

My comments were more for humor than reality, though I doubt any smartphone type device would be introduced by Steve without some mention of Apple's legacy in the creation of the PDA market, politics aside.



I was operating under the assumption that the rumors of a basic phone and smart phone both being developed had some merit. I doubt Apple would use an off the shelf OS, especially Symbian considering Sony's just made a large investment in the OS, being their sole remaining large vendor. Newton OS was pretty solid, and it ran on ARM hardware, but I don't think they'd use that either, I suspect Apple will come up with something new out of their iPod division.

The Windows question is a valid one though. How do you create vertical integration on the Windows side when you have to rely on MS Outlook to play nice? I'm not sure I see that happening.

For a company that has zero penetration in the market (okay, not zero, but close enough to not matter) outside of the US and some Euro countries, this guy is one smug son of a bitch!

What's this clown on about anyway? PC Guys? No wonder Palm almost tanked with a looser like this at the helm.

He would have done better to shut his mouth and offer a 'no comment'.

They can claim the acronym I suppose but not the market. It'd be wrong on multiple counts given that Psion beat them to it a decade earlier with their Organiser and some would argue HP beat them too. You couldn't move in London in the 80s without tripping over a Psion organiser and Moto phone brick. Psion later became Symbian.




Probably. I can't see Apple sticking with one model.


Sony Ericsson bought back UIQ from Symbian. Symbian is the OS that sits under UIQ and Nokia's S60 interface. Think of Symbian as Darwin and UIQ/S60 as Aqua.



The iPod UI is pretty tired though. Back when it used MacOS7 fonts it was kind of retro cool but since it went colour it's pretty plain. Dare I say it but the Zune shows more flair there.

Newton OS had some very good ideas but it certainly would need a rethink and rewrite for today.


Yep. Apple will be dead in the Smartphone market without Windows integration.

Pretty much straight out of high school I packed my backpack, grabbed my only cash ($300) and moved to SF to meet an aunt I never met before and get my start on a job interview on the stock exchange clerking for traders in the options pits of the then PSE (NIKE, AMAT, WCOM <-Worldcom pits) This was in July 1996- with a starting salary of 16k. In SF! This was before craigslist took off or was even known at all so you had to use metro rent or rent tech to find places. You'd be lucky to find two places in your price range a week. Then you'd show up to get an apartment and there'd be a line out the door and by the time you got to talk to the person with the applications you'd find a crowd of people offering to pay the year's rent up front- and to double it! So that ended up making for some wild roommate situations. I have no idea how I made it . It was good times though. Amazing times. Lots of awesome house parties, events, music- and lots of energy. SF just hasn't been the same since the dotcom era abruptly ended.

Referring to Mac users as "PC guys"?

That guy is worse than Hitler! And Saddam! Combined!

Sony Ericsson makes some sweet phones. I would think that Apple would have a multimedia Ipod phone like the w810i and then a PDA Apple Style. The problem is that SE phones trail Nokia and Motorola by quite a wide margin. I would spend up to $400 on the multimedia one and maybe $500 for the PDA. A lot of my friends who have a SE phone are not using their Ipod as often because they can load a 2 or 4 Gb memory card and only carry one device. Obviously it is not as good as an Ipod but combining 2 products can work if done right. apple would probably have to partner with a mobile handset firm to lower costs unless they are going for broke. If it's Motorola then I would not buy it...