When you are not the market leader (Palm) and can’t bully the competition or your audience (Apple & Google), you have to act like a startup in order to survive. That means, customers first. Empower your small audience to like you. Give them a superior product. Superior service. Engage. Give better technical support to independent developers that want to build on your platform to make fancy apps. Don’t charge a dime for building platform ($99) — they are enriching your platform. That’s cheap labor! Even consider recruiting startups to build apps for your platform. That’s what Apple did. And I think it worked quite well for them and those developers.
This is about winning enough market share and a pay wall hasn’t helped with their apps selection. Run contests to entice developers (Paypal, Amazon) and offer awesome prizes for the best apps. Solicit feedback and iteriate on the feedback you get from developers on how to make your tools and development kit better. Win the time, wallets, and more importantly the trust of developers and your audience. Without them, you have nothing but a soon-to-be-obsolete brick and lines of code — a device and technology capable for so much, yet no magic key to unlock that power.
I spoke to a person at Palm recently on the phone. He gave me a synopsis about Palm and their modile device/webOS strategy. He even bragged about how great their platform is and how it’ll be great for the future of modile devices. He mentioned how awesome their newest phone is (Pixi). But, I think Palm has it all wrong. Even if they believe their technology makes the most sense, it doesn’t mean the mass audience cares. Sure, I took a look at their website to learn more, but the problem is, I have an iPhone and there hasn’t been enough rave, mass adoption, or reason to even consider going to the store to check it out.
The mass audience doesn’t give a crap that uses webOS uses web technology such as HTML 5, JavaScript, or CSS. Nor do they care that the web browser uses WebKit layout engine. Those are things developers care about. The mass audience care about what cool apps they can download, what games they can play, what their friends are up to on Facebook, how reliable the network/phone is in their area, and so forth. Oh wait. That’s what Apple promotes on their advertisements.
Time is ticking. Elevation Partners already put in $325M for 25% stake in Palm (current market cap: 1.56B @ price: $10.96) in the beginning of 2007 plus another $100M in late 2008. And what do they have to show for that? Another straight quarterly loss (10th) and a decline of 5% in # of units in its fiscal second quarter. This past quarter, S&M expenses rose 64% and operating cost rose 21%. The stock price has increased 3x since the beginning of this year because of the hype and anticipation that Palm will become relevant again. But, that’s all it is. Hype and anticiptation. Time is running out — In the AM many shares will be sold because of poor execution and results. Will they ever get the equation of success, right? Before they burn through all their money? Before reality kicks in and investors realize Palm is nothing more than a technology company that can’t figure out how to turn a profitable business?