Pre's Success Dependent on Developers 14
Even after a worse-than-expected net loss of $90 million announced on March 20, Palm still has a pulse and many are rooting for their success. The much-anticipated Pre, their first webOS smartphone, is believed to be their sink or swim device. Palm's fate is in the hands of the Pre's success, and fortunately for Palm, there is a lot of good energy and mojo around the Pre these days.
There is an excellent article by Peter Burrows in BusinessWeek that takes a closer look at the essential piece of the puzzle for the Pre's success - the developer community. Many developers, including Ge Wang, co-founder of iPhone software developer Smule, believes that Palm's Pre with webOS is #2 behind the iPhone for software development - and this statement comes before the Pre is even in the hands of the public. Even though most developers flock to the smartphone platform that has the most market share, BusinessWeek learned that most developers they contacted would rather write apps for Palm than Windows Mobile or Google's Android.
Why is the Pre so attractive to developers even before it's official release? There may be a host of reasons, but include the fact that Jon Rubinstein of Apple fame is chairman and head of product development. Rubinstein has attracted other Apple talent as well, like engineer Mike Bell. Also, developers are excited to work with a smartphone platform that doesn't require proprietary development tools - Palm's webOS enables millions of Web programmers to write apps.
Palm once enjoyed thousands upon thousands of developers writing software for their smartphones, making them a household name and driving their sales to the consumer that needed and wanted a wide variety of third-party apps. That time may be coming once again with the Palm Pre, as long as the prodigal sons and daughters in the development community return. Read the article for more detail - what do you think? Will developers return in droves and drive the Pre to success and save Palm?
[businessweek]
14 Comments
The Pre success is dependent upon getting the damn thing out the door!!! Enough talk!!!!!!!!! RELEASE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I can understand people being impatient to get the Pre. It looks like it will be a fantastic device. But Palm gave a "first half of 2009" window for the launch and so I wonder at how people can get quite so upset that it hasn't been launched by 27th March. Bizarre.
Maybe because they also said it will "be here before you know it", and we KNOW IT already.... ;-p
Maybe because they also said it will "be here before you know it", and we KNOW IT already.... ;-p
I thought Palm was touting for years that 97% of Palm users (or something like that) don't use *any* third party applications. That was Palm's repeated excuse for why they continued to release Treos and other devices without sufficient memory. Anyone who couldn't fit their PIM databases and a few applications into 16MB (then 20MB, then 52MB...) was a "power user" and highly disruptive to the "97%" of people who "never" install a third party application... And developers were ranting and raving at Palm for underspec'ing the memory resulting in many lost sales for lack of space on the device.
Now all of a sudden Palm decides to show those same Developers some love?!? Sheesh. Make up your mind, Palm.