The Nokia N950 was designed at a weird time. Nokia’s position as the premier smartphone maker was under siege from Android and iPhone after seeing off the Palm OS and numerous iterations of Windows Phone. Nokia had missed the boat on devices with capacitive touch displays. It was using a smartphone operating system that was starting to show its age, a bit like PalmOS did previously. Like Palm, Nokia wasted far too much time coming up with its next generation OS, which gave Google and Apple the opportunity gap that they needed.
Part of the problem was that Nokia was wrong for the right reasons:
Different consumers do need different types of phones, which is why HMD have managed to resurrect modern versions of classic Nokia feature phone designs
Phones are better if they can be operated one-handed. Whereas Google and Apple busied themselves designing computers that happened to be phones
Phones needed to be made down to a cost. So the handsets were different on the outside but had common ‘guts’, which meant that premium products could be underpowered
Nokia had their own answer to Android and iOS in MeeGo which grew out of work that Intel and Nokia had separately done on mobile Linux. Nokia was partnering with Intel partly because it believed that Intel was the future of mobile.
The Nokia N950 was a development handset showcasing this operating system in action. It was similar and related to the N9.
The N9 was released in a limited amount of markets were it was successful. However the N9 success story was overshadowed by the larger business problems Nokia faced in its transition from Symbian and feature phones to Windows Phone.
There were an estimated 5,000 Nokia N950 handsets made in total, which went to the Nokia global developer community. Technically there are loaned devices rather than given to developers. They occasionally appear on eBay going for 1,000GBP+
Up close with the Nokia N950
At first glance the Nokia N950 looked like a chimera of the N9 and the N8 with a slide out keyboard riffing on the Communicator form factor that Nokia pioneered.
It makes sense to list the differences with the N9 first of all:
The Nokia N950 had a TFT LCD screen roughly the same size as a Nokia E90 Communicator, but with a higher resolution. The N9 had an AMOLED screen which is slightly smaller and has a slightly higher resolution
The N9 was made from the same machined polycarbonate body that then made its appearance on Nokia Lumia models. The Nokia N950 has a case made from a mix of machined and stamped aluminium parts and came only in black (though I have seen pictures of un-anodised devices as well. These were probably pre-production prototypes)
They had different camera modules that performed broadly the same
The Nokia N950 had a pop under keyboard similar to the N8 and E7. More on that a bit later on
The Nokia N950 had 8.5GB of usable storage compared to up to 64GB of memory in the N9
The N9 has a slightly larger battery than the N950, but the difference wouldn’t have been noticeable due to the difference in screen technology
What you end up with is a phone that still looks modern (partly due to its anodised black case making the screen edge harder to spot.
The device is slow compared to modern devices but is speedy for its time. The device flipped from landscape to portrait mode, but this wasn’t perfectly implemented.
It had a pop under keyboard which allows the device to have a really shallow design in comparison to Communicator devices. However it does leave the screen exposed to damage. The past decade of Gorilla Glass™ screens on iPhones and Android handsets proves that the Corning wonder material is not invulnerable.
The problem with the design means that you end up with a shallow area for the keyboard. The Nokia N950 like the E7 and N8 don’t have as full a featured keyboard as the Communicator devices.
Here’s a keyboard from the E90 by comparison. When you were using the Nokia N950 you end up with a virtual keyboard on the screen providing the tab, ctrl, esc and alt keys, as well as very commonly used symbols. Which begs the question of how useful the keyboard would really be for developers?
Compared to the modern iPhone, the N950 meets the goal of a mobile computing device much better. You can write longer emails and documents on the keyboard than the iPhone. The camera is adequate for most people’s needs and it shows in some respects how little the smartphone concept has moved on over the past seven years.
Could the Nokia N950 been the future?
Historically Nokia’s Symbian phones had been built on TI’s OMAP processors; but these didn’t have a roadmap for 4G wireless. Nokia had two choices bet on Qualcomm or Intel. Qualcomm had come out on top in IP related disputes, which probably made Intel seem more attractive. Intel was also championing WiMax as a 4G standard.
WiMax had limited adoption at best, Nokia was on the wrong side of networking standards and eventually was forced to use Qualcomm processors in Windows Phone reference designs.
`Nokia could have gone to Snapdragon processors but its joint relationship with Intel on the software side of things would have been tainted. There is also no guarantee that Qualcomm would have been a helpful partner given the history between the two companies and that both Android and iOS devices used Qualcomm products.
Secondly, Nokia bet all the marketing budget on the Lumia device launch which left nothing for the MeeGo devices.
Finally, Nokia would not have been able to get out of the legal contract that they had with Microsoft. The only way MeeGo would have stood a chance is if the Nokia board had not approved Stephen Elop’s proposal to go with Windows, rival schemes to go with Android and bet on the home team.
At the time the internal Nokia option would have looked high risk. Board members would have been familiar with historic project problems on Meamo and then MeeGo
Secondly Nokia had a history of buying in new generation operating systems. It licensed GEOS for the Nokia Communicator 9000 and 9110. It licensed and then bought into Psion’s OS business unit, which became Symbian
Nokia’s feature phones ran on homegrown technology built on Intelligent System Architecture (ISA), also called the Nokia Operating System (NOS)
Ten years ago, I was busy helping get a communications agency’s digital offering up and running. Social media was a thing. There was a mix of curiosity and fear in clients. A bit like the web before it, they felt that they needed to do something but often didn’t have sufficient momentum to turn this into action.
Now social media means Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Snapchat and maybe LinkedIn depending on the client objectives. Back then it was much more diverse. Blogging was still powerful and I spent a lot of 2005 – 2007 helping Yahoo! and then agency clients develop social media and blogging guidelines.
The first panel that I ever spoke at was an event called Blogging4Business held at the Marriott in Grosvenor Square in April 2007.
It was a time of tremendous growth. Facebook had gone from 28 million users in July 2007 (less than half the size of MySpace) to 200 million users by November 2008. MySpace doubled its user base in the same time but was still left in the dust by Facebook.
Here’s the top social platforms by unique worldwide visitors ten years ago in November 2008 according to comScore.
Blogger
Remember I said that blogging was big? Pyra Labs had launched one of the first dedicated blog publishing tools in 1999. By February 2003, it was acquired by Google. The second iteration of this blog was started on Blogger in March 2004. Blogger’s killer app was that it was much more flexible and scalable than DIY sites like Geocities and Tripod that came before it. It developed a number of great features added around this time including allowing me to post via email. You’ve got to remember, network access was pretty poor outside the home.
Email was one of the few things that worked well on mobile devices. I started using Flickr as my image hosting which allowed me to send image attachments as well as my copy to my blog. An email could be written on the go, without internet connectivity. The next time that you connect to the internet, the email would sail into the ether and trigger a blog post, which was much more practical than the nascent app economy on PalmOS and Symbian at the time. I sent an email to publish this post using a Palm Treo 650, whilst waiting to fly back from San Francisco airport in August 2005. At the time I was going back and forth between Yahoo! Europe in London and global headquarters in Sunnyvale.
Blogger attracted 222 million unique users on a monthly basis.
Facebook
We all know it now as a dominant ever watchful social leviathan. Culturally Facebook represented a changing of the guard. Up until 2007, web 2.0 ethos had been about data portability. It meant I could easily move my photos from Flickr or my bookmarks from delicious.com. Part of this came from the hippy ethos that was baked into the Silicon Valley world view. Here’s what I was saying about Facebook back in 2008:
I don’t work with Facebook, I can only go on the way that the company presents itself and judge it on its actions. But from this I can make some deductions. Its terms and conditions particularly the ownership of any user data is much more onerous than the likes of Google and Yahoo!. With Yahoo! you grant them a non-exclusive license to your content; you can choose to remove the material when you want. With Facebook, they own your data period. This isn’t about putting their business on a legal footing but serving the audience up with a price on their head, and showing a lack of respect for their audience. And I haven’t even talked about Facebook’s privacy infringing marketing practices, of which Beacon was the latest high-profile example. As the saying goes ‘A fool knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’.
The company takes a Hotel California approach to APIs (your data can enter, but it can never leave). Add to this the control that Facebook is going to put on developers in 2008 – not exactly right neighbourly now is it? Even Apple bows to their influence and had to give developers an SDK (software development kit) for the iPhone. Also remember that developers are the kind of web influencers who can make and break a service: they lead people on and they can lead people elsewhere.
By 2008, Facebook was getting its ducks in a row to become an online advertising powerhouse. What we couldn’t see at the time was the way that Facebook missed the boat on mobile and had to consciously work to not fall off the wagon. Back in November 2008, Facebook had 200 million followers.
Facebook was defined in many respects by its rival MySpace. by 2008 they had been rivals over three years. 2008 marked the turning point when Facebook gained the upper hand and surged away.
MySpace
The roots of MySpace was in a digital marketing company eUniverse who had employees with accounts on the Friendster social network.
They decided that they could do a better social network. Friendster had struggled to scale and many times you couldn’t log in. So the bar was set pretty low. Being based in Los Angeles, MySpace used entertainment connections to have bands and celebrities as ‘tent pole’ users on the platform. Digital promotion was really taking off in the music industry so their timing was fortuitous. MySpace was also instrumental in the rise of freemium casual gaming. This drove one of the first booms on the Facebook platform: remember Farmville? And opened the door to freemium mobile game apps like Angry Birds and Candy Crush. A sale to News Corporation saw MySpace take your eye off the ball. In November 2008 MySpace had 126 million unique users, by 2015 MySpace had almost 1 billion active (and inactive) accounts.
WordPress
WordPress.com sprang out of Matt Mullenweg’s open source blogging platform project. WordPress.com offered a half way house between Blogger and having a self-hosted website. It has an annual subscription to contribute towards hosting and a better experience than Blogger. In November 2008 WordPress.com attracted 114 million unique users, WordPress.com claims that this number has now grown to 409 million unique users per month.
Windows Live Spaces
It was an experimental time in social platform design. But even back then Windows Live Spaces was a weird chimera of a blogging platform, photo gallery, a Geocities style guest book and a social platform. You have a pretty good idea from just reading this how much of a mess it was in terms of its user experience. Facebook was pretty awful; Live Spaces made it look reasonably good. It didn’t help that it was originally launched as MSN Spaces back in 2004 and got caught up in the wider online rebrand that Microsoft did in 2006. In November 2008 it was attracting 87 million users per month (presumably due to integration between the Microsoft browser and Windows Live services). Microsoft shut it down in 2011.
Yahoo! Geocities
Yahoo Geocities was a pensioner in web service terms by 2008. Geocities was originally launched in 1994, it offered people like you and me the opportunity to create our own web pages with no technical skill. If you became a paid user you could increase the size of your website and get telephone technical support. People would build pages to share holiday or baby pictures in low resolution.
When I was in college, Geocities was useful as other students would publish essays and book reports online, that I could then reference. This was back when you could surf the web or discover content by following a webring. A webring was a pre-Google way of discovering quality subject content once you had landed on a relevant site. As the name implied a webring is a collection of (amateur) websites (usually around a common subject area) linked together in a circular structure. By 2008, Geocities was on its last legs but still drew in 69 million unique users. It was shut down in the US the following year. Geocities still lives on in Japan.
Flickr
I started using Flickr at the end of 2004, it allowed you to have a visual diary a la Instagram. In addition, it provides flexible image hosting. It still does the image hosting for this blog today and allows great searching through the use of labels and tags. Flickr drove access to creative commons visual content. There is a whole novels worth of material about how Yahoo! mismanaged the business and missed opportunities.
When I left Yahoo! in 2006, one of the last things that I worked on was the default installation of flickr on the Nokia N73 camera phone four and a half years before Instagram was even launched. Instagram is basically a less flexible, less community minded Flickr with filters that allowed millennials to convince themselves that their poorly taken snaps was art – a digital version of Polaroid or Lomography. In November 2008, the strain of being inside Yahoo! was starting to show, the founders had resigned in June 2008; but flickr welcomed 64 million unique users. Flickr turned 14 years old on February 10.
The first photograph that I took and posted on flickr for the Pirate Communications Christmas party. This happened right after we’d lost a large part of the BT business, which was the agency’s anchor client at the time.
hi5
Back at the beginning of 2007 there was some data that suggested the user growth at social network hi5 would put it ahead of MySpace, I can remember marketers getting excited about it for about six weeks. By November 2008, it had lost a lot of steam and Facebook tore ahead. hi5 still had a respectable 58 million unique users. hi5 was one of a number of social networks that seemed to be adopted in loyal pockets in developing countries. The network pivoted into social games to try and ride the casual gaming boom and did some interesting work around game software development kits for the platform.
Orkut
Orkut is a classic tale of opportunity squandered. Orkut was ‘inspired’ by extranet group software called InCircle. Back in 2004 it looked like a dead cert. A Google backed social network that had been developed during an engineers 20 per cent time. At this time:
Silicon Valley was seen as making a positive difference
The internet was still largely idealistic
Google could do no wrong. They didn’t need to ‘do’ PR, the positive stories wrote themselves such as ‘Google spots Jesus in Peruvian sand dune‘ and the general media would be absorbed with every Google Doodle
There was no apparent reason why their venture into the social networking space shouldn’t do well. It featured integration of (at the time) great services including GTalk instant messaging and both YouTube and Google Video. Orkut became a a community of over 300 million registered users. The problem was that Orkut only took off in very localised areas, if you weren’t a Google employee, Brazilian or Indian you likely won’t have been an active Orkut user for long and this stymied its growth. I suspect that the reason for this was that the initial community was grown on the back of Google’s engineering base. There were groups of users in the Persian gulf states and Saudi Arabia but access was blocked due to groups like ‘Dubai Sex’.
Orkut had numerous security issues in 2006 and 2007. Profiles became infected with the MW.Orc worm which stole users banking details, user names and passwords. A second less malicious worm automatically made a user join a virus related community and then replicated itself on the users profile to spread further. Finally there were session management and authentication issues that posed particular risks for those people using cyber cafes. They allowed access to a users Gmail account. After ten years Google finally pulled the plug on Orkut. In November 2008 Orkut had 46 million unique users.
Six Apart
Putting my PR hat on for a moment, I would have killed to have Six Apart as a client back in 2008. The were the complete package and had it all. Photogenic husband and wife founders, great technology and bold business moves. Six Apart created Moveable Type which at one time was the go to blogging platform. They also founded TypePad which was a wordpress.com analogue. Vox launched in 2006 was a simpler blogging experience – Tumblr was a good analogue. They bought French platform Blog and Loic Le Meur became their head of EMEA. Around the same time they bought LiveJournal. Vox was eventually closed down, but LiveJournal was sold for a profit. At the time, the smart money would have been on Six Apart to win over WordPress.com, in the end it turned out rather differently. Back in November 2008, Six Apart websites enjoyed 46 million unique users.
Baidu Space
Baidu Space was a social network that grew out of the search engine company. It launched in 2006 and over 18 months it managed to grow to getting 40 million unique users by November 2008. It was closed in 2015 and all the content was transferred to Baidu Cloud file storage service.
Friendster
Prior to its sale in 2009 Friendster had managed to clock up 115 million registered users, which was a minor miracle given how unstable it was and was virtually impossible to log into over a two year period. On a good day it was like using a website though a sluggish Citrix window. Twitter used to have a reputation for poor infrastructure which made the ‘fail whale’ iconic, but that was nothing on Friendster’s instrastructure. They knew what they had to do , but due to management issues and technology issues couldn’t make it happen. It seems like a miracle that in November 2008 the site had 31 million unique users. Mark Zuckerberg is obscenely rich because Friendster was very unlucky.
56.com
Back in 2008 56.com was owned by Chinese internet company Sohu. It was one of the most popular video sharing sites. This was back before Tencent came to dominate the video market alongside Tudou | Youku. It lost a good deal of its traction when it was shut down for over a month in June 2008. By November 2008 it had 29 million unique users per month. 56.com was sold to youth orientated social network Renren at the end of 2014.
Webs.com
I was surprised to find that Webs.com is now owned by Vista Print and is still going. It was launched in 2001 and was a step up from Tripod, Geocities and Angelfire in terms of allowing you to build and host web pages. In November 2008 it attracted 24 million unique users. This was on the back fo massive growth from 2003 to 2007. It has now been overshadowed by Squarespace and WordPress.
Bebo
Bebo was founded at the beginning of 2005. The founders(Michel and Xochi Birch) managed to built a user base amongst teens in the UK and Ireland before selling it on to Aol in March 2008 for $850 million. The Birch’s sold at the top of the market. Aol managed to sell on Bebo, but at a large loss. Eventually it went into bankruptcy administration. It is now a Windows programme that streams to Twitch. In November 2008 is had 24 million unique users.
Scribd
it is optimistic to call Scribed a social service but that’s the category that comScore listed it in. It was launched in 2007 and by November 2008 it had 23 million users. Over the years it has evolved into a subscription service for books, comics and audio books.
Lycos Tripod
Tripod was a rival of Geocities, that has evolved into a small business hosting business similar to Square Space. It was launched in 1995 focusing on college age students and was acquired by Lycos in early 1998. By November 2008 it enjoyed 23 million unique users. That didn’t start the European arm of Tripod being closed down in 2009.
Tagged
Tagged is the cockroach of social networks. It isn’t amazingly successful but is durable. In marketing circles they were known for their deceptive email marketing practices. Tagged users had email contacts taken from their address book and contacted. It resulted in a class action law suit that was settled in 2010. They seem to be still going as a social network site. In November 2008, Tagged had 22 million unique users.
imeem
Ten years ago the music industry was at its worst ebb and technologists were busy trying to reinvent it. imeem was a hybrid of Spotify, Vevo and last.fm. Launching in 2005, it allowed had an advertising supported free music model. You could share music, stream tracks and playlists. It also provide widgets that you could embed on a website, Facebook or MySpace profile showing your favourite tracks. They were notable for being able to get licences from all the major US music labels for free streaming on the web. The economics of it didn’t work, whilst it had 22 million unique users in November 2008, it was sold a year later in a fire sale by MySpace Music.
imeem were smart enough to have good mobile apps on iOS and Android right from the beginning. They allowed the purchase of DRM-free MP3s, which was a pioneering concept at the time.
Netlog
Netlog was a Belgian based social network aimed at a youth market. It was founded in 1999, but didn’t really start to take off until 2002. In 2005, they started expand beyond Europe. There were a couple of things notable about it:
You could send invitations to friends via Facebook, though the user experience was a bit of a mess
They geo-targeted and age-targeted content to users so you would only see content from people in the same region and age group as you
Registered users peaked at 94 million in November 2008 it saw 21 million unique users.
Honorable mentions
Cyworld
Korea had a unique web eco-system. Part of the reason for this was that the Korean government mandated a couple of security standards. Cryptographic links using Microsoft Active-X – I know, I know but they were at least thinking about security for sign-in and banking details, which is more than be said for most governments. Secondly Koreans needed to provide their national identity number. Part of this was due to the fact that Korea was a relatively new democracy with weaker free speech laws. Lets talk about the name ‘cy’ means between people in Korean, rather than alluding to cyber space.
Cyworld started in 1999 by a bunch of students who built the social networking site as an offshoot to discussions they were having about a research project. Most of the members abandoned it after graduation, but one of them became CEO at the end of the year. It wasn’t particularly successful until a ground up redesign dubbed Minihomepy was rolled out in 2002. This pioneered virtual goods that pre-dates the stickers available on Asian OTT messaging services such as Mixi, KakaoTalk, LINE and WeChat.
Cyworld was bought by SK Telecom – a Korean fixed line and mobile carrier. SK had a distribution footprint including app space on their handsets, a popular online portal Nate and Korea’s most popular instant messaging client NateOn. Over 2003, Cyworld tripled in size from 2 million to 7 million users.
Cyworld peaked out in 2011 at 25 million users. It’s decline due to the rise of the smartphone. Kakao Story and KakaoTalk provided a superior experience on mobile devices and became ubiquitous in Korea with 55 million registered users (just about every man, woman and child in Korea). Facebook entered Korea in 2009, its progress in the country was slow, though it was useful for those Koreans who had international connections. A hacking attack which compromised the Cyworld and Nate user base precipitated a mass exodus from the platform in 2011. There is no evidence that Facebook was involved in the hack; but they did benefit from the fallout.
When I started agency life I still had a trusty Filofax that had my contacts I had built up from DJing, working in the oil industry and being in college written in barely legible text on address sheets or plastic sheets stuffed with business cards. It had a reassuring heft to it like it contained both the old and new testaments of the bible. In my first 12 months working at the agency, my contacts were further swelled by journalists, suppliers, clients and colleagues stuffed into two Rolodex frames and 99 numbers on the SIM of my then new Ericsson PF 768 mobile phone.In addition to all this, I also had built up a database of over 200 industry contacts on ClarisWorks running on my by now ancient Apple PowerBook. This presented me with the kind of problems that businesses sorted with CRM software. A second problem that I had was making all this data portable. The solution to all this was the Palm Vx. The only device that was compatiable with my Mac was the Palm series of devices and flush with cash from my first year’s bonus. I got myself a Palm Vx from Expansys. In many respects despite its lack of an always-on wireless connection, the Palm Vx was the benchmark I have in mind when I look at smartphones.
At its core the smartphone lives or dies by its personal information manager and its ability to sync with your computer for your contacts and calendar. When I used a Palm Vx, I never had the machine brick when I loaded too many contacts on to it, it never endlessly duplicated or corrupted contacts and it didn’t freak out when you scheduled events more than three months ahead.
Unfortunately the same can’t be said for subsequent devices I owned including Palm’s Treo 600 and 650 phones, or the succession of Nokia devices I owned up until my E90 communicator gave up the ghost and went to the great Carphone Warehouse in the sky.
The Vx was primitive, which was one of its main strengths:
Its screen which showed 16 types of grey was easy to view in direct sunlight
It’s electroluminescent backlight allowed you to view it in a darkened room and still have enough battery left to last you a week
It didn’t have an app store, but then there wasn’t any productivity sucking software and you could find new applications with your search engine of choice
It had to use a stylus for all but the most basic items on the resistive touchscreen, but Palm’s original single stroke handwriting called Graffiti once you got the hang of it is faster to use than the soft keyboard on my iPhone. Unfortunately a long-running patent dispute that went on until 2004 meant that Palm had to move to the inferior Graffiti 2 based on a product called Jot
It did allow you to sync your desktop PC’s inbox with your device so you could go through your email on the commute home, but you wouldn’t be bothered by the always connected aspects of push email. Push technology was a big thing then so if you got tired of clearing out your inbox you could read highlights from Wired.com or CNBC via the AvantGo service which sucked in content via your PC that you could then browse through offline at your leisure; in many respects an RSS reader before RSS became well-known
Location-based software before GPS was a subscription service called Vindigo that provided recommendations on restaurants, clubs and bars, and shopping. It also had maps that provided turn-by-turn instructions from a look-up table of directions and was updated by syncing via serial port or USB connected cradle
Wireless connectivity was an IrDA infra-red port which was pathetic. I once tried to use it in conjunction with my Ericsson phone to surf the web but it was too much effort to keep both of them lined up. It was perfectly fine though for exchanging business cards electronically. I remember being at a Red Herring conference during the summer of 2000, demoing Palm devices and spent half the time beaming business cards with consultants and lawyers. It involved a curious ritual akin to an animal courtship display where two people would hold their devices in front of each other and move them closer or apart until their contact details had been exchanged. But it seemed to work better than any solution since. Moo cards are now my common currency of information exchange instead
It was the industrial design of the Palm V and Vx that feels the most prescient parts of the product in many respects. Some of the decisions in this were forced on the designers by the hardware specifications. Palm used to use AAA batteries in their earlier devices and held the OS and resident apps in ROM. ROM was expensive at the time so the V and the Vx had everything in RAM which meant that there always needed to be a power supply which meant they had to use a lithium-ion battery. Since the battery wasn’t designed to be user serviceable the case was hot-glued together. This allowed the industrial designers to make the device much thinner so that it could be slipped into a set of jeans or a shirt pocket and weighed in at a paltry 114g, some 20g lighter than my iPhone without its case.
The need for a ‘picture frame’ around the screen provided the designers with a way of making the device feel nicer in the hand by making it have rounded edges. It wasn’t that far off the iPhone in terms of size, but felt nicer to hold. When I first got my iPhone 3GS the device felt too wide in my hand. The product design encouraged premium brands like Burberry and Jean Paul Gaultier to make Palm V cases (which is a bit nicer than the silicone rubber jacket most people have on their iPhone. I used to have a slider case by a company called Rhinoskin made out of laser cut titanium plate that was indestructable.
At the bottom of the Palm V and Vx was a connector that Palm continued to use on the M500-series devices. This connector meant that lots of companies made great accessories. A company called OmniSky sold a GSM modem that the PDA slotted into, ThinkOutside made the best folding keyboard I have ever used, again using the connector at the bottom to connect with the PDA. I once wrote a by-lined article on the train back from London to Liverpool without any at seat power and with both the keyboard and the Palm Vx slipping into my jacket pocket when I reached Liverpool Lime Street. Something I just couldn’t do with the iPhone due to its greedy battery life and the bulky keyboard accessories currently available.
Looking back on it, the Palm Vx was the high point of of Palm the company. Missed technological opportunities, numerous management issues, poor quality product and software engineering together with wider market technological progress meant that the company and the PalmOS developer eco-system was a shadow of its former self by the the time the company was sold to HP.
The Good Morning Silicon Valley newsletter carried a story about Palm’s largest shareholders asking the company to sell out to another player while its fortunes are still on the rise. This raises concerns about Palm’s roadmap and vision if even their largest shareholders don’t believe them.
Why sell out?
Palm has a number of challenges to overcome:
Maintaining relationships with distribution channels which are different and distinct for both the Treo and PDA ranges
Palm needs a new OS that will have it ready for the next ten years. It could have done with that new OS in the year 2000
Innovation and localisation: in order to keep its head above water in the PDA market Palm needs to innovate, Pocket PC manufacturers can leverage reference designs and even sell devices at a loss to support service businesses in the enterprise. In the cell phone market, Palm needs to localise the device to meet each carriers needs.
Make like Dell: Palm not only needs to get better at innovation and localisation, it needs to innovate operationally; something that had a positive transformative effect on Apple. Dell is a by-word for a slick logistics chain that keeps cost down and allows for user customisation at the order stage
One-trick pony: when HP goes into business it is looking to sell everything from a HP9000Superdome high-end computer to an iPaq and the services to support it. When Nokia speaks to carriers it can sell them everything from all the kit to run a network to budget phones for PAYG (Pay-As-You-Go) customers
Convergence: cell phones now have PDA functionality and so do iPods, Palm has unsuccessfully tried to make a convergence play with the LifeDrive and seems to have a crisis of ideas
Get big or get out: As can be seen from the MP3 player market, where there is a hot, competitive sector size wins because it can bring economies of scale to bear. Palm could not have taken the gamble that Apple did in terms its forward contracts for flash memory to role out a flash-based LifeDrive even if it had the vision to do so.
Who should buy?
A lot of the heat in this discussion centres on Research In Motion, Nokia and Apple.
Research in Motion has never had the best product design and user experience, Palm could help them.
Palm’s pen computing experience could be invaluable to Nokia.
Apple is the collectively the player considered by technology pundits the people who can make a market work and has the expertise and chutzpah to make change the game devices work. Palm could bring carrier relationships and expertise.
Why buy?
Palm has a strong brand its name has been a by-word for PDAs for a long time. The Treo has made a name for itself amongst early adopters and has proven itself to be more adaptable than the Blackberry. Its product design has made it a success that has saved Palm up to now. However, much of the crown jewels within Palm (its distinctive look and feel) marched off with PalmSource acquisition by Access and even then there was a lot of work to be done to assure the future of the PalmOS as a modern platform.
If Apple wanted to build a Palm-like device it already has much of the expertise needed, arguably the best product design team in the world and it could license or buy the PalmOS software from Access. It even has the talent to build its own OS over Darwin. However, this would necessitate a hell of a lot of work during the time that the company is migrating its hardware and software to the Intel platform and rolling out new entertainment services. This means that a Palm-like Apple device is probably not likely
Research in Motion could poach a few of the Palm design team and licence the PalmOS software, but it has bigger issues as competitors are using the NTP case as an excuse to eat the companies lunch. In addition, services and software are more lucrative so there is already some industry signs that RIM are looking to move away from being a hardware player
Nokia has some of the best mobile phone designers in the world, the user experience of its Symbian phones rivals Palm. It makes sense only as a way to eliminate competition, but it would be more profitable to tempt key staff away and watch Palm nose-dive into wherever dead companies go
Conclusion
OK, first of all there is the question of whether Palm needs to be sold: probably not, but a shot of energy, vision and cajones in the management team wouldn’t go a miss and this shareholder action may be the boot in the backside that they need. Bottom line is that this question can get kicked back and forth for a long time to come, what’s more its an emotive area so don’t expect a consensus soon.
If a ‘for sale’ sign went up, Palm may get a buyer, but I would expect the purchaser to come from the Far East rather than the established tech players named. I would also expect them to buy if or when the company is on its knees. Ningbo Bird, Haier, Lenovo, BenQ or HTC for example already know how to make phones, if they want cute industrial design they can buy it in as necessary from IDEO, frog design or their ilk. If the company did tout around for a buyer, you could expect the business to drop as carriers and enterprise look for alternative ‘safer’ suppliers. If the business isn’t on its knees when the for sale sign goes up, it may be by the time the deal is signed.
The crown jewels: the PalmOS software is already available to whoever wants to licence it at a discount to Windows Mobile, the value would be in the carrier relationships and the brand recognition of the Palm name.
UPDATE: Palm Addicts ran this piece in full, you can find it here. More related posts here.
Bob Cringely wrote an interesting article about the need for internet appliances such as 3Com’s Audrey to provide internet access for the slow adopters and laggards. internet appliance were orginally muted as an idea by Larry Ellison of Oracle as part of his network computing vision. They failed because of the topsy turvy economics that have driven PC growth, though one could argue that the iMac incorporate the spirit if not the technical specification of an internet appliance. Bob’s discussion reminded me of the small time I worked on 3Com.
I got put on the Palm pan European PR account when the company had been spun out from 3Com and Audrey was on the horizon, my predecessor worked on Palm as part of the 3Com portfolio. Part of the reasons discussed internally for this was that Audrey had the potential to eat Palm’s lunch. Audrey was based on a more modern operating system. Even by 2000, Palm realised that its current operating system was in need of a replacement.
Unlike Audrey, It couldn’t multitask and involved kludged layers of abstraction to work. When it worked it was brilliant. But it wasn’t ready for a connected online future and the greater demands that we will put on mobile computing devices. The upper layers of the operating system providing the user experience and handwriting were the real genius in the PalmOS.
The lower levels were off the peg software from the mid-1990s. Back then we didn’t even have multi-tasking in Macs and most installed versions of Windows. Indeed Palm went on to buy Be Systems, who provided the software and expertise behind Sony’s eVilla internet appliance.
Now PalmOne has different things to worry about, like how to stop Microsoft’s kamikaze antics in the handheld and mobile space. It is interesting that PalmSource has had to go and purchase a mobile Linux company due to client demand. More content similar to Audrey here.
Revisiting this post in 2022 on the Audrey 3Com net appliances reminded of how Robert X Cringely in his book Accidental Empires talked about innovation in terms of surfing waves. Picking a wave too early would mean that you wouldn’t get much of a ride, picking it too late would leave you wiped out. Audrey was a ‘too early wave’. A stable multi-tasking operating system with easy single purpose apps is the basic technical specification for the iPad that my parents use to keep in touch wit me and the the world online. Superficially Audrey resembled the appliance like computing experience of the early iMac where everything you needed was in the box, but the iPad was its true successor as a communal communications and content consumption device. If that doesn’t sound like Larry Ellison’s net computing device and the Audrey I don’t know what does.
