Ged Carroll

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  • Palm for sale

    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 HP9000 Superdome 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.

  • Day pass media model

    I first came across the day pass concept with Salon.com, its an interesting compromise between subscription content and ‘free content’. First of all, with the possible exception of consumer homepages there’s little free content on the web. Content that you don’t have to pay for has advertisements around the sides of the pages and in the text, these are often paid for on a ‘per click’ basis.

    Self described ‘premium’ publications like the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal go for a walled-garden approach where you have a paid for subscription and they vend the content out.

    I consider this to be going after short-term gains and sacrificing their future.

    The day pass says my content is valuable; however if you engage with my sponsor, they will pay for your access to my content over the next 24-hours. It means I have a moral contract with them to listen to their sponsor (and actually Aviva the insurance company did a smart bit of work by tailoring their content to deliver their message to an Economist reader whilst at the same time getting over their positioning as a progressive innovative company), I understand the ‘real value’ of the content that I get to look at AND the publisher remains relevant to a modern net audience rather than trapped in the dead forest business.

    As Oscar Wilde said it is better to be talked about than not be talked about; in the online world, getting talked about means that you have to be accessible. Bloggers will tend not to blog about sites were people cannot go and see the content in context, for instance I have reduced the number of links I have to New York Times stories because of their part-way subscription model.

    During my day pass tour of the Economist, I came across a series of trend articles and a number of interesting podcasts for download touching on some of the editorial teams hot topics for 2005: economic change

    More related content here.

  • Hallyu, Mociology & Microchunk

    Hallyu – The rise of Korea as a cultural hotbed (what’s called the Korean wave in some quarters) in Asia: from the sexiest mobile phones, or well written and produced cinema to K-pop (the Korean equivalent of J-pop: sugar-coated Japanese pop music that carries well in other Asian markets and performed by young performers so physically perfect, you wonder if Sony hasn’t a secret laboratory protected by ninjas inside of Mount Fuji to manufacture J-pop artists).
    Interestingly the Korean wave has not yet impacted on Japan in the same way as its neighbours, which was an interesting aside that came out of Richard Edelman’s keynote at the London presentation of his agency’s global trust barometer survey. Kudos to the New York Times Online (registration required).
    Expect to see more of hallyu: the mix of professional product perfection and the conservative nature of Korean culture produces a product that travels better around the world than much US culture.

    Mociology – The study of how mobile technology impacts with sociology from purchasing concert tickets to organising political rallies, raves and flash mobs. (Derived from mobile and sociology).

    Microchunk – A product or service sold traditionally as a package broken down into its constituent parts so buyers can purchase a la carte for consumer electronics to news feeds. Think sachet marketing for the digital world. People like 37signals have successfully built ‘microchunk’ applications and services (like Backpack) that do one thing extremely well and compete against other much larger software companies that take a bundled approach leveraging an effective desktop monopoly (mentioning no names). Kudos for mociology and microchunk to Wired Magazine. More related content here. 

  • Boxman online retail

    Boxman


    My first transaction online was registering and paying for a piece of shareware software at Kagi.com for my Mac whilst I was still in college. I can’t remember what it did now, but I remember that the author was a student at a Scottish university. The first physical item was bought from Boxman a few years later.

    e-dancer

    The first thing I purchased online in what most people would understand as e-commerce was a Kevin ‘Reese Saunderson CD under the name e-dancer from Boxman.com. I can remember why I loved Boxman.I had read about them in an article in the Sunday Times, it was a way of getting CDs from all over Europe in one place, Boxman would buy at the lowest price, consolidate their stock in one warehouse in Holland and pass on much of the savings to the consumer.

    (CDWOW have a similar approach and have incurred the wraith of the record industry who like to have keep up market barriers to maximise profit margins.)I picked up an import copy of the Troubleman soundtrack by Marvin Gaye, when I couldn’t get a UK copy on back order from HMV. The mix of choice and price the e-commerce killer application for me.

    Unfortunately Boxman.com unraveled for a number of reasons. Usability experts put it down the search function on the site being the only way for finding what you were looking for (although I had no trouble). Tony Salter, one of the directors in the business laid the fault at the foot of the software which controlled the supply chain of the site. In order to fulfill on its promise, Boxman needed to:

    • Track wholesale prices and cost of delivery across Europe, including comparison pricing for the same product with different national catalogue numbers
    • Organise shipping in the most effective and efficient manner
    • Track customer orders and trends
    • Calculate the most effective and efficient ways to ship goods

    This was on top of the complex website functions visible to the consumer. The system would be much more complex than your typical JD Edwards ERP set-up, so Boxman got some of the brightest names in IT to help out: IBM. The project seems to have been a learning experience for IBM as the software failed to deliver on its promise. Anyway, Slate.com have a timely reminder on the importance of logistics management, before we all get lost in reverie around web services revolutionising the online world. More related content here. 

  • Chinese eyes on Korea

    From romantic Korean drams to hard boiled films like Old Boy and Silmido are making waves amongst arthouse cinema fans and movie industry talent-spotters throughout the western world. It now seems that its not only Hollywood that is turning its eyes eastwards to follow the latest cultural carrying-ons in Korea, but Chinese eyes are too.

    The New York Times China’s Youth Look to Seoul for Inspiration by Norimitsu Onishi (January 2, 2006) has an interesting article on how young Chinese eyes Korea as tastemakers in fashion, beauty and  popular culture.

    The country’s cultural exports are cutting-edge tempered with the Confucian-based culture familiar to Chinese audiences. American culture is too ‘post-modern’ to be absorbed directly. At least some of the time, China sees Japan in a way reminiscent of Basil Fawlty and  is still beyond the pale because of the War. Although the Chinese consistent appetite for Japanese AV content is well documented elsewhere. Taste making goes beyond pop singers and movies to hip brands such the must-have mobile phone from Samsung and Hyundai cars.

    Rather like Eric Clapton adapting the blues for white audiences in the UK; so Korea is adapting western idioms from hip-hop culture and sit-coms like Sex in the City. It is then making them palatable for East Asian audiences. Free trade and intellectual property protection is likely to not be as beneficial to Hollywood in tapping the Chinese market as the media moguls had hoped. More Korea related posts here.