(Updated 9/28)
The depressing news that a once innovative and leading software company has been vanquished by Microsoft is hardly surprising. Palm, now called PalmSource, revolutionized the “personal digital assistant” by shedding features and focusing on simplicity and a good user experience. Now it lives to see the day that its own hardware unit, called just Palm, dumps its operating system in favor of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 5.0 for an upcoming smart phone. I haven’t used the latest version of Windows Mobile but in the past I have found Windows CE to be unwieldy, overly complex and slow (The new version appears to be only a smidge better, so says Rob Pegoraro in the Washington Post). It also doesn’t play nice with Macs, though Palm has been up and down on that score since OS X came along.
To a large degree, this week’s news was just the icing on the cake — last year Windows CE devices started outselling Palm-based gear and in the second quarter of 2005, Palm had just a 19% market share, half of its position a year earlier, according to Gartner. It did bring to mind those who were previously overtaken by the Redmond monolith and those who have thus far survived. I don’t think there are simple rules to be derived from these two lists. Clearly execution is at least as important as strategy here and underlying market dynamics play a role too. Update: Zdnet’s Michael Singer has a cogent piece describing five missteps by Palm.
Surpassed:
Apple (PC OS)
Wordperfect (word processor)
Lotus (spreadsheet)
Novell (networking/servers)
Netscape (browsers)
Borland (programming)
Adobe (fonts)
Palm (PDA OS)
IBM/Lotus (enterprise email)
Hanging on:
Intuit (personal and business finance)
Google and Yahoo (search)
Sony (video games)
Research in Motion (mobile email)
Oracle (enterprise databases)
Any other suggestions or notes from the peanut gallery?
As an aside, while researching this post, I came across a cool slide show by Fortune magazine that displays when Microsoft’s market share passed rivals Netscape (1998), Lotus 123 (1992) and Wordperfect (1992).
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