Palm

Lots of people apparently think it’s a big deal that Gartner is predicting Android will surpass iOS for second place. But why is that necessarily a good thing, given that they’re predicting Symbian will remain in first place? Who thinks Symbian is actually doing well? Nokia’s board sure doesn’t.

via Daring Fireball Linked List: Gartner Predicts Mobile OS Market Share.

I also noted with amusement that by 2014 "other" is slated to sell 85 million units or nearly 10% share, up from 6.1% in 2009. These "others" will be selling more than twice what Apple is expected to sell this year. Is "other" WebOS, Bada, MeeGo, LiMO? If so they're in for a healthy future.

But dwelling on details like these is missing the point. To see how improbable this prediction is, let's go back to 2006 and ask what Gartner was forecasting would happen now.

First thing to note is that in 2006 Gartner was busy tracking PDA sales. You might wonder why this is relevant. The reason is because a significant proportion of RIM's Blackberries counted as wireless PDAs and were therefore considered to compete with Palm's Treos, HP's iPaq and Dell's famous Axim. Nokia was in the running with its Communicators. Here is how Gartner characterized the equivalent market in early 2006:

So I'll just come out and say it: In 2006 Gartner did not have a clue what a smartphone was. By their admission:

Gartner defines a PDA as a data-centric handheld computer weighing less than one pound that is primarily designed for use with both hands. These devices use an open market operating system supported by third-party applications that can be added into the device by end users. They offer instant on/off capability and synchronization of files with a PC. A PDA may offer WAN support for voice, but these are data-first, voice-second devices.

In other words, in 2006 Gartner was splitting phones with operating systems into two separate markets: data-oriented wireless PDAs and voice-oriented smartphones. The split was mostly based on the judgement of the analyst on whether a device was "voice" or "data" oriented. I suppose they used the primary input method as a proxy: numeric keypads meant the device was one-handed and therefore voice-oriented. If the device had a full keyboard and/or a stylus-actuated touch screen then it was a two-handed data-oriented device. But even this proxy was not quite enough, sometimes devices were classified whimsically.

To make it more complicated, they bundled non-cellular but Wi-Fi enabled PDAs with wireless PDAs. This made some sense from a corporate IT point of view (their primary customer base) as these data-oriented devices would be used either on a LAN or a WAN (Wide Area Networks: what Gartner anachronistically called cellular networks.)

The presence or absence of a cellular radio did not enter into their view of these devices. So if you asked Gartner in 2006 to forecast smartphones (as we know them now) in 2010, I suppose you'd get what they forecast for "data-centric" devices.

So assuming that today's smartphones are mostly "data-centric" we would have to look back on their view of that market and not the voice market which was seen as an entirely different thing. Their answer should have had something to do with the market leaders and participants in 2006. As the table above shows Gartner showed that RIM, Palm and HP led in 2005 with Nokia and T-Mobile[1] pulling up the rear.

However, from a platform point of view, at the beginning of 2006

Microsoft Windows CE was the No. 1 PDA operating system (OS) in 2005 as 7.05 million PDAs were loaded with the OS, up 33 percent from 2004 shipments of 5.28 million units. Palm OS PDA shipments declined 34 percent to 2.96 million units in 2005.

In late 2006, Gartner made further predictions for the year:

In 2006, Gartner expects the PDA market to increase by 6.3 percent to 16 million units. The market will continue to be driven by broader availability of cellular-enabled PDAs from wireless carriers. Gartner estimates that 53 percent of all PDAs shipped in the first half of 2006 featured integrated cellular capability, up from 46 percent during the same period in 2005. “The share of PDAs purchased by enterprises will continue to increase; it accounted for 49 percent of all PDA shipments in the second quarter of 2006 and Gartner expects that the enterprise market will account for 52 percent of all PDA shipments in 2006,” said Todd Kort.

At this time I have not yet dug up a Gartner "Wireless PDA OS" four year forecast from the year 2006 but I suspect it would not show devices running Google's Android operating system or any running something called iOS.

I also seem to remember that they were suggesting that Windows would be the leading mobile platform. Although it was trailing in 2006, Gartner was quite bullish on the disruptive challenger from Redmond.

[1] T-mobile is in the list because it was common practice in 2006 for operators to market Pocket PC Phone Edition devices made by HTC under their own name. Orange, Vodafone and Verizon also had own-brand HTC Windows touch-based devices. Now what does that strategy remind me of?

It's hard to get excited about the new RIM Blackberry Torch.  It's not exciting in a positive way and not exciting in a negative way. It's just more of the same and the same is not all that bad. Then again, the same is not all that good either. Every piece of the Torch product is playing catch-up with others' innovations without enhancing the core innovation RIM itself brought into the market years ago.

RIM has a significant but deteriorating share and is a company that has done very well as an entrant in a space dominated by larger incumbents.  But there is a strong smell of Palm about it.  The musty smell of decomposing innovation. Wall Street seems to smell it too (two year stock price chart relative to AAPL below)

The problem seems to be that, like in Palm's case, mobile computing is a game for big companies.  If you ask why Palm and RIM became uncompetitive you get two different reasons. Palm could not do hardware and distribution well and RIM can't do software well. But these reasons have remedies which neither company can bring to bear: resources and processes. Palm did not have the resources for distribution and production and RIM did not have the processes to be a software platform company.

Their values and priorities are adequate but competitiveness today, in this market, requires projecting market and development power.

I can only conclude that RIM is simply too weak to make it in the long run.

Continuing from Will Apple rule the iPad market? | Asymco.

The first claim is that

it is unclear if [Apple] will end up dominating the market the way it has come to rule the digital music player market with the iPod.

After hearing a thousand voices cry out that the iPad is nothing more than a bigger iPod touch (which, plainly, it is) it's amusing to read that its similarity with a sibling ends when it comes to market performance.

Let me make one claim up-front: the iPad is more of an iPod than the iPod.

The original iPod was successful because it had a significant integrated value chain bolted on. Apple disrupted music with a value chain, not a product. It changed the way music is bought, consumed and even how it is produced. It changed the economics from retail down to songwriting.

This is why it came to dominate its market. Every competitor that took a run at it did so with a partial solution to the value chain. Often it was nothing more than a music player, and in some cases (e.g. Zune) it was bundled with some other pieces of technology, but poorly executed and too late.

The iPad comes with an even bigger value chain bolted on: the App Store. Apple is flogging not just an "app player" but also a new way to develop and distribute software. If you cut "music" and paste "apps" you see the immediate parallel between iPod and iPad. The app ecosystem will quickly grow to be larger than the music ecosystem with the mobile software business already eclipsing the music business.

A competitor launching a tablet device will have to somehow overcome the momentum of billions of downloads fed by hundreds of thousands of apps built by tens of thousands of developers for hundreds of millions of users.

The iPod juggernaut pales in comparison to the iPad supernova. The iPod had no apps or dedicated developers. Its ecosystem consisted of a handful of music companies. The only thing that made it "sticky" was the tie-in with one type of content.

The iPad on the other hand has a thousand other jobs to do for its users. It has a rich tapestry of functionality and a multi-dimensional (literally) user experience.  It's a platform. It's even powerful enough to impose new standards on the web itself and to suggest that search is a bygone activity.

So to suggest that Asus or Dell will somehow build "iPad killers" sounds asinine. These competitors don't even grasp what the product is and what it's for.  Sony said they don't see a market for it. Microsoft, trapped in the innovator's dilemma and overshooting the market by miles, said they don't understand what the point is because users want full PCs.  Google asked what's the value of a big iPod. I could go on, but there was not a single company in the industry who recognized what they were looking at in January. Apple keeps a tight lid on new products so that competitors don't get a head-start on copying, but in the case of the iPad, advance knowledge would not have had any impact. Competitors look at the iPad and see nothing.  They'll only react once the market explodes and they start to feel belated pain.

If, and it's a big if, they do recognize what an iPad is, their response cycle is going to be measured in years. On hardware, they were blown away with a product that had twice the power, half the bulk, twice the battery life with half the price of what they had on the shelf. They may catch up on hardware in a year or two and launch some sort of iPad-like assembly of components, but that is like making the first iPod killer in 2002.

Then there is software. Their software supplier (Microsoft of Google) will have to build a platform that works. That will take years. Years during which the iPad will penetrate every geography, demographic and vertical market.

Google might move more rapidly than Microsoft, but they will produce an open source poster child of a platform. Fragmented and rough around the edges to the point of looking like a hobby project. Their flea market store will also have the smell of fresh glue about it. Microsoft is so far behind the curve that I don't even think they will try to move the tiller.  Their view of the market was betrayed by the recently knifed Courier demoware. To suggest a challenge to the PC/Windows model inside Microsoft is a career-limiting move so don't expect their brightest to be lining up to propose new platforms to management.

What about HP? Assuming they overcome the pitfall of NIH that kills 80% of integration efforts, they will still need to perform an enormous amount of heavy lifting to get WebOS to be a competitive experience on a tablet. Most opinions were that Palm came pretty close with a smartphone, but that was nowhere near enough to stay alive, never mind challenge iPhone.

Then there is the ecosystem. Building it is just not something I can even begin to roadmap. What about developer tools, SDKs, frameworks and evangelism? With a Palm division, HP is the best positioned of the PC vendors but it has a chance at being a player as much as Creative did vs. the iPod, or needless to say, Palm vs. the iPhone.

So the iPad challengers face five daunting obstacles:

1. Recognition of a threat from a seemingly benign product
2. Execution on hardware against the best integrator on the planet
3. Execution on software against a new UI metaphor fortress surrounded by a patent moat
4. Integration of hardware and software to a sublime whole
5. Re-building a value chain for which they have no handle vs. a broad and deep existing universe of app/content creation distribution and consumption enjoying logarithmic network effect value.

That does not even touch the logistics, sourcing, margin and pricing challenges of world-wide distribution of the whole value chain. Nor does it cover the lock-in of advertisers to new tools for creatives or the billions of daily views from a platform that is blindingly dazzling.

To put it in the language of disruption, by the time the competitors launch symmetric attacks on the iPad, Apple will be the incumbent. And we all know that symmetric attacks never work against entrenched incumbents who have all the levers of power at hand to deploy in a withering counter-attack.

This question sounds like a tautology. It's like asking "Will Apple rule the iPod market?" But redundancy has not stopped WSJ journalist Benjamin Pimentel from asking. His answer to the question is below:

But while Apple apparently has the edge in the emerging tablet war, it is unclear if the company will end up dominating the market the way it has come to rule the digital music player market with the iPod.

Gartner's Fiering said the iPad has "raised the bar and suppliers are now scrambling to make sure they get it right."

IDC now projects 6 million tablet devices to ship this year, including 4 million iPads, Shim said. But while Apple has taken the lead, he added, the company faces the "burden of lifting or defining this entire new market," because there are no other competitive devices available.

"In the iPhone market, they learned from everybody else," he added in a video interview. "In this new space, there's nobody else to kind of bounce ideas of so to speak."

But Apple may not have to feel so alone for long.

Fiering specifically pointed to H-P's as the best positioned challenger, given its scale, reach and its upcoming merger with Palm.

"There are not too many suppliers that can pull all those pieces together," she said. "H-P could if they integrate the Palm acquisition properly."

Another IDC analyst, Crawford Del Prete, agreed saying, while the "buzz" from H-P had generally been defensive in relation to the iPad, "the longer term story is far more interesting."

"Given H-P's massive scale, I think they have the ability to drive new price points for this kind of product," he said. "With a lower price point, the category becomes far more interesting."

via PC Makers Look To Challenge Apple's IPad - WSJ.com.

Before diving into the statements above it's worth noting where the journalist went to get opinions to fill his column. He called Gartner and IDC. Quoting industry analysts is a standard operating procedure to fill column-inches with material that does not offend. But how good are they?

In my years of watching those who watch markets I formed a ranking of analyst types and their likely accuracy with respect to prognosticating a market shift. In order from most accurate to least accurate:

1. The most accurate are rank amateurs (deagol, Muller, et. al).  Independent bloggers who do some fact checking tend to make the boldest but most accurate forecasts.
2. The next most accurate are sell-side analysts (purveyors of analyst reports from established brokerages).  They follow financials for individual companies.  You might think their record is quite poor, but in fact they are much better than..
3. Industry analysts (like Gartner, IDC).  Their forecasts and sensitivity to disruption are often off by an order of magnitude.  This is partly because they forecast a bit further out than Wall St. but also because they are closer to their industry clients-- the source of their ideas.  They spend a lot of time talking to the least accurate forecasters...
4. The corporate analysts.  They are typically hired to advise management in the incumbent companies. These are people who have the most information about the way the industry is performing on a daily basis.

You might notice a pattern here: the closer you are to the market, the less likely you are to observe how that market is crumbling around you. You cannot see the forest for the trees.

How could this be? How can having more access give you a poorer picture? The answer lies in the asymmetry of a disruptive attack. The more you know about how things are the less you know about how things could be.

In practice, the analyst information value chain works like this:

Corporate analysts feed information to management that management is comfortable digesting. Those managers then hire industry analysts to validate their opinions. Industry analysts are keen to maintain a relationship with those firms and so they listen carefully to the prejudices of their clients. They then hold up a mirror to those myths and consolidate those opinions for wider distribution and quotation by journalists at respectable publications.

Stock analysts listen with one ear to the chatter but with the other to the way the wind blows with the stock market. Sometimes they actually sample the data in the value chain directly by calling acquaintances in the market and hire interns to watch what's happening in the shops. They then build an opinion that has some level of surprise but that they hope will not stray too far into controversy so that they can keep their jobs in case they are wrong. The safe bet is always to say that things will stay mostly the way they are, but to say it in clever ways.

So that just leaves only one group of analysts with independence from a paycheck who can make an opinion on the basis of facts alone.

This post has become longer than I planned, so I'll dive into the exact answer to the article claims in part II.

In the free press release linked below Canalys reveals their estimates of vendor shares but not the OS shares for smartphones. However it's not hard to see the OS split due to the high degree of exclusivity of OS's to vendors.

For example, virtually all Nokia devices are Symbian powered, all RIM devices are Blackberries and all Apple devices are iPhone OS.  Motorola is only shipping Android and HTC is the only top 5 vendor that now licenses more than one OS.  Even HTC's portfolio is now heavily Android weighted.

We can carve out Palm (960k units shipped) from the "others" and we're left with mostly Windows Mobile.  My estimate would be about 5 to 6 millionWinMo made it out.

That leads me to the following estimated OS shares:

• Symbian (Nokia): 42%
• Blackberry OS (RIM): 19%
• iPhone OS (Apple): 16%
• WinMo (Microsoft): 10%
• Android (Google): 10%
• WebOS (Palm): 2%

If anyone knows the actual Canalys OS shares, let me know.

Global smart phone market growth rises to 67% (Canalys press release: r2010043).

"During a conference call about HP's acquisition of Palm Wednesday, Todd Bradley, executive VP of HP's Personal Systems Group, said that there are "a lot of opportunities" with the purchase. Namely, he said, HP could use the WebOS mobile operating system as a touchscreen interface for new hardware such as a tablet or netbook.

Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein and Brian Humphries, HP's senior VP of Strategy and Corporate Development revealed that HP plans to "double down on WebOS," which is considered the "prized asset" of the acquisition. The two reportedly mentioned the scalability of WebOS, implying that HP plans to bring the platform to multiple hardware form factors. HP even said it has already tested WebOS for its scalability."

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/04/28/hps_purchase_of_palm_could_lead_to_webos_tablets_netbooks.html

Oh, and someone from HP also said they will still do business with Microsoft.

Let's see...HP is adding its own mobile OS, HTC was hunting for its own mobile OS but is living on skinning, Palm made its own mobile OS and managed to escape oblivion, Samsung launched its own mobile OS, Apple has its own mobile OS, RIM has its own mobile OS and bought the kernel of another, Microsoft has its own mobile OS--really more than one, Nokia has its own mobile OS(s), and Google has its own mobile OS (plus Chrome). Chances are that Amazon is building its own OS as well.

Only Microsoft and Google are still betting that licensing is going to be the way forward but each is hedging its bets: Microsoft with Kin and Google with Nexus One.

Can anyone seriously suggest that the mobile computing industry is rapidly moving toward horizontal modularity or even consolidating like the Operators are hoping?

Before you answer, consider also other horizontal players that are no longer with us: PalmSource, Symbian (and, give it a year, Windows Mobile).

Buried in the news that HP is buying Palm is an updated lower guidance for the fourth quarter, otherwise known as a warning.

The Company expects revenues for its fourth fiscal quarter to be in the range of approximately $90 million to $100 million on a GAAP (1) and a non-GAAP basis. Revenues for the fourth fiscal quarter are being impacted by slow sales of the Company’s products, which has resulted in low order volumes from carriers. Palm also expects to close its fourth fiscal quarter with a cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments balance between $350 million and $400 million.

$90 million in revenues for an average ASP of $300 would put unit sales at 300,000 for the quarter. RIM just sold 10.4 million devices, Apple sold 8.75 million. 300k is just an astonishingly small number.

Huawei has largely rejected Palm's request for a buyout, a tip said this morning. Palm had reportedly proposed that Huawei take over the company in mid-February but hasn't made any progress since. It's not clear what objections, if any, Huawei might have.

via Palm rebuffed by Huawei on takeover talks | Electronista.

Palm CEO "I've never used an iPhone" Rubinstein quoted in the earnings conference call:

"We had an arrangement with Sprint that when we launched with Sprint that they would invest in marketing and carry the product and for that they would get an exclusive for a period of time. That really determined when we could do our launch at Verizon. I agree with your premise that if we could have launched at Verizon earlier, prior to Droid, that we would have gotten the attention that the Droid got and since I believe that we have a better product, I think we would have even done better."

So we are led to believe Droid launched into a window in Verizon's launch schedule. A window which was shut to Palm due to their exclusive with Sprint. It's a matter of timing.

Then again, Droid got $100 million in advertising and marketing budget from Verizon and Motorola. It's unlikely that Palm could leverage that kind of muscle, and their product ended up being positioned on a female demographic.

Palm was either late or under-funded or mis-positioned or all of the above.

Essentially, Palm's problem is not the quality of the product (which is arguable) but their ability to market and distribute in a highly competitive market. In other words, it's not that they're not smart enough, but that they're not strong enough.

Sadly, it's not enough to be smart or good. They're in the wrong market if they think having a clever product is a winning strategy. Mobile Computing is the toughest technology market today. Because the stakes are so huge, it's a market that is targeted by enormous resources.  This is no place for start-ups.

Palm is simply too weak to make it.

Smart phones sold to retail customers totaled 408,000 units, down 15% from a year earlier and 29% sequentially

By some estimates, Apple pre-sold more iPads online in one week than Palm sold smartphones through Sprint and Verizon stores in 3 months.  What's more remarkable is that year-on-year decline implies Palm sold more Windows Mobile devices than WebOS which was not on the market a year ago.

link: Palm Narrows Loss but Retail Sales Decline - WSJ.com

• The company said there are over 2,000 apps in the Palm App Catalog.
• ASP was $367, down from $375.
• Almost all volume was from WebOS products (Windows Mobile devices are gone)
• For Q4, the company expects revenue to be less than $150 million.
• Q4 gross margin likely in the mid-teens.
• Guidance for $150 million in revenue, down 57% sequentially.

After hours market cap for Palm is about $833 million down 13%.  Expected revenue and ASP imply about 410k units will be sold into the channel in the following quarter.

[Donna Dubinsky] called the decision to spin off PalmOS a "huge strategic error." "As RIM, Apple and Palm all have demonstrated, these devices need to be highly integrated hardware and software developments in order to optimize the user experience," Dubinsky wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press. "When Palm no longer could advance the OS, and had to create a new one, it lost several years."

Donna gets it.

link: Palm Inc. teeters in crowded smart phone market - Yahoo! Finance

[Rob Glaser] said with those "super" abilities, mobile has a great potential, but if Apple gets its way, the wireless industry could end up like the MP3 industry. The other option is for things to go the way of the PC, which he considers more horizontal.

"As of today, Apple is the clear winner. It's incredible what they've been able to do in a vertical paradigm,"

link: Former RealNetwork's CEO Rob Glaser Says For Now Apple Has Won - Yahoo! Finance

Sorry Rob, you're still missing the whole point. It's not incredible, it's the only way to go. What's incredible is that anybody tried to do it differently.