On Palm’s PR problem
This was going to be a much longer post than this, but Scott wrote up mostly what I think. I think it’s fair to say that there is a technical problem at Palm - they have not been executing on their current product line, it would be hard to dispute that. The oddity that Scott notes is that there are obviously very capable engineers at Palm hard at work. I am going to assume they’ve all been hard at work on the Foleo which is why the Treos have stagnated. Ok, so that explains the technical issue - it’s not that they’re not doing anything, it’s just that they refocused on something new that’s taken time to come to fruition. Whether or not devoting all those resources to the Foleo was a mistake, only time will tell - but the bottom line is that their Treo line has been completely stagnant.
What they have is a PR problem and it seems like they have been doing everything to exacerbate it instead of remedy it. Starting that blog was a good idea, but only if they were going to actively man it and engage their core audience - they really have not. I haven’t seen anything vaguely resembly PR come from any Palm source except for what I’ve seen Ben Combee doing. Which is exactly (amongst other things) what Palm needs to be promoting. They need to turn it around quick to salvage what remains of their once dominant fan base.
Anyhow, now I’m just rehashing what Scott wrote, go read his piece.
