Just like Colligan cancelled the Foleo, Palm should fire Colligan

You know as much as I wasn’t expecting it (because I never really thought about it) in retrospect the only surprising thing about Colligan cancelling the Foleo is how not shocking it is. It explains the lack of even one marketing dollar spent on this “new, revolutionary” device. It’s sort of exactly like what happens when a network has a show they hate, but feel like they have to put on - they don’t spend any money on it, shift its time slot around without telling anyone and then they kill it before the season’s over.

Now, I won’t deny that I think it’s a good idea, the Foleo was a bad idea from the start - I harbored some suspicion that perhaps we were all missing the point and that when we saw it a light would go on and we would see what Palm was talking about. It turns out there was no hidden ingredient, it was a cheap, stripped down laptop that traded a world of general purpose functionality for some ability to work tightly with a Treo.

But let’s have a look at some of the things Colligan has to say, it’s a little long so read on after the jump.

In the course of the past several months, it has become clear that the right path for Palm is to offer a single, consistent user experience around this new platform design and a single focus for our platform development efforts.

First of all, does that mean it was not clear 5 months ago that they needed a good, uniform platform to work with? Prior to this debacle they kind of thought, hey, we should have a few distinct UI’s and try to spread our development as thinly as possible? Given that that was the thinking, what exactly changed in the past few months that turned the light on, what exactly was it that made it clear when it wasn’t before?

I have decided to cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration and focus all of our energies on delivering our next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market. We will, of course, continue to develop products in partnership with Microsoft on the Windows Mobile platform, but from our internal platform development perspective, we will focus on only one.

This was a pretty spectacular quote. Here’s what he’s saying, “We’re cancelling this because we need to really focus on our main product. Oh, I mean, we’ll focus on that product and this other Windows Mobile stuff we’re doing, too. Yeah the one that was the root cause of the 700P debacle because we didn’t have enough engineering to build a new platform for the Palm version of the device we just tried to get away with using the WinMob version…”

Foleo is based on second platform and a separate development environment, and we need to focus our efforts on one platform.

Honestly, given that Foleo was a linux based product I had assumed that it was the second platform. That is, development for the Foleo was like getting 75% of the way to linux on a smartphone. That it wasn’t is crazy, that they just decided to build a completely separate non-smartphone OS in the middle of a smartphone war is just bonkers. And if it actually is mostly repurposable for smartphones, Colligan should be fired simply for being the most incompetent public letter to their community and share holders writer ever.

I would also like to thank the developers who have supported our Foleo efforts. They have been loyal to Palm and have worked hard to deliver some compelling solutions on the Foleo platform. I know that they will understand that the right thing to do for the long run is to focus on one platform that will live for years, rather than invest energy in a one-off solution.

It’s pretty amazing how much Palm goes out of it’s way to screw those most loyal to them. First they fragment their community by selling Windows Mobile devices, nobody knew what was going on. They had a great community going and then Palm muddies the waters of their devotion to the platform by selling the wares of what had been considered their main competitor. Then they drop the 700P debacle, punishing severely any customers foolish enough to have bought it. Now after convincing several big names in their community to develop applications for the Foleo, they cancel it at ship time. It’s as though they are doing everything in their ability to confuse, frustrate and otherwise scare off potential customers and developers.

We’re not going to speculate now on timing for a next Foleo, we just know we need to get our core platform and smartphones done first.

Could you speculate a little on timing based on getting a smartphone out with this new version of Palm OS? The one that as far as I can tell has been discussed for years and years and still no sign of it?

This decision will require us to take a limited charge of less than $10 million dollars to our earnings. This is a lot of money, but it is a small price relative to the costs that would be required to support two platforms going forward.

What about the cost of development? What were those costs in both dollar terms and lost opportunity? How many man years did this take from the main Treo line? How much of an industry lead did this cause Palm to squander?

I hope this renewed focus at Palm will allow us to deliver more compelling solutions to our core smartphone market

This is my favourite line from the whole thing. “Renewed focus” which implies that they believe they ever had any focus! LOL! Let’s take a look at their track record:

- buy handspring - launch Treo! Yay!
- split OS from Palm
- sell PalmBrand to PalmSource
- start selling Windows Mobile
- PalmSource bought by Access
- license back their own OS

Yeah! Oh, there’s some Cobalt action in there, a couple hints of a linux based os, actually developing the Foleo hardware and software… That’s some real focus there, they were so busy splitting and trying to figure out how to use their own operating system they couldn’t really develop anything else. Anything else but the Foleo, I guess.

Colligan shows that it’s never too late to fix a mistake. Palm should take the hint and get rid of Colligan. What has he been doing all these years??

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