Palm laying off employees?

We haven't heard any confirmations of this just yet, but PalmInfocenter has it that a number of Palm employees have already been shown the door and asked not to come back. Citing "reliable sources," it goes on to mention that the layoffs could reach beyond North America and could affect "hundreds" of employees. 'Course, the past few months quarters haven't been the best Palm has ever seen or anything, but this would certainly make a bad year even worse if true.

[mushrooshi @ Dec 12th 2007 7:29PM]

But will it be Doom?

[Reader @ Dec 12th 2007 7:37PM]

When no witty joke is at hand, Doom is always there to save the day (or not).

[mushrooshi @ Dec 12th 2007 8:01PM]

Wow.

I tried 3 variations of these annoying jokes, and they suck...

I think I will try normal comments.

[Khris @ Dec 12th 2007 9:30PM]

I think you should just STFU!

It's hard to have a battle of wits with you. Especially since you're unarmed.

[moo083 @ Dec 12th 2007 7:42PM]

DAMN YOU BONO!!!!!!!

[JAmerican @ Dec 12th 2007 7:42PM]

If I was Palm CEO back when iPods were still B&W and my devices played video. I would have taken advantage of the music/video market with a Tungsten device that had a few gigs of memory and slowly increased it with the period. The Palm TX is a device most users wanted to be a phone and Palm simply rejected us. Now when they need us most, looks like a lot of people are jumping ship. Palm is a perfect example of how not listening to developers, customers and just being cocky will kill your company.

Not only the entertainment sector, I would have made devices for teenagers and taken over the Sidekick market. Sidekick is really just an overrated product. It still can't even play videos in 2007 going into 2008. (Probably only video you record).

Sad. Oh well my eyes are on the HTC Kaiser. Hope T-Mobile gets it in '08.

JAmerican

[Carlos @ Dec 12th 2007 8:10PM]

Thats true - Palm had a lot of good devices over the years that could have easily competed in the consumer market against Apple. One of them even had a hard drive with a few gigs of memory. Life Drive or something like that.

Seems bizzar to think that their latest offering is that plastic fisher price looking Centro and the poorly thought out Folio.

[Sam @ Dec 12th 2007 7:46PM]

Everyone will typically blame Palm themselves for their financial woes. That's easy. I put part of the blame on the wireless network providers like Verizon. If not for the carrier's insistence to regulate the equipment on their networks, Palm would be more free to market devices to the consumer as opposed to what Verizon suits think the consumer wants. How can you innovate when you have to please the carriers needs first, and not the consumers?

[Mitch @ Dec 12th 2007 8:03PM]

They can innovate and drive the market or they can be a follower and let Verizon tell them what to do.

If Palm produces a product that is desired and utilized by their competition then Verizon will offer it or loose customers.

[cruci fiction @ Dec 12th 2007 10:53PM]

Mitch,
Obviously you do not work in the industry, Palm does not have the weight to be able to do that. Only Motorola and Nokia might be able to pull something like that off, Verizon even told Apple to go to hell.

[NutMac @ Dec 12th 2007 7:55PM]

What about the management? Since they made stupid decisions, they should get laid off first.

[GKA @ Dec 12th 2007 8:43PM]

hahahahahahaha

[Andrew @ Dec 13th 2007 12:46PM]

Actually, usually they DO get laid off first. They probably already went through a few sets of executives (just guessing in Palm's case but that's how it usually goes) trying to fix the business. The only difference - but a big one - is that a "layoff" for an executive is usually a golden parachute.

[Frangible @ Dec 12th 2007 8:12PM]

Palm's problem is they made an initially excellent PDA and later, successfully transitioned into the smartphone market when the PDA market started to die off. However, they did not innovate, instead releasing the same basic designs for years that were expensive, large, and heavy. Users generally do not like expensive, large, and heavy.

Now they have to compete with a variety of smaller smartphones like the Motorola Q, which shows you certainly *can* be innovative with design in that market space, and the iPhone which loses some of the Treo's functionality and rapid text entry but has more consumer appeal and better multimedia/internet browsing/screen, all while being much smaller.

The Treo was designed to target a market-- business users. As was the Tungsten C before it. Unfortunately for Palm, the consumer market is a much bigger factor, and few are willing to spend $600 for Blackberry functionality to TXT their BFF Jill when they mainly want something that's not a brick with music playback and an internet browser.

Verizon's music phones (ie, LG Chocolate) have sold quite well, and they're really quite terrible compared to the iPhone, especially the interface. And I'm not an Apple fan, so that's saying a lot.

Palm is now finally, finally starting to get hardware with smaller profiles but I think it's too little, too late. With an archaic OS and poor web browsing / music (Blazer and PocketTunes? In 2007?) they're not competing with the iPhone or even the Motorola Q9M.

They could also use Windows Mobile as they have on some phones, but Microsoft's been very lazy about making improvements to it, even after the iPhone's release; Pocket Internet Explorer is still a mediocre browser, and the PDA software is actually less functional than the original Palm Pilot was over 10 years ago. They're just now getting around to adding copy and paste. Wow. Pocket Windows Media Player is better than PocketTunes, but doesn't really compete with Apple's offering either.

There's really not a whole lot Palm can do in the already saturated business/Blackberry type market and they know it. If you look at the marketing for their new phones it is very consumer-oriented. But someone plunking down cash and watching Blazer crash and render pages slowly/poorly is going to be very disappointed it's not the iPhone's Safari.

Palm's answer to all of this up until now has been... the Foleo. Yes, the Foleo. Rather than improve the display (iPhone's 480x320 to the Palm 700wx's 240x240 resolution), or improve the horrible Blazer browser, they decided making an expensive proprietary subnotebook that would connect through the phone would be a winner idea until people gave them a reality check. Never did they stop and say "how can we improve the Treo display or input"? Or "how can we get a web browser that doesn't suck"?

They had it coming, and as a MotoQ owner, I say so does Microsoft. I really don't even like Apple that much, nor would I buy an iPhone if they were available on a CDMA network where I live, but I will give Apple credit for making a decent device that at least innovates when others stagnate.

You can't keep releasing the same tired Treo design year after year and expect sales to be brisk. If Palm survives, they will be forced to adapt and make products that people want to buy. Painful, but a good lesson to them.

And yeah, the iPhone has its problems as well, but it also does some things very well, things that have been flawed on smartphones for too long.

[why not the LS2LS7? @ Dec 12th 2007 11:54PM]

I kinda of agree, but I would say things a little differently.

Palm made a good PDA, and it was rather successful. They had a certain OS, UI and API (programming interface) that went together. When Palm decided to make a phone, they just brought that software over to the phone.

They stuck with it when it was clear their system had serious issues, like the aforementioned lack of a decent web browser.

They seemingly valued the breadth of shareware and freeware apps for the Palm platform over new innovations they could have made by making a new platform on a new (ARM) CPU.

So, Palm mistakenly thought that people would buy their phones because they could load a shareware golf scoring app instead of realizing they'd want it to be faster, have better battery life, a browser that worked and perhaps WiFi.

[Andrew @ Dec 13th 2007 12:50PM]

Uhm, windows mobile had cut and paste for many years. My old iPaq running CE 2003 not only had it, but it was *required* of you to do a practice cut and paste upon the first boot of the thing (as part of the tutorial and setup).

[qrius @ Dec 12th 2007 8:13PM]

@JAmerican

yeah, they sure did make some major missteps.

I would have done the following:
focused on just fixing the major bugs/annoyances/missing features of palm/garnett:
1. slow blazer (perhaps replaced w/ opera by working w/ them heavily)
2. developed the tethering feature of the early palms to phones. They stopped w/ the drivers long long time ago. combined w/ resolving #1, it would have been a hit. BT pair w/ phone and have internet.
3. tossed the quirky sync cable, and just gone usb.
4. improved SMS and IM and market it to the teenagers

perhaps hindsight is 20/20 but... wait, actually i was fully aware of this when it was going on. never mind. palm just has wrong visions - is that what they call illusions? or delusions? ugh.

[Constable Odo @ Dec 12th 2007 8:41PM]

Blame the Palm Centro. They probably fired the people who designed it or at least those that decided on the color.

[phil @ Dec 12th 2007 9:04PM]

Palm is a case study in inept management and a failure to innovate. It's story is like a soap opera with mergers and management fights, but having just one successful product since the Palm V, and that they had to acquire from Handspring. That product, introduced 4 years ago has been buggy and unreliable with little attempt to fix it. They rested on their laurels and never improved it in any meaningful way. The new Centro looks like an old Speak and Spell. Palm will make a great case study at Harvard.

[Mischa Lockton @ Dec 12th 2007 9:20PM]

I still love my treo 700p, and the 650 before that. I'm here for you Palm, I am worried one day you won't be.

[MB @ Dec 12th 2007 9:33PM]

Had Verizon Wireless released the Palm Treo 755p I would still be a VZW customer and a Palm user. Instead by dragging their feet I switched to the iPhone, though I would have rather kept on VZW with an upgrade to my aging Treo 650p. VZW and Palm are both idiots for that debacle. And the 700p is a POS, I know, I owned one for three weeks before getting my money back.

[Lee Glantz @ Dec 12th 2007 9:41PM]

A palm rep actually told me that when Jon Rubenstein recently took over, he fired the entire Engineering and the QA Departments. That sounds like a good start to a successful company :) (I'm not being sarcastic)

[Lee Glantz @ Dec 12th 2007 10:38PM]

I actually do think Palm has a bright future with Mr. Rubenstein taking over, though. Right now all of their phones in the lineup look ancient, but I think we may see some interesting things from Palm in Late 2008. I just hope they can stay alive until then!

[Luigi Izq @ Dec 12th 2007 9:48PM]

Well they had it coming. They had the 700P sitting there for almost 17 months before they decided to finally release a semi-workable update. When they did. They bricked sprint phones and caused data connectivity issues with both sprint and vzw networks. Error 3000 anybody? Lets rewind JUST a few months before the release. The 680 is released. They release fixes for their WM phones. Oh.. issue w/ the 680? we'll issue a fix for the 680. Meanwhile the 700P users were all benched on the sideline watching all the other phones getting patched. Oh wait.. Theres a new quaterback.. The Foleo (Fooleo). We just signed the foleo to a $1.8million dollar deal. Then at the last minute they decide to pull the foleo to focus on 'core products'. Oh wait.. the 700P is still sitting on the bench and finally gets the update.. It breaks data and it tooks them 2-3 months to issue a patch update which somewhat solves it but again the error 300's continue. As a former palm user dating back to the Visor Handspring THEN Visorphone.. its the worst device ever. 5 phones in the span of 4 weeks. Most of the times having ZERO software/contacts installed and the phones constantly reboots upon getting a incoming call. No thanks. Many of us jumped ship to blackberries/Moto-Qs/HTC/WinMobile/etc... Palm has it coming to them and at $5/share vs RIMM $100/share since a 3-1 split... You just have to wonder who's doing the right thing here.. And then there is iphone.. a serious contender if it wasnt on a slow EDGE Network. There is a linux phone on the horizon not only by Palm but by OTHERS now. Just have to use another device that works until the dream phone comes out. Good luck Palm. History and stock prices will be the judge.

[strider_mt2k @ Dec 12th 2007 11:57PM]

It's better to burn out than it is to rust.

[2she @ Dec 13th 2007 12:16AM]

testing

[CoolBradG @ Dec 13th 2007 7:15AM]

I bought a Palm awhile back and the stupid thing froze and the store wanted me to take the smudged/scratched display model as replacement. I said no and returned the piece of junk and never bought one again.

[hugo @ Dec 13th 2007 11:49AM]

Everytime T650 locked up-I could trace back to some app conflict i.e. i was responsible. Palm suffers for users, but if the company paid more attn to modernizing (bulletproofing) the OS it would be in better shape. Never had the need for MS palm because xiino, kwikmaps, wassdat, 2day, mVoice, pTunes, googlemaps, even slow blazer, take care of whatever needs. T650 just works. Foleo was a mis-step because palm didnt load impressive throughput into the subnotebook. iPhone size is just right (design feels as natural as a zippo lighter) but Treo 680 size also works. If only Palm would put a large screen across the top of the entire device and put a slideout keyboard underneath.

[Glenn @ Jan 15th 2008 5:41PM]

They're not done yet, but they're getting pretty crispy...

If they can make me a Treo that is THINNER, I'll buy it. That's all. Just thinner. No faster, no different apps, same keyboard, etc. Just THINNER.

And by thinner I don't mean slightly thinner, I mean A LOT THINNER.

Jeez, what year is it again?