By Michael Compeau
I can't write this article without coming clean: I'm not a journalist. No, really. For the past six or seven years I've been employed in the "product development" field. The field is distinct from engineering because of the level of marketing theory that permeates it. Notwithstanding that, many "purist" marketers frequently scrunch up their noses at the discipline. After all, the field's adherents generally get far more kicks from listening to customers and changing their product to suit them than from listening to customers in order to craft a clever ad campaign to move the tired old product already on the shelf.
Naturally, I'm interested in how companies come up with ideas for products and how they attempt to understand the customer requirements and latent needs in order to develop and commercialize them. This leads me to a fascination with many products, chief among them being handheld devices. So, naturally, I experience plenty of excitement when I hear of new Palm or Palm OS-based devices being released or even just hinted at.
As a result, I was more than just a little tickled to be able to attend my professional organization's annual PDMA (Product Development Management Association) Y2K Conference held the third week of October in New Orleans. There, I had the chance to hear Carl Yankowski, CEO of Palm, Inc., deliver the opening keynote address on Palm's future product plans. He's pictured in Figure A.
FIGURE A
Carl Yankowski, CEO of Palm, Inc.
Carl speaks: "We have a plan"
There's been no small degree of conjecture in the Palm device-user community over the past year about the future viability of Palm in the face of strengthening competition from Microsoft's Pocket PC and the growing strength of Symbian in the ubiquitous cellular phone market. A significant number of journalists and handheld enthusiasts were fairly disappointed in the past few product introductions by Palm; we've been patiently awaiting some sort of "killer" product revision that would change all the rules again and re-establish Palm's claim to the gadget geek's trophy.
Instead, most past products have been viewed as largely single-attribute incremental improvements. The Palm V and Palm Vx gave us a lean, sexy industrial design, but without too many enhancements to the basic feature/function list. The Palm VII added sparse geographic coverage for wireless connectivity in a larger form-factor, again with few real enhancements. The Palm m100 was simply a Honey-I-Shrunk-the-Palm-III model; and the Palm VIIx finally added the memory that should have been in the Palm VII from the start. Many in the enthusiast community were wondering if Palm still possessed the "chutzpah" to create real innovation in the market space, as opposed to throwing out incremental changes that rested on past laurels. So where's the "Palm plan?"
