.FLYINGHEAD INDUSTRY ANALYSIS
.TITLE The future of the Palm platform: lessons learned from the Sharp Zaurus
.AUTHOR Jason Perlow
.SUMMARY From December of 2002 through February of 2003, Computing Unplugged Senior Technical Editor Jason Perlow was Software Developer Liaison for Sharp Electronics’ Zaurus. As some of you may recall, the Zaurus was also a Linux PDA, which shared many similarities with the ALP platform, and like ACCESS and PalmSource, the Zaurus was also the product of a Japanese company. The Zaurus had many things going for it, but it failed miserably in the US and European consumer market. In this important article, Jason shares his insights into what went wrong and what ACCESS has to do to get it right.
.FEATURE
From December of 2002 through February of 2003, I was Software Developer Liaison for Sharp Electronics’ Zaurus. As some of you may recall, the Zaurus was also a Linux PDA, which shared many similarities with the ALP platform, and like ACCESS and PalmSource, the Zaurus was also the product of a Japanese company.
.CALLOUT It failed miserably. Why?
The Zaurus had many things going for it: great technology, an excellent industrial design, and a solid consumer electronics company behind it. But it failed miserably in the US and European consumer market. Why?
.TEASER If you want to know the answer, you’re gonna have to tap here and read the rest of this fascinating article.
.H1 Understanding developers
For starters, Sharp didn’t know how to keep their developers happy. The highly protective, secretive nature of a Japanese consumer electronics firm just didn’t translate well over to the free-wheeling, bohemian mindset of the Open Source and Linux developers.
It wasn’t until eight months until after Zaurus’s North American and European introduction that a collaborative development Web site was launched, and by then it was too late. Developers were frustrated: they didn’t have timely access to beta OS code, Kernel source or the updated ROM images, so they went rogue.
These developers formed their own communities and spun off the development into Linux OSes that ran Zaurus applications on other PDA hardware platforms, like OpenZaurus, OPIE and Familiar. If ACCESS doesn’t want to repeat these mistakes, they should make sure that developers have absolutely everything they need to build the entire ALP and MAX environment, because they’ll want to completely rip it apart, make changes, and fix problems.
ACCESS has to make everything they can Open Source, within reason, and there should be oodles and oodles of documentation for their developers to pour through.
.H1 The Japanese to English language barrier
It also can’t be emphasized enough that the Japanese to English language barrier was also a huge problem. Our US developer support team was completely understaffed and we had a twelve hour lag between our single English-speaking Japanese developer liaison at Sharp’s engineering center in Nara, Japan. The US team was kept entirely on a need-to-know basis.
ACCESS and PalmSource should make sure that plenty of English-speaking people are on-hand in the US to address developer concerns, to directly interact with the community, and make sure that Wind River, the supplier of the ALP SDK, is also able to directly communicate with developers.
One of the biggest problems we had was that the Zaurus platform was a combination of Trolltech’s Qt Embedded and Lineo’s embedded Linux platform, and the SDK was a bastardized combination of the two that was tailored to the Zaurus’s environment.
However, Sharp arranged it so that all Zaurus related development issues went directly through Sharp, and both Lineo and Trolltech essentially had to stick their fingers "up their butts" whenever developers went to them for advanced support issues. The situation eventually became completely untenable.
.H1 Availability of the developer toolkit
Finally, there was the issue of the cost of the developer toolkit. While it was free to develop Java applications on the Zaurus, the Qt Embedded/Qtopia developer kit had to be purchased from Trolltech, and originally cost several thousand dollars per seat — a ridiculous amount for a one-man developer shop, the type of developers where most of the Palm and Windows CE apps came from.
Sure, you could use the Open Source version of the developer kit, but that was only good for building and selling Open Source applications, not ones for commercial sale. Eventually, a $250 1-seat Qt Embedded Zaurus SDK was released, but by that time, it was too late.
.H1 Can ACCESS/PalmSource learn?
While it appears much of these problems are moot with GTK+, since its licensed under the GPL, the entire Wind River PCD for Linux toolkit needs to be made available for either free or super-cheap to the ALP developers — otherwise history is likely to repeat itself.
Additionally, PalmSource needs to be aware that Linux developers like to work with all sorts of Linux APIs and tools (like direct to framebuffer libraries such as SDL for games development) and they should allow them to be used on the ALP platform, including Qt Embedded.
This is why its essential that developers should be able to re-build and repackage the entire ALP environment and produce their own ROM images, such as for vertical use.
Developers are the key to success for any software platform. For ACCESS to succeed, the company will have to do more than give lip service to developer relations. After all, this is an area where Microsoft really "gets it".
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on the Sharp Zaurus, visit http://www.myzaurus.com.
For more information on ACCESS, visit http://www.access-us-inc.com.
For more information about PalmSource, visit http://www.palmsource.com.
For more information on OpenZaurus, visit http://sourceforge.net/projects/openzaurus.
For more information on OPIE, visit http://opie.handhelds.org.
For more information on Familiar, visit http://familiar.handhelds.org.
For more information on Trolltech, visit http://www.trolltech.com.
For more information on Lineo, visit http://www.freescale.com.
For more information about WindRiver, visit http://www.windriver.com.
For more information on GTK+, visit http://www.gtk.org.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO Jason Perlow is a long-time contributor to Computing Unplugged and a mobile technology enthusiast. He can be reached via email at jperlow@gmail.com. Jason’s food and technology exploits are chronicled on his blog, Off The Broiler, at http://www.offthebroiler.com.
