.KEYWORD pptechskeptic0400
.FLYINGHEAD TECHNOLOGY SKEPTIC
.TITLE Why isn’t the Palm organizer catching on?
.DEPT
.SUMMARY PalmPower’s resident technology skeptic, Kevin Quin, has been feeling a bit lonely lately. When he bought his first PalmPilot, he dealt with "you geek" looks from friends and coworkers by confidently telling them they would all be Palm computer users within three years. Flash forward to present day, and handheld organizers are yet to have landed in the grasping palms of every man, woman, and child. This month, he analyzes the phenomena and offers some tips for Palm, Inc.’s marketing division in this thought-provoking and funny article.
.AUTHOR Kevin Quin
Name five people you know who use Palm organizers. Now cross off the ones who call themselves "systems analysts," "Web page designers," or some other title that suggests they’re trying to get a tan by basking in the glow of a bright monitor all day long. Of the ones still left, how many drive cars worth more than your home?
Among my acquaintances who confess to owning Palm devices, I can think of a couple who don’t fall into those categories. But while neither of them are electrical engineers, both of them, unlike me, are the type of people who can, say, edit the BIOS (Basic Input Output System) settings of their PCs without fear of launching missiles against Russia.
I can think of only one truly non-technical person with a Palm organizer, but it’s not really fair to count my wife. She was only sold on a Palm device because she knew that she would have in-person round-the-clock technical support: me. I’d like to take this opportunity to warn spouses considering this adventure: when something goes wrong, it’s your fault.
As a Palm computer user, I’m feeling a bit lonely lately. When I got my first PalmPilot, I wasn’t expecting this. I dealt with those "you geek" looks from friends and coworkers by confidently telling them they would all have something like this within three years. Well, time’s up. I took a highly scientific study of my coworkers by glancing around the office last Friday, and after doing some higher math, I can report that the grand total number of electronic organizers, Palm or otherwise, is zero.
But Palm, Inc. says it’s sold five million of these things. You’ve heard the propaganda: everyone who is anyone has a Palm device! Al Gore has one. Robin Williams has one. Steven Speilberg has one. But what about those of us who, to put it gently, aren’t anyone? How about us regular slobs?
I hold the heretical position that Palm organizers, despite the hype that they are the fastest selling electronic product in history, aren’t catching on with us regular folks. I’m thinking here of people who can’t program their VCRs, who didn’t hook up their own cable modems, and who have incomes that are, shall we say, somewhat under the seven figure range.
This isn’t just an intellectual exercise. It’s the law of supply and demand. The more people carrying Palm organizers, the more features and applications will be created to help us integrate our lives with other Palm organizer users. The IR port, which Palm, Inc. added when it introduced the Palm III in early 1998, is an example. Now Palm device users can beam data to each other rather than scribbling in Graffiti. WeSync, a new application allowing users to keep shared data current, is another. So the more Palm devices there are, the more we all benefit.
I can think of several reasons that Palm organizers, and certainly other PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), haven’t caught on with regular folks. Some of these are problems only in the minds of prospective buyers, but some are very real.
.CALLOUT Many people still joke that handwriting recognition on a PDA means that ‘have lunch with Bob’ will be turned into ‘mail socks to Mom’.
Regular folks still have a lot of misconceptions about Palm organizers, probably as a holdover from the bad old days of the first electronic organizers. People still remember the ugly things with the nearly unreadable eight line by forty character screens, the tiny memories, and the Chicklet-size keys, and they expect the Palm device to be similar. Only a true gadget lover would suffer with something like that.
One of the most commonly asked questions Palm skeptics have is, "What if the batteries die?" I don’t know anyone who’s lost data as a result of battery failure. My batteries last for weeks, and I always get an early warning to replace them. Even if they did die, I would only lose a bit of data. Performing a HotSync with my PC on a regular basis guarantees that I’ll always have a recent copy of my data ready to dump back into my Palm unit. The second most common question is, "If you lose it, don’t you lose all your information?" The same answer applies, but wannabe Palm device users often don’t know any of that. Palm, Inc. probably needs to do a better job of educating (read "advertising") here.
Then there’s the Newton stigma. Remember how Doonesbury trashed the alleged handwriting recognition of that early PDA? Many people still joke that handwriting recognition on a PDA means that "have lunch with Bob" will be turned into "mail socks to Mom."
Well, truth be told, even Palm organizers aren’t as intuitively simple as writing on paper. While the handwriting recognition is okay, I still think that very few real "regular" folks are willing to learn graffiti. Unfortunately, many of them think they have to; they’re not aware of the on-screen keyboard. I suspect that graffiti-frustration is the leading cause of premature retirement of Palm units. This is probably Palm Inc.’s fault. They’re in a bit of a Catch-22 when it comes to discussing this issue, because the official line has to be that Graffiti is so easy that anyone can learn it. Mention the on-screen keyboard in the same breath, and some might wonder why it exists if Graffiti is so simple. (A darn good question!)
This brings us to some very real reasons that Palm units aren’t catching on among regular folks. First, the silly things are too expensive. You think the Palm IIIe, which is down to $150, is cheap? My old paper calendars and address books, which my first Palm device replaced, were free. Let’s see, 150 divided by zero makes a Palm device infinitely more expensive. I told you I’m not a technical type.
The small screen also doesn’t help sell these things. My wife’s main complaint about her Palm unit is that she can’t see her monthly schedule as anything more than a bunch of little dots on a grid. Her old pocket-size paper calendar, on the other hand, folded open to allow her to read everything at a glance. Some clever engineer needs to come up with a way to put a big screen in a small package without violating the laws of physics. Where’s Doctor Who when you need him?
The data entry burden associated with a new organizer is also a big headache. When a friend recently gave his mother-in-law a Palm IIIxe, he told me he actually gave her two gifts: the organizer, plus the gift of retyping all her information from her old electronic planner into her Palm desktop. The second gift cost him a lot more than the actual hardware. This hassle is probably the second most common reason that Palm organizers wind up as paperweights. Now, I’m no engineer, but maybe Palm, Inc. can get newbies over this hurdle by offering software templates that allow a scanner to automatically scan in handwritten address listings, at least for common types of organizers like, say, the DayRunner. Scanners are becoming common since they’re regularly given away with new PCs. On the other hand, they’re about as easy to use as programming your VCR. Palm’s solution would need to be very simple.
All-in-all, though, other than the price, I think the real reason Palm organizers aren’t catching on with regular folks is that Palm, Inc. isn’t selling them to us; they’re selling them to engineers and expense-account executives. Sure, Santa granted my wish and killed off the company’s advertising campaign with the naked woman ("Kate Hunter, dancer"), but Palm marketing is still squarely focused on the Lives of the Rich and Geeky. Most Palm advertising shows up in places like Wired and those in-flight magazines read only by laptop-toting road warriors. TV commercials recently ran on The X-Files, but you gotta know anyone still watching that show is as familiar with their Windows System Registry as they are with the little grays of Area 51. And while ads recently started appearing in venues as mundane as Time Magazine, they tend to hover around technology-related articles. You’ll know that Palm has changed tack and is thinking about the rest of us when ads start showing up in Parenting, Redbook, and People.
On the other hand, maybe it’s just where I live. As everyone who lives near the Beltway knows, the PDA wilderness of Washington, DC is, well, different. One of the ways it’s different is that there seems to be a kind of glamour to ignorance in this town. Self-effacement has a twist here, in that it’s fashionable to portray yourself as ignorant or incapable, at least when it comes to technology. A laugh, a wave of the hand, and an un-self conscious, "I could never figure that stuff out!" is a common saying at cocktail parties of the powerful. I suspect it’s a primal sort of defense mechanism; instead of being behind the times you’re actually too important to waste your time on such things. If one of these powerful Neanderthals were caught with a Palm organizer, their cover would be blown. They might actually have to use the office photocopier themselves once in a while. The plague of ignorance spreads, however, as the minions of the powerful endeavor to emulate them.
"But wait," you say, "Al Gore has one!" I can assure you that the Vice President’s Palm unit spends way more time being seen than used. Al undoubtedly has, as they say in this town, people for that sort of thing.
But maybe I’m being too hard on Palm, Inc. Look at the history of PCs. I got my first computer (if you could call a Timex Sinclair 1000 a computer) in 1983, about the same time some people started bringing them into their offices. However, it was a good seven years before most professionals had them on their desks, and maybe five more years before they started showing up in most middle class homes. At that pace, Palm, Inc. has until 2004 to convince my coworkers to ante up.
But as Palm, Inc. always says, Palm computers aren’t PCs, so maybe this comparison isn’t the right way to go. Let’s think of calculators instead. After all, when Palm, Inc.’s first unit, the Pilot 1000 came out, it was often advertised next to calculators, as if retailers still hadn’t figured out what it was. I first saw a calculator in 1974, when the rich kids at Covington Junior High started flashing their $200 Bomar Brains. Five years later, I spent $19 on a calculator that could do everything including wake me up for my 8 a.m. classical civ class, though it couldn’t make me go. By then, they were so cheap that they were stamped with corporate logos and given away for free as advertising and, most importantly, everyone could figure them out.
If this is the right comparison–and I think it is–Palm organizers need to start falling out of the sky for $25 a pop by 2001. I’m no Palm unit guru, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.
That is, it’s not going to happen unless–and this is still a big unless–they are tied into cell phones. While not many regular folks use Palm organizers, I noticed the other day that even the garbage collectors in my neighborhood have cell phones. There’s a lot of talk about putting organizer functions, whether from Palm devices or others, into cell phones. Although I still think that sticking your Palm device up to your face and chatting into it would feel like a bad Star Trek episode ("Kirk to Enterprise, one to beam up"), maybe some clever engineer can get around the dork factor and put a Palm unit-sized screen in a normal-sized cell phone. If that happens, Palm unit-integrated cell phones will probably be given away free by cell phone providers. Then the sky really will rain Palm organizers.
On second thought, maybe I don’t want them to become popular. Right now, I’m ahead of the curve when it comes to having my information at my fingertips. When I pop up an essential phone number that nobody thought to bring with them it can still draw a few oohs and aahs from the crowd. Once everyone has one, I’ll be expected to have my data with me at all times.
Hey, I’ll just be a regular guy again.
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