Update: (May-2-09) Since I wrote this piece, it seems that the Palm OS folks have changed their minds, recognizing that ignoring the current customer-base was a mistake. The Palm Pre will come with a PalmOS Emulator that will “let the phone UI look and act like the Garnet OS, and even has virtual, on screen buttons to give you full functionality“. Good, smart move!
The new Palm Pre is a step on the right direction for the company. From the H/W to the UI to the app store, to the approach to application development which is based on web technologies. I’m glad to see Palm re-inventing themselves.
That said, who or what kind of customers more likely will move to the Palm Pre/webOS? My bet is that at first it would be existing Palm customers (in the U.S. lots of these are enterprise customers) which typically are pretty loyal customers.
That is where the Palm (Product) folks dropped the ball, as they have failed to provide a transition path to convert their existing customer-base to the new Palm Pre webOS platform; see New Palm Pre won’t work with old apps (ComputerWorld).
Perhaps this is an opportunity for a 3rd party to develop such solution, or maybe Palm just ran out of time for CES and is working on such emulation, but the PMs at Palm must recognize the strategy of not providing a good a path for existing Palm users as a flawed strategy that is going to cost them…
…existing Palm customer-base must be able to seamlessly run the existing inventory legacy applications and data on the new WebOS via some kind of emulation.
ceo