Palm: Stop Missing Obvious Opportunities
I spent a chunk of my professional career working on turnarounds. Thus, I always find it interesting to look at companies which are in turnaround situations. Palm, obviously, is.
What’s incredible to me is how Palm keeps missing opportunities to provide real value to its customers.
Take the example of 2 services that have become popular in the last 3-4 years : LinkedIn and Plaxo. The latter provides address book master backup and related services, while the former is a professional networking tool. Both services are rooted in the user’s address book, an application that Palm has had a long history with.
Ideally, I would love to have my Treo come with a Plaxo-like address back-up service, so that I can automatically have my database synched up with all Palm users around the world. I would also like Palm to provide the same professional networking hub service that today LinkedIn offers. I assumed, at least 2-3 years back, that one of these days, Palm would figure these applications out.
But no, it hasn’t. Today, perhaps it even would make sense for Palm to buy Plaxo and LinkedIn, and offer their functions for free, as a differentiation mechanism, rather than an independent business with a revenue stream, which both companies have struggled to establish.
