"How the Pocket PC beat the Palm - Lessons for Apple iPod" is an article I saw over at Pocket PC Thoughts.
This is a follow-on to my "Could Apple mess up again with the iPod" post from last week. As I said last week, the real challenge will come from Microsoft. I think MS will model its strategy after its successful Pocket PC campaign.
Pocket Pc Wins the War
Let us first look at Microsoft brilliantly outflanked Palm to the extent that Palm capitulated entirely and released a Treo with a Windows Mobile OS. Interestingly, as I pointed out last week, Palm did use the much-talked-about license-your-OS strategy advocated by Clayton Christensen. It licensed the OS to several partners (Sony, Garmin, Tapwave, Handspring, Handera...) and for some time it did seem like the Palm was winning the battle.
Microsoft, meanwhile, made quite a few attempts (remember the brick-sized clamshell Jornada with a full-keyboard, anyone?) and finally hit a home run with the Compaq iPaq which used a similar stylus-based UI pioneered by Palm. iPaq was introduced in 2000, a full four years after the Palm Pilot debuted in 1996. In the interim, MS has also done another important thing which will help it in the year 2002, as we will see - it built the OS as a general purpose one capable of running on multiple types of processors including the more powerful Intel ARM-based XScale processors.
From the beginning Palm OS was running on 33MHz Dragonball processors and it persisted with that architecture by saying that it was focusing on simplicity. Palm released the Palm OS 5 capable of running on more powerful processors only in June 2002. Interestingly, Palm actually boasted in Feb 1999 at the release of the chic Palm V with the following : "The sleek, modern Palm™ V handheld redefines the handheld industry with a new icon…a product that
strategically had zero additional features from its predecessor. Message: style matters." [emphasis added by me].
In my opinion, the real inflection point for Pocket PC came with 2 near simultaneous events - FedEx and UPS, both deciding to use PocketPC for their next generation handheld devices for their field force - a very key application for both companies. At that time, when I heard about this, it intrigued me that they did not chose Palm. But i was not armed with the hindsight that I have now. Remember, both these projects were worth $100MM or above. So this was a very big deal for PocketPC.
Read the full article at SastWingees.blogharbor.com