The Wall Street Journal has posted a letter from Palm CEO, Jon Rubenstein, to employees. Here’s an extract- “I realize this news is difficult to swallow. We made this announcement today to prevent a surprise for Wall Street when we announce quarterly earnings in March. In the meantime, the entire executive team has been working extremely hard to improve product performance, and have implemented a number of initiatives to increase awareness and drive sales.
Dave Whalen and I just returned from a very successful meeting with Verizon Wireless, where they acknowledged that their execution of our launch was below expectations and recommitted to working with us to improve sales. To accelerate sales, we initiated Project JumpStart nearly three weeks ago. Since then, nearly two hundred Palm Brand Ambassadors, supplemented by Palm employees from Sunnyvale, have been training Verizon sales reps across the U.S. on our products. Early results from the stores have already shown improvement on product knowledge and sales week over week. You may have also seen a growing number of Palm ads on billboards, bus shelters, buses, and subway stations—all getting the word out about Palm…”
It’s amazing to think that this time last year the Pre was touted as *the* device to have.
Typical-have a good product and scew up the perception because apple has sucked up all the good marketing talent. HaHa
I’m not a marketing or logistics expert but why didn’t palm enter new markets when earnings started to fall in the handful of countries the Pre is currently available and instead offers the Pre with HUGE discounts? Why do they offer an improved Pre in the states but still announce the old one in France (rumors say the Pre is about to be released in France soon) and the rest of the world?
Why isn’t there any kind of ETA for other countries? Although i thought it was 8 months….the Dutch Palm site is telling the Pre is “available soon” for over THIRTEEN months. There are some people on their marketing department who should look for another job. When I buy an unlocked Pre only a handful of applications (150+) are available….most of them not very useful.
I was a Palm fan for over 10 years but it’s hard for me to understand what they are doing. I even bought myself an “unlocked” German Pre a few months ago but it was a horrible experience. Palm did accept my Euro’s when I bought my device but refused any help (No 3rd party apps and No data connection and very hard to setup in a not supported country) because I live in a “not supported” country. Luckily the shop I bought my Pre had a return policy.
So it’s not a surprise for me Palm is having a hard time.
Palm is too small a company – period.
It’s simply too expensive to stay in the game.
Apple and Google have moved the bar so high, so quickly – when the opposition was M$ windows mobile, Palm and the likes of Motorola could survive. And the new players like HTC are making it VERY hard for a company to own an entire ecosystem unless they are big like Apple.
But even Nokia now knows that the OS matters.
Palm SHOULD be merged with a synergistic partner to get the necessary mass to succeed. I’d like to see the full potential of webOS unlocked – but I’m afraid it’s going to be like the Commodore Amiga – a terrific followup product that was too little, too late to save the company.