Palm is laying off an undetermined number of its 1,050 workers this week in an effort to stem the effects of the economy and Palm’s decreasing smartphone market share. While it’s not a shock – everyone is doing it! – Palm now has to deal with RIM and Android eating their lunch and iPhone essentially stealing the entire casual smartphone market out from under it.
Reuters notes:
According to data released Thursday by ChangeWave, only 5 percent of companies plan to buy a Palm smartphone in the next quarter, half the figure from a year ago. By contrast, 78 percent of corporations planned to buy a RIM device and 22 percent an iPhone.
Sadly, that sounds about right.
I’m surprised that Palm still has that many people on staff…
Palm should quit dicking around and add all options of OS on every phone across every carry they sell through. Furthermore, they should jump on the Android band wagon and offer that as an option too.
I loved my Palm’s, but moved on to other things when it became apparent 5-6 years ago that Palm was incapable of any further innovation. Surprised it lasted this long.
Can anyone prove that palm isn’t really zombie technology? Chuck nails it.
I have to jump on the bandwagon for this one. Palm needed to adapt to the market in order to survive against players like Google and Apple and clearly didn’t…
They make a solid product and still have some very talented engineers, but clearly in an industry like ours if you don’t modify your product after a few years, you might as well put your name in the history books. I give it another couple weeks before AOL is in the same predicament.
- Eli
http://www.thewebwar.com
I used to have a desk at the building in McCarthy Ranch. I remember going to the second floor and staring at a display of a piece-by-piece exhibition of the Zire 72. Nasty little sucker….
Then I remember the feeling of holding in my hand my first Treo 600. With that crazy writing technology. I remember the look in the face of the Sprint lady who activate it for me. She was saying “Dude, you got a hellof a phone there”. Yes I did……
This was 4-5 years ago.
Two months ago I ended my Palm addiction with a BB Curve. I don’t feel the tip of my fingers now, my metacarpal bones are fused in a beer-grabbing position, the browser is so much faster, and the form factor is so much comfortable.
Now palm decided to sell the new treo….In Japan…
I’m not moving there…
Yes, there is still an employee pool there to fire 300-500 of them. You can see them having lunch in Tomatina ot in the Babana Leaf from time to time…
I work for AT&T supporting PDA phones like Blackjack’s, Blackberries, HTC, and yes, Palm’s. If you call in with a Palm phone we make fun of you behind your back. Sorry, but those phone’s suck, and are nothing but problematic.
Yeah Palm make horrible smartphones. Am very surprised that they this many people on staff?
Oh btw
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This article likely isn’t all that acurate as the percentages add up to over 100 percent without even factoring in android or wm devices.
I guess that a company could plan to buy at the same time a RIM and an Iphone or Palm. So this explains that the total can be more than 100.
Good point Costock.
5% + 78% + 22% = 105% of all corporations for only three brands. Is there something wrong with these numbers or does it just mean that some corporations are buying more than one brand?