Features

Awful Hannover. No, Munich! - awful hangover ...

Palm faces a problem. It's called Europe - it has fallen off the golden platform there, and even Microsoft is doing better. Even in phones.

So the bandwagon is being loaded up, and you can load a bandwagon up more impressively than by putting a beer keg on it. So that's what PalmSource is doing: holding its developer forum in Munich, home of the Munich Beer Festival or Oktoberfest - and yes, during the beer festival itself.

As if that weren't enough, it's also giving a Segway to some lucky programmer. And on top of that, it's joining phone company, Orange, in a programmers camp next week - and the word 'camp' means exactly the same in Poitiers, France, as it does in Yosemite, California - sleeping bags, tents ... that sort of thing.

It's a tragedy of missed opportunity. It's the same sort of tragedy which led to Iridium: a bunch of people for whom North America was the world, and anything that wasn't in the USA or Canada wasn't important. And of course, ten years on, the excuses roll in.

Sales of the Treo, in Europe, have been feeble. Why? According to a report on VNUnet: "Mark Hodgson, PalmOne's UK smartphone channel development manager, said: 'Because of the success of the Treo 600 in the US, our supplies have been limited. The smartphone is a mass-market device, but the Treo appeals to business.' Hodgson said the recent success of Research in Motion's (RIM's) BlackBerry email device showed that IT managers want a single product that handles messaging and voice."

Is that honestly the best you can come up with when a journalist phones, Mark? One call to Orange is all it takes to expose the hollowness of that one: Orange has had the exclusive rights to the Treo, and it certainly hasn't been short of product. They'll tell you as much - and they told Forbes as much: "Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi said: 'We still see [the Palm OS] as a very niche operating system beside Symbian and Microsoft Pocket PC. PalmOne has a geographical advantage in the US, and I don't think the reason it has not taken off here is all to do with the supply.'"

Way back when Palm was launched, I met the founders in Indian Wells, near Palm Springs, at the Demo exhibition, and fell in love with it. "But you need to put wireless into it," I said.

They knew better.

When they showed me the prototype of the Treo 600, I said: "It's got to have Bluetooth, for Europe!" - and again, anybody who actually lived in Europe could have warned them, and did: "We're all going to legally mandated hands-free, and drivers don't want wires tangled around the gear shift and hand-brake."

They knew better.

America is a big place. It's also a rich place, and perhaps this fools some people into thinking it's the only place that matters. In wireless, however, the world is a much bigger place, and the writ of the FCC is a matter of pure indifference to people living under the umbrella of the ITU.

I can think of some of our industry leaders who really might consider re -thinking their beliefs that their own local experiences are all that matters, and who might spend some time listening to the rest of the world, rather than telling it what it already knows.

PalmSource will use the Oktoberfest to offer "sneak previews" to the new Palm platform, as well as offering that Segway as a prize to a programmer. But the question developers at Eurodevcon will be more interested in is: "Has PalmSource really grasped what the world's phone business is about, yet?"

Doing a deal with RIM is great! - but 95% or so of RIM users are American, not European. Palm already has the US market nicely in hand, and a strategy to impress buyers in the North American territories is not where the urgent priority lies.

Guys: I know it's unpleasant looking at some injuries, but you put the band-aid on the wound, not over your eyes, OK?

[This is an archive copy of a piece that first appeared on eWeek.com]