Mon ikke MS' markedsstrategi kan interessere lidt i gruppen?
------- Begin Forwarded Message -------
Subject: What happened to Palm?
From: Shannon Jacobs <shanen@cashette.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.palmtops.pilot
Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2007 11:26:01 +0900
[From an email discussion with a Windows Mobile advocate:]
You say Windows Mobile is popular? Funny, but here in Japan, the PDA
market has almost completely collapsed. A few years ago there were
entire stores for PDAs, and large PDA sections in the major
electronics stores. Japanese love gadgets of that sort. Now you have
to search to find a tiny counter with the few PDAs that are still
being sold. Elsewhere the PDA market seems to be growing slightly in
absolute terms, but shrinking as a market percentage--and I think
that's mostly due to the awfulness of the increasingly dominant
Windows Mobile platform.
Windows Mobile has sort of succeeded for three reasons.
Most important, Microsoft is pumping money into it. In case you didn't
know, Windows Mobile has always lost money. This is not always
obvious, because Microsoft plays lots of accounting games, and many of
those games are designed to hide which divisions are being subsidized
by other divisions with monopoly profits. However, there are financial
experts who manage to penetrate the games (eventually). The latest
relevant report that I read was about 6 months ago, reporting on a
previous Microsoft reorganization from about three months before that.
It was only a very minor point in his report, but I was already
sensitized to notice it, and his summary was that Windows Mobile was
still losing money. For Microsoft, the amounts of money being lost are
almost too trivial to notice. For the competitors (especially Palm),
Microsoft's trivial losses look enormous compared to their best
profits. However, Microsoft obviously sees these trivial losses as
justified to defend their important monopolies from low-end
encroachment. (Microsoft is using similar strategies elsewhere, most
notably for music players and game consoles.)
Second, is the power of advertising to shape public opinions.
Actually, that's a polite wording for propagandistic distortion of
commercial reality. In the PDA market, Microsoft has basically
followed an advertising strategy of promising glorious things, things
that were far beyond the legitimate missions of a PDA. This strategy
worked by sucking the top off the PDA market, and Palm basically fell
into a trap by trying to upscale their PDAs to compete with features that
Microsoft was promising for the glorious future--which *STILL* hasn't
arrived. Actually, it never will arrive. PDAs are not and never will be
super-duper all-purpose computers.
Third is the gullibility of people like you [the Windows Mobile advocate].
Something about one being born every minute... Who said that?
--
The truth alone will not make you free. However, it is one of the
prerequisites. Unless you know the truths underlying your options, you
cannot choose in freedom, whether you're buying shaving cream or a war.
Busheviks are simply slaves to BushCo's lies.
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--
Per Erik Rønne
http://www.RQNNE.dk