This is a whole new category. I think it's the best idea I've ever had. The further out you are, the more people have trouble understanding. It's hard to go back in time, but when we did the Pilot, there were a lot of people that thought that was a stupid idea. I mean a lot.
I'm very confident about (the Foleo). It's a challenging product to design. It's a great idea that's got a huge amount of legs to it.
Hawkins thinks of product marketing like a chess player. He envisions the position he wants to have later in the game and then figures out how to maneuver his opponent (or really, customers and developers) into unwittingly fulfilling his objective. He gives the example of the Palm Pilot:
We created this organizer. That's what it was. Now, we didn't want to create organizers. We wanted to create handheld computers. We wanted to create personal computers, actually.
But to get a product accepted you have to find somebody who wants to buy it. Then you get it going. Once you get it going and you have a lot of people writing software for it, then it evolves into something else. We knew in the very beginning that it was supposed to be a little computer. But we didn't say what it was. We basically said it's an organizer and we'll find the people who want to buy an expensive organizer. And it was an expensive organizer. It was $300 or $369. Then it turned into something else.
So what is the "something else" that the Foleo could turn into?
Long term Hawkins' states that Palm's goal is to make your mobile computer your primary computer. Ok, that's a fairly ambitious goal and I'm pretty sure I recall there being some other significant players in that market. ;-) It happens to be an idea I'm partial to myself, and for all their size and resources, I'm not sure the aforementioned competitors have the DNA to do this right. So I don't read this as complete crazy talk. But I'm most interested in the steps to get there.
One thing that dawned on me yesterday is that for the first time Palm owns the operating system on both sides of the sync—the pocketable computer and the big screen computer with the mass storage capabilities. This is an advantage that Microsoft has always held over them, and Palm just closed the gap. Synchronization has always been one of Palm's strong points versus its competitors, but it's never been completely bullet-proof and Vista whacked Palm's HotSync and Desktop software good. With full control of the OS on both sides, they are already starting to do some interesting things with synchronization that we haven't seen from them before. The option to keep your Foleo and smartphone continuously in sync sounds very promising if it's implemented in a way that you could safely save a document you're working on at the Foleo, grab your smartphone and run out of the office, knowing the revised document is there on the phone (or at least didn't get corrupted if you broke the connection too early).
But what if Palm uses its new beachhead on the PC (can we agree that Foleo is really a PC?) to extend the notion of the "companion" relationship with your phone a little farther? Foleo has WiFi so it can connect to the cloud just like your smartphone. And it sounds like Palm may be using a new or heavily revised sync protocol, based on the talk about the continuous sync option I just described. Could the two devices establish a peer-to-peer connection over the Internet? If so, and if this ability is built-in, easy to configure, and reliable I see wonderful usages. I'm a big flash drive user—I always have a few gigs hanging off my keychain—but the problem is I always seem to have forgotten to sync up the files I need the one time I really need them. If my phone was my new flash drive and I could sync up part of my file system with a remote Foleo I would be very tempted to start keeping a lot of my stuff on that Foleo where I could get at it remotely.
I know this is possible with a PC and smartphone today, but the fact that I've never bothered to set it up tells me that it's not going to be something that most other people will bother with either. Palm has an opportunity to make something like this work straight out of the box.
I also realize that Web 2.0 applications claim to eliminate the need for synchronization. But I'm not convinced that everyone is going to be happy to have the one copy of all their important data living on someone else's server. I know I'm not there yet. For one thing, Internet connectivity, especially wireless, is not ubiquitous or 100% available. At those times when it's not there, there's a lot of data of which I'd like to know I have a copy locally. When the network craps out while I'm trying to use a web app I always wonder what condition I'm going to find my data in when I am able to reconnect.
Brain-dead easy, bullet proof synchronization. That would be a huge innovation from Palm. Even if Foleo 1.0 isn't up to this remote sync scenario yet, the fact that Palm owns a big screen and a little one now paves the way.
Posted by cervezas at 12:11:50. Filed under: Palm Foleo
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