Yesterday I wrote that Palm's recent product announcements, especially the Foleo (which was really a pre-announcement) are indicative of a bigger, more disruptive vision than most people give them credit. The strategy I see Palm taking is one that opens a new front on the battle between the two prevailing visions of computing today, the one that puts your PC at the center of your computing life and the other that sees "the network as the computer," commonly known as Web 2.0. First, I'll take a look at what that battle has been about and then show why and how I think Palm is trying to change the game. In my next post I'll look at some of the obstacles Palm needs to overcome for this vision to become a reality, and add some foolish musings about a fourth act in the remarkable drama that Jeff Hawkins is writing and producing.
Why do people care whether their data and the software they use to work with it live on their PC or on an Internet server that provides a rich AJAX browser interface to it? A lot of people don't, which is one reason why web-based applications (often but not always free) are leading the software adoption landscape today. But if we wanted to really analyze this shift we'd want to look at the relative virtues of native PC versus Web 2.0 applications along several dimensions that people care about. Since I have a penchant for the pompous I'll call them the "Eight Computing Virtues." (Hey, just be grateful that "The Noble Eightfold Path" had already been taken.)
The Eight Computing Virtues
- Richness. Short for feature-richness. What input and output options are available? Many computing features come from a computer's operating system, so what kind of access is there to the OS?
- Capacity. How much stuff can you store for any given cost?
- Security. How safe is your stuff from being lost, stolen or corrupted? How easily can your computing environment be hijacked by the bad guys?
- Privacy. How safe is your stuff from prying eyes? How easily can you have a computing session that's private from other people in your home or office?
- Availability. Is your stuff at your finger-tips wherever you go? How reliably?
- Sharing. How conducive is your stuff to being shared with others? Does it enable you to tap into the "hive mind?"
- Simplicity. How easy is it to learn all the things you can do? Can you do them with minimal effort and thought? Is your environment free of clutter from things you don't care about or that demand frequent maintenance?
- Responsiveness. Does your software respond instantly to your every gesture? Does your computer jump to life instantaneously when you need to interact with it?
Using these virtues as dimensions for comparison, I would map out the relative benefits of natively installed PC applications and web applications like this (closer to the edge of the circle means a higher rating along that radius):
It's subjective, but qualitatively I think most people would agree that the big attraction of web applications has been the enhancement of sharing and the fact that your apps and data are available from any PC with an Internet connection. People are more mobile than ever, and they have more PCs in their lives—office, desktop, laptop, the PC in the hotel lobby, the client's office, the best friend's house—so it's quite liberating that their web applications and data are "on" all of them. I'd also contend that many web applications have gained traction because of an ethic of simplicity among Web 2.0 developers. And I may have exaggerated the security benefit, but I do think a lot of folks see Google as being a safer place for their data than their PC hard drive, even if it doesn't relieve them of the pain and uncertainty of securing their PC from malware.
What still holds people back from using Google or Zoho in place of Outlook and MS Office? Native applications are still more feature-rich, more responsive to input, and they live in a box where (for now) your storage dollar goes a bit farther than on the web. They also can run off-line, a partial compensation for the fact that their attachment to PC hardware rather than "the cloud" makes their accessibility inferior under many common circumstances. APIs like Google Gears may be eroding that advantage (some say they are game-changing) and AJAX is making inroads on the rich, responsive UI. Still, it'll be quite a while before we have something like Photoshop or immersive 3d games running in a browser.
But I think one of the biggest factors that will inhibit adoption of web applications is privacy. The companies that hold our data on their servers simply have too strong an incentive to peer into that data and too little accountability for lapses or active violations of our privacy. This week, Google, the company that has more of our data than anyone, was rated as the worst privacy offender on the web. And too few months seem to pass between revelations like AOL's exposure of personal data of 650,000 of its own users.
So what's this got to do with Foleo?
I've read a number of comments from folks who watched the Foleo announcement and thought that Palm's "bigger picture" for the device was (or should be) running web applications. I think Opera 9 will be a capable AJAX-compatible browser for such use, but Hawkins and his team have their sights set higher. Others, myself included, have said that Foleo in and of itself is really a new take on the PC and that Palm should just come right out and say this. But this isn't it either, really, despite the fact that Foleo is attractive to people who are looking for a simpler, more portable PC.For Hawkins, it's the smartphone that is the new PC. The Foleo is just the piece that completes the vision.
Here it is in his own words, from the "Experience Foleo" Flash video on palm.com:
When we started this company in 1992 it was based on a very simple vision: that the future of personal computing would be mobile, that over time more and more of your personal computing needs would be satisfied by a device that fits in your pocket or purse.... We want to make the computer smaller and smaller, and we can do that. We can put more memory in it, we can put more data in it, we can put movies and pictures and so on. So we thought about the future, and we said, well, in the future people are going to have these very powerful portable computers in their pocket. But, they have these two limitations: there are times when you need a large display, and there are times when you need a large keyboard.... In our mind the future of mobile computing has and always will be small devices that are in your pocket, that contain all your data, access to the Internet and so on. And there is a need for a large screen experience..... We believe [Foleo] is really a beginning of a whole new wave of finally and truly making the mobile device that's in your pocket your primary PC.
This makes a hell of a lot of sense, and it's only going to be making more sense as storage gets denser and cheaper. Also as wireless gets faster and more affordable. For a lot of PC users today, the two to eight gigs of Flash you can affordably put in the SD slot of a smartphone is already enough to hold all their data. If you're a heavy media user you need a lot more, but the ability to access your full media library speedily over a high-speed wireless connection is fast closing that gap. There's really not much left that keeps you from having everything you care about in your pocket wherever you go. Palm may very well have correctly identified the last piece of the ideal personal computing setup for a lot of people.
Let's look at this in the light of the Eight Computing Virtues.
Nothing is more available or private than what's on your mobile. You can't beat it for instant-on responsiveness, either. While even the best cellular wireless networks still introduce more latency in the use of the mobile web than a PC connected to fixed broadband, WiFi is highly available in a lot of the use cases that Foleo is targeting, and WiMax is just around the corner. The factors that bring people back to their PC more than anything else are its immersiveness, ergonomics, and seemingly unlimited capacity. While Foleo is not an always-on-you device like your phone, it shows great potential for making that fuller PC experience a lot more portable, responsive, and simple. No one is saying it's going to replace your PC, but supplemented by Foleo, your smartphone could start to occupy a lot more of the time you once spent at your PC, as well as expanding your digital life with some new use cases you probably never thought you cared about.
I'm guessing it will take a couple of generations of this product, coupled with attendant growth in smartphone and wireless data adoption and solid execution by Palm, for it to break into the mainstream (more on this in my next post). But Foleo is a very carrier friendly product because of its expansion of the utility of wireless data and the fact that the value it adds to a smartphone doesn't necessarily come from installing 3rd party software on the phone. The latter is something that the carriers still have reservations about and that hasn't in any case taken off with consumers as many had hoped. The carrier angle gives Palm a potential leg up when it comes to marketing and should expand Foleo's retail footprint well beyond what they could do on their own. The fact that it could work with almost any smartphone on the market is also big. The idea that little Palm would be taking a run at the PC itself is still totally audacious and sounds more than just a little crazy, but I really think there are a number of important stars coming into alignment here, and it's going to be exciting to watch what happens. Much more exciting than you might think from the cool reception Foleo received in the blindered technical media.
In my next post I'll look at some of the objections and challenges to this vision. Plus I have a few musings of a more speculative nature to throw out there just because they're too tantalizing for me to resist. There's a lot to discuss here!
Posted by cervezas at 17:14:32. Filed under: Palm Foleo
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