Software Everywhere — David Beers on Mobile Computing

In my last two posts I offered an explanation for why Foleo sailed right over the heads of most of the technical media and why the vision behind it actually opens a major new front in the battle for the future of personal computing—one that puts the smartphone at the center of your personal computing universe rather than its current status as a wandering satellite. There are a number of objections to the vision behind Foleo—the fact that it hasn't been well understood by the techies being itself an indication of a problem for Palm. But I'm going to suggest here that most of these objections are challenges that are within Palm's capabilities to overcome. I hope Palm's new ownership configuration and John Rubinstein's hand in product development bring some sure execution on this post-PC plan, because I think it's a pretty compelling picture, even if it's crazy to be coming out of a company with the small size and somewhat faded reputation of Palm. Read my last post to understand why.

On to the objections:

Who wants to lug around two devices?

Foleo is for the millions of people who are already carrying around a mobile phone and a laptop, a mobile phone and a PDA, or most common of all: a mobile phone and a notebook or pad of paper. Most knowledge workers already carry multiple data tools with them when they move about the office or campus, take their work home, or take it on the road. Foleo is just a more integrated and functional pairing than the bag of tools they have today. The "two device" objection is something for marketing to address. Palm really needs to emphasize what you get to shed when you're carrying a Foleo with your smartphone. The heavy, fragile, slow-booting laptop, the binders of paper notes and reports, the novel you wanted to read when you got some down-time. That message will play well to the people for whom Foleo is designed.

I also think Foleo could have a decent market among people who don't even care to own a smartphone and just want a simplified standalone computer for writing and light Internet usage over WiFi. I've already talked with a surprising number of people who seem enchanted with it almost on sight, but it's difficult to know whether Palm can have success reaching these customers when their primary target audience is so different. They'd probably need to launch a specific model for this group, kind of the way they aimed the Z22 PDAs at (mostly female) users who wanted ultimate simplicity and basic PIM above all else.

Great, but what if I need Application X?

From what we've heard so far it sounds like Foleo has the same 80/20 mix of the most required features in MS Office and Outlook as you find on the Treo (assuming they have a synchronized calendar and contact list in there, which I'll bet they do by the time it ships). If the Treo is any indication, with Documents to Go you should be able review and edit Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations and save them in their native formats. In fact, MS Office support has long been better on Palm OS devices than on Microsoft's Pocket PCs. These applications are practically all of what many working people do with their PCs and if they can shed several pounds or several hundred dollars of the cost of making these applications both portable and ergonomic, a great many will be happy to do it.

But that phrase "practically all" is a sticky one for Palm. People do have other applications they like—or are required—to use on their PC and I agree with Michael Mace that there's a pretty insistent voice that says "well, I better carry a full-blown Windows machine, just in case." Palm obviously needs to do a great job supporting 3rd party developers to fill in as many gaps in the application ecosystem as possible, but they also ought to do something clever to quiet this nagging voice of resistance.

I think one thing that would help is to license a PC remote control product like pcAnywhere or LogMeIn and ship it with the Foleo. Make sure it's a native application, not something that runs in the browser and requires a site registration and a bookmark. Make sure users can tunnel securely through port 80 on the firewall (or partner with Cisco to line up a VPN client) so they can get to their office PC and control it with the pointer and keyboard from any place they're connected to the Internet. Then market this as a use case: "your office PC from anywhere."

I use a remote control application with an open protocol called VNC a lot, sometimes spending entire work days connected via a virtual private network to a workstation on the site of a client. It enables me to run Eclipse, WebSphere, MS Project, Office, a native CRM application, and so on, without having any of these applications actually installed on the computer I'm connecting from. Many businesses are uncomfortable with letting certain sensitive data live on hard drives that leave the building, and they see allowing this kind of remote access as the right mix between mobility and security. On a broadband connection you can almost (not quite, but almost) forget that you're working on a remote PC. I have a VNC client that I use to conduct remote PC sessions on my Nokia N800 tablet, too, but with the Foleo's big screen and keyboard this would be infinitely more practical. It's not a perfect solution (for one thing, the experience would suffer on a slow connection) but I think it would be enough to convince a lot of business users and IT departments to give the "what if" voice a rest and see that Foleo is finally a mini-laptop computer they can afford.

Foleo is a niche within a niche

I've read this objection a few times: "Smartphones are still a niche in the overall mobile phone market, so selling to some fraction of that niche isn't exactly a marketing plan for a disruptive product." I get it. And, yeah, it's a challenge for Palm. But I'm not convinced the math works out as badly as it sounds. 70 million smartphones is a pretty healthy niche, and one that promises to grow more rapidly with the splash from the iPhone and its competitors. Treo has been extremely influential (and profitable) in that market with a very small piece of that pie. And Foleo isn't just a Treo companion: it's designed (optimistically) to work with all of the smartphones out there. Personally, I think the "niche within a niche" characterization is a negative spin on a situation that's actually pretty good. I'm more worried about the next objection.

The micro-PC space is already crowded by formidable competitors

It's a pretty exciting time when experimental form factors that split the difference between handset and laptop PC are starting to get the muscle of Intel, Microsoft and Nokia behind them. It's also a confusing time for consumers, who are trying to figure out what these things are and whether they are cool toys or things that might solve real problems for them.

In my opinion, the UMPC-type devices are not going to drive a lot of adoption because they are too generic to present a real solution to users. Sure the prices will be coming down, but the problems they address are too diffuse for most people to say "hey that's what I need to do XYZ that is a pain for me to do now." Palm is right to highlight one thing that Foleo does really well and build the marketing message around that. The other use cases will flower up around it.

The problem is, once Palm gets through to someone with that vision, Foleo's physical similarity to a standard mini-laptop is crying out for comparison. The same techies who panned the Foleo as pedestrian and uninspired are going to be hyping new gadgets like the Intel Mobile Internet Devices, bringing peoples' attention back to feature lists, specs and shiny, fresh-looking hardware. It doesn't take long before a lot of folks who "get" the Foleo concept start thinking these other devices could be pressed into service on the same use cases. I know that it's not feature lists that sell products, but like a lot of folks I sometimes worry that even the best marketing pitch from Palm could end up selling a lot of non-Palm products. This can cut both ways, and with a new device category the last thing you want is to be small and alone in the market. But the resources arrayed against Palm are daunting and there are other visionaries out there.

The only thing I have to say on this one is that despite their apparent underdog status, the Palm guys really do get the value of simplicity in a way that I don't think Intel, Microsoft or Nokia will ever understand. No one out there has a more user-centric focus than Palm. The original Pilot followed on a long, long line of failed handheld computers, many of which had much better feature sets. It prevailed because it took the path of simplicity at every single fork in the design process. I don't know how Hawkins understood this back then, but he knew something that few technology product designers understand to this day: a product is defined more by what it leaves out than what you put in. Simplicity in technology is much harder to create than you think, but if you succeed, it sells. Add features after you've hooked people with it.

If Palm can deliver a full-screen mobile computing experience that exudes the same ethic of simplicity and instant response as the Palm Pilot, then get people's hands on it with a strong retail presence (partnered with the carriers and the Big Box retailers) I now think they have a fighting chance at a great third act. And they may very well play the pivotal role they have aimed at from the company's very inception: turning your mobile into your primary PC.

I promised some speculation about an even longer view for the Hawkins vision. That will have to wait for my next post.