Wall Street Figures Out What The Rest Of Us Already Knew About Palm
Palm yesterday warned that it would miss its quarterly sales target because of weak Treo sales, and investors responded in kind, beating the company’s share price down. This slowdown has been a long time coming, and it looks like Palm’s failure to make significant updates to its Palm OS-based Treos, and its inability to compete with price against Windows Mobile devices, has finally caught up to it. Palm’s insistence on sticking to an outdated operating system and its continued failure to deliver the long-promised family of Treos with models aimed at different market segments have been plain to see for a long time, and as one analyst says, the problem isn’t necessarily with the market, but rather that the company is facing “Palm-specific issues”. It’s launching a version of its Windows Mobile device with a European carrier next week, and it’s been rumored to have a cut-price version of the Treo on the way for some time. But the problem for Palm is that these products, in one way or another, lag the market. The original Treos were hailed because they stood out from anything else on the market, but the current line of devices don’t really have any distinguishing features, and their prices aren’t competitive. Like the Treo, that’s something that hasn’t really changed over the years, but apparently Wall Street just figured it out.
