>. The other option is to start educating your customers about the
platform.
Yeah, right. It seems half of my customers don't read manuals...and the
other half wants to know why we can't put their entire operations manual on
the Palm. Most commercial/industrial companies don't understand the Palm.
The product, in their eyes, is either an organizer (in which case it could
never perform the tasks required) or its a hand-held computer (in which case
they want it to perform the same tasks as a PC)....and we get caught in the
middle. e.g.. we have to prove the Palm is powerful enough for simple tasks
and discourage them from thinking the thing is as powerful as a Pentium III
with a 12G HD.
I don't think it should be (and can be) completely up to the developer to
educate current/potential customers on how the Palm should be used. For us
anyway, it seems to be an up hill battle.
Bob, do you honestly feel that a shareware author or a small company like
mine has the resources and/or time to educate people that the Palm can
manage some contact information, play a game or two, inspect your salad bar,
log your tire temperatures, but not hold the complete Lippincott Nursing
Manual? We loose allot of sales because of the attitude: I love the Palm,
I love your product, it will save us money but I want to also be able to
drop it 4 ft or also read my 1,000 page safety manual on it or use it under
water or also have it sync to my POS system and so on.... We explain the
Palm Platform is not designed to do those things and explain the Palm
philosophy we still loose the sale.
Back to the point...Palm should worry about the products they release and
educate the world on the Palm Platform so developers don't get asked the
unrealistic questions. Besides, most of the non-partner developers can't
afford to educate our current and potential customers and say in business.
(but I try anyway)
-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Ebert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Tuesday, July 20, 1999 8:28 PM
Subject: Re: The Palm IIIe launch
>At 6:16 PM -0700 7/19/99, Steve Patt wrote:
>>One thing for the Palm folks to think about is this - we don't need to
>>know WHAT a new model is, whether it's a high end, low end, or anything.
>
>One thing for you guys to think about is this -- Palm Computing (a division
>of 3Com Corp.) is not the sole manufacturer of devices that run Palm OS.
>In the forseeable future, other companies that are not Palm will ship
>devices that run some version of Palm OS, and those devices will run your
>apps.
>
>So you have a couple of options -- one is to try to keep your list of
>devices up to date, but that will get harder as more companies ship more
>devices. The other option is to start educating your customers about the
>platform. Probably you'll do both.
>
> --Bob
>
>
>
