At 4:01 PM +0200 08/8/00, K. Chugh wrote:
>Palm would do itself a huge favor by trusting it's developers, retailers,
>etc. enough to let them in on the company plans.
We're devolving into personal opinion now, but... well, I'll give mine.
It's been my observation that Palm has been burned in the past by sharing new
announcements too widely. Rumors of the Palm V, for example, were being spread more
than 8 months before the device was announced. Also note the recent ZD net article
about the M100... that information had to come from *somewhere*.
I wish it were the case that we could trust developers, retailers, etc... but history
has shown that this is a risky proposition.
Our developer community is HUGE. According to the palmos web page, it's more than
100,000 people. It's (sadly) not such an intimate group any longer.
Given that Palm is currently undergoing dramatic changes as a company (e.g. becoming
independent), perhaps you can understand its being nervous about taking chances that
could have major impact on its bottom line? While the PalmOS platform is very
important, and is growing, today Palm still makes the majority of its income from
device sales. A widespread leak of a new device can have a serious (negative) impact
on these sales.
Fortunately, everyone benefits from Palm staying in business and growing it's market,
so we can at least align on that!
--Bob
--
For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see
http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/support/forums/
