First question: sales... I was wondering how sales have declined for others over the past year (and after 9/11 in particular), and if anyone has any predictions for when that will turn around (in general, or in any particular category: HW, SW, utilities, entertainment, etc)? For us, sales this year were always steady at around 5/day (a slight drop from last year), but this past month and a half, they have markedly dropped and just this past week, are sitting at around 2/day. That's a big enough dip for us to ask: should we delay the launch of our next product (3 years in the making) until conditions improve?
Second: PGHQ... I believe PGHQ made a big mistake when they allowed themselves to dip into developer's 80% (evidently a lot of it too). For accounting purposes, that money should not exist in their books. I was upset by the fact that they let developers' cash sit in their accounts for an average of 60 days and earn interest for them. But I was more upset when I found out that they also used it as capital to run their business. While I'm upset with their business practices, I believe it is in our best interest to bail them out. I would support the previous poster's 3 point plan of indefinate postponement of 3 months payments in exchange for a complete reform of business practices. That is, starting with Jan 1 2002, PGHQ never sees our 80%. It sits in an escrow account or something and is either automatically paid out to the developers at the end of the month, or it sits the normal 30 days after the end of the month (to allow for return processing) but earns interest for the developers during that timeframe. Third: Handango's 30%. I wrote a letter to them saying: "Dear Handango: Is there a justification for widening your margin by 50% besides the aggressive future business goals you cited? Your competition has not raised their margins at all over the past 5 years, and it could be argued their service is in some ways better from the Palm developers' point of view. We will continue to sell through Handango, and we wish you luck with your new policy; but we wanted to let you know that to compensate for this unilateral adjustment, we will be increasing our prices on Handango and making a note of this price discrepency by the links on our website on Jan 1. I hope this doesn't negatively effect both of our bottom lines." That was about 10 days ago -- no response yet. -Jason -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/support/forums/
