Ana Lidon
March 9, 2010
MGMT 489, Case I
Professor Aron S. Spencer
PALM ECONOMY
Reading the case study of “Palm Economy” I could discover different issues, opportunities, and challenges in relation with the company. I suggest possible solutions to this problems and an analysis of each solution.
Palm’s philosophy is to have the designers working backwards by figuring out what the customers want from the product and use that information to design the product while the competence is more oriented on using better technology. This gives the company advantage over the competence. For instance, the version of Palm’s OS that has color screen was competing with the Windows CE operating system that has actually better technology such as color and multimedia applications. Even though the features of the Palm OS have worse qualities than those of the Windows CE, customers still prefer the Palm OS because it is faster and does not need that much memory.
In addition to a wide range of products, another selling point of the PalmPilot platform was compatibility of hardware accessories for the different families of Palmpilot. For example, all accessories used by the Palm III family could also be used by Palm VII users but when Palm made the Palm V, it did not have compatibility features as the others so it was considered more prestigious. Instead of having the Palm V with all different features, Palm could make it different, with new applications and features but giving the change of sharing it with the other versions. For example, users who had before the Palm III would want to buy the Palm V because the applications and features used for the first one could also be used on the other but with some innovations on them.
Another problem rises with the dependency of Palm.net on the services provided by Bell South. This agreement of using Bell south services was a challenge because of Palm’s lack of flexibility and the difficulty of changing carriers because Palm...