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To: gdichaz who wrote (1933)	9/26/1999 12:54:00 PM
From: engineer	Respond to of 13582

One problem is the timeline in making products and the development cycle. The Palm OS was chosen in 1997/early 1998. the conditions then were such that it was basically the only choice due to the factors I listed. At todays point in time, there are alot of other choices and directions. Also, it is not always easy to see through claims made by people trying to push up a market share versus people who "just do it". I believe strongly in the latter. Sometimes way too much time is spent on making optimizations and trying to find the best choice rather than making a product and getting it out there. Early entry makes up for alot of errors in choices. I think in the future there wil be so may ways to implement data appliances that the choices of which particular one you go with will not be as important as what kind of innovation you have in the design and what functional use you present to the user. All this market share stuff with pages of full color presentation on value return are most times useless versus a good basic engineering design which provides expandability, user modifications, and good design features, or as the Palm OS provides simple elegance at the cost of lots of limitations (internal OS limitations, independent hardware expandability,....) I do no think the ones that are present today will necessarily be present 2 years from now. In 5 years, all the stuff we have now will be like the AppleII or commodore PET is today. Good start, but so antiquated that you can't even remember it. It used to be in the mid 80's that the replacement time of comsumer electronis was on the 4-7 year period. This time is shrinking every day. Today this is approaching 3 years and in 10 years may be as short as 18 months. With this, it will be the one who provides a solution which not only has some time value, but has the fastest time to market. Alot like the Hard disk drive industry. You go all out and build hte best drive today which does xxxGbytes and in 6 months you are behind the curve. the sales windows for consumer goods is also shrinking, the time that your product is right positioned with the market demands. Today this is like 24 months for telecomm and data appliance markets and it too will be shrinking down to less than 12 months in 10 years. This also drives fast, optimal decision making which provides the right items quickly. If you have a management which takes 6 months on product approval cycles, then you cannot ever produce a product in todays environment. This point wreaks havoc with managers who feel that cost control is the ultimate design point. This is why a startup has a better chance of making comsumer products that a larger company. This is partly in fact why the original people at Palm needed to go find a new place to innovate. The overhead stopped innovation. If consumer electronics is to survive at larger companies, they need to find ways to let the innovation proceed with teams of people who can cut through the overhead and make things happen. the exception to this is the true market leaders such as Sony or Intel who set the tone for the basic underlying industry. Outside of that the rest of us need to find that streamlined approach. Take care.