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Technology Stocks : PALM - The rebirth of Palm Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Crystal ball who wrote (4207)	3/15/2001 1:47:15 PM
From: David E. Taylor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6784

CB: While you are correct that Palm has been component constrained for the last 9 months or so (they said on the Q2 CC that the European market was in "allocation" mode), you have to remember that Compaq has been suffering from similar component problems, mainly the color screens for their iPaq's. What the market shares in the US and Europe will look like once all components are freely available is still up for grabs. OTOH, Compaq still seems to be targeting only the high end of the market (which right now is small units wise but delivers much larger revenue/unit and GM's), leaving the mid and low ends of the market to Palm and its licensees. Compaq can presumably afford to do that because it has a large presence in the corporate PC world (as does MSFT), and is clearly pinning its hopes on leveraging that presence into domination of the business market for PDA's. Palm's strength is its large installed user base, its developer army and all the vertical apps, and its business partners IBM, Seibel, Oracle, Sun et al. Best outcome here for Palm (IMO) will be domination of the consumer/retail market, a decent 50% +/- share of the business market, and Palm OS/GUI as the preferred cell phone platform vs MSFT WINCE/Stinger and the Euro sponsored Symbian EPOC. I'm fairly confident they'll manage the first of those three objectives, but the second two markets are still in their infancy and Palm does not have any real headstart, other than their big installed user base. David T.