The Battle for PDA Supremacy Heats Up
Microsoft's October release of its Pocket PC 2002 operating system was the latest maneuver in a battle to wrestle PDA market dominance from Palm, an incumbent if ever there was one. Like political incumbents, Palm can't depend simply on past success to ensure continued market dominance. The company must divert attention from the skeletons in its closet and prove to the world it is as worthy a player in the enterprise mobile computing market as it has been in the consumer market for high-end personal organizers.
While Palm didn't create this market (Apple did, with the Newton), it certainly established the market's viability by delivering a well-engineered, easy-to-use, rock-solid PDA platform. My Palm has never failed me. Palm hit a market price point that not only made it a popular impulse purchase for millions of people, it also generated healthy margins for the company. And with Palm devices in the hands of the masses, support within the developer community crystallized. Meanwhile, Microsoft was desperately hawking its clunky Windows CE OS and even clunkier ActiveSync software to hardware manufacturers like Casio and HP, whose offerings were coolly received by a market firmly in Palm's control. Then came Compaq's immensely popular iPaq running Windows CE on a brawny Intel StrongArm processor and sporting a beautiful display and multimedia capabilities that caught the eye of the hippest professionals. A colleague of mine, a long-time Palm evangelist, surprised me one day by showing off his new iPaq. He had made the move. Then I discovered that by using a PC Card sled, I could turn the iPaq into a fairly functional node on an 802.11 wireless LAN. This wasn't quite enough incentive for me to relinquish my Palm PDA, but it sure made me think about it.
