Palm again has disappointed application developers champing at the bit to begin building programs for webOS and the just-released Palm Pre smartphone.
An unheralded post on Palm's developer network blog explained late last week that the Mojo SDK, which provides developers with application frameworks, webOS services and Pre interfaces, won't be generally available until late summer. Maybe.
By today, over 70 people had posted comments, many of them expressing frustration and intense disappointment, especially as early Mojo developers report enthusiastically about their initial experiences.
Some posters urged the angry mob to cut Palm some slack. Palm’s limited public comments seem to amount to…well, the same thing, plus “we’re doing the best we can.” The problem is, how can anyone tell whether they are or not?
I emailed Palm's PR department asking if anyone from Palm would provide more details about the Mojo announcement. The reply: "The posting on the blog was written to address some recent developer questions. It was not a 'formal' announcement. We will release all of the information about the Mojo SDK when it is ready for public availability. At that time, we’ll have more to say and people available."
I don’t know what Palm considers a “formal” announcement; perhaps putting its newly minted Chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein in front of reporters (which sounds quaint today) or on a Webcast. But social networks, blogs, Twitter posts are like a kind of rich cyber loam: any post (as everyone is seeing with the Iran demonstration) has the potential to blossom almost at once, fed and spread by inter-related and intersecting networks of passionate interests. And that’s what happened to the “posting on the blog written to address some recent developer questions.”
The odd thing is that Palm, or at least some Palm employees, have tried to do exactly that – participate in a community. On a formal level, besides the developer blog, it makes available the various open source packages used in webOS at a special portal.
But more intriguing was the experience of Palm’s Andrew Shebanow, who in early January added a post to his blog launching a discussion about how what developers would like to see in an online online webOS applications catalog. He was flooded with replies and private emails.
Responders were deeply grateful for the chance. “One person wrote: ‘I love your oneness with this matter. I wish Apple allowed posts like these.’”
What was the result? “By Wednesday, he had removed the post, replacing it with one saying that its popularity had caught him and Palm by surprise. ‘My boss has asked me to hide the post while management decides what they want me to do about it,’ he wrote.”
To Palm’s credit, management moved the discussion to the official developer blog, where Shebanow offered an explanation on the fine but important distinction between him doing something as a Palm employee and him doing something as a representative of Palm. “…[W]hen folks at Palm saw how much the [original] post had taken off, there was concern that people would think I was speaking for and promising things on behalf of Palm, even though I had issued a number of disclaimers to preempt that effect,” he wrote.
I think one of the things hampering Palm is its boutique mindset: it sees itself as a small, exclusive specialty shop, so its ambitions are equally specialized, equally exclusive, and, alas, equally small.
That’s the real difference with Apple. Apple’s conceit is based on its design prowess, a deep conviction that its products have that ineffable coolness that by itself is a fundamental feature. But with the lessons learned from the iPod’s success, Apple with the iPhone and iPod Touch laid bare its ambition to create a high-end smartphone with mass market appeal. Granted, it’s a more upscale market and therefore smaller than say the global market for Symbian-based feature phones.
But even that is changing with the under-remarked decision by Apple to slash the price of the 8-Gbyte iPhone 3G in half to $99. That decision has the potential to dramatically increase sales, and dramatically change the demographics of iPhone users.
Rubinstein comes from Apple, where he had a hand in developing the iPod, and presumably well-understands Apple’s strengths. The question is whether he also understands Apple’s weakness: a self-contained, ultimately self-centered orientation deeply at odds with what’s happening on the Web today.
When the Pre was unveiled in January, I wrote “[In contrast to Apple,] Palm has the opportunity to crystallize a new corporate ethos more suited to the Web's democratic openness, and more importantly, to the Web's sense of that "Star Trek" adventurousness of boldly going where no man has gone before: just take the users along for the ride.” That doesn’t seem to be happening. But it still could.
Rubinstein can achieve much if he marries Apple-scale ambition to the Palm boutique, where he oversaw the Pre’s development, while exploiting those elements that make Palm’s webOS genuinely exciting: very simple development using widely-known Web tools, new emerging Web standards like HTML 5 that make possible interactive, robust applications running natively on the webOS device, and the potential to blend the Palm Pre and its user with Web-based servers, services, and networks that recognize that user and engage him or her in a continuous, personalized, two-way “conversation.”
No vendor can do everything at once. And rolling out the smartphone, a brand new operating system and SDK for it, along with an online applications catalog, all in conjunction with your partner wireless carrier and its requirements, is quite a bit more complicated than filing a blog post.
Palm deserves credit for having brought all these elements into alignment at the outset. At the initial release of the Apple iPhone in June 2007, there was no SDK and no plans for an SDK. Any apps you wanted to add above what Apple deigned to provide would have to be Web applications, written as widgets or plugins for the mobile version of Apple's Safari browser. An SDK for native applications was finally announced in October 2007 but not released until March 2008.
The ground-breaking online App Store, along with such tacky achievements as the “Baby Shaker” app, didn't even exist as a concept. It finally went live in July 2008, 13 months after the first iPhone, with 500 applications.
Quite a few of the posters at the Palm developers blog don't begrudge Palm taking its time to get the SDK right, noting (correctly, I think) that a high quality development tool, and a properly functioning OS are going to be essential to both developers and endusers.
But I was struck by one post that included this, by "Larry": "Silence begets fear and dread. In this age of advanced communication, blogs, and twitter, silence breeds contempt. It makes us wonder what you’re not telling us. I’m sure it’s hard to see this from the inside. Out here, we’re wondering if we’re going to be stuck with a glitchy phone, serious buyer’s remorse, the balance of a 2-year contract and an empty App Catalog in six months. You cannot communicate too much, Palm."
Actually, there probably is such a thing as too much communication, but I think Larry has a point worth making.
Cox is a senior editor at Network World.
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Palm again has disappointed application developers WHY
Well Blackberry Bold here I come!!!
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