Why the Palm Pre won’t “kill” anything

PC World has a story by Ross Catanzariti, with the headline “The Palm Pre Will Be an iPhone Killer.” There’s a good chance Catanzariti didn’t even write the headline, but in any case it’s long past the time to bury once and for all the phrase “iPhone killer.” What can the term possibly mean? It would have to mean something like this: “The Palm Pre will cause the millions of current iPhone users to cancel their AT&T contracts, throw their iPhone into the trash compactor, and buy the Pre/Sprint package. AND persuade more than half of all prospective iPhone buyers to buy the Pre instead.” If that happened, then you could in fact say that the Pre killed the iPhone. That is not going to happen. Both Palm and Sprint have a lot riding on the Pre. The conventional wisdom is that the Pre, when it launches sometime between now and the end of June, will do well but not as well as the iPhone at its initial launch. Personally, I think if Palm and Sprint invested some creativity in viral marketing and social networking technologies they could do BETTER, in both the consumer and enterprise markets. But so far, all we’re seeing is conventional product marketing so the conventional wisdom is likely to be right for a change. The US smartphone market is still in flux, with a lot of potential for growth, but from what I can see, most users have very simple requirements: a cellular voice system that’s reliable and gives good quality calls for price they consider reasonable; email access; and increasingly Web browsing. Oddly, these are the same requirements which are driving the explosive growth of a new product that was derided and mocked as dead on arrival: the netbook. Netbook users don’t see these compact, wireless, keyboard displays as stunted or stripped down notebooks. They see them as the means to do just what they want. And increasingly what they want is to make use of online applications and services, as seamlessly as possible. [UPDATE: John Gruber, at DaringFireball, has a worthwhile iPhone assessment that is somewhat similar; he focuses on the point that Apple’s began with the assumption that the iPhone should be a general purpose mobile computer, not a phone with computer functions. It’s success, he says, is evident by the fact that 13 million of the 30 million iPhone OS devices shipped are iPod Touches, which lack the 3G cellular radio and rely only on Wi-Fi.] The Pre, through its webOS, promises to do something very similar. The iPhone will be remembered and honored as device that opened a lot of people’s eyes to what it means to have the World Wide Web in your hand. But in light of what Palm is doing, the iPhone is already starting to look dated. Developers in Palm’s “early access” program, working with webOS and its Mojo SDK, report that webOS applications are indeed built with JavaScript, HTML, and Cascading Style Sheets. Those are standard technologies familiar to a whole lot of modern developers (including iPhone developers), not matter what core programming language they might use. On top of that, Palm apparently has designed both the software platform and its first hardware iteration (the Pre) to be easily, tightly, almost transparently integrated with cloud-based services — with the Web. Apple is only now releasing a notification service for iPhone apps. Palm’s newly announced Mojo Messaging Service, at least on the surface, seems vastly more functional, something that can be used by a majority of webOS developers to use notification and presence in creating interoperable, multitasking applications. And THAT is important not because it represents a pinnacle of geekdom but because those kinds of applications both simplify and expand the user’s “mobile experience.” That experience is both much more personal and much more communitarian than the PC experience. As much more intelligent people have pointed out, the “mobile experience” is one in which the user’s identity and location and “context” mediate his relationship with data and services and, of course, people. Palm seems to have created a platform to enable that to a degree not possible before. It’s this capability, not the Pre’s multi-touch screen or hardware keyboard, that make it possible for the Pre to be a success…without killing the iPhone or anything else. Except the expectations we’ve had until now about how we live and move and have our being in the mobile Web. We can celebrate the iPhone as a successful product that represented a big and important step forward. And soon, we’ll be able to do the same with the Pre.