 | May 1, 2000 |
Still counting
Palm programmers proliferate
If support in the developer community is any indication of success, then Palm will continue to prosper. The company just announced that more than 50,000 developers have registered to create applications for the Palm OS. In one of the latest announcements, Club Photo announced a product that allows Apple users to download and display color photos on the new color Palm IIIc and compatible devices.
Such strong support makes one wonder what the Wall Street wizards are thinking when they fret that pricing pressure from competitors will reduce Palm's PDA sales. Think about it. Despite the success of Dell, Gateway, and others, Microsoft has achieved far greater success than any hardware vendor can dream of. Palm has the same opportunity to enjoy software royalties, even from its competitors in the hardware space.
The long-term key for Palm isn't necessarily PDA sales, but porting its OS so it can run on more processors—and fast. This process may be more difficult for the Palm OS than for others, because the Palm OS was written largely in assembly language for an 8-bit processor. That's what allowed it to boot instantly and made it so simple to use in the first place. Going forward, the company must successfully balance simplicity with a portable implementation.
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