Q&A: PalmSource CEO David Nagel - Page 2

The Future of PDAs

Q: Do you see the PDA going away?

It's sort of a work in progress and I don't think anyone knows the answer to that. Obviously there are lots of new products being developed that fit into one category or the other or somewhere in between. The Treo is very much a phone but many people think of it as a PDA. My guess is that the market will vote for a variety of form factors, because what we're seeing in the market is moving into pretty sophisticated segmentation.

There are also important regional differences. In Asia they are looking for style, especially in an emerging market like China where it is a status symbol. In Europe, it's not surprising the most successful devices are the phone-like devices. In the U.S. the markets are more open to the data-centric devices.

Q: What is the greatest reward/challenge of moving from Palm OS 4.x on the Dragonball processor to Palm OS 5.x based on ARM architecture?

First of all, suddenly we don't have the problem that we don't have enough computing cycles to do some of what our licensees what to do. You take Sony the new Clie' NZ 90 which has got a 2 megapixel camera with MP4 capabilities. That was simply impossible to do with a Dragonball. What you hope to see is the licensees being freed from some constraints, even the Tungsten T is in that category. And we're beginning to get new product categories. Some we have seen. Some have yet to be announced that will make it clearer why the move to ARM was so important.

What has been a challenge is that this has become a very competitive space. Microsoft and Symbian have become competitors. So we have to continue to innovate. I think the bigger problem is that not everyone who buys one of these products considers buying third party software or even knows that they exist.

Q: What is your message for developers who may be tempted to jump to Microsoft CE or Linux for PDAs?

Some do. All of the things being equal in the market, the number of Palm powered devices is somewhere north of 25 or 26 million and the Pocket PC ones are about 10 percent of that. You probably got a better chance of making a living designing for the larger market. If you have a product that can work on both and hits both segments, we say 'go for it'.

We track developer registrations and de-registrations and one of the best indices of how successful a platform has become is how much developers continue to write to it. When I think of where we are now to where we started; we had 15 percent market share to where they are today. And developers should stick with us. We have a seminar in May in the Silicon Valley that is focused more on native development.

Editor's note: Nagel later said the company would be touring to various countries this year with seminars for developers.

Q: What kind of compatibility will we see in future handheld devices?

We spend a lot of our engineering resources making sure we are compatible both backward and forward and such and so forth, but also with Widows. Windows is a fact of life on the desktop and as long as synchronization is important -- and we think it is -- we will maintain that compatibility. We're pretty good now but I think we can do better.

Q: How do you aim to do that?

I think the openness of the Internet standards has shown the power of truly open standards. And that open source model is here for good and there are enough checks and balances. We haven't talked about this much because we have not formalized this as much as we will in the future is that... I like a lot of the aspects of the open software movement, in the sense that you get as many IQ points focused on a problem as you can get. There are some problems in the open source model as it applies to a business like ours but the general idea to get more people to help you is a very good idea. One of the things is that we see is that not only will all the phones in the future -- say ten years -- have an operating system, but I think they will have an open operating system.

Q: Does this mean you are looking to contribute to the open source communities and their standards groups?

I certainly would consider it and there are some candidates that are being talked about. Some of them we do already. For example, the PIM code is released to developers today and a lot of third party products are based on open source availability of that code. In that sense, I'd say we are already a part of the open source community. Where we have the opportunity to do that, we will do more of that. It reduces expense to us and gets more people working on a problem in a shorter period of time.

Q: So would the goal be that the Palm OS opens itself up like a Linux?

[Laughs] I don't want the headline to be 'Palm goes open source' because that would be inaccurate. I'd say we're more like Microsoft than we are like Red Hat today. But we do see that there is some virtue in the model and we're looking at what we can do that is very close to the open source model in its complete form. Are there other areas such as synchronization in which we could throw it out there and take advantage of the situation?

I am a proponent of openness in all things. I think that in this day and age that companies have to be willing to be much more open to the good things that could happen as well as the risks that might happen.