My Visit to Palm

I went to Palm's headquarters in Sunnyvale on Wednesday, December 20 for an MBA recruiting visit. They recruit MBAs from all over the West Coast for their internships in Business Development, Program Management and Software. During the summer an MBA would work with the product manager, who essentially "owns" the product, software or device. An intern works with engineering, sales, support and marketing to research market trends and determine the end user scenarios.

Palm's number one priority is user experience--in fact, the software product manager who ran the recruiting session emphasized that Palm is not a tech company, but instead a consumer company. And even though they produce the best smartphones (PDA+phone), they focus on the phone first. Another significant difference between Blackberry and Palm is that Palm tries to design their phones for end users instead of IT technicians.

Some of the projects interns have done in the past include:
-Macintosh strategy
-WiFi/Bluetooth sync
-DRM (digital rights management) strategy
-How to target new customers
-Web browser strategy

An intern performs a variety of functions from deciding whether to build or acquire, to analyzing what aspects of the value chain Palm should control. Fifty percent of an intern's time is spent on this type of strategic work, with the other fifty percent spent assisting the product manager (creating market research reports, etc.).

A couple of issues that I brought up that have not been sufficiently resolved include: Motorola's recent acquisition of Good Technology (Good is used on the Treo for email exchange, but Motorola is obviously a major competitor with Palm); the manufacturer of the actual Palm handsets has also become a competitor with Palm; Palm has not pursued a WiFi strategy, and in fact I got the sense that they won't until "they have to."

This is one theme that really drove home from my meeting with Palm; they are not focused on technology, and it seems that they wait until consumers ask for a technology before focusing on it. This is an issue because by the time the majority of consumers want to adopt a technology, a major competitor probably will have introduced it on their smartphones. Palm can only rely on their own brand name for so long, and even that has begun to erode with the introduction of the Blackberry and the Q.