I took a project management course this summer and one of the key lessons I learned from the course was recognizing when a project should be killed. There are times when a company embarks on a project only to find later on that the project really doesn’t make much sense at all. Good project managers or company executives will recognize this and even kill the project before it finishes. Some projects just shouldn’t see the light of day. Case in point? The Palm Foleo. The Foleo was announced earlier this year and the overwhelming response was.. somewhat.. how shall we say it.. underwhelming? The problem with the Foleo was – it didn’t necessarily make sense in a world of advancing smartphone and notebook technologies. It might have made sense for a small niche of business mobile professionals.. but realistically that was it. Thus it was no surprise that the Palm Foleo mobile companion product was killed earlier this week by the CEO of Palm, Ed Colligan. The announcement was made on the “Official Palm Blog” as Colligan stated the following:
To that end, and after careful deliberation, I have decided to cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration and focus all of our energies on delivering our next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market. We will, of course, continue to develop products in partnership with Microsoft on the Windows Mobile platform, but from our internal platform development perspective, we will focus on only one.
According to Mr. Colligan, Palm has been building a new next generation software platform and the Foleo just didn’t fit into that plan simply because the product was based on a secondary platform (Linux) and a completely different development environment. With the product needing additional improvements, it made little sense for Palm to continue developing and marketing the product when the core focus of the company was going to be on its next generation platform which will debut later in their new Smartphone products.
Of course.. that’s the official story. One has to wonder about the negative feedback that the press and the user audience has been providing to Palm over the course of the last 3-4 months. Even when Palm held their sneak peek events in July, the response was fairly tepid to say the least. It just didn’t make much sense for someone to purchase a $499 device that was more limited in functionality than a full fledged notebook or even a high end smartphone! Sure you had a larger screen and keyboard but there were new products coming out from folks like ASUS and VIA that would pose a challenge to the Foleo – both in terms of product capabilities as well as pricing.
So the Foleo is no more – at least for now. The company will refocus its efforts on a single platform and will take a limited charge of less than $10 million dollars to their earnings. Things could have been worse of course had Palm decided to go full force with the Foleo.
I’ll say this much – Kudos for Palm for realizing that they had to do something about their product.
Hint hint!
