Essay Preview: Palm
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Hawkins is an inventor, and he walked away from PDAs because he saw cell phones were everywhere and wanted to invent the best voice based application. He new there was a need for an application that could combine all the features of the mobile communication and organization tools in the market today. I believe he was not only creative, but very smart about the market place, because, he foresaw that PDAs were becoming commodities. The price, at which PDAs were being sold, would severely cramped margins of any company expecting large returns from these devices. Every person on the block could now knock off a version of a Palm Handheld, Hawkins found a complimentary market, and handspring was nimble enough to beat all the big players to that market.
The Treo is the hottest device on the market because it was first to market, and has very little competition. It appears that the advance features of the Treo blows away the competition when it comes to providing a small convenient tool that replaces all the other gadgets. I believe the main competitive advantage is that the Treo wasnt tied to one specific carrier by contract, so they were able to build a network of sales through their affiliation with different cellular carriers. Another competitive advantage of the Treo is the fact that its not a phone masquerading as a PDA or even a PDA trying to be a cell phone. The Treo was designed from the ground up to be more than a phone, while I believe the phone makers are trying to jam the Treos functionality into what they are most familiar with, Phones!
Hawkins and Company went back to Palm because they really needed each other. Handspring needed the extra financial stability that Palm could bring, while Palm needed the Treo to help diversify their product line. The two companies together would be able to provide more efficient distribution, marketing, and production for the Treo.
PalmOne still has to a lot of work ahead of them to survive. They have to fix production and distribution issues with the Treo. They must