Palm: How to Lose Fans and Alienate Developers: Corante > Copyfight >: “Raising the price of the full-functioned unlocked Treo turns away those user-developers. By making it more expensive for users to develop for the platform, Palm makes the device less attractive even to the non-developers. By alienating the ‘alpha-geeks,’ in Tim O’Reilly’s term, Palm has hurt many more than the few hundred people who might have bought the unlocked Treo. It hurts every user of the platform, and its own bottom line. I hope I haven’t just bought a $600 paperweight.”
This is like the eight billionth rant I’ve seen this week about the “price hike” of the unlocked Treo 650. I’ve seen all sorts of interesting conspiracies around the move. The most common, and the one cited in the above article, is that it’s a reaction to flak from Cingular over the initial price being too close to their subsidized Treo 650.
Or, you know, we could just go with Occam’s Razor. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. In this case, PalmOne made a mistake in their original rollout and fixed it as soon as they could. Come on, people, it’s not like 5 and 6 are all that far away on the keyboard. If you’re nearsighted, they even look similar.
I’m as apt to run with a good conspiracy theory as anyone, but there’s no there there. PalmOne made a mistake, and they corrected it. It’s that simple. If you don’t want to spend $699 to get the unlocked Treo, buy the locked Cingular version, or hell, buy something else.
And Wendy, let me clue you in on something. The Treo may be popular, but it’s just ridiculous to say that the fate of the Palm OS software community hinges on its success. There’s MILLIONS of Palm OS devices out there and the Treo 650 is just a tiny, miniscule piece of that market. As for alienating the alpha geeks, those that can’t see this innocent screw-up for what it is probably have other issues to deal with.
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