« This is not good | Main | Union City red light timings »

September 24, 2005

A Windows Palm

Palm's next Treo will run Windows Mobile. This must have been a pretty hard decision for Palm. On the one hand, PalmOS has been obsolete for years and they clearly needed to update their operating system. On the other hand, Palm's big advantage has always been the high quality of their UI. I haven't seen Windows Mobile lately, but it's predecessor Windows CE was pretty clearly inferior to PalmOS from a UI perspective. Palm has a pretty large market of people who are used to their platform and have put up with lousy platform performance to avoid switching. Even if Windows Mobile is better in some abstract sense, if Palm doesn't do a pretty good job of keeping the UI the same, then patients will start evaluating their other options rather than just reflexively buying the next generation Palm.

Posted by ekr at September 24, 2005 10:38 PM | Filed under: