...as Palm kills the Foleo three months after its introduction. Bringing out a product that is too similar in price, functionality and even form factor to the contemporary vision of the PC - without being one - has been the kiss of death for over two decades. It started with 'near clones' from the likes of DEC and AT&T, but it was IBM itself that provided the paradigm case with the PCjr.
From then to now, there's been a regular tide of similar errors by product managers wanting to attack an emergent market and trying to reach their design and BOM targets by cutting away functionality from the perceived 'standard' platform. A recurrent folly of wannabe multimedia PCs, TV PCs, network computers, e-mail terminals and what have you, and all dead. Palm is just the latest example of forgetting the tech past, and repeating it. In spite of the dwindling strategic importance of the so-called 'desktop', its image with customers is still so strong that it acts as a sort of tech marketing black hole, ripping apart competing visions that venture within its event horizon . (I expect the '$100 laptop' will ultimately end up in the black hole as well.)
Palm's cutting the Foleo is a sign the new investors and management team are showing some discipline. RHIT this isn't the only project to have been canned to free up resources and respond to the iPhone. Let's hope there's still some design magic left there. If Palm goes dark, and then produces nothing but an iPhone clone to restore the fading Treo brand, they're dead as well.