Growing the Treonauts Family

Something quite important happened to me a couple of weeks ago.  Namely, after many months preaching its virtues I finally convinced my brother to switch from his Nokia to a Treo 600 - after a 'trial' period I think that he's well and truly hooked now as he keeps calling me to tell me how great the latest application that he's installed is...

While having another Treonaut in the family is undoubtedly an occasion to celebrate, a significantly more important issue has been trying to figure out why it took me this long to persuade him that the Treo was an ideal tool for his needs.

It was a particularly frustrating process because by all accounts he fits the Treonaut profile perfectly - mid-thirties, senior executive, public company, pan-European P&L responsibilities, travels a minimum of twice per week, manages a large team, gets an SMS every 30 minutes, is on the phone or on email most of his working day... you get the picture - he's basically as busy as you can get and leaving him incommunicado for a minute longer than a plane ride is simply not an option.

So my analysis began.

One of the most significant issues standing in the way of his Treo adoption was his absolutely lousy past experience owning a Palm Vx which had made him deeply distrustful of any Palm powered device and my pitch to switch to a Treo.  While his Palm Vx was undoubtedly a superbly designed handheld it suffered - as most of its contemporaries still do - from what many will argue is a deep flaw.  Namely, without periodic attention (hotsync + recharge) a palmOne device will eventually wipe its memory clean - you could say that the device suffers rejection badly... 

In the same vein, my brother considered this 'rejection' totally unacceptable and promptly stopped using his Palm Vx.  Essentially his attitude was: "Fine. You want to reject me? Then I'll reject you".  This was over four years ago and he hasn't gone near a Palm device since.   After having paid some $400 for a portable tool that he needed primarily to backup his 5,000+ Outlook contacts as well as input new contacts, it was simply absurd to him that the device could 'lose' all of this data.  He thought that it was a bit like thinking of an external hard drive which if not periodically 'synched' with his PC will delete all his saved data - not exactly something that would fare too well commercially...

It's particularly interesting to note that, within a business context, throughout the years that he has not been using a Palm powered device he has been in a position to influence and authorize the purchase of computing equipment for his mid-size organisation.  Naturally, when anyone in the company sugggested to buy Palm handhelds they did not meet a receptive audience.  During this period, assuming a yearly replacement rate, Palm lost 4 sales opportunities to him and some 400 unit sales to the organisation - and this doesn't even take into account his potential effect as an 'influencer' outside the organisation when he's regularly meeting with other heavy hitters...

Unfortunately his story is not atypical.  I have come across a disproportionate number of ex Palm users who have conveyed the exact same or very similar experience to me and who are extremely sceptical or vociferously negative about my Treo pitch.  On the other hand others like my brother are now slowly coming back to the PalmOS fold thanks to the extraordinary qualities of the Treo.  To a large extent this epitomizes the challenges and opportunities facing palmOne as sales of traditional PDA's have plateaued and the company ramps up its efforts to get the world to embrace our beloved Treo.

Much as it did years ago with the introduction of its first "category-defining" PDA, palmOne and PalmSource now have the opportunity to capitalize on a truly new category-defining smart phone that is the Treo family while also making up for past mistakes.  The key issue will be to make sure that past mistakes are corrected, not repeated and that not too many new ones are committed either (a vague issue about memory springs to mind) so as to attract, convert and most importantly retain as many new and existing Palm users to become Treonauts.

There are encouraging signs that things may be changing.  For one, people are warming to the Treonauts lifestyle at a brisk pace (at least in the US thus far) with some one million Treo units sold.  For its part, palmOne has made some significant hardware improvements on its latest Treo 650 - for example the introduction of non-volatile memory finally makes the issue of lost data a thing of the past - and there is rarely a review of the Treo 650 that does not place it at the very top of the smart phone heap.  Then there's also PalmSource on the software side whose Cobalt and PalmSource Installer (PSI) developments for example demonstrate a very strong customer-centric and solutions oriented approach which was not previously typical of the company. 

I can only hope that the combination of millions of enchanted Treonauts, increasingly better hardware design by palmOne and ever smarter software by PalmSource will combine to make the Treo the most successful smart phone in the world.

I've got to go now, my brother's rung to tell me about yet another cool application that he's found...

Treonauts welcome big challenges...