You can read more about the slow fall from grace here.

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Apple just reported a phenomenal quarter. From my experience, there are no signs of this trend letting up for now.

Bloomberg link.

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Link.

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You know what? I’m going to sue Hyundai Motors for not allowing their engineers to build cars using my tools instead of their own.

Adobe needs to get off its high horse and actually get a viable mobile Flash platform in the market as opposed to crying over Steve Jobs not letting them play in his playground.

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All I know is this, Schmidt as CEO is beholden to the board and the stockholders and his decisions may very well get the best of him if seemingly continues to do things with the company just to spite someone else. Steve Jobs is a brilliant man and Apple has been making hardware and software much longer and in greater scale than Google. Schmidt may have well bitten off more than he can chew and the next relationship he ruins would be with the company that employs him.

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Why am I mentioning Palm today? Well, for one, they positioned themselves as a direct and better competitor to the iPhone while neglecting and ignoring their true competitors — Google and Microsoft. Secondly, I think their CEO lacks vision and really didn’t understand how to deliver truly innovative devices. Yes, they were pioneers of PDAs and smartphones, but that was at a time when the market was nascent. In my opinion, they rested on their laurels and milked their successes.

Then comes along the iPhone, a truly revolutionary device, and what does Palm’s CEO go on record saying?

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” – Palm CEO Ed Colligan

That was in 2006. Then after watching the iPhone rocket to stellar success, they came out with an iPhone copycat three years later. At that time, analysts and industry watchers questioned the then high price of the Palm Pre device compared to the iPhone. His response:

“Why would we price ‘Pre’ less than iPhone when we have a significantly better product?” – Palm CEO Ed Colligan

There was nothing significantly better about the device. I believe it had early success because at the time Sprint didn’t have a device on the market to sell to their customers like AT&T and Verizon. So, Sprint’s customers were just to be happy to buy anything remotely resembling the iPhone. Then reality set in. The device was no iPhone. At that point, the sales trajectory turned negative and it’s been all downhill from there especially once Google got in the game to take attention away from Palm along with Microsoft, RIM, and others.

I say this all to say that maybe Palm should’ve focused its efforts on refining and polishing its WebOS initiative and worked harder on developer relations so that it could have an app catalog that may not have had more apps than the iPhone, but arguably better apps. Instead of worrying about what Apple was doing and talking bad about them every chance they got, maybe they should’ve worked on the nagging details that makes the Palm Pre a pain to use and own.

Ed Colligan, here’s a truism that I think you should’ve read daily as you tried to develop a strategy to keep your company relevant.

Pride is the very gateway to defeat.

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That, my friends, is no small feat. What’s even more impressive? Apple has plenty of room to grow.

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Myopia is serious problem for pundits, analysts and commentators in the tech industry.

Nonetheless, my first iPad should be here on April 5.

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For a design process to produce an extraordinary product, two conditions must be met: stakeholders and participants must unequivocally accept that they aren’t designers, and trust the real designers’ abilities.

It took me years to realize that. This is why I expect a new client to be able to clearly articulate who his target audience is during the discovery process. If he can’t identify that, then your hiring me is a waste of effort and time because energies are going to be wasted crafting something for the wrong target.

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