Tag: technology

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Die, Foleo, Die

Palm CEO Ed Colligan announced today that the Palm Foleo is dead:

> In the course of the past several months, it has become clear that the right path for Palm is to offer a single, consistent user experience around this new platform design and a single focus for our platform development efforts. To that end, and after careful deliberation, I have decided to cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration and focus all of our energies on delivering our next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market. We will, of course, continue to develop products in partnership with Microsoft on the Windows Mobile platform, but from our internal platform development perspective, we will focus on only one.

Kudos to Gruber for nailing the appropriate response:

> Everyone knew this thing was a turd except for Palm. Well, it looks like they’ve figured it out — but only after (a) announcing it; (b) blowing millions on developing it; and (c) its original ship date. The sooner you realize a mistake the better, but at this point it’s hard not to see the company as a joke. Credit, though, to Palm CEO Ed Colligan for making the announcement in his own voice on the company weblog, rather than hiding behind a mealy-mouthed press release.

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Poor Business Move Of The Day

Wired has a [nice piece up](http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-08/ff_sheep?currentPage=1) showing the strange void in Second Life – where countless companies have gotten in at the ground floor to produce very little.

Stuck in the middle of the article is a paragraph discussing the performance issues that affect Second Life, and theres one thing sticking out like a sore thumb:

> Created by an underfunded startup using a physics engine that’s now years out of date, Second Life is made up of thousands of disconnected “regions” (read: processors), most of which remain invisible unless you explicitly search for them by name. Residents can reach these places only by teleporting into the void. And even the popular islands are never crowded, because each processor on Linden Lab’s servers can handle a maximum of only 70 avatars at a time; more than that and the service slows to a crawl, some avatars disappear, or the island simply vanishes. **”It’s really the software’s fault,” says Andrew Meadows, Linden Lab’s senior developer. “Way back when, we used to say, ‘This is not going to scale.'”**

I certainly appreciate candor and honesty in business people, but there’s a sharp division between “acknowledging a performance issue” and “admitting you knew your system was crap from the start.”

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Adventures In Product Renaming

Back in March, Adobe was making lots of noise about a new piece of technology they were pushing then called Apollo. To avoid drowning you in buzzwords: Apollo lets you create desktop apps using web programming. Kind of neat.

But Apollo was always just a code name, and we were threatened told that the project would be renamed sometime later.

Today, Adobe [announced](http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/06/11/apollo/index.php) the official name: [AIR](http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/).

This is problematic for handful of reasons.

One: “AIR” is a [fairly generic word](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_%28disambiguation%29). It’s the stuff we breathe. It’s a quality or manner. It can be a musical composition. It’s also a [terribly popular French electronic music act](http://www.intairnet.org/). Best of luck to Adobe as they try to [make page 1 on Google](http://www.google.com/search?q=air).

Two: Despite the acronym expanding to “Adobe Integrated Runtime”, it is being referred to repeated on the web page as “Adobe® AIR™”. That’s right: *Adobe Adobe Integrated Runtime*. Rolls off the tongue as easily as *automated teller machine machine*.

Three: I would argue calling it a *runtime*. Perhaps a *runtime enviroment*, like Java. But this is a geek quibble.

Finally: You would think “Adobe AIR” was a unique name. [It’s not.](http://www.adobeair.com/)

A golf clap for the renaming team. Brav-o.