12 Jan 2009 1913H

In praise of the Pre

Congrats to Matias Duarte, Wes Yun, and the team who worked on making the Palm Pre’s debut such a success. (If you haven’t seen the launch keynote, check it out.) Backtrack a little over 13, 14 months to a conversation I had with Wes and Matias about working for a project that they could not talk about, except to say:

As for what’s going on here at Palm… let’s just say that it’s NOT business as usual. We are working on what is probably the most exciting project in the Valley, maybe the industry. I’m commuting to and from LA on the weekends to take up this challenge. Hopefully that gives you an idea of how exciting I believe this project to be. This is truly a rare opportunity.

After speaking to Matias and his team, or rather, from what they didn’t say, I was pretty sure that project was working on Palm’s next generation operating system, a competitor to Apple’s iPhone and a shot at recovering the glory that was Palm. Aside from moving to the Valley to toil for fame and glory, I had another nagging question in the back of my mind.

It’s quite clear that whatever leadership decisions led to the Palm Pre to be have produced a fabulous product. The real question now becomes, has the culture changed sufficiently at Palm so that they are now able to avoid the sorts of stumbles that brought them to the point where Apple was able to out-Palm Palm, or that caused Motorola, which was never a design-driven company to begin with, to fall into such a rut with the Razr.

The device, as we now know, is virtually irrelevant. For instance, paper still works great and it doesn’t require batteries. But, before digital cameras came around, and became integrated with cell phones, did anyone know that such a pent-up demand lay in taking photos wherever and whenever people found themselves? Did anyone know that people would use text messaging from their phones like an extension of their online messaging? These capabilities didn’t exist but tapped into people’s existing and unfulfilled wants.

User experience people, and in particular, interaction designers know this best: it’s really what the device enables the user to do — and how easily those devices are designed to make that happen — within his and her contexts that makes the device magical. But that’s just one product. It takes an entire company, aligned from research to sales to development and support, to make that experience happen over and over again. That can only happen if leadership is in position to make that culture happen.

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Filed under Design, Interaction Design, Product Design, Strategy, Technology, User Experience

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