Palm sales ‘lower than expected’… it wouldn’t be the ads would it?
Well, this doesn’t spell good news for the future of WebOS. Palm’s ‘re-entry’ into the smart phone market has been less than spectacular. In fact, even with the launch of the ‘Plus’ versions of their Pre and Pixi devices, Palm still hasn’t managed to pull out of a sales slump.
Palm, Inc. (NASDAQ:PALM) today indicated that it expects that revenues for the third quarter of fiscal year 2010 will be in the range of $285 million to $310 million on a GAAP basis and in the range of $300 million to $320 million on a non-GAAP basis.1 Revenues for the quarter and full year are being impacted by slower than expected consumer adoption of the company’s products that has resulted in lower than expected order volumes from carriers and the deferral of orders to future periods. [press release]
UPDATE: Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein sent out a letter to all employees address ing the issue…
Dave Whalen and I just returned from a very successful meeting with Verizon Wireless, where they acknowledged that their execution of our launch was below expectations and recommitted to working with us to improve sales. To accelerate sales, we initiated Project JumpStart nearly three weeks ago. Since then, nearly two hundred Palm Brand Ambassadors, supplemented by Palm employees from Sunnyvale, have been training Verizon sales reps across the U.S. on our products. Early results from the stores have already shown improvement on product knowledge and sales week over week. You may have also seen a growing number of Palm ads on billboards, bus shelters, buses, and subway stations—all getting the word out about Palm. [from the letter]
Palm’s WebOS is a solid smart phone platform, but it just hasn’t managed to catch the attention of the general public. There’ are any number of factors that play into this lowered performance, but I suspect that the advertising campaign for Palm on Verizon couldn’t have helped… catch a couple more examples
And from the initial launch campaign…
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