RIM to Lay Off Another 2,000 Workers in Restructuring Bid

There is no such thing as being 'too late' to enter a market....

If there were, Toyota and Honda never would have been successful when they entered the US automobile market in the 1970's.

If there was such a thing as 'too late' the Apple iPhone never could have been successful.

If there was such a thing as 'too late' Microsoft Office never would have been successful, after all you already had WordPerfect, Lotus 1,2,3 and Dbase, who needed, Word, Excel or Access?

If there was such a thing as 'too late', Windows never could have been successful, after all you already had the Mac, the Atari ST, the Commodore 64, the Amiga, the Apple II...who needed yet another operating system?


The failure of webOS is not due to its being 'too late', remember that at its debut it was widely hyped, and the Pre quickly became Sprint's fastest selling phone debut ever....

The problem with the Pre was that Palm had decided to offer it as an exclusive on Sprint, which besides being too small a carrier was also a CDMA carrier, limiting its international appeal, and that the hardware was crappy. If they had launched on at&t the phone would have been more successful.

The Pre sold something like 800,000 units in its first weekend, which was very respectable, the problem wasn't that it was too late.

The problem was that the hardware was really bad, extremely shoddy, customers had to exchange their phones for warranty 5-6 times in the first 3-4 months of purchase due to hardware defects, and webOS 1.0 was very buggy and had lots of problems. webOS didn't become the awesome OS it is until 2.0, which arrived nearly a year later.

What killed the Pre was the bad word of mouth that immediately erupted when people bought the phone.

If the Pre had been a better product and had launched on a btter network, Palm would probably still be around.

It was poor quality out of the gate that killed the Pre, not 'being too late'.