Palm: Insane, or Batshit Insane?

There has always been a hint of men­tal ill­ness at Palm. From their habit of break­ing third party appli­ca­tion com­pat­i­bil­ity with each hard­ware release, to treat­ing expand­able stor­age in such an incom­pre­hen­si­ble way that I don’t think that any­one ever really fig­ured out how it worked, to the bizarre chain of buy – outs, merg­ers and acqui­si­tions that make Palm’s own­er­ship his­tory look more com­pli­cated than the Habsburg fam­ily tree; it’s always been appar­ent to out­side observers that there has to be some­thing in the water over at Palm HQ. But none of Palm’s pre­vi­ous shenani­gans holds a can­dle to the cur­rent whacky antics that they are dis­play­ing over the Palm Pre and its Media Sync functionality.

For the unin­formed: when Palm first announced the Pre, one of its highly pro­moted fea­tures was Media Sync. Which pro­vided the abil­ity for the Pre to appear as an iPod with Apple’s iTunes soft­ware. Before the first units shipped there was wild spec­u­la­tion regard­ing this fea­ture. Was Palm work­ing with Apple to enable this? If not, how would Apple respond?

As it turns out, Apple wasn’t work­ing with Palm on the Media Sync fea­ture. What was hap­pen­ing was that Palm was uti­liz­ing a very sim­ple hack of the USB 2.0 spec­i­fi­ca­tion that allowed the Pre to lie to the oper­at­ing sys­tem and claim to be an iPod. All breath­less claims of “monop­oly” and “anti – com­pet­i­tive prac­tices” aside, Apple quickly responded with a Knowledge Base arti­cle which can be tidily summed up as say­ing, “Don’t fuck with us. ass­holes.” Apple then, slightly less quickly released and update to iTunes which patched at least part of the hack that Palm was using.

Palm, with all the obnox­ious tenac­ity of the nerdy side­kick in a a John Hughes movie who can’t get it though their head that they are never, ever going to get any of that deli­cious Molly Ringwald poon­tang, released an update to the Pre’s WebOS that took the USB hack one step fur­ther. Normally at this point we’d be able to say, “ball’s in your court Apple,” and get to the pro­fan­ity, but in an act of hubris of Sophoclean pro­por­tions Palm has announced that they’ve reported Apple to the USB Implementers Forum com­plain­ing that Apple is hin­der­ing inter­op­er­abil­ity. Also Palm is alleg­ing that Apple won’t share their GI Joe fig­ures, and that Steve Jobs keeps pok­ing Jon Rubenstein when mommy isn’t looking.

So, now you have the back­ground and I can get to the part of this crap that I actu­ally enjoy.

What in the ever­last­ing fuck is Palm think­ing here? First off, com­plain­ing to the USB Implementors Forum is pos­si­bly the most whiney and inef­fec­tual act that I have ever seen a cor­po­ra­tion make. At the very best all that could hap­pen is that Apple will have to remove the USB 2.0 logo from their pack­ag­ing. At the very worst the USB Implementors Forum can decide that it’s Palm that’s vio­lat­ing the spec­i­fi­ca­tion (hint: they are) and have them pull the USB logo. No, all this is merely pos­tur­ing for the media.

Secondly, Apple has all the cards here. Apple con­trols iTunes and, should they choose to, they can con­stantly stay one step ahead of Palm. Given enough time and hard­ware revi­sions to the iPod and iPhone hard­ware lines, Apple can lock things down so tight that it would take DMCA – vio­lat­ing lev­els of hack­ery to over­come. Barring that, Apple could take the sim­ple way out and just sue Palm into obliv­ion. In my com­pletely – unqual­i­fied legal opin­ion Apple could make a decent case of trade­mark infringe­ment by way of brand dilution.

The truly insane aspect of this is that all of this is com­pletely unnec­es­sary. Vast num­bers of peo­ple, par­tic­u­larly Windows users, hate iTunes. I would haz­ard a guess that there are prob­a­bly more peo­ple look­ing for a solu­tion to man­age their iPhones and iPods with­out iTunes than there are actual Pre users. And it isn’t like there aren’t legit­i­mate ways to get con­tent man­aged from within iTunes into a non – Apple device. Apple pro­vides an iTunes Library file in XML for­mat specif­i­cally for this. Or, let’s get really whacky here. Palm could part­ner with a non – iTunes provider. I’d imag­ine that Amazon might be recep­tive to overtures.

The real tragedy in all this is that it’s only the Palm Pre users who are going to suf­fer here. By attempt­ing to piggy back on iTunes’ suc­cess Palm is con­sign­ing their users to become per­pet­ual sec­ond class cit­i­zens. Always play­ing catch – up with iTunes. Unfortunately, if this con­tin­ues, Palm may very well be forced to learn a les­son that Apple learned long ago. When users of your prod­uct are ham­pered by issues with a third – party ser­vice, they rarely are will­ing to accept that as an excuse. The major­ity of Palm Pre users will not ask, “why is iTunes bro­ken?” They will ask, “why is my Pre bro­ken?” My advice to Palm, look at the grief that AT&T has caused Apple, and they are legit­i­mate part­ners. Do you really want to be put in that position?