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Palm Gaffe Showcases the Power of the Web

Palm has publicly admitted that, contrary to its advertised specs, the m130 PDA is only capable of displaying 4,096 colors. (The advertising had claimed 64,000.) The interesting thing about this is not that Palm has willingly admitted to this, but the fact that they’ve only come clean after users posted their suspicions on Palm message boards.

All of this harks back to the main argument of The Cluetrain Manifesto: markets are conversations, and those companies not willing to converse will fall by the wayside. I recently read (ok, heard via Audible) the Manifesto, and although some of it seems a bit quaint in the post-boom era, a lot of it is still valid. The fact is that the Web has changed the way that people and organizations—especially companies—interact with each other, and this change is probably irreversible. The proverbial genie is out of the bottle.

The sad thing about all of this is that the business world seems to be in denial about this. In my day-to-day interactions with business people, I sense eerie echoes of “I told you so” when confronted with the (un)viability of Web business models. Enough, already! The Web is here, and it is one of the paramount creations of the human species, right up there with the printing press, the moonshots, and the Cheesecake Factory’s fresh banana cream cheesecake. We can’t take it back, nor should we want to.

August 19, 2002 | Archived in Business