One hailed as the OS and PDA of choice amonst business and personal users Palm has been dying a slow death. In 2006 Palm had a market share of nearly 36% vs. RIM with a market share of 30% with their blackberry devices. That has steadily declined to a market share of 7% for Palm, 40% for RIM and 30% for the Iphone in 2009. That is a huge loss of market share in only 3 years time.

In my opinion Palm’s biggest mistake was giving up on their OS and switching over to windows mobile. What were they thinking? They had a huge pool of developers, a stable and quick OS that used very little memory and a good hardware plat form. By giving all that up and switching over to windows mobile they introduced a memory hogging, buggy OS to their hardware and left a lot of Palm developers without a job. They lost their competitive edge and ended up being just another windows phone with no real advantage over their competitors RIM and eventually Apple.

The problem with windows mobile is that like the PC equivalent it doesn’t provide users with an “experience”. Simple things are so cumbersome on windows phones that once you use Apple or Blackberry you wonder how you ever lived without them. Windows phones get the job done, but in a very “rough” and roundabout manner. Perhaps that’s why Palm’s market share has been declining so much. Had they capitalized on their early marketshare and evolved their OS along with the time perhaps they would have been able to offer a better option to Apple’s Iphone and RIMs Blackberry. However with their very low marketshare I don’t see how they could ever recover, and my prediction would be that they won’t be around for very long.