AllThings D co-executive editor and Wall Street Journal personal technology columnist Walt Mossberg says that, in the case of Palm, “even a hit phone might not be enough to overcome the company’s substantial woes: a cash crunch, an otherwise depleted product line, and an exclusive deal with a carrier, Sprint, that is losing customers in droves,” Aaron Task reports for Yahoo! Finance. “Meanwhile, Palm has to compete against the marketing blitz of its larger, cash-rich competitors — and not just Apple.”
Task reports, “The veteran tech journalist notes with awe the numbers Apple is putting up:”
• 40M devices sold in 2 years
• 40K+ apps and 1 billion downloads in 10 months
Task reports, “That kind of excitement among developers, he says, hasn’t been seen since the arrival of PCs in the 80s and websites in the ‘90s.”
On why Apple is not attending the “D7” conference this year, Mossberg said:
Their CEO is on medical leave. We all know that. Steve Jobs has been a wonderfully generous participant in this conference. He’s been here, I think, four times, maybe five times… He’s not a guy who goes to conferences, but he’s come here. So, the fact that he’s not here this year is because he’s not anywhere at the moment, except taking care of his health which is what he ought to be doing and what he said he needed to do. He’s on medical leave. I have no reason to think he won’t return from that medical leave. And, believe me, if he returns, as I expect he will, we’ll try to get him back to [the “D” conference] at some point.
Watch the video of Task’s interview with Uncle Walt here.
