Wak Oentoenk

The question was familiar, but it was the first time a reporter had asked me to go on the record since I left PalmSource. She said, "Given all the uncertainty about Palm, should people avoid buying their products?"I asked what uncertainty she meant."You know, all the uncertainty about what they're doing with Microsoft. It's the same as RIM Blackberry, where people say you shouldn't buy because of the uncertainty about their patents."I'm glad to say that my answer today is the same as it was back...

When I worked at Palm, I was always amazed at how different the mobile market looked in various parts of the world. Although human beings are basically the same everywhere, the mobile infrastructure (key companies, government regulation, relative penetration of PCs, local history) is dramatically different in every country, and so the markets behave very differently. Even within Europe, the use and adoption of mobile technology varies tremendously from country to country.And then there's Japan,...

I think it's very likely that recent changes in Symbian-land will open a new chapter in the soap opera over the company's ownership structure. At the end, there will probably either be some significant new Symbian owners, or Nokia will finally be majority owner of the company.Either development will generate a lot of public discussion, hand-wringing, and general angst, but probably won't make any meaningful difference in the company's behavior and fortunes. It should be entertaining, though. Here's...

Computer Outlook is a syndicated radio program that covers various computing topics (it's also streamed over the Internet, so you can hear it by going to the website). They did a boradcast live from the last PalmSource developer conference, and I had a nice time talking with them at the end of the conference. Last month they asked me to come on the show again. We had fun talking about various topics, mostly mobility-related. They've posted a recording of the program here.This second item has only...

At the end of October, Microsoft's Ray Ozzie and Bill Gates wrote internal memos announcing that Microsoft must pursue software services. The memos were leaked to the public, I believe intentionally. They drove enormous press coverage of Microsoft's plans, and of the services business model in general.Most of the coverage focused on two aspects of software as services: downloading software on demand rather than pre-installing it; and paying for it through advertising rather than retail purchase.Here...

The Register picked up an article from DigiTimes reporting that Microsoft's seeking bids to create a sub-$300 Windows Mobile smartphone.At first the article made no sense to me because it's easy today to create a Windows Mobile or Palm Powered smartphone for less than $300. You use a chipset from TI, which combines the radio circuitry and processor in the same part. You can't doll up the device with a keyboard like the Treo, so you end up with a basic flip phone or candybar like the ones sold...

There was an interesting little tidbit buried deep in a recent NY Times story on Microsoft and software as a service:"For the last few months, Google has talked with Wyse Technology, a maker of so-called thin-client computers (without hard drives). The discussions are focused on a $200 Google-branded machine that would likely be marketed in cooperation with telecommunications companies in markets like China and India, where home PC's are less common, said John Kish, chief executive of Wyse."Google...

I'm working on a posting about software as a service. During my research, I reviewed Microsoft's recent executive memos on the subject. As always happens when I read Microsoft's stuff, I was struck by the loving craftsmanship that goes into those documents. Although these are supposedly private internal memos, I believe they're written with the expectation that they will leak. Microsoft slips little bits of revisionist history into the memos. Since the history notes are incidental to the main message...

It's philosophy time. If you're looking for comments on the latest smartphone, you can safely skip this post.One of the nice side effects of doing a job search in Silicon Valley is that you get to step back and take a broader view of the industry. A friend calls being laid off the "modern sabbatical," because this is the only opportunity most of us have for multi-month time off from work.It's not really a sabbatical, of course. Unless you're supremely self-confident, it's a time of uncertainty....

The image above was sent to me today by a former PalmSource colleague. Yes, that's a list of Amazon's best-selling consumer electronics products. And yes, that's the Fossil Palm OS watch at #1, outselling the iPod Nano. The Fossil saga is one of the saddest stories in the licensing of Palm OS. Fossil had terrible manufacturing problems with the first generation product, and so the company became cautious about the market. I think the underwhelming performance of its Microsoft Spot watches...

Is Wikipedia wonderful or awful? I’m going to argue that it’s mostly irrelevant. But first some background… In the last month and a half there has been a kerfuffle between Tim O’Reilly and Nicholas Carr regarding Wikipedia. It started when O’Reilly posted a very interesting essay in which he laid out his definition for Web 2.0. It’s a long and pretty ambitious document with a lot of good ideas in it. If you’re interested in Web 2.0 it’s an important read. It’s also kind of amusing because...

I did an online search today for the words “Rokr” and “failure” together in the same article. There were 49,700 hits. I don’t want to pick on Motorola, but the speed at which its two-month-old product was labeled a failure is fascinating -- and a great object lesson for companies that want to play in the mobile space. Here are some thoughts. First off, it’s hard to be certain that the Rokr actually is a failure, since there are no official industry stats on phone sales by model. But the circumstantial...

I wrote last month that I thought Google was likely to offer to install free WiFi in more Bay Area cities. Now the company has offered to do just that in Mountain View (a city north of San Jose and site of Google’s headquarters). You can view the Mountain View city manager’s summary of the proposal, and a letter from Google, in a PDF file here. A couple of interesting tidbits: The city manager writes: “Deployment in Mountain View is considered a test network for Google to learn…future possible...

Or, why Web 2.0 doesn't cut it for mobile devicesOne of the hottest conversations among the Silicon Valley insider crowd is Web 2.0. A number of big companies are pushing Web 2.0-related tools, and there’s a big crop of Web 2.0 startups. You can also find a lot of talk of “Bubble 2.0” among the more cautious observers.It’s hard to get a clear definition of what Web 2.0 actually is. Much of the discussion has centered on the social aspirations of some of the people promoting it, a topic that I’ll...

The November 7 issue of BusinessWeek features this full-page ad for the LG VX9800 smart phone, which is currently available through Verizon. The screen shows what looks like a video feed of a football game, and the “remote not included” headline implies that it’s a video product. But the presence of a keyboard implies e-mail, and look at the background of the photograph -- the phone is sitting on what looks like a polished granite table, and out the window you can see tall buildings, viewed from...

There has already been a ton of commentary on the “leak” of information about Google Base, a Google service in development that would let people post their content on a Google database. Most of the speculation I've seen has positioned Google Base as a classified ad service that would let people sell things online, competing with eBay. But that’s not what I read into the service. What I think I see is a freeform database, a free-of-charge data publishing service. Right now if you want to post...

Helio is the new name of the MVNO being created by SK Telecom and Earthlink. The name itself isn’t worth a posting (although I’m always happy when a company successfully gets a new brand, considering how hard it is to get legal clearance). But I like the story Helio’s telling about its target market. Helio says it’s going to target young people with phones enhanced for music, games, video, and other entertainment. I like that they claim they’re working on both the hardware and the software together,...

This has almost nothing to do with mobile computing, but I think it's cool and wanted to share it. A longtime friend and co-worker of mine proposed to his girlfriend this week. Like any good technologist, he found a Web-assisted way to do it. Check out his marriage proposal website.By the way, she said y...

I’ve been doing a lot of networking in the last couple of months, meeting new people and getting in touch with old friends and co-workers. It’s fun to have the time to share ideas again, after being heads-down with Palm for six years.Most of the conversations eventually come around to the question, “What does Google want?” It’s a great topic because Google has enough money, and is ambitious enough, that it might be planning to do almost anything. Google is also deliberately coy about its intentions,...

Who will buy smartphones? And what are the “killer” features?One of the most common themes among people watching the mobile market is the quest for the ultimate device. “Which is the one everyone will buy in the future?” reporters ask me. Discussion boards have endless debates over the relative merits of the Treo, Blackberry, Microsoft Smartphone, and so on. The underlying assumption is that at some point we’ll see the emergence of one converged killer device that gets universally adopted.I’m not...