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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...