In my opinion, I think it is just plan poor management. It is clear (to all of us anyway) that Sharp has superior engineering staff and their products are ussually unrivaled at the time of their release (with perhaps the SL3000 being the only exception...since it lacks some power compared to other on the market, but it IS a nice item all the same).
Anyway, Sharp has horrible palmtop marketing or perhaps does not budget for marketing. I think these Zauruses were always made with the intent of selling 100 of thoiusands of units to business and not to individual users. But Sharp never realized that they need to convince the IT admins of the usefulness of the proiduct AND and management as well.
Anyone in IT would love a Sharp (especially in the growing Linux segment), but the real bread and butter sales are convincing executives that they are indispensible.
Look at the blackberry...the first few generation did pretty much just email and limited at that, but it became an indispensible part of being an executive. Hence, see this increased prodiuctivity, blackberries trickled down the ranks (exploding in sales volume as it went).
Sharp made extraordinary hardware, and built it on the most flexible and open platform, but they failed to deliver out-of-the-box productivity boosts (except for the IT admin segment, who ussually don't make the big $$ calls).
Sharp thought "if we build the hardware on an open platform the open source world will bring us the software to drive the sales"...well, that was a nice IDEA, biut they gave the plan all of about one year to materialize into something great. They also did not offer developers much incentive becuase although their products were open, their corporation acted like a silent partner. Very few people from sharp ever communicated with the developer community and those that did seem to be either low on the tottem pole or just not "in the know"....so developers were left in the dark until the product was released. Which is insane !!
I mean look at the video game market, all the big players MS, Sony, and Nintendo, get their development platform in the hands of delopers way way way before product launch. With sharp, we had to play catch-up only to be blind sided again and again.
By the time we understoof the 5500 and were just about ready with products, Sharp switches the whole structure of things for the 5600, without a warning to anyone, even (as far as I know) theKompany software company.
Sharp has lost all crediibility in the development community and with all these unsupported products, I doubt too many companies are going to invest their IT infrastructure to ANY future sharp product.
I own a C860 (Still on the fence about the 6000L or 3000). and I plan to keep these becuase the hardware is excellent and the platform is still wide open. I strongly believe this product will lhave a long life in the hands of the guru and experts becuase nothing fills this space. Now it ain't a big space, but it is one that I feel will literally live as long as these units continue to function. Much like the old HP 200LX, it has a core of users that will continue to share info and push the unit further and further and keep it in line with all new technology developments for as long as is humanly possible. (I mean when the 200LX was designed, no one ever considered the idea of surfing the Net with it, but yet it does that and tons more, all with a monochrome screen and a 80186 processor and 2MB of memory....granted the hardware has been expanded (hacked) to doublespeed the CPU and run with as much as 96MB of ram).
HP 200LX palmtops were the hands-down best thing going at the time and still kick a considerable amount of ass today, but the newer HP units adopted MS WINCE and are now pretty much an also-ran with many other devices. I mean, they got some nice machines, but nothing that really makes them shine like linux, and all the portable software that that entails.
(Discliamer, I don't folow all these companies anymore, so maybe their products have gotten better in the last few years, but once I got a Sharp 5500 and surfed, watch movies, got email, played EMUs, etc, etc,etc I never looked back.)
Perhaps someday a company with marry superior engineering with incredible marketing and we will have a palmtop with the impact that the IPOD had on the MP3 world. Not that IPOD is so special now, but when it first hit the streets, it was a superior mp3 collaboration of technology and incredible marketing. So much so that even though there are better players, people still consider the Ipod the unit to own.
Sharp Zauruses could have been the Ipod of the paltop market (on MORE than one occassion)...but they lacked the ability to communicate (meaning LISTEN and TALK) with their developer community and their marketing approach was effectively "The unit will sell itself"...which is pretty much NEVER true...at least not to start.
The first Zauruses were world changing devices, the inital reviews were littered with speculation about all that these devices could do that was never done before. But business does not buy on specualtion, they biuy on solid products. And only a well informed development community working hand in hand with the hardware manufacturer can develop solid prooducts that are ready at hardware launch. I think the 5000D was the only pre-release hardware attempt ever made by Sharp. I suspect it was not upto their expectations of sucess, so they never did it again....which is dumb becuase the developers (open-source community members by nature if not name) had never gone thriu that process and it takes time to work the kinks out of any system as compex as a pre-release of hardware to facilitate software at launch. Had Sharp marketed heavily and kept a strong hardware pre-release to developers, by the time the c700 hit the (US market) shelves the world of PDAs/palmtops could have been an entirely different place. (But it never even hit the US shelves becuase Sharp convinced itself that American buyers did not want a clamshell device.
Do you know anyone who is not looking to upgrade their old cellphone to the new clamshell models?
If so, they are in the minority. Sharp can count Nokia as one of it's partners in unfathamable misiunderstanding of the US (and I would guess European) markets.
Whew....Okay, I feel better now. Thanks for the rant.
O
