Abstract
Palm Inc. is the leading global provider of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) for both hardware and operating systems. The company sold its first PDA in 1996 and quickly established a leadership role in the PDA industry. In a span of four years, its revenues grew from $1 million to $564 million. At the end of the May 1999, Palm had achieved nearly 73% shares of the US market and over 68% shares of the worldwide market for PDA products. There were over 50,000 developers who had agreed to make application software for the Palm OS or hardware accessories for the handhelds.
Although Palm Inc. enjoyed immense growth and dominating shares in the PDA market, the future for this market still remains uncertain in the face of the major competitors' different predictions concerning the directions in which the market will go.
Thus, ‘How to keep the Palm way of PDA a standard in the future?' is a big challenge that the company is facing today.
