Eric Benhamou: The Saga Of Palm (Part 7)

SM: I want to ask about some of these aspects. I think operationally you managed to turn the company around, but where was the marketing vision, the juice, coming from? Who was the visionary? EB: We still had Jeff, who had envisioned the Treo. It was his brainchild, just like the initial PalmPilot. He was

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Eric Benhamou: The Saga Of Palm (Part 1)

In this second interview series with Eric Benhamou, we discuss his involvement with Palm. If you haven’t already, do read the first interview series for context [here]. As you know, Palm is in the midst of a great deal of change at the moment. However, it is an important company that established the PDA category,

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Tom Tom + Tele Atlas: Perfect Match

If there is ever a perfect marriage, this could be it. Tom Tom’s (AMS: TOM2) planned acquisition of Tele Atlas (AMS: TA) is perfect in more senses than one. For one thing, both are Dutch companies, with synergistic businesses, and a merger integration will be dramatically easier based on that reason alone. But of course,

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iPhone and the Future of Infineon

One of my readers, points out that I have not discussed Infineon in my iPhone and the Future series. True. I somehow missed, even though it very much featured on the list of component vendors. In fact, looks like some analysts are predicting, that Infineon’s iPhone design win will result in over $100 Million in

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iPhone Competitors: Nokia’s Convergence Device Strategy

WSJ has a good roundup on the various iPhone competitors. One of the top iPhone competitors is expected to be Nokia’s N95, a high-end smart phone that, like the iPhone, has a relatively large color screen (2.6 in), can surf the Web and can play music and DVD-quality video. Unlike the iPhone, the N95, however,

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iPhone and the Future of Qualcomm: Addendum

I wrote iPhone and the Future of Qualcomm last week, and it generated a huge amount of controversy. My main point in the iPhone series is that if iPhone succeeds in becoming the industry galvanizing event that I think it will be (even if the product itself is a limited success for Apple), it will

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iPhone and What’s Coming: Synthesis

Over the last few weeks, we discussed a number of iPhone related issues that are key blocks challenging the rest of the eco-system today. Here is a quick synthesis of the key nuggets: (1) It’s positioning as a laptop replacement device, which I believe will force most of the other laptop and cellular handset vendors

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iPhone and the Future of Microsoft

This is a very strange perspective, but I think in the mobile world, the iPhone is actually driving the market towards Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS, and away from the current OS leader Symbian. Let’s go through the logic step by step.