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Palm Case Study

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Case Study Report, Palm Inc. BACKGROUND: Jeff Hawkins founded Palm Computing Inc, a hand-held computer business, in 1992 which has since changed names (Yoffie & Kwak, 2001). In 1999 it changed to Palm Inc (Yahoo Finance, 2006). The case study concentrated on Jeff Hawkins, the founder of Palm, and Donna Dubinsky the former CEO of the company. These two left Palm in 1998 and founded a company called Handspring, the only company as of 2001 to take a meaningful share of the market away from Palm (Yoffie, 2001). Currently the CEO at Palm, Inc is Edward T. Colligan. For the period ending May 31, 2006, Palm had sales of $1.578 billion and a net income in excess of $336 million (Yahoo Finance, 2006). This is a significant increase over the …show more content…

56). As the company grows however, the strategy does have potential to become a weakness. As previously mentioned, Yoffie (2001) said, "By investing over time in specific skills and strengths, you create opportunities that perceptive rivals can exploit. In other words, you risk becoming the target of another and possibly better judo strategist" (p. 63). This risk is the biggest weakness of the judo strategy. The Judo strategy is very similar to the focus strategy described in our textbook (Dess, Lumpkin & Eisner, 2007, p. 175-177). COURSE OF ACTION RECOMMENDED: The problem that a technology start up such as Palm always encounters is that when their product captures enough market share, the large competitors begin developing their own products and competition becomes fierce. If I were in Palm's position I would take the following steps: 1. Look for a corporation that was interested in my product and propose that they acquire Palm. I would look for a corporation in the electronics industry that had a reputation for purchasing smaller companies and allowing them to flourish while providing them with additional funding, research and development (Dess et al. 2007, p. 205-207). Our text discussed several companies with this type of related diversification strategy including Johnson and Johnson and 3M. I would have to look for a company in the electronic industry that had the same type of reputation such as

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