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FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
The April Fool's article that never was
By David Gewirtz
I find April Fool's Day to be unbearably tempting. Well, it's not exactly unbearable for me. But I'm told by my editors that the effort required to keep me from writing bogus news stories or publishing bogus articles gets pretty darn unbearable. Even so, once in a while I manage to find a way to sneak something in that tickles, at the very least, my own funny bone.
Such was going to be the case with this article. In fact, I'd gone to some rather considerable lengths to give credence to my scheme. My plan was to write about a slick new prototype Springboard module. This one would play DVDs by spinning them in a slotted unit that attached to the back of the Visor, as shown in Figure A.
FIGURE A
The handheld DVD module is playing Bedazzled, a movie only Hugh Grant could love. Click picture for a larger image.
As you can see, in my deviousness, I even used Photoshop to create a pretty credible image that would have supported my story. I had planned to go on with my review of the unit, talking about the resolution of the screen, pixelization, and even how comfortable it was to hold the Visor while the DVD was spinning at high speed.
But this year's April Fool's article is not to be. Less than a week after Palm announced that it will lay off 250 employees and contractors (actually, a relatively small percentage), it's not fair for me to devote my editorial to silly topics like DVD-playing Visors.
Instead, we need to clarify some issues about what's going on at Palm, talk about what's going on in the economy, and make some decisions about how we're going to move forward as a populace.
What's going on at Palm
First, let's talk specifically about Palm's announcement. On March 27, Palm reported revenue of $470.8 million for its third quarter of fiscal 2001, ended March 2, 2001, up 73 percent from the $272.3 million generated in the third quarter of fiscal 2000. In other words, Palm has made 73 percent more this year, in these last three months, than it made in the same three months last year. That doesn't suck.
In addition, shipments of Palm handhelds during the third quarter rose 112 percent over the same period a year ago, to 2.1 million handhelds. This brings the total number of handheld devices shipped by Palm, to date, to nearly 13 million. In other words, in the last three months, they sold more than twice as many devices as they sold during the same three months a year ago.
So, why the layoffs? And why all the doom and gloom about Palm's productivity? What's actually going on?
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