Could Palm have known the Pixi would miss the mark?

I was reading a review of the new Palm Pixi on Gizmodo and I was struck by the classic new product issues that the review highlighted. First off, the product was released at $100 when its more powerful sibling the Pre is available for roughly the same price. So, Palm has likely hurt its sales more than anyone else. Second, the product appears to be riddled with quality problems. The Pixi is apparently really slow which totally misses consumer expectations for a $100 product. As a result, both Amazon and Wal-Mart are selling the Pixi for $25.

Could Palm have known? The answer is Yes. Palm invented the smart phone (remember PDAs). Do you think that Palm has some people who know about consumer preferences and behavior? Do you think that Palm has people who could have raised the alarm about the price in comparison to the already released Pre? Do you think Palm has people who could have pointed out the quality problems? You bet. So, why does this happen? Often, it is because the company has no way to listen to employees and then collect information in a way that is scalable across the company yet consumable by executives.

If Palm were to run Crowdcast solutions on a project like Pixi, then questions such as – When will the product really ship? How much will it sell for? How much will it cannibalize the Pre? and How many defects will it ship with? could have been asked. The answers to these questions would have been revealed as metrics, a date (Oct 09), a price ($25), at $25 it will hurt Pre sales by 50%, and unless we do something like fix the software before we ship it will be really slow.

It’s time that we started asking the crowd to drive new product introductions.