Palm: Put a Sock in It, McNamee
by John Paczkowski
Posted on March 10, 2009 at 6:37 AM PT
“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two-year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone. Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later. Think about it–If you bought the first iPhone, you bought it because you wanted the coolest product on the market. Your two-year contract has just expired. Look around. Tell me what they’re going to buy.”
– Elevation Partners founder Roger McNamee
Roger McNamee’s hyperbolic predictions about iPhone-to-Pre conversion rates didn’t go over too well at Palm. Appalled by McNamee’s inflated, indecorous claims about its forthcoming smartphone, the handset maker on Monday filed a Free Writing Prospectus with the SEC that distances the company from McNamee’s claims and categorically refutes his your-next-iPhone-will-be-a-Pre foolishness. There are 10 “clarifications and corrections” in the prospectus, among them these two little gems:
5. With respect to the statements in the tenth paragraph of the transcript that the Palm Pre is “going to be a million times–well, not a million times–several times faster” than Apple, Inc.’s iPhone products and is “going to run rings around them on the web,” the Palm Pre is still under development and it is premature to state the speed at which the device accesses the web or the relative speed of the Palm Pre compared to the smartphone products of competitors.
8. The statement in the second paragraph of the article that “not one” person who bought an Apple, Inc. iPhone on the first shipment date “will still be using an iPhone a month” after the two-year anniversary of that day is an exaggerated prediction of consumer behavior pattern and is withdrawn.
Ouch. That was CRAZY talk, Roger.
An embarrassing retraction for McNamee and for Palm (PALM), which was understandably uncomfortable with the silly levels to which the investor raised expectations for the Pre. The next time McNamee appears on Bloomberg TV, he’ll be accompanied by two Pinkerton guys with tranq guns….
Comments
I once did a marketing mailer called “Smart People, Dumb Statements.”
(You can guess some of the classics – Gates’640K ought to be enough statement; DEC’s Olsen on PC market Prospects, etc.)
McNamee just claimed a spot on version two of the mailer.
Posted by Mark Sigal at March 10th, 2009 at 11:45 amroger is trying to hype a dead horse and save his own skin as an investor
palm is way past the dead stage and anything they do, short of walking on water while making wine flow from the pre, won’t matter
roger, just suck it up and go home and ask bono how he likes the new blackberry since rim is sponsoring the new u2 tour (and bono is one of your investors)
Posted by Sam Harrison at March 10th, 2009 at 12:10 pm