VideoFrom medical schools to law firms to animal-feed companies to the halls of Congress, personal digital assistants (PDAs) are proliferating. The handheld computers that were once no more than gimmicky phone books are evolving into important business tools in a select group of workplaces.
But the emphasis remains on select. Broad acceptance (that is, bulk purchases) has been a dream deferred for makers of PDAs, which continue to harbor hopes that corporate clients will augment or even supplant the consumer market that thus far has been their mainstay.
Global PDA shipments fell 21 percent year over year in the first quarter, according to researchers at International Data Corp. in Framingham, Massachusetts. IDC attributes the slump largely to individual buyers who haven't purchased or upgraded PDAs as quickly as expected. So as the consumer market cools, PDA makers and software developers have focused instead on convincing companies of all sizes to equip their workforces en masse.
They've got plenty of convincing to do. Right now, corporate purchases account for just 27 percent of conventional (nonvoice-enabled) PDA shipments in North America, says Kevin Burden, IDC's program manager for smart handheld devices. That's because as the economy faltered, the seemingly inevitable march toward the mobile workplace took a lengthy detour as companies opted to spend technology dollars for more-prosaic purposes, such as upgrading desktop PCs and increasing network security.
But Burden believes that as the economy recovers, so will corporate interest in PDAs. By 2006, he says, the "enterprise" share of the PDA market will rise to 46 percent, while consumer sales will drop to 54 percent.
Don't look for across-the-board adoption, though. Analysts expect to see growth concentrated in a handful of industries, including health care, education, government, law, manufacturing, and logistics, driven largely by the specific applications aimed at those industries and the fact that vendors are concentrating on them.
Companies that have embraced PDAs have found them to be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, these early adopters have come up with plenty of ways to use the devices on the job — and on the road, with the proliferation of wireless applications and a growing number of high-speed Wi-Fi access points.
Even simple features, such as "instant-on" capabilities, win raves from employees weary of the downtime that laptops impose as they boot up.
But they also report that PDAs have their pitfalls: they're far less powerful than laptop computers, and much easier to lose or break. They come with a whole new crop of security woes (see a summary of management issues in the box below). Their tiny screens, especially the monochromatic ones, can make for mighty tough viewing. And some people just can't, or won't, adjust to the pixie-size keypads on some PDAs and the special handwritten codes or techniques required to use others.
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In the beginning, aka the '90s — when Apple Computer struggled to market its doomed Newton and Palm launched its first Pilots — PDAs were billed as lighter, neater alternatives to the brick-size personal organizers that many executives hauled everywhere. Early handhelds typically offered a limited menu of features: address books, calendars, notepads, simple document files, calculators. For some users, that was enough.
But the technology marched on, thanks largely to the exploding popularity of cell phones and the concomitant interest in all things wireless. Devices like Research In Motion's BlackBerry, which made mobile E-mail access not only possible but downright cool, began popping up, soon incorporating a number of PDA-like functions as well. Next came a new generation of devices — Handspring's Treo, for instance — that took the all-in-one approach, grafting together a PDA and a cell phone.
Soon companies began to view all these portable devices as less about organization and more about communication. And that made PDA makers dream of selling hundreds or even thousands of them directly to corporate clients.
Carl Zetie, an analyst at Forrester Research, says that while corporate adoption is increasing, it's often guided by a "think globally, act locally" philosophy. Companies don't buy them by the thousands, but by the dozens, often choosing different models for different types of employees depending on the specific requirements of the job.
Take Edmunds.com of Santa Monica, California, a 37-year-old publisher of car-buying information. Just eight years ago, the company — then known as Edmunds Publishing Co. — derived 100 percent of its revenues from its hard-copy buying guides.
Today the books account for just 1 percent of the company's income. The rest comes from its advertising-supported Web site and its affiliated data company, Edmunds Data Services, which provides a comprehensive automotive data set to the Edmunds.com Web site, and licenses data, content, and tools to third parties.
As an online publisher, Edmunds is a round-the-clock business. But its employees still work a traditional five-day week, taking off from 5 p.m. Friday until 8 a.m. Monday. "That means 28 percent of our revenue stream is naked [less protected] over the weekend," says CFO Charlie Farrell.
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