Can Bubba pronounce your product name correctly? Take no chances. I was struck by Microsoft’s new venture in gaming, “Project Natal.” Now, looking at the name dead on, I’d think it was natal, associated with birth, pronounced natal like … “fatal.” But no, the Microsoft rep said it’s Natal like Napal. “Na-tall.” Pronounced similar to femme fatale. It adds an air of high style to pronounce it correctly. But Natal like Napal just invites Bubba to mispronounce the project. Bubba may be freaked out enough by the supernatural body readin’ technology.

Palm took no chances. When they announced the Palm Pre, they made sure to put the long e symbol promotional material, lest Bubba make the mistake of pronouncing it the Palm Pray, instead of with a long e like “Palm Free” or “pommes frites” or “Prius.” It implies “expect more” …. like fancy fried potatoes. Everyone loves chips. Jason Chen already demonstrated that the Palm Pre slices soft cheese, can fancy fried potatoes be far behind? After all, the iPhone is brutally competitive in the category “elegant name simplicity,” but does it imply deliciousness?… Or energy-saving transportation?

Jon Rubinstein, executive chairman of Palm, and CEO Ed Colligan had a good weekend. With Palm Pre selling out of the current production run and a lot of favorable reviews, they’ve got to be optimistic about the future. Besides, Bono is banking on them too. But it is challenging out there and the question is: do they have the Mojo? The talk on the street is that many sales were prior Treo and Centro users upgrading to the Pre. Outside the buzz on the iPhone, there is a great deal of affection that people have for their Treo and Centros, and Palm has a good slice of that corporate user market. I believe a lot of the legacy affection is around the form factor and those nubby keys. Corporate users can text during meetings by touch, practically without looking, and this is something Blackberry users also can do too. Once you get accustomed to the nubby keyboard, the smooth key or touch screen key board just is not as efficient.

However the key to sustainability is the software, which is something mobile handset companies and cellular companies have chronically overlooked, defining their competitiveness on “new cool hardware” and “new cool pricing plan.” This requires them to think differently about their whole ecosystem and new analysis of adoption rates and retention of customers.

Can they gain the affection of the developers and app sellers? A recent survey by Skyhook Wireless of app developers  showed:

“56% of all developers surveyed will port their app to other platforms. Developers are most interested in Android. 58% of non-Android developers plan to port to that platform, while 40% of non-iPhone
developers plan to port an app to that platform. 26% will port to RIM, and 20% will port to Windows
Mobile.

Developers are least interested in Palm and Symbian, with only 8% and 9% of developers planning to
port their applications to those platforms, respectively.”

But this survey was done before Palm really promoted their totally new architecture and the Palm Pre wasn’t all over the press. The survey had “Palm” as a checkbox item, but did the developers really think about the new OS, once called Nova, now called Mojo?

And at the outset, they haven’t made the big moves yet to gain a lot of affection. On the developer front, it’s a matter of getting their dev program out, and it’s not now, and they seem to be doing a fan dance on when and what will be available. They pushed the device out the door without concurrently pushing the dev program out the door, but could they have waited? The device needed to get out this year with all the modern amenities to compete before their current customer base switched. On the app seller front, it looks like they are headed down the path of requiring apps to be sold through a Palm store, which is not necessarily the fastest way to go broad and wide in the market.

Yet when you look at what they do show as far as their new WebOS, it looks like a winner from the architecture fundamentals. So the “form factor” of development should be the easiest compared to other platforms, because it is essentially geared toward a common scripting web developer. It looks like they asked themselves, “where are mobile apps really going in the future” and they answered, “to the browser” “widgets with services.” The metaphor is “cards, scenes and stages with widgets” like story board cards, which ought to be comfortable to web designers crossing over to the platform. They can access common services like the universal search, the combined messaging, contact list, intuitive notifications. You simply use scripting to register widgets, add listeners and write event handlers. They will offer simple data management through a HTML5 database API and JSON objects.

Especially when tools like Eclipse, Visual Studio, and DreamWeaver supply support for the WebOS, your average corporate development can be done by the web staff you have now. Like the iPhone, the API has the advantage of being developed with the device company having a hand in it, so access to things like the device accelerometer ought work well. However, immediately out of the box, the new WebOS may not be robust enough for example, for some gaming and data applications that require a deeper API and the language capability to handle complex class structure and data types and more complex error handling.

Will the architecture metaphor catch on with developers - will it be enjoyable and profitable to employ? It looks like it has a good shot by design. The execution of it and all those factors around making the Mojo happen, we’ll have to see.

(Update: After this was posted, Jon Rubinstein has become CEO of Palm.)