The Zaurus had many things going for it: great technology, an excellent industrial design, and a solid consumer electronics company behind it. But it failed miserably in the US and European consumer market. Why?

Understanding developers
For starters, Sharp didn't know how to keep their developers happy. The highly protective, secretive nature of a Japanese consumer electronics firm just didn't translate well over to the free-wheeling, bohemian mindset of the Open Source and Linux developers.

It wasn't until eight months until after Zaurus's North American and European introduction that a collaborative development Web site was launched, and by then it was too late. Developers were frustrated: they didn't have timely access to beta OS code, Kernel source or the updated ROM images, so they went rogue.

These developers formed their own communities and spun off the development into Linux OSes that ran Zaurus applications on other PDA hardware platforms, like OpenZaurus, OPIE and Familiar. If ACCESS doesn't want to repeat these mistakes, they should make sure that developers have absolutely everything they need to build the entire ALP and MAX environment, because they'll want to completely rip it apart, make changes, and fix problems.

ACCESS has to make everything they can Open Source, within reason, and there should be oodles and oodles of documentation for their developers to pour through.

The Japanese to English language barrier
It also can't be emphasized enough that the Japanese to English language barrier was also a huge problem. Our US developer support team was completely understaffed and we had a twelve hour lag between our single English-speaking Japanese developer liaison at Sharp's engineering center in Nara, Japan. The US team was kept entirely on a need-to-know basis.