Handspring Files For IPO

William Tanksley writes: "Handspring, the PalmOS licensee started by the inventors of the original Palm, is going public. " Not much information yet -- just stating they've filed with the SEC.

Comments

another one?

[Anonymous Coward]

"IPO". The next time I hear this word I think I'm going to be sick.

Don't any of you people remember the lessons of 1929? This insane drive to make as many irresponsible investments as possible, each one based on the "greater fool" theory, is going to send our economy back to the virtual Stone Age if we don't start behaving sanely sometime soon.

Yahoo, Amazon, Red Hat, VA Linux - do ANY of these companies have ANY reason whatsoever to have the stock prices that they do? No. Of course not -- over the long run, everybody who gets stuck holding the bag here is going to get it, and get it hard - and with the current herd mentality, that's going to be a whole bunch of people.

So I'd like to lead the charge for sane investment here - IF THE COMPANY DOESN'T HAVE PROFITS, IT'S NOT WORTH MONEY. Basic, basic math, people - you own the company, if it doesn't make money, how can you?

So shame on Handspring for contributing to the madness, and let's all try to make inevitable bursting of the bubble as painless as possible by curbing this mania that so many people seem to have.

Re:another one?

[wmorein]

The value of a share of a public company is a representation of expected future revenues.

Whoa there. That's the kind of thinking that got us into this bubble in the first place. Replace "revenues" with "profits" and we'll be in better shape.

Re:another one?

[Carnage4Life]

So I'd like to lead the charge for sane investment here - IF THE COMPANY DOESN'T HAVE PROFITS, IT'S NOT WORTH MONEY.

And to prove this point one of the top 10 ecommerce websites that received over 5 million visits in the month of February is not worth the the money in my savings account. Don't take my word for it look at their share price (CDNW) and listen to what financial auditors have said here and here.
A choice quote from an analyst from one of the articles is "I could buy CDNow with what I've got in my wallet right now,'' Sinnreich said. ``The question right now is -- is it worth the expense? Not just the dollar value, but the expense of integrating CDNow into an existing property."
Other dot comms that are now officially on their last legs despite well received IPOs are Dr. Koop(KOOP), the online grocer Peabod(PPOD) as well as Value America (VSUA).
Considering that 3 of the above companies had business plans that involved being loss leaders ("Sell lots of stuff at a loss until no more competition then jack up prices") while the fourth (Dr. Koop) never had a business model, it makes one wonder about the sanity of investors and CEOs alike. It looks like the bottom has begun to drop out of the dot comm industry. Hopefully in a few years this embarrassing era will be viewed for what it truly is...a time of insanity. I wonder if Netpliance as well as other Loss Leaders are paying attention to this fundamental rule of business in effect.

PS:Guess the only thing of value CDNow has left? That's right, their vast database of user information, addresses and buying habits. It's going to be like the collapse of the USSR and all those missing nukes all over again.
PPS: Even with all this news some cretin still plans to buy the domain name cool.com for $38 million.

Damn...

[Shaheen]

I recently applied to Handspring for a summer internship. Turns out that the only thing I lacked (compared to the people who went on to the "next round of cuts") was that I hadn't developed applications for PalmOS before.

Sucks to know that had I just spent a week or two developing a few apps, I mighta been a lot richer this summer :P

Re:Handspring's service problems

[William Tanksley]

What do you mean, all my claims are factually incorrect? It's not April 1st anymore.

Every single thing I said was true. The Visor comes with 8M and an USB cradle; and companies have developed all of the things I listed. To deny this is to waste our time.

-Billy

Re:Moderate the Above Up

[William Tanksley]

Have you looked at the power requirements for even the weakest transmeta chip? It would burn through a battery in only a day. The Visor takes several days of continuous use to use up a pair of AAAs.

Transmeta is WAY cool, but it can't compete against the Palm yet.

-Billy

Re:Palm and Open Source

[William Tanksley]

Good info. Also useful is the Palm Open Source area, at t he Open Palm Group</a>; not many compilers, but a lot of good examples.

Also, Quartus Forth isn't open source, but there's a decent amount of open source stuff written for it, and it's easy to work with interactively.

-Billy

Handspring's service problems

[konstant]

I own a Handspring Visor Pro (one of those wicked icy blue ones) and although I'm sure investors are going to go mad over this, I don't know whether I would buy into the company.

What are the benefits of a visor that Palm computing can't replicate? I'm not sure they number above three or four.

1) sane pricing for once (this was my big incentive)
2) cool expansible port
3) the PalmOS rep and the notion that this is what a "pure" Palm should be like

You can bet that (2) will be mimicked soon universally, especially in the beefier WinCE's. I believe Palm Computing is already working on this?

The pricing issue is not a very effective barrier to Palm Computing, since they can easily offer a stripped down version that eats into Handspring's share. Even had the Visor been considerably less powerful, I would still have purchased it due to the pricing. I have just enough clutter in my life to justify a palmtop, but not enough to make the difference between 4mb RAM and 8mb significant.

Finally, I suppose OS is a matter of preference, but there are some functionality problems I've encountered with the version that runs on the Visor. And unlike the hardware extensibility, the OS cannot be upgraded, at least in the current models.

Unless Palm Computing is brainless and doesn't offer a lower end model for entry-level newbies like myself, I don't see how Handspring is ultimately going to differentiate itself. The simple fact is that it is too similar to a Palm to survive.

That all said, I wish I had $500 bucks for a wicked cool WinCE device.... Ooooh! Heresy! :)

-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!

Re:Handspring's service problems

[bubbasatan]

Just a brief note or two about CE devices. I support the little devils, and they are as close to awful as anything I have ever encountered. Yes, they can do a number of things that Palm devices can't right now, but from a support standpoint they are not worth it. I support about a thousand users, many of them with handhelds. Probably 2/3 of the handheld users have Palms. We average less than 1 call per month about a Palm misbehaving. We probably average 50 or more calls a month from the CE users. CE devices, from my experience, are unable to communicate with their desktop counterparts, for useful things like synchronization, a majority of the time. Most of our folks have HP Jornadas, and maybe part of the problem is with those devices specifically. From what I've seen though, CE has a habit of crashing randomly in a manner strongly reminiscent of Win 9X. So, my whole point in this diatribe boils down to the fact that Palm devices, and consequently their manufacturers, will be more successful than their more pricey Win CE counterparts, at least in the foreseeable future, because they are simply better designed products. I, for one, am willing to accept a little less functionality for greater stability, lower cost, and the ability to use it with the desktop operating system of my choice.

Re:Handspring's service problems

[William Tanksley]

What do you _mean_ a IIIe offers the same stuff? It has six megs less memory -- two megs versus the Visor's eight.

And it's NOT true that nobody's developed anything for the port; they've developed Bluetooth, AirPort, modems, flash backup, general flash, a pager, two-way pagers, radio, a digital camera, MP3 players (one of which allows you to add up to 128M of RAM to the unit), and more.

These things have not only been developed, they've been demonstrated. It's true that they're not shipping, but claiming that they'll therefore never ship is royally stupid.

Oh, and you don't have to buy the cradle seperately; it comes with the unit. Always has. It uses USB, too, so it's a HECK of a lot faster than the Pilot's cradle.

-Billy

Moderate the Above Up

[Redking]

It's true. Nobody has developed anything for the Visor's expansion port. I feel sorry for all the people who got a Visor thinking they could do cool stuff with new hardware coming out. It'll never happen.

Handspring isn't stupid. They saw how the Palm IPO went and they know Transmeta's Crusoe is going to revolutionize the PDA/Wireless market. Gotta cash out while the going is good.

Re:Hard to compete against the YOPY

[AlphaHelix]

Uh, what exactly do you see as being the benefit of a Linux-based PDA? I think most people believe that two of the major benefits of Linux are reliability and security, neither of which are currently big issues in the PDA market. Security is clearly a non-issue, and reliability requirements aren't even marginally as important as they are on server and desktop based applications.

On the other hand, some extremely important issues in PDA design are useability and user interface, two areas where Linux is behind many of its competitors.

Nobody except Slashdotters want to hack on their PDA. Most people want to bring up some names and addresses, jot a few notes, maybe play a game or read a document, read e-mail, browse the web. The PalmOS currently handles all these things pretty gracefully. Slashdotters, as self important as they are, are not a major market share in the PDA world, and won't make even a minor dent into the marketplace.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *

Apache

[jbarnett]

Now that Apache has been released for their PalmOS, they have just enough buzzwords in their company description to go public. Today, they obtain: Apache, OpenSource and HTTP. They where really hoping for the buzzword 'Linux', but developers are still working on the port.

CEO Jim E. Prefertion was quoted as saying "Due to the release of Apache, the number 1 web server on the Internet, PalmOS is now going to change direction, go public, and compete head on with the major Internet players, like Sun, Linux and Microsoft."

Palm and Open Source

[Tassach]

There isn't too much information in the article to get excited about, or much that is interest to the /. crowd. So, in the interests of providing some (hopefully) interesting content...

For anyone interested in developing apps for PalmOS, there is a GPL'ed Palm emulator; which borrows code from other neat GPL'ed projects - UAE: The Ultimate Amiga Emulator and WinUAE (the windoze port).
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'

Is it Palm Friday?

[lar]

Forgive the pun.... it was just too easy.

But seriously, what's the deal? There have been at least 3 /. articles on the Palm today. Did Andover buy 3Com now or something?

Or maybe Hemos just bought himself a Palm VII, and he's just a tad over-excited about it...

==

Re:Too little too late?

[tomreagan]

I'm impressed by the folks at Handspring, and I think they have a really good product, but I have to wonder about the IPO bit. Those who saw Caldera's IPO a couple of weeks ago probably noticed that it was less impressive.
...
I'm not entirely certain that becoming publicly traded carries the same amount of glitz and glamour that it did a year or two ago.

I don't think that this is a question of glitz and glamour, or even a question of the relative value of handspring. I think that the market is just going sour on IPOs b/c of market pressures.

The announcement the other day that US GDP was up 7.8% in the fourth quarter is going to pretty much guarantee that Greenspan will raise rates 2-4 more times this year. As a result, the market has gone haywire over the past few days, as people are reluctant to hold tech stocks at any price. So, even though companies are growing and the economy is booming, the market is suffering b/c of long term predictions.

That being said, this doesn't make the IPO necessarily a bad idea. If this is nothing more than a get rich quick scheme, then you are in trouble. If you need to raise capital on a large scale, however, this is the way to do it. And don't forget that companies with solid fundamentals and a hotly-demanded product are still doing well, like IBM and Cisco. At the same time, don't think that prices will go through the roof as frequently anymore, because the market has the fear of Greenspan in them.

So, all in all, a sound business move, and probably not an extraordinary event.

Palm was like Apple until Handspring

[ballestra]

Palm should welcome the competition from Handspring. It makes the Palm OS more widely accepted, while keeping their feet to the fire on hardware. The result will be the dominance of Palm OS over CE. The competition seems to be quite friendly, since the two product can work together harmoniously. It ends up benefitting consumers as well, by encouraging hardware innovation and keeping prices competitive.

The only advantage that WinCE had over Palm was that there was healthy competition among the hardware makers. That advantage is now gone. (Oh, and color, too)

I predict the HS IPO will be very successful and that HS and Palm will both be very healthy companies for some time to come as they take more and more marketshare away from WinCE.