Palm Announces Separated Software Operations

Eharley writes: "'Palm on Monday announced it has completed the split of its operating system division from the rest of the company. The software unit will now report separately on the financial performance of its licensing business, and could eventually be spun off or sold by Palm.' Yahoo is carrying the story here. Considering that their market share in PDA devices has been slipping, is this a move that will signal the end of the Palm hardware line or organizers?"

Comments

Interesting...

[Uttles]

I don't think this will signal the end of the Palm hardware line. From my personal experience people think of Palm as THE personal organizer. Yes, they are familiar with others, but they still refer to them as "Palms" rather than "personal organizers." Their market share may be slipping, but I don't see that meaning the end of their hardware.

It's interesting that they split the software division off. Microsoft is a well established software giant and having a company that only does software is not such a lucrative position with MS in the mix. Unless there's some contract that says Palm hardware has to use Palm software, I wouldn't be suprised if we eventually saw Palms running Windows CE and never saw Palm software again. Don't get me wrong, I'm in no way saying MS is better, I'm just pointing out the fact that they are bullies and they will do anything to destroy another software maker.

Think their CEO was a shoe salesman?

[Pussy Is Money]

While I understand that Palm still has a reasonably strong following in the US, they seem to be losing out big to PocketPC here in Europe (although it varies, e.g. Palm sales are still strong in Germany).

Can't say I'm surprised. I never really understood the tradeoff Palm made between screen size and writing area. Probably cost concerns. That's understandable. You have limited amounts of everything so you may need to market a slightly flawed design. Then you can go back to improve on it later. Instead what Palm did was to write their OS and application software as if their hardware would never need improvement.

I suppose their marketing and influence has been superb. Also I suppose that Linux and Windows CE will have completely supplanted Palm in all its incarnations in ten years time (except perhaps unless AOL buys the Palm brand and starts selling pda's that run Mozilla).