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Palm Reveals New Name
dmehus writes "Milpitas, Calif. based Palm Inc. announced Sunday afternoon the new name and moniker for its handheld hardware business. After almost two years in the planning and focus group stages, the company's Board of Directors and executives decided on PalmOne. PalmOne's ticker symbol will change from the current PALM to PLMO. Sister company PalmSource, which will be the operating system business, takes ticker symbol PSRC. According this report by CNET News.com's Ina Fried, the two companies will be publicly traded, but they will also be controlled by a new holding company. In addition, the Spring 2004 line of handhelds will adopt the PalmOne moniker. Devices that run the Palm OS can continue to say "Palm powered." The new ticker symbols and corporate name changes will take affect some time in late September or early October, once the Palm buyout of rival HandSpring is complete."
They didn't even make it fully buzzword compliant.
But hey, they did make a compound word with an unnecessary infix capitalization.
(CitiGroup, MetLife, SunTrust, etc.) That's pretty CorpSpeak of them.
Would it not have been wiser to keep the name "Palm"? They don't want any of the two spin-off's to benefit of the name. But doesn't the PalmSource company benefit from the sales that are generated by "PalmOne"? (Note that this assumtions hold true to a certain level the other way around, but not that strong.)
Therefor, i find it a bit silly. The split was made by the board that will control both company's (they did not sell one division as far as I know) and the new controlling company. The controlling company name is irrelevant, as no-one outside the Palm-offices and the financial world will know, or needs to know it.
It would be better to keep the name for the hardware division. They had a strong name, and I guess that they did a bad move. And two years to come up with "PalmOne"? For crying out loud...
As a sidenote, as a belgian, I guess that I'm not worried, as long as the name change does not influence the taste of a glass Palm beer.
Charge $299 for an Palm-based product which has less than half the processing power and half the capabilities of comparable PocketPC devices, and expect people to buy it.
Good thing they have an OS and UI that people actually enjoy using.
Though I just bought a wonder $180 Sony SJ-22; terrific screen and the UI/OS I love. I think Sony is more of a threat to Palm hardware than the PocketPC is.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
"Palm" was easy, simple, and only 4 freaking letters! Plus their ticker was PALM! Hello?! Going to PalmOne is longer, dumber, and not as intuitive, plus their ticker changed...
Bad idea.
I disagree... there are no serifs on any of the other letters in their logo. Someone was trying to go for the numeral reference.
Plus, the "p" is lowercase, which is somewhat odd. (Of course, whether they were purposely going for leetspeak or not is unknown, of course.)
A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself.
...when someone ascends to a high enough position that they CAN change a name, they DO change the name. It's a way of assuring themselves that they're actually in charge.
It's simple: if you only issue orders that have a rational reason, you can never tell whether your subordinates are obeying them because you actually hold power, or simply because the orders make sense.
On the other hand, if you issue orders that are irrational, you can tell whether or not you actually have power, but if people obey them it will hurt the company which, in the long run, could affect your career.
The only safe way to demonstrate your authority is by issuing an order that is _arbitrary_ and has no significant effect for better or for worse.
Of course, there's always a cover story about how the new name, color scheme, typography, etc. "projects a more contemporary corporate image." (In the case of a magazine, whenever a new editor takes over they always revamp the typeface and the amount of whitespace around things, and the stated reason is always "to help you find information faster.")
See Antoine de Saint Exupery's "The Little Prince"--the part where the Little Prince visits the tiny planet with the king who can command the sun to set, but only after checking an almanac to make sure that he issues the command at the right time.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Upon closer inspection it appears from their logo that the new name will actually be pa1mONE. That's the number 1, not the letter l. Wonderful. If that isn't cause for a DDOS attack, I don't know what is.
Not to start a flame war over the incorrect use of irony, but isn't it ironic that their name, which is meant to show their solidarity and dominance, uses a term for "one" twice?
And if you disagree with my use of "irony" as a word, please replace "ironic" with "hilariously coincidental," pretend I said it the whole time, and don't flame me for it.
Isn't it odd that we get uptight about the use of "irony" but we allow people to write "lol" in posts and get away with it. "lol" isn't even a word. Without capitalization or periods, it's not even a proper acronym, but it's totally acceptable.
Well, there's another post that's gonna be modded down for being off-topic. Damn my train-of-thought writing style!
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I'd rather be flamed than ignored.