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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."
Stage One of Going Down the Toilet: Split yourself into groups of N, and give each sub-company a new name. That way no one knows who the hell they are dealing with.
Frequently employed when a company's market share or mind share begins to slip, in an irrational attempt to reverse said slipping.
"Sig free in '03!"
In the graphical form of the name (which you can view on their web site) they :-)
have chosen to use leetspeak in the form pa1mOne which seems to me to be a horrible mistake (it's also
worth knowing that palmOne did not buy the sites pa1mOne.com and pa1m0ne.com: pa1mone.com seems to have be
purchased by an employee of Palm just yesterday and does not take you to palmone.com
The real mistake though is that should we be referring to the company is palmOne or pa1mOne? It's just
confusing for no reason. I mean you don't see Microsoft changing its name to M1cro$0ft just to look cool.
John.
I am more and more convinced that marketers live in a different dimension from the rest of us. One day it is all about "brand name" and talk about it worth in millions, the next day, it is just any old hat. /annoyed
Can I now use Palm myself? It is obviously not worth anything to Palm themself...
I don't understand why companies INSIST on doing this? Is this some sort of corporate fear that their brand name is watered-down by ubiquity?
It seems that companies who are so successful that their name BECOMES the product would be happy.
I watched this happen to Digiboard. They were THE standard product in their line but then went & changed their name to Digi International. D'oh.
-Styopa
Why do Microsoft competitors keep using the word ONE?
Netscape ONE
Sun ONE
PalmOne
Is this synergy, coincidence, or lame marketing?
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
Are you kidding me? Way, way over a million bucks I'm sure. 2 years of searching? Hell my university spent 1.5 million for a month of searching to change their color from red to...dark red. Many many millions were spent on making this name longer, and I hope they realize people will still refer to them as Palm. PalmOne reminds me of a bank.
more information from including the logo....my favorite quote
"The new name is characterized in two colors - deep red for the word 'palm' and vibrant orange for 'One,' reflecting the subbrand colors for the company's Tungsten line of solutions for mobile professionals and business and its Zire line of solutions for consumers and multimedia enthusiasts, respectively."
Come on, from Pro/Personal, III, V, Zire, Tungston, m, these guys have changed branding more often than their underwear. This is what they want to bank on?
No explanation given for the lame l->1 conversion.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
I'll admit I prefer the Sony Clie line, but the Palm OS has one thing going for it that the /. crowd can appreciate: it doesn't run any version of Windows.
Oh, and it syncs with my Macs with no problem.
Oh, and it does just about anything a WinCE (or whatever it's called today) device can do. It only takes software. You need that on a non-Palm device, too.
Honestly, if I could put a color screen on my still-working Newton and shrink it to a reasonable size, I'd probably use it instead. Unfortunately it's now just a curious toy that I don't use for anything.
--Jim (me)
He had valid reasons for it - his label was in control of the name "Prince" and was being bitchy about it. That's why on that triple-CD set he has "slave" written on his cheek. So he changed his name so he could release music during the dispute, and after it was settled, changed it back. I don't know why he didn't just tell people that, but I figure there were legal reasons.
Palm, on the other hand, are simply dumbasses.
c-hack.com |
Speaking of messing with an established identity... most people I know still refer to their Palm devices as "Palm Pilots", and that term hasn't been officially used for what, 4 years now?
A Markov word generator can do better. Seriously, no better way to discover words that mean absolutely nothing yet sound cool.
Try these on: Palogica, Unizard, Zaticand, Apprecros. PayPal me my fees.
Works great for naming countries too. Who would ever forget the name Sertaintritativiroboweakeeterrying?
(only requires the time it takes to get to the end of the word)
...
On a marketing basis, this doesn't seem like a wise decision.
First, you already have excellent name recognition.
Second, you have to change all of your existing advertisement methods.
Third, you lose the product standard. What if Xerox became Xenix or something? We don't "Or-Something" or documents! We Xerox them.
Of course, most people have probably already said this.
I hope they kept their old trademarks. They'll probably regret this down the line.
Palm hardware is fairly nice: compact, light, long battery life, and the applications are pretty decent as well.
But PalmOS is becoming a drag on the company--PalmOS was OK for underpowerd 68k-based handhelds, but the 175-400MHz RISC handhelds of today would be much better off running a more modern OS; none of the restrictions, flakiness, and limitations of PalmOS are justified by the hardware it runs on anymore. Neither PalmOS 5 nor PalmOS 6 look like they are going to fix the grave deficiencies in PalmOS.
One can only hope that, with this split, the Palm hardware group can look to other options in terms of software: Symbian, Linux, etc. They can even keep running the existing Palm applications, which people are used to. But the OS has to go.
Is BeOS still under the wings of Palm? Why don't they use the thing, or simply open the source?
When Palm bought Be, Inc. they promised there would never again be a BeOS release. They refused to license the IP or allow anyone to work on it ("Omigod, they killed the BeOS!" "You bastards!"). :P
However, a German company (yellowTab) which had wisely started negotiating to work on BeOS long before the sale (during the period where Be was "refocusing on Internet Appliances") and somehow had the rights to work on a BeOS, or something. Their version of events is here.
For some reason, none of the Be sites is linking to them, and googel does not like them either. I had to find the old slashdot article to find them at all. They also seem to be calling the OS Zeta instead of BeOS. Perhaps the people at Palm have the reverse midas touch w/r/t brands and anyone who has a good brand but associates with them loses it altogether. By the way can you tell I hate the new name and wonder why in the hell they would change the most recognized name in PDAs? Perhaps this is bad karma for trying to crush BeOS on purpose.
Still if you want you can buy zeta from yellowTab and it does come with lots of software, apparently...