PalmOne to become Palm Again; PalmSource & Linux

gandell writes "CNET is reporting that after only two years, PalmOne is spending $30 million dollars to become "Palm" again. From the article: "PalmOne, which makes handhelds bearing the same name, plans to change its name to Palm later this year, the company said Tuesday. At that time, its product line, which currently includes the LifeDrive, Treo, Tungsten and Zire devices, will be branded under the Palm name..." Some will remember that Palm split into two companies, Pa1mOne and Palmsource (which made the Palm OS). According to the article, "...At the time the two companies created a third company, called Palm Trademark Holding, of which PalmSource held a 55 percent stake. That stake will now be transferred to PalmOne for $30 million, the companies said.'" As well, at a recent show Dave Nagel gave notice that Linux is PalmSource's platform for the future.

Comments

I will never buy PalmOS device again

[Anonymous Coward]

To waste XScale processor for emulating 68k at pathetic speed.

Such a waste of time...

[FF3451]

I just can't help but find it amusing how much time and money companies spend changing their names, to so often change the back again afterwards.

The new names are often awful, as well as the justification for changing them, like when the Post Office here in the UK announced they were to change their name to "Consignia" to enable them "to better serve the needs of customers". So many people went "WTF?" that they scrapped the plan, but not before they'd already wasted loads of money on it.

Re:viable and sensible

[argent]

PalmOS isn't really an operating system, it's more like a window system, toolkit, and standard library. All that stuff already runs on top of a third party embedded, real-time kernel.

PalmOS is a lot like the original Mac OS, with the difference that instead of trying to cram a minimal OS under the GUI and then crank it up, they licensed the OS from someone else. The problem is their license kept them from being able to take advantage of that underlying OS properly.

I suppose that slipping Linux in underneath is reasonable, though Linux does raise some interesting licensing issues for kernel extensions. On the other hand, I don't expect Palm to voluntarily release kernel source the way Apple has... Palm's always seemed a lot more secretive than Apple (and that takes some doing), so perhaps it's best that they're using a kernel that obligates them to do so.

Why Palm is failing

[duffer_01]

I think it is farily straightforward why Palm is failing.
It is primarily due to the lack of development tools available. The main ones (I know of) are Metrowerks Codewarrior which is a fairly hard to use development environment and AppForge MobileVB which allows you to develop in VB but port to PocketPC and Symbian. I mean sure there is Java but come on, we all know that is unrealistic on these devices. None of these tools make people want to stick with that device.
Don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of the Treo 650 and would love to see Palm succeed because nothing would be worse than if MS had another monopoly.
I just think they need enterprise business to succeed and they are not going to get this until they have the ease of use development environment for the Palm.

Couldn't care less about Linux

[joenobody]

I traded mail with David Nagel about two months ago when he first talked about Linux being important to them. I asked why the tools for developing Palm OS apps on Linux were so neglected by them -- the devs for pilot-link (great guys) could only support what they happened to own because they had no technical documentation, no code from either Palm company, not even anyone they could ask questions of occasionally.

Nagel's response was that they're thinking about porting their Eclipse toolkit to Linux. No one wants or cares about it.

Years ago Palm employed and then fired authors of open source tools. They've got a terminal case of NIH and don't understand that they're dying because they don't do enough to make it easy to develop for Palm OS. It doesn't matter what the handhelds run if they don't have third-party developers, and they shit from a great height on the Linux alpha geeks who could be incredibly valuable.

Re:Isn't that what it's SUPPOSED to do?

[rho]

A friend of mine got the folding Palm keyboard and he took that and his IIIxe to Chiapas for an archeological dig. He used it to input data and take notes, rather than bring a big, heavy laptop.

For all its limitations, you could still take the Palm 3.5 OS, put it in a box with a screen and have a real computer. Nothing blazingly fast, but it would do word processing, spreadsheet, database type work well enough. Email, even.

I agree with you that people who want the Palm to be a desktop replacement are usually misguided, but the Palm is a very robust and quite powerful platform.

Oh let's see....

[furry_marmot]

...where to start. Why does Palm have so much trouble?

Self-proclaimed genius works on stylus UI for Psion (IIRC), decides to take it further, comes up with one of the few interfaces would-be PDA makers hadn't thought of and it actually takes off -- though slowly at first.

Genius forms a company with a bunch of bitter ex-Apple folks.

PalmPilot starts to take off and Palm immediately make plans for the Nth generation of the OS, which will work on handhelds, phones, game consoles, etc. They also make plans to split the company into a hardware and OS division so there will be no conflicts like Apple had when Palm takes on Microsoft and kicks their butt. They talk about this for years.

The split is a disaster. They didn't figure out how groups would work together and left lots of unanswered questions -- and then rushed the split. The result? Two half-staffed divisions with no plan for how to work together.

Carl Yankowski is hired, who tells all of Palm to stick it 'cause he's here to tell y'all that Bluetooth is the future. A year is wasted trying to a) figure out how to cram Bluetooth into a Palm without sucking its batteries dry, b) trying to figure out the protocols, c) trying to figure out something useful to do with a Bluetooth-enabled Palm. The result? Carl is fired (Oh I'm sorry. He resigned. And all that cheering when the door hit his huge butt? Um...that was cheering.)

The two divisions are re-merged, with plans to split them again at some future date. Jobs are duplicated, jobs are lost. Nothing is gained.

The relatively inexperienced guy who runs the supply chain operations, after years of pressure from marketing over parts shortages, finally works out a contract so that Palm will have more Palm V's in the next couple of years than you can shake a stick at. I don't know how it got approved, but someone finally worked out that the Palm V was supposed to be end-of-lifed in six months and they needed to clear out the channel for the new devices. This is bad.

In Europe, in March (IIRC), Palm announces the release of the next-gen Palm. People say "Wow, that sounds good, so I'll put off my purchase of a Palm V until the new one comes out." Later marketing claims no one told them that the project was delayed until at least June (it actually turned out to be September). The channel is stuffed with Palm V's -- with tons more on the way -- and no one's buying them. The new Palm isn't ready, so no one's buying them either. Palm's revenue dries up faster than an earthworm on a sunny day.

The billion dollars or so that came from its IPO was partially committed to all those Palm V's no one wanted. But there was also some kind of fallout from the land deal for the new World HQ, that was made worse by ever-abusive parent company, 3Com, raping Palm yet again to pay for its own lost business. Palm loses something like $800M in six months.

First round of layoffs are announced. People panic. Next two rounds of layoffs are not announced. But someone reserves every conference room in the Outlook calendar, so it's kind of a tipoff.

All those friends of friends who were hired when everyone thought they were going to get rich from the IPO fall into two camps: A) Friends in high places are still there to protect them, B) first to go. Where Camp A people are found, so are scapegoats.

Lunatic VP of engineering cheerfully announces that the only way to continue on towards greatness is by adopting parallel development. To wit, every engineer is now on 5 projects. Project A on Monday, Project B on Tuesday, etc. Completion dates are not changed.

Stock options are repeatedly given as incentives. Let's say options at $10 are granted on Monday. By Wednesday, when they can be distributed, the stock is down to $9.50. This happens repeatedly.

A calendar company is bought, not used, its people fired. A web portal company is bought, not used, its people fired. A French software company is bought and the engineers are actually vit

Re:Oh let's see....

[steveha]

You clearly have insider perspective I do not (cannot) have. But I still want to argue a couple of points.

Jeff Hawkins deserves most of the credit for Palm's early success. He really did figure out exactly what customers wanted in a PDA, where no one else had successfully figured it out before. He specified that the first Palm must: fit in a pocket; syncronize seamlessly with a host PC; use Graffiti instead of whole-word writing recognition; and have at least one model that cost $300 or less.

The first Palm devices were an amazing home run. Long battery life with 2 AAA cells. Simple software that really did Just Work. Replaceable/upgradable memory cards, so you could buy a $300 Palm and later upgrade it to the same amount of memory as the $500 one. Infrared "beaming" of data, including the cool feature of "here is my business card" (just press and hold the "contacts" hard key).

So Jeff Hawkins and a few others split off to make Handspring. You dismiss the Visor as "-- a Palm Pilot knock-off." Actually it was another home run. The first Palm PDA to use USB for HotSync. Much faster processor (Palms at the time were 8 MHz, the Visor was 16 MHz, and it wasn't that long before they shipped Visors with 33 MHz). Springboard was also a really cool slot; you could take a stock Visor and slot in an MP3 player, a flash card reader, etc. Maybe it was a "fat, ugly" add-on card standard, but it had some cool features. (For example, it used the same connector as a PCMCIA card, to make it cheaper to make in small quantities; and Handspring paid for the equipment to make the plastic shells for the cards and sold the shells cheaply. Basically the cost of entry for Springboard was as low as Handspring could manage.) I was happy that I could use a Visor keyboard and a Visor Springboard modem at the same time; all Palm modems at the time used the same connector that the keyboard needed to use.

I always wished someone would make a Springboard card that would turn a Visor into an autoranging voltage tester, but that never happened, sigh.

After the Visor, though, I waited for the next cool thing from Handspring and it never came. The color Visor was thick and heavy, and I never bought one. The Visor Edge was thin, but somehow cheap-feeling and never felt right in my hand. The Treo PDA with a built-in keyboard wasn't great either; I bought one but somehow kept using my Visor.

While you were chronicling the list of management mistakes, you missed a big one at Handspring: they "pulled an Osborne". Donna Dubinsky announced that PDAs were dead, that the Treo line was the future and there would be no new development of the Visor line. The problem was that she announced this at a time where Treos weren't the bread-and-butter of Handspring yet, and the Visor was still selling. Well, not for long, not after that. All the small companies that offered Springboard accessories pulled the plug, and just like that the Visor sales plummeted.

Jeff Hawkins probably is a genius, but he hasn't done much lately. Maybe it's too late anyway--it's now pretty clear what customers want in a PDA and execution is probably more important than genius.

Still, it would be cool if Jeff Hawkins started up a new company that made a new PDA that ran Linux. He could possibly hit a home run a third time.

steveha

I have this sick feeling

[PMuse]

that the Palm - PalmOne - Palmsource - Palm Trademark Holding Corp. saga isn't all that different from the first few chapters of the Santa Cruz Operation - Caldera - SCO story, lo these many years ago. I guess I'll just have to RAFO.