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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.
In the bad old days of the dotcom boom, Palm Pilots were the hottest executive PDA piece of flair out there. And all it really did was manage contacts.
Technology has really made a lot of progress since then and that old Dragonball chip looks like a Hyundai when compared to an XScale Ferrari. The processors can handle much more than the simple PalmOS requests, and in some respects this is a good thing. It means that the underlying OS is relatively light and lots of power can be used to run apps. Unfortunately, that also is a limitation of the OS.
Embedded Linux provides a full operating system with a plethora of drivers and applications. It uses the capabilities of the chipset without being too heavy. It is definitely the way to go.
And actually not just Linux, but any general-purpose embedded OS is the way to go. You'd obviously want something that had guaranteed real-time performance as well as a well-done threading model. The API would need to be very well understood too. This brings up a whole slew of embedded operating systems. It also leaves out PalmOS.
So Palm is now the company formerly known as the company formerly known as... Palm?
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.
PalmOS is like the Apple of the business. It may not be the cheapest (but often is). It may not be in the lead marketshare-wise (but currently is). But the interface is hella streamlined, and it Just Works (tm). Besides that, it's not too bad to code for, and it's got a firm old of the hardware it's on.
Even so, it wouldn't be all that bad to port PalmOS to the XScale chip, or any other archetecture. I'd be interested in seeing it run on x86 natively (emulators already exist).
I guess you're one of the few that actually like Windows CE or Windows Embedded or whatever they're calling it today; an existing system ported onto a system with ten times the restricted ram, and even more so when you speak of CPU power and battery power. Why not let PalmOS, the operating system designed to fit embedded PDA systems, do the job it was created to do?
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Previous application compatibility: Palm OS Cobalt (6.x), which is being waited for with bated breath in the handheld industry, is being built as a combination of Linux technology gained through CMS (a China-based mobile company) which palmsource purchased last year, and the BeOS which Palm purchased when still a combined company (IIRC). Although PalmOne (now Palm) switching to Linux _by themselves_ may sound a great idea at first, there could not be any backwards compatibility (licensing), and there would therefore be no apps - and apps are the reason p1 remains in the game.
There are no Cobalt devices. When PalmWhatever kept pushing out more iterations of the PalmOS 5 platform, it became pretty obvious that the BeOS curse was alive and well and Cobalt was never going to show up.
Linux, though? OK, it's not as badly adapted to handhelds as Windows, since the UNIX API doesn't have nearly as much desktop-nature built into it, but... sheesh.
Unfortunately the latest OS5.4 Palms (Tungsten 5 and Treo 650) are not branded under the JustWorks(tm) trademarks. Crashes with wired error messages are very common. Substantial bugs (such as the global find function that does not work) are persistent and not resolved by PalmOne. Daily work with my new Tungsten T5 with 416 MHz XScale Processor is slower then with my 5 year old PalmV (e.g. opening up a split screen in DateBK5 takes 50 seconds - 0.5s on my old PalmV), due to the inefficient handling of the data management between flash and ram. The flash memory has 512 byte minimal cluster size. This increased the DB sizes substantially and did not help to make the slow flash access faster... There is a patch out there for some Treo650. The Tungsten T5 is still waiting for the second patch. The first patch improved the TT5 from unworkable to buggy! Hope there *will* be a second patch. Hope is all we can do... Together with me there are many other ex-loyal Palm follower that are severly disappointed about the latest models and the way Palm is not dealing with it (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tungsten-t5/).
In case anybody is wondering what the parent talks about.
PalmSource acquired the rights for BeOS and he's right, they didn't really do anything with it, but at the same time people who wanted to do anything with it had the problem that they couldn't get the rights needed.
P.S.: Why BeOS should be the polar opposite of Linux is beyond me.
Although PalmOne (now Palm) switching to Linux _by themselves_ may sound a great idea at first, there could not be any backwards compatibility (licensing), and there would therefore be no apps - and apps are the reason p1 remains in the game.
Quite to the contrary: PalmOS on Linux will be highly backwards compatible with existing Palm applications according to Palm, probably more so than than Cobalt would have been. That's one of the big attractions of doing this.
PalmOS started out as Palm libraries on top of a third party kernel. With PalmOS 5, they added a 68k emulator into the mix. With that history, moving to a different kernel while preserving backwards compatibility should not be all that hard.
BeOS. Which Palmsource bought, refused to licence even to people who had pre-existing reseller licences, and never used in (any|a major) way in a product, and not at all in a shipping product.
That sounds more like my experience with the Pocket PC. So long as you use the Palm software, which all works well together, it's been absolutely reliable for me since 1999. I've gone through 3 Palms and 2 Pocket PCs, and the only time I've lost data has been on the Pocket PC. Even when my Visor was sat apon by a less than watchful 17 year old, I was able to replace it, sync, and EVERYTHING came back, applications and all. I was never able to perform a complete recovery from a backup on a Pocket PC even on the same handheld (after an embarassing data loss when Microsoft Pocket Streets crashed while I was trying to give someone directions).
It's a pity Palm lost the plot. The whole handheld market has turned very strange, with Microsoft crippling the Pocket PC to make it more like the Palm, and Palm trying to cram so much into the Palm to compete with the Pocket PC on features. The last of the 68000-based Clies, Sony's Palm-OS devices, ended up being the best of the lot.
I have no idea what handheld I'll get when my SJ22 breaks. I can't see anything in the current lot on EITHER platform that really attracts me, but I suppose it'll be a Tungsten or a Zire. There's no way I'm going to trust a Pocket PC again.
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.
Yeah and I bet the tiny screen and lack of real keyboard are real convenient, too.
Palms are meant as extensions to a real computer, not a real computer replacement. People who constantly try to put ten pounds of shit in a one-pound bag are rather amusing, because it's usually those same people who give up after a while, claiming that the Palm platform sucks balls because it can't replace their computer.
If it works for you, great, but you are one of the very small minority who can function in such a restrictive environment. And hell, I'm an embedded systems designer, I know all about restrictive environments. :-)
Palms are meant as extensions to a real computer, not a real computer replacement.
Palms are "a real computer". They're not "a desktop computer", but then a desktop OS makes a crappy server OS (hey, Microsoft, I'm talking to YOU here) and a mainframe would be out of place on the desktop (though IBM's first personal computer emulated the IBM 360 mainframe... and almost nobody's ever heard of it). There's lots of "real computers", just like there's lots of "real vehicles" from a pushbike to a space shuttle.
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.
Adventure City Tours
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.
Way back when I worked at Novell, they spent millions trying to change their image as they struggled in the market playce. At first they had a really cool shark's tooth trademark. Then the decided to change it to a bunch of balls connected by lines in the shape of an N (it was extremely ugly). Then they changed it to Novell(R). Our motto back then was "No teeth, no balls, just plain Novell."
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.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
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
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.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)