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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.
Palm(One|Whatever) seem to be more like Apple before the "Second Coming of Jobs": lacking direction, floundering around trying to bring a new OS to market to replace their increasingly outdated current version, full of infighting and confusion.
I hope they can sort themselves out, because I really like the PalmOS platform.
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/).
Completely correct analogy. They're caught up in dozens of pointless rewrites of everything, nothing actually gets accomplished, the hardware and software are just getting more complex without actually improving, and they're losing sight of the core simplicity and "it just works" aspect that made them so successful in the first place.
Microsoft, to their credit, soldiers on, getting slowly better, version after version, as they always do. Palm had a huge lead, and squandered it on stupid stuff like splitting up into different companies and trying to sell the OS to clone manufacturers (sound familiar?).
I HOPE and PRAY that the embracing of linux on Palm will have the same effect that embracing UNIX had on Apple -- finally building in the robust multitasking and hardware management that have long been needed while letting more resources be spent on the actual user side of things
I quake in terror for the day when i have to use a Pocket PC device daily -- a horribly mangled UI designed for a regular computer and just shrink-rayed down to an unusable abbreviation of an interface. *shiver*
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
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.
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