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The End of PalmOS?
SLT writes "According to Engadget, PalmSource was purchased by Access, a Japanese cell phone software company known for their NetFront browser. What does this mean for the future of Palm?" More coverage at LinuxDevices and Reuters. From the Reuters article: "Japanese software developer Access Co. said on Friday it would make U.S. software developer PalmSource Inc. wholly owned in a 34.4 billion yen ($311.3 million) cash deal to strengthen its development of software for handheld devices. Access will pay cash to shareholders of PalmSource, which will be later absorbed by Access' U.S. unit Apollo Merger Sub Inc., Access said in a statement."
Hardly. It'll just be in more devices. And the Palm handheld will just morf. OTOH, I think we may see $20 organizers or cheaper given away with other products. Kind of the way MP3 players are being given away these days.
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
it's just my .02, but...
The end may be a bit of hyperbole, although PalmSource has made some historical blunders which contributed to its demise (and I love thier devices, and have had them since the very beginning):
1.) Basically did not update the core OS between 1997 and 2004. Version 5.x is bascially 3.x with color and a network stack shimmed in. A lot changed over those seven years, and the OS did not evolve as well as it could have. They rested on thier laurels, much like Apple did during the Scully era at Apple, releasing new models every 8 months but not really improving the core operation.
2.) They released the big new version (6.0.) in late 2003, and no devices were ever released with it. This was a huge mistake, and points to poor partnerships (ISV and others) and planning. No other company in history has released an PDA OS that was never implemented on a retail device.
3.) They released version 6.1 late last year, and again, nearly a year later, there are no devices running it. Again, big problem.
Too bad the mutual admiration society that exists in Palm senior mangement was blind to their basic business folly.
Without Palm, the handheld-market would be much better off.
Compare a Palm to a Sharp Zaurus, and you will be disgusted to even touch the Palm again.
Web Server for Palm OS
...how much do they want for it? I'm sure that a lot of people would be willing to pay for BeOS to be open sourced. I would pay $200 for the BeOS code to be released under a BSD license. How many more people do they need to pay the same amount before it becomes worth their while, financially speaking? I doubt they actually wanted BeOS when they bought PalmSource, after all.
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Glad to have been of assistance.
I had read somewhere that the PalmOS might move to a Linux base. That would be great since I'm currently working on some Linux-based Qt GUI projects that run on the Sharp Zaurus. If I could port these over to a Tungsten so much the better for getting my sales force to adopt it!
Palm had such a nice OS. It was such a friendly, crisp, easy interface...so much better than the attempts to scale shoehorn in the Windows desktop that WinCE was pursuing.
I still love my Sony Clie...320x320 screen, good battery life, nice UI. (On the other hand...the 4k memo limit and even smaller clipboard ALWAYS seemed gratuitous to me.)
Personally I thought the writing was on the wall once they had to switch to Graffiti 2...I've only dabbled with it, but for people accustomed to Graffiti (an idea it took me a while to warm to) it's jarring. And tht Xerox "unistrokes patent" lawsuit was SUCH CRAP...Graffiti is so much better than those stupid squiggles that didn't even look like any human alphabet.
Feh. Hopefully when its time to upgrade I can find some kind of Palm work alike. And hopefully whatever I switch to can import Palm data; I love that I have my schedule going back to 1997 riding around on my hip, not to mention assorted memos, contacts, and todos...
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BeOS was bought for chump change, Silicon Valley-wise. $11M, IIRC, after how many hundreds of millions were invested in it? Golden parachute for Gasse, and that's about it.
I guess they decided to give up fighting with outdated technology against Opera, and instead went to diversify their software offerings to survive the onslaught of better mobile browsers.
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I maintain that Palm has never really done a good job at much of anything and that their pinnacle was the release of the Palm V.
... and then they found out that all Treos have a shielding problem that cause them to start buzzing!
Microsoft's inability to compete with a mobile OS that worked well on low-spec hardware, and the WinCE hardware vendors' inability to make good portable hardware really was the factor that kept Palm alive so long.
Palm's ability to release new versions with differerent amounts of ram or different case colors can hardly be considered as innovative.
Palm's inabliity to bundle wireless sooner is inexcusable.
Palm's purchase (back) of Handspring for the Treo 600 just proved they didn't have a good new product.
The fact that Palm has never released a real successor to the Tungsten T|3 is painful to all longtime faithful Palm power users.
The PalmOS6 fiasco... It must have been even worse than I could imagine because even Palm didn't want it.
The LifeDrive. Never has a machine with a 416mhz cpu seemed so slow! Hey, let's make all I/O go through a hard drive and let's not include an effective disk cache! I'm sure people won't mind waiting 3 minutes to reset, and I'm sure our power users won't mind STARING AT A FRIGGING BLANK SCREEN FOR 40 SECONDS WHILE THEY TRY TO SWITCH APPS! It makes me feel like an idiot for having purchased your product every time I switch apps.
Palm, I was your best advocate, and I don't know how you could have disappointed me more.
Let's hope that someone else can succeed where you failed.
I took some of my proceeds and decided to invest in the hand that fed me, so to speak. I bought 200 shares each of Palm (PALM) and Handspring (HAND). Shortly after I bought, Palm decided to do a reverse 20:1 split to bolster their share price and buy Handspring. My 200 Palm shares became just 10, and after they bought Handspring that left me with 15 Palm shares and a fractional share in cash, which I was paid about $10 for.
Palm then split to PalmOne (PLSO) and PalmSource (PSRC) and my 23 PALM shares turned into 8 PLMO shares. Again, I received some fractional share payout. Today I hold exactly 8 shares of Palm, Inc (again PALM) that I won't sell because I don't want to take the $15 or $20 eTrade comission hit.
I'm only satisfied in the fact that I knew going into this that it was a risky investment and only played with money that I didn't mind losing. If there's a moral to this story, maybe it's that Palm may yet stage a comeback, but this is not a good company to invest in.
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A coworker asked Microsoft about the rumors. Microsoft confirmed them. Whether Microsoft was telling the truth or not remains to be seen, but it's looking pretty likely. I'm not at all happy about this... I much prefer Palm OS.
I worked at Palm+PalmSource until 2004, and the parent is dead on, with one unfortunate exception:
I believe the company has shrunk back down to a small enough size that they've attritioned off the morons acquired at the turn of the century
Unfortunately, some of the Be, Inc. engineering team are still there. Those folks never had any experience shipping a successful product, and got bogged down building an intellectually interesting product that no one wanted. Their preoccupation with vindicating BeOS's utter failure only served to make it fail yet again (witness the number of retail sales of Palm OS 6 -- zero).
It's a sad story that's repeated often in Silicon Valley: a bunch of really smart people working hard building the wrong things.