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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.
...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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.