And that would be really sad.

Reminds me of an OS of the late nineties… BeOS, whose Intellectual Property was ironically bought by a certain company called… Palm

The history of innovative products are littered with losers, just ask Sony about the Betamax. Disappointing as it may be, Palm may well only be viable as a patent stable; to be consigned to history as an also ran.

“Palm quickly disowned such statements, but the damage was done, lofty, out-of-reach expectations were set.”

There is a lot of old information being re-circulated as well as a self-reinforcing loop that the race has already been won, to the contrary, it’s just beginning and that’s without considering the global market.

Consider for Palm:
- 4G, mobile broadband (end of year 2010?)
- WebOS 1.4
- meaningful game development by EA, Gameloft and others
- actual sales\training support initiative for Verizon
All of the above will take a few months to gain traction and are certainly not reflected in the Feb 2010 quarter.

Certainly cash flow and debt are serious issues but we are only at the nine month release mark. Marketing to date has been mishandled but bottomline is they have a good product. Three key people have a track record of success: Rubinstein (Apple), McNamee (T. Rowe Price Science & Tech. fund, private equity investor) and Bono (U2).

To consider:
* http://g4tv.com/attackoftheshow/gadgetpr0n/70184/Palm-Pre-Plus-Review.html
* http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20100305/gdc-10-palms-mobile-gaming-push/?reflink=ATD_yahoo_ticker

Marketing. Strategy. Consumer awareness of brand.

Palm missed those things, not being superior as a device.

Hands down, the webOS and the Palm Pre is the best one out there.

Betamax was out against VHS at the same time as laser disk. Laser disk was the best technology and basically DVD 10 years before DVD came out. Betamax was a better format that VHS.

VHS won. It won on these principles: Marketing. Strategy. Consumer awareness of brand. Not quality.

I had Palm for 12 years and watched as the hardware of this extremely handy tool became less and less reliable. Still, Palm’s operating system is still so simple for a cripto-Luddite like me. What Iphone 3G doesn’t have are the simplest tools of the Palm OS from 10 years ago. e.g. Palm Memos can be written or pasted quickly on your laptop, then downloaded into Palm. Not only can iTunrs not support the transfer of my 1800 + Palm memos, it does not even have a means for me to enter new “Notes” from my laptop via iTunes. Everything has to be done via the clunky “typing” on the actual iPhone. Ditto, entering contacts. Palm Contacts transfer to iPhone can be done, but only through a complicated system using Outlook( from Microsoft, a company Steve Jobs presumably hates more than he hates Palm)

You would think with the SS Palm half sunk, that Steve would be welcoming old Palm users onto his ship. Instead, he won’t even allow an App to correct these problems

I was at a meeting not long ago with some 100 others and when I pulled my Palm M500 out there was some who pointed it out. Amazingly, more than a few opened their cases and likewise pulled out their Palm PDA (admittedly newer models) and said they still maintain them as the smartphones are not as convenient to use and have issues crashing with a loss of data. It seems to be more common with the MS OS than the RIM. However, they hid the fact as it was no longer cool to pull out the PDA. Maybe Palm should reintroduce a decent PDA and make it cool again and let their users come out of the closet.