When asked about losing his fortune soccer legend George Best is quoted as replying "I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered". I'd be asking similar question of a company called Palm Inc. right now - only I don't think the answer would be anywhere near as satisfying. Palm's recent results were below market expectations and according to reports they are in the red and burning through their last $500m at the bank.
Back in 1996 Palm introduced a revolutionary low cost PDA device - the Palm Pilot - and it sold like hotcakes. Palm OS was a revelation with its simple and intuitive gui and grafitti was a pretty good stab at handwriting recognition too. The Palm Pilots influence can still be seen in devices like the iPhone today (large screen, no physical keyboard, few physical buttons, downloadable applications, pc syncing, etc). In fact when you think about it the only real difference between the Palm OS and iPhone OS is the replacement of the stylus with multitouch.
Then things started to go wrong for Palm:
- The brains trust left, came back and then and left again.
- The Treo capitulated and added keyboards, aping Blackberry's success, instead of building on the Palm Pilots keyboardless form factor.
- Palm OS stagnated whilst a new Linux based OS churned in development hell. Palm even commited herecy and lisensced Windows Mobile on some of their devices
- The ill-conceived Foleo debacle
The real irony here is that after all the issues related to the stagnation of Palm OS is that they really do seem to have come up with a great successor in WebOS. I might have even been tempted by the Palm Pre it it had been sold here in Australia. I for one hope that Palm can survive and prosper but that seems an unlikely outcome. The best I think we can hope for is that one of the big handset manufacturers becomes disillusioned with Android and buys the company for its IP so that WebOS can live on.
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