Goodbye PalmOne, Hello Palm, Goodbye Dave
Posted by Yardena Arar | Tuesday, May 24, 2005 9:23 AM PT
Lots of news at the
PalmSource Mobile Summit & DevCon here in San Jose, even before this morning's keynotes (I'm listening to PalmOne CEO Ed Colligan even as I write).
First, the Palm brand name is reverting to PalmOne, the company that makes Palm hardware--and PalmOne is going to change its name to Palm, Inc. as soon as possible. PalmOne, which co-owned the brand with PalmSource, announced in a news release that it has paid PalmSource $30 million for its stake in the company that owns the Palm trademark.
Since people never stopped calling the devices Palms, this makes a lot of sense--although what the Palm OS, which PalmSource develops and licenses, will be called remains to be seen. The
agreement between the two companies allows for a four-year transition period during which PalmSource and its licensees will be granted "certain rights" to the brand, which I take to mean that the OS will still be called Palm for a while.
Negotiating this agreement may have been one of the last major acts of PalmSource president and CEO David Nagel: In a PalmSource news release dated yesterday, the company announced that Nagel had resigned the day before. While PalmSource looks for a permanent replacement, Patrick McVeigh--the company's senior vice president in charge of worldwide licensing--will serve as interim CEO.
Despite the announcement, Nagel stepped up to the podium to deliver his scheduled keynote at PalmSource, making only oblique references to his announced departure. "This has already been a sort of surprising developer conference--no, I don't mean
that," he said. "We had originally planned a much smaller event." The conference for developers of mobile apps for Palms was expected to draw 500 attendees; instead, more than 1000 have registered.
However PalmOne's Colligan had some nice words to say about Nagel as he strode to the podium. "He's one of the great high-integrity guys in this business," Colligan said, thanking Nagel for also helping negotiate an extension through 2009 of PalmOne's license to the Palm OS.
Stay tuned for more from the PalmSource Mobile Summit & DevCon.
The change in naming and branding is so typical and expected when a company is failing and searching for new methods to reinvent itself while schlepping the same old products.
Why aren't they announcing any improvements in devices and software? It is because there aren't any to speak of and all efforts are now directed at sales.
My Treo still has software issues and here are these pinheads blathering on about how much they like each other and what they are going to name the company, cake anyone?
Plam and its os are great products. I own every single palm produced and each one offers better services than the one before it. This is not just a PR stunt. Check out plams new product called the Life Drive. The hardware is great which was developed by palmone. But Plam Source developed the os that allows the hardware todo the things that it does, without it the hardware would be useless. The combo of these two compaines is simply great.
I still call them Palm Pilots! It still feels wrong to talk about one as "my Palm".