Palm and PalmSource...Together Again?

This is just a rumor at this point, but there's scuttlebutt that smartphone and PDA manufacturer Palm (formerly PalmOne) may acquire PalmSource, the creator of the Palm OS. If that happens, it would deja vu all over again, since the two outfits were orignally one big happy company.

It might also make a lot of sense. PalmSource has never quite lived up to its potential as an independent provider of system software to hardware manufacturers. Sure, there have been lots of Palm-based products, some of them really interesting...but most of the ones that are clear-cut successes have come from Palm. (The device section on PalmSource's Web site still spotlights Tapwave's Zodiac, even though Tapwave has folded.)

When I've talked with PalmSource execs, they've stressed that they treat Palm-the-hardware-company just the same as PalmSource's other customers. That's what you'd want to hear if you were a manufacturer who competed directly with Palm's products. But increasingly, other licensees of the Palm OS seem to be addressing niches, such as GPS and education, rather than taking on the Zire or the Treo or Palm's other products.

Back in the original, one-Palm era, Palm products benefited from an Apple-like integration of software and hardware design. I don't think it's a coincidence that those devices were as rock-solid as any computing products I've ever used.

My Treo 650, by contrast, is sort of like a tiny Windows PC: It's amazingly versatile but also quirky and prone to crashes. (At the moment, there's an entry in my address book that, when I click on it, consistently causes the Treo to spontaneously reboot. That's a truly impressive feat of flakiness.)

I'm not sure whether you can blame problems like that on the fact that Palm and PalmSource are separate companies; it also has a lot to do with the fact that a Treo is a vastly more complex, powerful little machine than something like the old Palm III. Still, as a fan of the Treo platform, I'd be happiest if I knew that the OS people worked as closely as they possibly could with the device designers. That would be a lot more likely to happen if the two halves of the old Palm were stitched back together.

If Palm and PalmSource do reunite into one company called Palm, the original separation--which took years to implement and which managed to confuse even Palm loyalists--will surely rank as one of the biggest wastes of effort and money in tech history...