Palm: when does competitor become collaborator?

[Texrat]

...when the competitor is purchased, of course:

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Palm Inc. has reportedly hired an investment banker to help the wireless-device maker explore a potential sale.
The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Palm is working with Morgan Stanley to evaluate its options, citing "people familiar with the matter." Possibilities could include a sale to Finnish mobile giant Nokia Corp. or a private-equity firm

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/palm-said-hire-banker-explore/story.aspx?guid=%7BD06A411B%2D6CAA%2D4007%2DBDE9%2 DC1B96A0F311D%7D&siteid=yhoo&dist=yhoo

[Milhouse]

What does Palm bring to Nokia? A customer base yes, which is something Nokia seem to be losing right now in North America. But does it bring any worthwhile technology to Nokia? I can't think of anything that Nokia doesn't have already.

Palm failed miserably to advance their OS platform over the last 3 to 4 years, suggesting there are major problems. They eventually sold the OS to Access over a year ago who are still some way from developing a Linux version, and in fact Palm are also a WinCE licencee (will Nokia be interested in this part of their business - I hope not!) Nokia already has a very usable Linux mobile platform - maybe Maemo can be ported to Palm devices... :)

Perhaps the Palm PDA experience and knowledge within Palm could be useful to Nokia, but I really wouldn't value Palm at anything north of $250m (I've seen estimates of $1.3b!) - IMHO the company has way too much unwanted baggage to justify a higher price.

[Texrat]

Customer base is the only thing that comes to mind, unless Palm has some software/tech usage agreements in place that could prove beneficial...

FYI, Nokia elected to use WinCE for the 330 GPS device, which I found shocking.

[Milhouse]

I'm sure Nokia could better use the money they would need to blow on Palm by investing it in better products with better marketing - why waste that money on a company with yet another platform (one requiring massive investment) and also with a diminishing market (it's getting hammered by Symbian and WinCE on a global level, Palm is such a niche player and only in North America - not really where a global company such as Nokia should be headed).

Think how good Maemo could become if Nokia were to invest several hundred million dollars in the platform rather than invest (is that even the right word?!) in Palm... At the end of the day, I just can't see why Nokia would be interested in Palm as the company is well past it's sell by date. Symbian, Linux and WinCE are the future on mobile devices - not Palm OS.

[Texrat]

I'm sure you're right, Mil, and I'm not suggesting the speculation was spot-on. But Nokia does have huge cash reserves and if the higher-ups see any benefit at all to be gained, even if its just consumer perception, I wouldn't put it past them to gobble Palm up.

[Milhouse]

FYI, Nokia elected to use WinCE for the 330 GPS device, which I found shocking.

Yes that is shocking - is the 330 a Nokia device or designed/manufactured by a third party? Maybe it's such a low volume product it wasn't worth Nokia investing the engineering effort to put Symbian or Linux on the 330 when WinCE software and drivers are available off the shelf.

Hopefully it's not the thin end of the wedge! :)

[Texrat]

I don't have enough info on the 330 offhand, just what I got off engadget a while back. :D

I'm betting it was acquired though.

[Milhouse]

I'm sure you're right, Mil, and I'm not suggesting the speculation was spot-on. But Nokia does have huge cash reserves and if the higher-ups see any benefit at all to be gained, even if its just consumer perception, I wouldn't put it past them to gobble Palm up.

Don't worry I'm not suggesting this is your idea :) - it's been reported several times in the last few weeks that Nokia may be interested in buying Palm. I just find it totally bizarre that Nokia would be interested - if they've the money to spend, surely there are better ways to spend it.

My concern is that Palm will be over priced and the long term cost to Nokia will be considerable as Nokia takes on the burden of support, staff and having to progress the Palm platform into the 21st century. Then again the new slimmed down Nokia of recent weeks could possibly accomodate Palm quite easily.

I just wish Nokia would spend the money on the Maemo platform! :)

[badger]

The 330 was a short term fix for a gap in the market... with the purchase of gate 5 and the Smart2go product set Nokia now need to have a presence and gain awareness from the mass market around their skills in the GPS market place. Future devices will use the Smart2go and possibly the symbian platform.

On a side note: I have heard that Palm has a Linux accessory waiting in the wings... think n800 with a qwerty... Not sure what distro. Do you think Nokia will licence Maemo? it would make sense and also could explain some of the talks of Nokia purchasing Palm. (ie the deal on the horizan is a maemo partnership not the sale of palm)

[Milhouse]

I can't possibly imagine how unhappy Access Japan would be if such an alliance came to pass! :) Access would be left with the Access Linux Platform but no devices to put it on unless they can find a willing manufacturer in China (always a possibility). But with all the open source alternatives, why would any manufacturer want to licence a closed source OS from Access... crikey that would be funny if it happened!!

A Palm/Nokia/Maemo partnership could very well be benefitial for Maemo by getting Maemo on more devices along with hopefully more developers, assuming of course that the existing owners and developers aren't alienated by the new change of platform. However if this were to happen, Nokia would need to get the hardware abstraction side of things sorted out pretty quickly in Maemo - I'm sure we can all do without multiple incompatible versions of the OS each running on a slightly different but largely similar hardware base...

Palm owners and developers do seem pretty dedicated judging by how long they have been waiting patiently for Cobalt (and now Access Linux Platform) to arrive, which seems like for ages. However Palm changing it's platform direction yet again may be one change of direction too far - perhaps the involvement of Nokia could sweeten the pill considerably (i.e. give Palm some credibility at long last).

A partnership centered on Maemo I'd like to see! :)

[lavo]

Do Palm or Access still hold the IP rights to Be Inc.? That may be of interest to Nokia, even though Palm did nothing with it :-(

[Milhouse]

Actually, if Nokia did buy Palm the only upside would be to p!ss off Mike Cane - he still haunts the Palm Info Center (http://www.palminfocenter.com/) web site. Luckily the Nokia Internet Tablets weren't to his liking - too sophisticated. ;)

[Milhouse]

I believe Palm may own the rights to what remains of Be Inc., but Palm sold the rights for the Palm OS to Access only for Palm to recently licence it back again (at least, Palm now have a generous licence for Garnet aka v5 Palm OS which is pretty much the same version they sold to Access).

Access are now busy trying to develop a modern version of Palm OS which uses Linux with a Palm compatability layer called Access Linux Platform (ALP). I guess the plan is/was for Access to licence ALP back to Palm at some stage in the future.

Here's a link (http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9250/more-access-linux-platform-photos-from-3gsm/) to an article on Palm Info Center with photos of ALP running on a Marvel (ARM) development board and also video of a phone handset (probably just a keyboard + screen wired into the same development board) from 3GSM 2007. Comments from the Palm devoted follow the article at the bottom of the page - the first comment made me chuckle as it sums up Palm owners who have been missing out on so much for so long:


It's like porn but better.


ALP actually looks pretty rubbish! :)

[Milhouse]

An interesting series of up to date articles on Palm (where it went wrong), Symbian, ARM, Linux, WinCE, Apple+iPhone etc.:

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/E1DD097F-EE28-4FBA-A1F2-D831512E423F.html

I hadn't realised that Nokia were once a Palm OS licencee! :eek:

[TA-t3]

I thought it was PalmSource (bought by Access), not PalmOne (now Palm) that bought BE? I may be mistaken though.
Another thing that nobody could yet figure out the details about is that Palm (formerly PalmOne) kept hiring Linux programmers over the last two years, apparently doing some Linux work in parallel with what PalmSource was doing. PalmSource started its Linux work by buying a Chinese linux mobile company, and Access continued this after buying PalmSource.
What it all ends up with is anybody's guess.

[Milhouse]

The combined Palm (pre split) bought Be Inc in 2001.

From the article I posted above from roughlydrafted.com...


Then in 2002 Palm created a subsidiary to develop the Palm OS, and later spun it off as PalmSource. The hardware remains of Palm merged with Handspring the next year to create palmOne. This was confusing for people who thought they owned a Palm, when really they had bought a palmOne device running Palm OS from PalmSource.

[Texrat]

Based on Palm's current shaky financial situation, I doubt a partnership would save them-- a joint venture (which Nokia loves) maybe. An outright purchase, certainly.

EDIT: although the pundits agree with Milhouse (no surprise, actually)--

"We do not believe that Palm holds any significant attraction for Nokia and see no reason why Nokia would want to acquire it," said Richard Windsor, a London-based analyst with Nomura International.

Carolina Milanesi, a principal analyst in Gartner's mobile-devices team, was even blunter.

"This doesn't make any sense," she said, stressing that buying Palm would be a huge strategic about-face for Nokia, which uses the Symbian operating system in its enterprise devices as opposed to the Palm and Windows Mobile platforms used by the U.S. company.

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/nokia-palm-deal-no-way-analysts/story.aspx?guid=%7B4CDE87CC%2D80E3%2D43CD%2D8CC8%2 D97855A264AA3%7D&siteid=yhoo&dist=yhoo