Short life line for this Palm
Posted by marshall Fri, 09 Sep 2005 21:59:00 GMT
So PalmSource has been acquired. It's not terribly surprising; it was clear that things weren't going well for PalmSource a while back with the rumors that the next Treo will run Windows Mobile, the general lack of interest in Cobalt, and the impending name change due to the-company-formerly-known-as-palmOne buying back the rights to the "Palm" name. But this to me sounds a lot like the death knell for the Palm OS platform.
It may take a while; Palm claims they'll continue to support the operating system that bears its name, and I'm sure there are devices in the works that will still use the Palm OS. But Palm has shown no interest thus far in Cobalt, which PalmSource released over a year and a half ago (right when Lara and I arrived in Redlands, actually). PalmSource has said that they'll be migrating Cobalt from its current BeOS-based foundation to a Linux-based one, so device manufacturers that might have been interested in Cobalt probably backed off until PalmSource figured out what it was doing...and now it's even more uncertain with a new company taking over. If I were making smartphones, I'd be looking very hard at Symbian, Windows Mobile, or possibly Nokia's new Linux-based platform.
And I had such hopes for Cobalt. I like the way the Palm OS works in general -- it's still considered by many to be the most usable PDA operating system -- but it desperately needs a more stable and capable foundation, and Cobalt would have provided that. Now it doesn't look like Cobalt devices will ever come about, because no one is going to want to wind up with an abandoned platform should ACCESS decide not to continue the OS after all, kind of like how PalmSource bought Be and then decided to move to Linux instead.
I'm guessing that, as with PC operating systems, the smartphone world is eventually going to come down to Linux and Windows. Symbian's doing very well right now, but Nokia's showing a lot of interest in Linux, as is Motorola. I can easily see, in a few years' time, the smartphone market being comprised primarily of several Linux-based systems with Flash user interfaces pitted against Windows Mobile. But then, I haven't had much success with predicting trends, so maybe ACCESS will end up taking the Palm OS API and mapping it to Symbian or something crazy like that. That'd be weird.
Update: Even weirder would be if they already tried it. Apparently the CEO later decided the current Palm OS was "good enough", just before he was ousted. Ah, what could have been...
