“As David Nagel ponders the future of Palm, he is ever mindful of what happened to Apple Computer. Both companies have a legion of loyal fans and both are considered leaders in making technology that is easy to use. Both walk a treacherous line by building hardware and operating system software. And a growing number of Apple refugees now work at Palm.” Read the rest of the story at ZDNews. Update: Here is an interview at C|Net with PalmSource’s CEO, David Nagel.
Palm: OS, Hardware Don’t Mix
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Eugenia Loli
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release updated BeOS versions once the company takes off?
of the story…it doesn’t include Apple (AAPL), which is currently the only one that is up as of 1:45pm 2/4/02.
Oh well, so much for Apple as an example of what not to do.
>so does this mean that perhaps they will release updated BeOS versions once the company takes off?
NO. Stop dreaming darn it.
Yeeesssss! Yes! Yes! It does!!!
It is obvious that PalmSource can not succeed as an exclusive ARM HandHeld OS alone. They will have to offer different platforms on different processors and eventually including desktops when the market is right!
Palm’s new OS will have to eventually “Be everywhere” to succeed.
Long Live BeOS/BeIA in Handhelds, desktops and everywhere else!
From the article:
“But to give the divided Palm anywhere near the kind of valuation it once enjoyed, the Palm OS will have to find its way onto tens of millions of wireless devices–something it has yet to do.
Although Palm initially signed up Motorola and Nokia as licensees, both companies have backed off their initial plans. Smaller players such as Kyocera and Samsung have come out with phones that use the Palm OS, but sales have been relatively modest for the devices, which were initially priced between $400 and $500.”
ciao
yc
Long Live BeOS/BeIA in Handhelds, desktops and everywhere else!
Come on, now. Wake up, move on, get over it. We all loved the BeOS, and there’s nothing keeping us from using it, but stop dreaming
I mean this in good faith, and no ill will.
If Palm sells a BeIA-derived in a cell phone, so what? I was interested in <strong>BeOS on the desktop</strong>. I really couldn’t have given a flying fig about BeIA itself to start with, except to the degree that success there might have possibly funded further BeOS development–and really, part of me stopped expecting good things the day that they announced Stinger as “BeIA” rather then “BeOS for Embedded Systems.” People with far more industry pundit credentials than I saw the focus shift as a harbinger of doom.
I wish PalmSource’s ex-Be employees well, and to the (limited) degree we were once part of the same community I hope PalmSource does well for them. Palm certainly has more of a clue about what to do with embedded OSes than Be’s partners did. But my interest in BeIA when it was BeIA was only academic at best. People will argue for years about whether the IA gamble was the best course of action for them. I argued long ago that focusing on IAs before there was a viable nationwide broadband infrastructure–even a wired one, much less wireless–was a road to failure. (But, hey, Be’s Board of Directors believed otherwise, and they’re the ones getting paid the big bucks, not me.)
I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that Palm won’t release anything called “BeIA”: the next OS will be called, wait for it, “PalmOS.” It’ll have BeOS-derived technology in it but not in any recognizable form. And there will not be any desktop OS released by Palm this year, or probably ever. I’ll give slim odds on a “self-hosting development environment”–but they’re pretty slim. (Be was trying to do that, yes, but Be was essentially targeting only x86-based IAs, which some analysts saw as a tactical error pretty early on.)
I don’t think I’m going out too far on a limb there.
>>move on…
To what?
I simply refuse to give up and I’m not alone!
I can dream…
http://www.ucando.org/dreams.html
ciao
yc
Eu continuarei sonhando.
Sorry, in American
I will keep dreaming.
As if that weren’t enough, Microsoft is lurking with its Pocket PC operating system. Although it holds only a 15 percent share now, nobody is discounting the […] example of what it did to early market leaders such as Apple and Netscape Communications.
While I am sure that Microsoft did everything it could to bury Apple back in the day, Apple’s “low points” were a direct result of it’s own corporate bungling in the early-to-mid 1990s….
While I am not a fan of Apple’s products, I am glad to see them back in some semblence of health these days…. Hopefully they will continue to grow as time moves on.
Apple has made any number of tactical errors through the years– the biggest by far was then-CEO Scully firing Steve Jobs– but keeping the OS and hardware tightly integrated is not among them. We LIKE it that way.
Apple’s smallish marketshare is for the most part the result of the fact that the Mac came out in ’84– a full three years or so after DOS got a solid foothold in the biggest market: enterprise. MSFT monopoly tactics have kept MacOS’s marketshare small.
I think the dark days are over for Apple. As someone intimately familiar with both BSD-based MacOSX and win2000, I have to say that OSX’s ease, stability, and security widen the gap between Mac and Windows enough that I think it will garner much attention. Especially in light of weekly Outlook viruses, and MSFT’s ever increasing prices. Wintels are a LOT more pricey than Macs these days, if you factor in ALL the costs.
Re BeOS: I don’t see where Palm wants to go with this. Who needs a multitasking PDA? I have a IIIX, and I love it. But face it, a PDA is a glorified Franklin planner. It is not a real computer. I think to beat WinCE, Palm just has to keep doing what they are doing: making a simple, useful device. I’ll bet WinCE will get stuck in the program-bloat tarpit, like every other MSFT product.