Palms down

November 7th, 2008 12:50 UTC ·

Morgan Keegan analyst Tavis McCourt said in a note that he expects Palm’s cash balance to fall to $75 million next year as it launches its new platform. Its cash balance was $248 million at the end of August.

“We are increasingly concerned that Palm has little room for additional missteps prior to its new platform launch next year without needing to raise additional capital,” McCourt said, noting that Palm filed a shelf registration on Monday that would allow it to issue debt, stock or other securities to raise funds.

PalmOS was a fine operating system. My Treo 650 (black tie edition, thankyouverymuch) is a fine phone. But when Palm’s obituary is written in the not-too-distant future, it will be one of the better “here’s a perfect example of how not to develop software” tales. Sell off your old operating system, bungle your new operating system, buy back your old operating system, continue bungling your new operating system . . .

In the meantime, someone else managed to create what PalmOS2 might have been,and get a new phone out, in a year. Android’s “put the PalmOS inside a browser” metaphor makes it easy for a loyal PalmOS user like me to switch.

Note to Ed Colligan: cut your losses. Give up on PalmOS2 – Android has absorbed that slot in the market. Focus on making great Android and Windows Mobile hardware, and Palm might just survive.

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1 Will Palm prove me wrong? // Jan 6, 2009 at 5:34 pm

[...] November I lamented the coming demise of Palm, based on the long series of mistakes made in developing the successor to [...]

jac

"Pete, it's a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart." – U. E. McGill

Palms down

November 7th, 2008 12:50 UTC ·

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John @

Interesting

Inner child stuff