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Palm Plans To Acquire Handspring
from the back-to-the-mother-ship dept
The only thing that's really surprising about the fact that Palm is buying Handspring is the fact that this is even necessary at all. If you remember, Handspring was started when 3Com wouldn't let Palm's founders do what they wanted with the company. Of course, then Handspring really just ended up advancing in the direction that Palm should have been going in... and then taking market share away from Palm. Handspring also recognized relatively early on the fact that PDAs and wireless devices were converging and it didn't make sense to keep them separate. This is a realization that Palm only came to recently - though the two companies have gone in a different direction with it. On the whole, it makes sense for the two companies to combine - it just never made sense for them to be separate. The interesting thing to watch is what happens to Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky in the combined company - and how long they stick around.
Reader Comments
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Springboard is dead
Springboard is dead.
Almost all Handspring products now are Treos which don't include Springboard slots.
My employer was spending a butt-load of money developing a new Handspring/Springboard based product when the rumor was spread about Handspring ceasing the production of the Visor model line. We sent representatives to their headquarters and we were reassured that the reported comment had been taken out of context and that sometime in the future they *might* go that route, but for now Visors and Springboards were still alive and kicking.
We went back to work and about 30 days prior to the launch of a product that has now had a million+ dollars spent developing it, Handspring came out and announced that the rumors were true, they were getting out of the PDA business and focusing on the 'Communicator' business and would be selling primarily Treos without Springboards.
Needless to say, we were not happy, especially since we had already purchased over a thousand various Visor models we had planned to use as a give away promotion on top of the million+ dollars already spent on R&D.
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The unZen of Palm management
Palm seems to have little more in resources than does Handspring (nearly broke vs broke, I suppose) and is throwing away good ideas right and left (e.g., WeSync, which is _the_ killer app for any family with multiple Palms). Now, Palm will have the pleasure of figuring out wireless. Which transmission system? Which frequencies for world phones? Do we sell wireless PDAs only through carriers, and which ones, or do we go it alone and let the carriers compete with us? Unless they do the zip lock screw top brain transplant on Palm management, it will be as crowd-pleasing as the rest of the dot-splat.
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