Palm OS Spinoff 107
iCharles writes "According to this SEC filing per this Palm Infocenter story, it would appear that Palm is spinning off its OS devision. I'm a Handspring user, so it sounds quite interesting to me."
Always leave room to add an explanation if it doesn't work out.
hercules using arm? (Score:4, Interesting)
It also brings up interesting prospects for the future of Palm OS. If Palm's OS division is making a Palm OS for an ARM processor, will we start to see Palm OS as an option on iPaq's and th like? It's just my personal opinion, but I like Palm's interface more than WinCE, but right now, the hardware that runs it is slower. I guess we'll see.
Spinning off an OS division. What about BeOS? (Score:2, Interesting)
Unfortunate for us Palm users (Score:2, Interesting)
#1 - Having the OS and hardware made by the same company is IMHO part of what has kept the Palm stable enough to be useable in a "if this crashes with my [flight information / meeting notes / date's phone number] in it, I'm screwed" sort of way. As Apple has shown, there are definite advantages to having the hardware and software guys on the same team.
#2 - As anyone who's dealt with Windoze will attest, the "it's their fault" / "no its THEIR fault" blame shifting that goes on between software and hardware vendors whenever a conflict comes up can only mean one thing: much longer waiting times before issues are resolved. With present-day Palm, like with Apple, we the consumer can say "your problem, you fix it!" and, while they may not fix it, they at least have to acknowledge that, hardware or software, its their company's problem and not some other company's problem.
#3 - Dilution of the OS. The Palm OS works as well as it does because it is purpose built. I daresay Win CE has, as one of its many faults, the "all things to all people" problem, which makes it bloated and cumbersome and all that. Once a seperate company owns the Palm OS, logically they would seek to expand it across as many different pieces of hardware as possible, to maximize revenue and marketshare. As the OS is rewritten to run on more and more things, it moves away from the original "here's the OS we wrote to run on this one little machine" and closer to "here's a Windows CE competitor. Hey Bill! Come and crush us!".
Obviously, I'm no expert. But its food for thought.
Why did they spin *THIS* part off? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why does Palm think they're about to, in any way, create a new hardware device that they think will surpass these existing innovative devices? Palm is ALWAYS behind the curve on hardware advances in this area. We're not even talking about comparing them to the iPAQ [handhelds.org], VTech Helio [myhelio.com], Agenda [agendacomputing.com], Yopy [yopy.com], and the other dozens of non-PalmOS, non-WinCE handheld PDA devices.
Currently, Palm's OEMs for the PalmOS® software include:
They get licensing from each and every one of these OEMs. Their hardware is the last thing to ever be updated. It is without a doubt, the least innovative portion of their business.. and they're choosing to keep it?!
I don't quite understand the motive behind this decision on their part. I suppose I'll find out at Palmsource [palmsource.com] in February.
Clever move, but late (Score:2, Interesting)
Changing direction for Palm is clever, but one has to ask if they aren't late: Developing a new OS might take 2 years, while WinCE is pretty much there.
Disclaimer: Yes, I have a Palm. No, I dislike MS.
Why? (Score:1, Interesting)
Every time Edison came up with a new invention, he didn't spin it off into it's own company. Everything remained the product of Edison General Electric, or one of it's divisions. Same thing goes for IBM. Ford hasn't spun each model into it's own company.
How are you supposed to build a large business if you keep giving away all your best products?
Re:The future of handhelds (Score:2, Interesting)
Why? WinCE wasn't trying to be a handheld. It is trying to be a slimmed down version of a desktop OS. While it does enable some interesting ports (I'm still waiting for a port of Perl to the Palm (what a tounge twister!)) for a lot of PDA use (calander, to-do list, contacts, quick notes), it isn't the right model.
Palm, on the other hand, seems to do better. Perhaps Linux would with the right mix of apps, but I simply don't see it scaling that way and fitting into the day-to-day life of the average user.
Perhaps, instead, it will be a third (or, in this case, fourth) thing all together. Are there any serious PDA OSs out there aside from Palm and WinCE?
Re:What a great idea! (Score:2, Interesting)
Or better yet, if we could only convince Apple to do the same thing! This would free Apple's OS division to aggressively market their products to all OEMs. Imagine if all the owners of x86 boxes out there had the option to install OSX instead of Windows.
I know this has been debated before, but I still think it makes sense.