Palm Reveals New Name 306
dmehus writes "Milpitas, Calif. based Palm Inc. announced Sunday afternoon the new name and moniker for its handheld hardware business. After almost two years in the planning and focus group stages, the company's Board of Directors and executives decided on PalmOne. PalmOne's ticker symbol will change from the current PALM to PLMO. Sister company PalmSource, which will be the operating system business, takes ticker symbol PSRC. According this report by CNET News.com's Ina Fried, the two companies will be publicly traded, but they will also be controlled by a new holding company. In addition, the Spring 2004 line of handhelds will adopt the PalmOne moniker. Devices that run the Palm OS can continue to say "Palm powered." The new ticker symbols and corporate name changes will take affect some time in late September or early October, once the Palm buyout of rival HandSpring is complete."
Stage One of Going Down the Toilet (Score:5, Interesting)
Frequently employed when a company's market share or mind share begins to slip, in an irrational attempt to reverse said slipping.
Palm is so leet (Score:5, Interesting)
have chosen to use leetspeak in the form pa1mOne which seems to me to be a horrible mistake (it's also
worth knowing that palmOne did not buy the sites pa1mOne.com and pa1m0ne.com: pa1mone.com seems to have be
purchased by an employee of Palm just yesterday and does not take you to palmone.com
The real mistake though is that should we be referring to the company is palmOne or pa1mOne? It's just
confusing for no reason. I mean you don't see Microsoft changing its name to M1cro$0ft just to look cool.
John.
So much for the importance of branding... (Score:4, Interesting)
Can I now use Palm myself? It is obviously not worth anything to Palm themself...
Hm, wildly successful brand name...LET'S CHANGE IT (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems that companies who are so successful that their name BECOMES the product would be happy.
I watched this happen to Digiboard. They were THE standard product in their line but then went & changed their name to Digi International. D'oh.
What is it with ONE? (Score:5, Interesting)
Netscape ONE
Sun ONE
PalmOne
Is this synergy, coincidence, or lame marketing?
Re:Stage One of Going Down the Toilet (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, I think stage one goes like this:
Charge $299 for an Palm-based product which has less than half the processing power and half the capabilities of comparable PocketPC devices, and expect people to buy it.
Re:Palm is so leet (Score:3, Interesting)
What the hell is the point? "Palm" had some of the strongest name recongition in the business...it was impressive that they were able to stake out "Palm" (remember Microsot's "Palm PCs"?) Maybe they're worried about Xerox- or Kleenex-style dillution of their name?
Any way, that l -> 1 switch is awful. I have a touch of synthaenasia, and I'm not alone, so I "hear" the "1" in "pa1m" as "o", so it reads "paom one".
If this is for real, this is so lame.
A million bucks? (Score:2, Interesting)
palminfocenter has more... (Score:5, Interesting)
"The new name is characterized in two colors - deep red for the word 'palm' and vibrant orange for 'One,' reflecting the subbrand colors for the company's Tungsten line of solutions for mobile professionals and business and its Zire line of solutions for consumers and multimedia enthusiasts, respectively."
Come on, from Pro/Personal, III, V, Zire, Tungston, m, these guys have changed branding more often than their underwear. This is what they want to bank on?
No explanation given for the lame l->1 conversion.
Re:A million bucks? (Score:3, Interesting)
"iLink"
Which if course is what Sony calls firewire. It's even trademarked I believe. Well, our execs went nuts, they loved it and are still living in blissful ignorance.
T.
People DO buy it (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, and it syncs with my Macs with no problem.
Oh, and it does just about anything a WinCE (or whatever it's called today) device can do. It only takes software. You need that on a non-Palm device, too.
Honestly, if I could put a color screen on my still-working Newton and shrink it to a reasonable size, I'd probably use it instead. Unfortunately it's now just a curious toy that I don't use for anything.
about Prince (Score:5, Interesting)
Palm, on the other hand, are simply dumbasses.
Re:What about... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Palm is so leet (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The sad part is... (Score:3, Interesting)
Try these on: Palogica, Unizard, Zaticand, Apprecros. PayPal me my fees.
Works great for naming countries too. Who would ever forget the name Sertaintritativiroboweakeeterrying?
(only requires the time it takes to get to the end of the word)
Seems like a bad move (Score:2, Interesting)
First, you already have excellent name recognition.
Second, you have to change all of your existing advertisement methods.
Third, you lose the product standard. What if Xerox became Xenix or something? We don't "Or-Something" or documents! We Xerox them.
Of course, most people have probably already said this.
I hope they kept their old trademarks. They'll probably regret this down the line.
now, if they only drop the OS (Score:2, Interesting)
But PalmOS is becoming a drag on the company--PalmOS was OK for underpowerd 68k-based handhelds, but the 175-400MHz RISC handhelds of today would be much better off running a more modern OS; none of the restrictions, flakiness, and limitations of PalmOS are justified by the hardware it runs on anymore. Neither PalmOS 5 nor PalmOS 6 look like they are going to fix the grave deficiencies in PalmOS.
One can only hope that, with this split, the Palm hardware group can look to other options in terms of software: Symbian, Linux, etc. They can even keep running the existing Palm applications, which people are used to. But the OS has to go.
Re:What is it with ONE? (Score:3, Interesting)
When the cellular telephone networks were being built out, one enterprising company came up with the Cellular One (or CellularOne) name. Many non-wireline carriers got permission to use that name. Before 1990, and possibly a few years after, the Cellular One brand name was the most widely recognized brand name for cellular phone service in the country. Even markets not served by a Cellular One carrier recognized that name over the names of the carriers serving the market.
The first company I personally noticed using a "One" in their name for nationwide promotions was "Carpet One". They even had a cute logo that was supposed to be a corner of a roll of carpet, but that looked amazingly similar to some of the cellular one logos with "radio waves".
Now, using "One" in a name is so common that it is no longer unique. That combined with the virtual nonexistance of cellular one as a brand in the US means the coat tails these people are trying to hold on to no longer exist. Palm is a little late to the game.
One more personal observation. Cellular One as a brand was more recognized in the wireless industry than any of the other players, including AT&T, Bellsouth, and others. And, the only reason you just about don't see Cellular One anymore is the massive consolidation of wireless carriers. In many cases the transition was slow. It started with "Cellular One - a XYZ company", then it becase "XYZ Company - Cellular One", and finally it became just "XYZ Company".
Re:BeOS? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is BeOS still under the wings of Palm? Why don't they use the thing, or simply open the source?
When Palm bought Be, Inc. they promised there would never again be a BeOS release. They refused to license the IP or allow anyone to work on it ("Omigod, they killed the BeOS!" "You bastards!"). :P
However, a German company (yellowTab) which had wisely started negotiating to work on BeOS long before the sale (during the period where Be was "refocusing on Internet Appliances") and somehow had the rights to work on a BeOS, or something. Their version of events is here [yellowtab.com].
For some reason, none of the Be sites is linking to them, and googel does not like them either. I had to find the old slashdot article [slashdot.org] to find them at all. They also seem to be calling the OS Zeta instead of BeOS. Perhaps the people at Palm have the reverse midas touch w/r/t brands and anyone who has a good brand but associates with them loses it altogether. By the way can you tell I hate the new name and wonder why in the hell they would change the most recognized name in PDAs? Perhaps this is bad karma for trying to crush BeOS on purpose.
Still if you want you can buy zeta from yellowTab [yellowtab.com] and it does come with lots of software, apparently...