Will Palm's Deal with Be Go Through?

and bought BE with petty cash just to sandbag Palm??

Our friends at M$ have their hands full with the Justice Department just at the moment. Undertaking overtly anti-competitive behaviour (like buying BE)would not help in their on-going settlement negotiations. I wouldn't bet on M$ making a bid.

Bull****.. Nobody should ever be above the law, no matter what the circumstances are.

If it wasn't for him, we would all be using different OS's and applications and document formats and none of us could communicate and collaborate with each other with the ease we can today. MSFT has given us powerful tools and powerful software that helps us do our jobs, have fun, and use information in a more powerful way. We should be thankful to Gates & Co. for their hard work at improving the computing experience. They started the PC revolution which lked to the internet revolution. Not to mention creating a standard OS for many, many developers and companies to build their own products on and get rich and sucessful themselves. ALSO not to mention the wealth creation for investors that MSFT has created. ALSO not to mention the JOBS MSFT has created. ALSO not to mention the CHARITABLE donations resulted by MSFT and their investors. Bill Gates should be held up as a Saint rather than vilified. He has done more for the success of this country than probably anyone else. I love Bill Gates and he deserves every billion dollars he's earned. He's not doing it for the money - he doesn't need any more money - he does it for us! We need MORE Bill Gates's in the world. I'm glad we have someone in the White House now who realizes this and is letting the free market determine who wins/loses (The American Way) as opposed to competition through litigation. Thank you, Good Night and may God Bless America.

I pledge alliance to Bill Gates
and to the monopoly which he owns.
One company, bound by no laws, run by megalomaniacs
with high prices and no options for all.

Companies pay HUGE amounts of money to MicroSloth for the privlidge of having their software bundled- this is not a "free" service, it would cost Palm plenty.

Hello?! Pocket PC = Made by Microsoft = Palm's #1 competitor!

Microsoft = heavy handed with PC maker agreements -> remember IExplorer vs. Netscape?

How quickly some forget...

Dell could be a candidate. They already sell PalmOS devices and could very well pre-install Palm desktop sofware. Forget HP and Compaq for obvious reasons. :-)

HELLO?! You would think that YOU'D know that they can't be so ruthless and selective anymore. They pretty much have to have the competition and their software preinstalled, too. Unless they want to risk another chance of being split-up. Think about it.

I think what Mikecane means is that if the deal doesn't go through...there won't Be (pun intended) 85% market share for much longer. The entire future of the PalmOS rests on this deal. Palm can NOT continue on any further with the existing OS. A new one must be written..and soon!

There are good developers who DON'T work for Be. This deal will help Palm alot but it won't make or break the company. Palm wrote a damn good OS to begin with. How familiar is the Be people going to be with making an OS for a handheld? All their experience is in desktops. Their AV skills will help Palm but the Be people are not going to write OS5 all on their own. There's no time. OS5 is coming in 9 months. Palm has been working on it for at LEAST a year. Most of it has already been written. They want the Be people to add some AV bells and whistles. If this deal falls through, they'll get someone else. Maybe it will cost more but it will happen.

Thats ditto, dumbass. Dido is a musical artist.

I would use an expletive here but Ed would delete me.

A new OS for Palm? Would you prefer a multimedia capable OS with lots of hourglasses or one which crashes every day? How about a two minute wait while it boots?

The existing Palm OS (what is the plural?) are pretty basic but they get the job done. No fuss, no bother, they just work. As advertised. You don't even need to read the manual to get a Palm to work, just switch on and off you go - for the non-expert user (ie, at a guess, 95% of all customers) that is in fact a valid consideration - life is too short for 2 inch thick manuals. Sure, the Palm won't multi-task, but you can switch between apps so quickly that you can hardly tell the difference. Do do want a sophisticated file manager? Well, you can buy a program to do just that without changing the OS. I can go on.

The thing is that the simple OS may not be much fun for a technophile but it is robust, it is flexible and it runs very fast. (206Mhz on an iPAQ looks nice on paper but, with PocketPC, it runs slower than Palm OS3.5.3 on my old Vx!)

Palm's management may be putting far too much emphasis on the "Zen of Palm" stuff in order to justify their indolence. Nevertheless there is a lot to be said for the KISS formula. That was probably the main reason why Palm succeeded in the first place, against competition like the Newton and, later, WinCE Mark I & II (Mk III is on the ropes too).

This is not to say that Palm should continue to sit on its hands. However, in developing OS5, they should remember their (and Saint Jeff's) heritage, so as to retain the best features of the existing OS.

Progress comes best from sensible evolution, from improving what already works well, from building on success.

Thanks for the link but this is a terribly written article. I'm surprised at Bloomberg. Palm's share increased by 5.6 percent. Great! To what? 80 percent of the market? 100 percent? The article doesn't say.

>As of right now Palm's only advantage is low price, wide adoption, Sony's name and large personal related software titles.

Gee, is that all? <smirk> Actually, I'll admit you have a point. Even Microsoft has to break the mold now and them to maintain their market share. Windows XP is their response to Linux and Mac OSX. Palm needs to respond to the new PocketPCs in the future. I love my Visor now, but I'll be looking for something new in about two years. Product loyalty ca be only so strong.

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James Sorenson

What more do you want? A free handheld?