Palm Appoints Bill Coleman to Board of Directors
Palm today announced the election of Bill Coleman, founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Cassatt, Corp., to its board of directors. Coleman also was a co-founder and first chief executive officer of BEA Systems, Inc., a world-leading infrastructure-software company.
Prior to BEA, Coleman held various management positions at Sun Microsystems, Inc., including vice president and general manager of Sun Professional Services; vice president of system software, overseeing the Sun operating system, Solaris; and co-founder of the Sun Federal Division.
He is a member of the board of directors of Symantec Corp. and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and a member of the Trilateral Commission, a group formed in 1973 by private citizens of Japan, European Union countries, the United States and Canada to foster closer cooperation among core democratic industrialized areas of the world. He also is president of the Coleman Colorado Foundation, which supports the University of Colorado Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities.
He holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the U.S. Air Force Academy and master's degrees in computer science and computer engineering from Stanford University.
"Bill is an experienced technology entrepreneur, CEO, and director," said Eric Benhamou, chairman of the board of Palm. "He has been associated with many successful growth companies throughout his career. He has also earned a deserved reputation as a generous philanthropist. The Palm board is fortunate to be able to benefit from his wisdom and counsel."
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RE: Mmmmm. Web services. or not?
Or maybe they think he just has a good "Rolodex" of excellent software developers who know how develop an OS and/or bring a project in on time and under budget.
I think this is encouraging, either way. Maybe Palm is finally admitting they don't have enough expertise to do it all themselves.
Brent
Palm Vx -----> LONG WAIT -----> Palm T|X
RE: Mmmmm. Web services.
Yeah - I still think there's mileage in Palm's third business comments.
Could it be that their third business is the development of lean, highly optimised Linux based platforms for mobile computing?
i.e.Where the Linux core is wrapped in a new bespoke user-interface, making the internal core truely insignificant and transparent. Additional layers provide backwards compatibility with Garnet and 68K apps, provide user-friendly networking, telephony, multimedia and Grafiti 1/2 support. Scalable fonts and multi-tasking are inherited from the underlying Linux GUI layers and the GhostScript engine is put to good use as a Palm OS helper app, to render PDFs for display.
Linux would also open the gates for Palm to incorporate USB-host capabilities in their devices, allowing their devices to easily access standard USB hardware classes - such as the Mass-storage devices and keyboards.
Palm once used a slogan along the lines of... "Palm... the really connected organisor" ; perhaps this is a way to take that compelling concept to a level that is desireable today.
KultiVator
PalmOS? Don't need no stinkin' PalmOS!
Blasphemy!
No, someone somewhere noted that even among the PalmOS Weenie ranks very few, relatively speaking, applications are installed over and above what came with the device (regardless how many gajillions of applications are "out there").
Thus it is sufficient to mimic the "look and feel" rather than the underlying API.
Sell the sizzle rules.
RE: Palm OS? Don't need no stinkin' Palm OS
There is little utility to be backward compatible with any version of PalmOS.
There's a significant short-term utility of shepherding the faithful over to the new platform. Once they are there those that do install applications will want to get the best experience and install ones written against the new APIs so the backward compatibility will be less important.
That was my original thinking anyway. Now that we are faced with the prospect of Garnet emulation being a shared environment across ALP and Palm's Linux OS there's an interesting opportunity, though. Palm OS Garnet becomes a "cross-platform" API--one that is less powerful than a native Linux API, to be sure, but vastly more powerful than other cross-platform APIs like Java and Flash Lite. Don't forget about StyleTap, which has extended that API to Windows Mobile. It probably wouldn't be hard to port StyleTap to Symbian, too. Unlike the current situation where a bug in a 3rd party app can crash the whole system, Garnet running in emulated mode only crashes the emulator, so it can provides some sandboxing that the operators may appreciate. Garnet's limitations could be seen as acceptable if this emulation was deployed across enough devices (as seen by the popularity of Java MIDP, which is far more limiting than Garnet).
The critical thing (a problem that needs to be tackled with *any* mobile computing platform) is that ACCESS/PalmSource/Palm, etc need to greatly improve how people discover the third party software that supports the things they do. Right now I agree with Michael Mace that given a few minutes of time someone who knows the field well can talk to most people and show them apps that they would really want to use, but there needs to be a just-out-of-the-box discovery experience (on the device or maybe even the PC) that queries the user on the things they do and makes intelligent suggestions of stuff to try. Devices should come with coupons that allow free download of a certain number of applications to get new users hooked. These are the kind of things that will do the most to make mobile computing take off. The APIs are less important.
David Beers
Pikesoft Mobile Computing
Software Everywhere blog
www.pikesoft.com/blog
RE: Mmmmm. Web services.
I think your right. Palm is negotiating to get a preferred outcome from access (adding garnet or the actual PIMs and application suport). If that doesn't happen. I don't think it's a deal breaker. Palm will put out its own linux phone OS with applications that have the same name as they have today - so MOST users will not even notice the difference.
When I've talked to users who have used Palm OS for years, many don't even know you can add applications!
You all could be right
I don't think that's where things will go, but it's not an unthinkable option for Palm.
David Beers
Pikesoft Mobile Computing
Software Everywhere blog
www.pikesoft.com/blog
Java
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Mmmmm. Web services.
David Beers
Pikesoft Mobile Computing
Software Everywhere blog
www.pikesoft.com/blog