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1. boris_cleto

   Fresh-Faced Recruit

   Joined: Sep 2002

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   04/28, 04:22pm | report spam | close reply

   Bet it works out

   As well as buying Compaq did for them :P

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1. Steve Wilkinson

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   Joined: Dec 2001

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   04/28, 04:25pm | report spam | close reply

   Good for Palm....

   not so good for HP.

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1. ricardogf

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   Joined: Jan 2003

   +2
   04/28, 04:46pm | report spam | close reply

   Huh?

   So much for that moron Rubinstein to say that Palm was here for the long haul...good riddance, iPhone killer.

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1. iphonerulez

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   Joined: Nov 2008

   +3
   04/28, 04:47pm | report spam | close reply

   I can see a HP Jornada powered by webOS

   making a huge comeback.
   
   I wish I had bought some Palm shares and made some easy money. Damn. Palm shares jumped up so quickly on this announcement. And I never saw it coming. I wonder if it will tank HP shares. I wouldn't think HP investors would be too happy about the purchase.
   

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1. brainiac

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   Joined: Sep 2003

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   04/28, 05:00pm | report spam | close reply

   Brewsters Millions

   This is just like the film "Brewster's Millions" (at least the first part of the movie). HP likes to strive for mediocrity and then try to make money from volume. Two years ago HP product management said that Windows Mobile provided them with a competitive advantage compared to the iPhone or Android. Now they buy Palm so that they will have a proprietary OS to maintain as they attempt to draw application developers from Windows Phone, Android, Blackberry, iPhoneOS, etc. HP does not know how to make innovative hardware, they do not know how to create the market buzz to make people want a phone (I do not think I have ever seen an iPaq phone commercial) like other companies do (HTC, Apple, Blackberry, etc), and they seem to create a lot of products without building a real ecosystem around them.
   
   Also, because HP has a culture that really does not support innovation, they need to buy their way into different sectors. A year or so ago they told their employees that innovation through acquisition was over and that innovation would come from within. Innovation, no. Acquiring or reinventing what is already on the market, making it mediocre and low cost, and then selling in volume because of the relatively low price (and low margins), yes.
   
   This is not the exception to how HP does business, this is the rule.
   

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1. gmsquires

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   Joined: Jul 2009

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   04/28, 05:01pm | report spam | close reply

   Big + for HP

   Yes per the story this is a potential big plus for HP, as they have in the past depended on Windows mobile which has never been that great. I don't know if it would be possible, but depending on WebOS, it may be able to be installed on previous versions of the iPac handhelds. Someone mentioned Journada. That may be but Journada is long gone. Would be nice if it could though, as I have a couple of old Journadas one being the small notebook style one.
   
   This will save Palm's OS and definitely be a kick in the seat for MS.

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1. c4rlob

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   Joined: May 2009

   +1
   04/28, 05:05pm | report spam | close reply

   the Not-so-dull leading the Recently-dull

   HP has a rather dull mobile presence and they choose to drop over a billion on a company that is a fresh arrival to the Kingdom of Dull? This can't be reassuring news for HP stakeholders.

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1. WiseWeasel

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   Joined: Apr 1999

   +7
   04/28, 05:08pm | report spam | close reply

   Woot

   I knew $4 a share for PALM was too good to pass up. I'll be cashing out rather than counting on HP to actually get much value from this, but I'd love to be proved wrong. We certainly could benefit from the serious competition.

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1. gmsquires

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   Joined: Jul 2009

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   04/28, 05:25pm | report spam | close reply

   LOL Yeah HP can't inovate

   @ brainiac I think you need a brain transplant or you must have been in some alternate universe for the past couple of decades. True, HP computers and their handhelds have all depended on MS Windows, but to say they didn't innovate is balderdash.
   
   They did come up with some really nice handheld or mobile computers even if they did depend on MS OS. They also did some nice redesign work on their PC's beyond the usual beige boxes that were present in the 90's. They were most innovative in their printers, scanners etc. The HP Labs have been innovating for decades and I have seen it when I worked for a third party marketing company that did work for HP's retail marketing back in the 90's. Oh, BTW don't forget about their innovative CPU they worked on for servers back in the 80's.
   
   So I have no diea where you got your information Brainiac

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1. slider

   Mac Elite

   Joined: Oct 1999

   +10
   04/28, 05:51pm | report spam | close reply

   Wow, Lots of Palm Bashing

   Palm's WebOS isn't a joke - Palm is. And it's inability to gain momentum has more to do with Palm than with the OS. Palm's corporate structure was ancient and couldn't get out of it's own way. The company was already hanging by a thread when WebOS finally came to market and then the hardware had several QC issues, which may have been a result of Palm's financial straits. In fact, if it was not for the WebOS - Palm would have been completely worthless. The other thing that knocked WebOS on its @$$ was the surge of Android phones that came to market shortly after and Palms inability to produce enough of their devices to offer on multiple carriers.
   
   We don't want to start seeing smartphone/tablet OS's disappearing to the point where we are down to two primary OS like we are with desktops. The iPhoneOS, Mobile 7, Android, Nokia's OS, and others, all of these keep the others from getting lazy and push the limits. Otherwise you end up something like Internet Explorer after they squashed Netscape - fat and lazy - it took several browsers, namely Firefox, to get that fat code off the couch after years of eating bonbons.

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1. chas_m

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   Joined: Aug 2001

   +5
   04/28, 05:55pm | report spam | close reply

   The real story here

   Is the the industry as a whole are tacitly acknowledging that Windows Mobile is a POS, and dropping it as quickly as they can.
   
   This is good news for WebOS, probably (over the long haul) good news for HP, good news for Android too. You WANT competition in a market like this, but not TOO MUCH fracturing. Three or four competing smartphone OSes is probably about right.
   
   The real loser here is MS.

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1. canonsucks

   Fresh-Faced Recruit

   Joined: Apr 2010

   +5
   04/28, 06:03pm | report spam | close reply

   The Power of Choice

   HP made a smart move, no doubt about it. The Palm deal delivers yet another option for HP customers and opens up the potential for HP to more aggressively market their mobile products.
   
   It's all about choices, and HP likely sees this as an opportunity to compete with Apple's single, closed OS approach.
   
   It will be interesting to see how Palm evolves under HP's leadership.

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1. brainiac

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   Joined: Sep 2003

   -1
   04/28, 07:37pm | report spam | close reply

   @qmsquires - LOL

   I did not say that they have never innovated in the past (American car makers were once great too). They do still innovate in some ways but not often and not really in consumer products. And my comment about innovation through acquisition is dead on. I get my information from working there 5 years and talking to product managers and watching really innovative ideas be dismissed and then seeing a bunch of PR from other companies two years later who actually did pursue similar concepts. Instead of cultivating innovation, they tell developers "Ready... GO! innovate! Why are you not innovating?"
   
   iPaq - not innovative and HP employees use Samsung because the iPaq is so bad.
   TouchSmart all in one - an iMac with a touch layer added over a windows based OS and not much touch-based software support.
   Printers - aesthetically, maybe, but not in Mac software or even windows software
   Android tablet - could have been innovative if not dog slow and really heavy due to the battery (with low battery life)
   Windows tablet - nothing new there
   Enterprise software - as long as we copy the user interface from ServiceNow (or whomever) we don't need to fix the underlying conceptual and flow issues that could really differentiate us in the market but we need to make some change because we are losing sales deals to x**
   
   Where it really counts and where it could really be a differentiator for the majority of sales, HP is mediocre.
   

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1. brainiac

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   Joined: Sep 2003

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   04/28, 07:47pm | report spam | close reply

   @gmsquires Big + for HP

   In order for this to even come close to working, HP would need to build an ecosystem around the product offering to compete with Blackberry, Android, iPhone. HP has been horrible at creating ecosystems. They typically assume that HP can create a basic platform and then the world will rush to them and through social aspects of collaboration the rest of the world will build the killer apps and their ecosystem will take-off like facebook. In reality, they release a lot of partial solutions that you have probably never heard of, they do not adequately publicize or support the efforts, and they fizzle.
   
   I do not think that HP will follow-through where they need to in order to sustain this. Time will tell but history tends to repeat itself in this regard.
   

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1. Darchmare

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   Joined: Nov 2009

   +2
   04/29, 03:15am | report spam | close reply

   slider

   All good points, but as a community this site is basically the tech equivalent of the "Stockholm Syndrome" - if anyone even dares to challenge Apple in any way, they're quickly derided.
   
   The feeling I get isn't so much that these people think XYZ company is a joke, it's that they don't _want_ them to be anything but a joke. They don't realize that a healthy, competitive market is always good for consumers (and, taking the longer view, is even good for Apple).
   
   It's true, though: Palm itself has been in a morass for a long time, but under Jon Rubinstein it has actually improved - problem being that WebOS was a case of "too little, too late". No matter how good their software is (on most accounts, not too bad at all) it couldn't stand up to the juggernaut that is Apple in this market. The iPhone - and to a lesser extent, Android - sucked all the oxygen out of the room.
   
   Maybe now that HP seems to be interested in getting out from under Microsoft's thumb, Palm will have the resources and ability to get its technology into peoples' hands.
   
   As an iPhone developer, Apple stockholder and buyer of Apple products I hope that this is the case. Apple has shown an awful lot of hubris over the last couple of years - understandably so in most cases - and could use a bit more serious competition.