.FLYINGHEAD FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
.TITLE HP buys Palm, a Palm retrospective
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
.SUMMARY We’ve been covering Palm since Computing Unplugged was PalmPower Magazine and it’s been a strange and wild ride.
.OTHER
Today, Hewlett-Packard announced that it is buying Palm, Inc. for a whopping $1.2 billion. We’ve been covering Palm since Computing Unplugged was PalmPower Magazine and it’s been a strange and wild ride.
From the sale of the company to U.S. Robotics to the sale of the company to 3Com, to the renaming of PalmPilot to Palm, to the founders leaving, forming a competitor, rejoining the company, merging in the competitor, to the company selling off its operating system, to now, where Palm will become part of HP.
It’s too early to tell the future, but here’s probably the most complete retrospective you’ll find — a series of articles going back to 1998, looking at the continuing mystery that is (or was) Palm, Inc.
.TEASER Tap here to read the whole, morbid, sordid, strange story.
.H1 [[http://www.palmpower.com/issues/issue199801/hawkins001.html|Jeff Hawkins, creator of the PalmPilot]]
.H2 PalmPower Magazine – January 1998
It seemed fitting to kick off our first issue of PalmPower by having a candid conversation with Jeff Hawkins, the man who started Palm Computing and created the PalmPilot (as Palm handhelds were known, before Pilot Pens sued them and the company changed it’s name). Prior to my chat with Hawkins, PR people gave me some interesting background on Hawkins’ success: over a million PalmPilots shipped in 18 months, a 66% market share, and the fastest growth of any computing product in history, faster than the TV and the VCR.
.H1 [[http://www.palmpower.com/issues/issue199802/hawkinstwo001.html|Part 2: Jeff Hawkins, creator of the PalmPilot]]
.H2 PalmPower Magazine – February 1998
I continued my fascinating discussion with the the father of the PalmPilot in Part 2 of The PalmPower Interview with Jeff Hawkins. Jeff shared with us interesting insights into the design and execution of the PalmPilot, along with some ideas for the future.
.H1 [[http://www.palmpower.com/issues/issue199808/hawkinterview001.html|Exit Interview: Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the PalmPilot]]
.H2 PalmPower Magazine – August 1998
When I’d last spoken to Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the PalmPilot and lead visionary, 3Com had shipped just over a million PalmPilots, and it was PalmPower’s first issue. Eight months later, PalmPower had grown to more than 300,000 regular readers and 3Com had shipped nearly two million Palm devices.
Jeff Hawkins and Palm Computing general manager Donna Dubinsky left the company they founded, in the first of many shake-ups that were to come. To learn more about these big changes, I spoke to Jeff on his first day of his new life, in this exclusive PalmPower Interview.
.H1 [[http://www.palmpower.com/issues/issue199808/editorial898001.html|Jeff & Donna’s excellent adventure]]
.H2 PalmPower Magazine – August 1998
We were as surprised as everyone else when Palm creator Jeff Hawkins announced his resignation from 3Com. When I got the news, I set up an exclusive interview with Jeff to get the whole story. The interview was fascinating, but what did it all mean? How did we think the departure of 3Com’s visionary inventor impact the future of the Palm platform? How did we think it would it impact users? That’s what this editorial explored.
.H1 [[http://www.palmpower.com/issues/issue199905/whiteboard001.html|Simply whiteboard]]
.H2 PalmPower Magazine – May 1999
For some reason, those promoting and selling Palm devices went through a phase where they decided to use pretty-darn-near naked women to hawk their devices. If you think the ads for the Pre were weird, don’t think Palm was new at weird advertising.
Back in 1999, Palm ran a campaign called "Simply Palm", which sparked the ire of many of our readers, men and women alike. In response, we decided to run "Simply whiteboard". In this article, Meggan Durst, an editorial assistant and a whiteboard fanatic, compared her favorite portable organizer (the whiteboard) to everyone else’s favorite portable organizer, the Palm computer.
.H1 [[http://www.palmpower.com/issues/issue199908/palmart001.html|The story of customer service at Palm Computing, Inc.]]
.H2 PalmPower Magazine – August 1999
In 1999, there was a lot of reader hubbub about Palm device quality. In this Q&A, in a PalmPower Exclusive, representatives from Palm Computing directly addressed the customer service questions readers raised. This is how it’s supposed to happen: manufacturers and users in a direct dialog.
.H1 [[http://www.palmpower.com/issues/issue199910/ppeditorial1099001.html|Analysis of Palm and Handspring announcements]]
.H2 PalmPower Magazine – October 1999
All the cards were now on the table. We’d seen the Palm and Handspring announcements that changed how these handhelds were going to move forward. In this important article, I put the then new announcements under my analytical microscope and tried to put it all into perspective.
.H1 [[http://www.palmpower.com/issues/issue199910/visorview001.html|PalmPower interviews Handspring]]
.H2 PalmPower Magazine – October 1999
Everyone was curious about the Visor products from Handspring. In October 1999, we conducted an exclusive interview with Handspring’s Product Manager, Greg Shirai. We think you’ll find Greg’s replies quite interesting.
.H1 [[http://www.palmpower.com/issues/issue199911/bercowinterview001.html|PalmPower interviews Palm Computing]]
.H2 PalmPower Magazine – November 1999
This was the complement to the Handspring interview, where I went and interviewed Palm. In this exclusive interview, I posed a series of penetrating questions to Palm VP Mark Bercow. Here are his answers.
.H1 [[http://www.palmpower.com/issues/issue200209/ppeditorial0902001.html|The morbid fascination that is Palm, Inc.]]
.H2 PalmPower Magazine – September 2002
I compared my long-standing morbid fascination with Apple to my more recent morbid fascination with the mystery that was Palm, Inc. This was all the way back in 2002.
.H1 [[http://www.computingunplugged.com/issues/issue200509/00001645001.html|The continuing mystery that is Palm, Inc.]]
.H2 Computing Unplugged Magazine – September 2005
In one of its weird course changes, Palm decided it was going to produce what is essentially a Pocket PC phone. Palm also sold off the Palm OS, which was its primary differentiating factor. Did that mean the Palm OS is dead? Should you stop buying Palm PDAs? Should you stop developing software for the Palm OS? Read my analysis to learn what we thought at the time.
.H1 [[http://www.computingunplugged.com/issues/issue200510/00001653001.html|Palm OS developers speak out on the Palm OS]]
.H2 Computing Unplugged Magazine – October 2005
One of the biggest issues, of course, was how the Palm developer community would fare after all the dust settled. We asked five developers five key questions. Will there be new Palm OS software? The answers are in this article. You can almost read this as the beginning of the end.
.H1 [[http://www.computingunplugged.com/issues/issue200602/00001724001.html|The future of the Palm platform: rosy or uncertain?]]
.H2 Computing Unplugged Magazine – February 2006
ACCESS was the company that bought the Palm OS. they briefed Computing Unplugged on its new strategy to bring the Palm OS to embedded Linux. We also discussed how it intended to transition its traditional Palm OS developer community over to its new ALP, the ACCESS Linux Platform, which is now confirmed to be based on Wind River’s Platform For Consumer Devices, Linux Edition. In this article, we took a close look at the details of the ACCESS plan.
.H1 [[http://www.computingunplugged.com/issues/issue200602/00001725001.html|The future of the Palm platform: lessons learned from the Sharp Zaurus]]
.H2 Computing Unplugged Magazine – February 2006
From December of 2002 through February of 2003, Computing Unplugged Senior Technical Editor Jason Perlow was Software Developer Liaison for Sharp Electronics’ Zaurus. As some of you may recall, the Zaurus was also a Linux PDA, which shared many similarities with the ALP platform, and like ACCESS and PalmSource, the Zaurus was also the product of a Japanese company. The Zaurus had many things going for it, but it failed miserably in the US and European consumer market. In this important article, Jason shares his insights into what went wrong and what ACCESS has to do to get it right. They didn’t listen to Jason.
.H1 [[http://www.computingunplugged.com/issues/issue200603/00001734001.html|PalmSource clarifies our coverage of Palm OS and ALP]]
.H2 Computing Unplugged Magazine – March 2006
We’d been covering the changes in the Palm OS and its apparent eventual migration into something called ALP. As is always the case when trying to understand something new and relatively poorly documented, we got some of our facts wrong. We later got some excellent clarification on ALP from two PalmSource executives who would know: Maureen O’Connell, Senior Director, Corporate Communications and David "Lefty" Schlesinger, Director, Core Tools and Technologies. These two comments provide some excellent clues about what we might expect in the future from PalmSource. Except, well, you know…
.BEGIN_KEEP
.H1 [[http://www.computingunplugged.com/issues/issue200709/00002059001.html|Palm performs Foleo mercy killing]]
.H2 Computing Unplugged Magazine – September 2007
Palm had just announced that they’ve cancelled their ill-advised Foleo laptop wannabe before it will ever ship. And we said "about time".
.H1 [[http://www.computingunplugged.com/issues/issue200903/00002349001.html|An open letter to Palm CEO Ed Colligan about finding the win-win position]]
.H2 Computing Unplugged Magazine – March 2009
Are you out of your fracking mind? Let’s see. Happy developer. Makes fun little product that celebrates your new direction. Your own existing customers like it. What do you do? Do you feature them on your home page? Do you celebrate what they’re doing? No, of course not. You send a cease and desist letter. Yeah, this is Palm.
Stay tuned. We’ll let you know more in this strange Silicon Valley soap opera as the story unfolds.
.BIO
.END_KEEP
