PalmSource

» see palmsource.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

palmsource sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember using. the palm pilot was an american office-worker thing, and by the time i was old enough to want a pocket computer, the pocket computer was a nokia or it was nothing. palmsource was the company name behind the os on those devices, after palm split itself in two.

the split happened in october 2003. palm inc. renamed its hardware half to palmone and let the software half walk off as palmsource, with david nagel running it and a fresh ipo. the idea was straightforward. palm os would license to anyone who wanted to ship a pda, the way windows had licensed to anyone who wanted to ship a pc. samsung, sony, ibm, and a stack of smaller oems were on the list. on paper the platform sat at 38 million devices shipped.

on paper. the real number that mattered was the share line, and the share line was bending toward windows mobile every quarter. the pda category itself was shrinking. blackberry was carving off the people who wanted email on a belt clip, and treo phones were quietly turning palmos into a smartphone os that nobody had asked it to be. palmsource bought china mobilesoft in 2004 to pivot toward a linux-based successor called access linux platform. that successor never shipped a device anybody wanted.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it actually ended ~

access co., the japanese company behind the netfront browser that lived in feature phones and game consoles, bought palmsource on 14 september 2005 for 324 million dollars. the deal closed in november. the next may, palmone bought back the rights to the palm brand for 30 million, and renamed itself just palm again. by october 2006 palmsource was renamed access systems americas. the company that had owned palm os no longer existed under that name.

~ what got buried with it ~

palmsource also owned beos. they had picked it up from be inc. in august 2001 for 11 million dollars and a pile of patents. beos had been the os that almost shipped on the original mac before steve jobs returned to apple and brought next with him. it sat inside palmsource the whole time, doing nothing, never the successor to palm os anyone ended up building. when access bought palmsource, they got beos too, and beos kept doing nothing under new ownership.

~ what came after ~

palm os itself stayed around long enough to ship on the centro in 2007, and then on the foleo concept that never made it to market, and then it was over. webos arrived in 2009 as the replacement and ate its own three-year arc into oblivion. by the time the iphone was on its third generation, the entire palm lineage that palmsource had been the steward of was a museum item. it had been a museum item for years before that, technically. nobody told the spinoff in time.

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