Maszman Speaks!

HP kicks Win­dows 7 to the curb, will use webOS in Slate.

Although they weren’t men­tioned in any of the rumors I had heard, HP has announced they will buy Palm for $1.2 bil­lion. It makes sense, in a way, as HP would prob­a­bly love not hav­ing to depend on Microsoft for an OS for mobile and tablet devices.

As I’ve men­tioned before, I was a Palm user from way back but when it became time to replace my Treo, I ended up with a Droid. For me it made sense because Palm’s new WebOS was not com­pat­i­ble with its older Pal­mOS and if I was going to make the break, I wanted to go with the plat­form that looked like it would be around in a cou­ple of years. But I had no idea how poorly Palm was really doing. In ret­ro­spect it was a smart move on my part, even if I felt a lit­tle funny about mak­ing it.

Palm’s new phones seem to be pretty good but no one is buy­ing them. At this stage, Palm’s only chance for sur­vival is being pur­chased. Apple would be a nat­ural fit, given the gen­e­sis of the orig­i­nal com­pany, but Microsoft has also been men­tioned. But why would either buy Palm? Apple is happy with it’s iPhone and Microsoft’s new Win­dows Phone 7 is prob­a­bly too far along to need much of a tech­nol­ogy infu­sion. The irony is that Palm may have sur­vived too long, had it failed sooner it might have made for a much more attrac­tive package.

I know I keep post­ing these, but the dam­age at Palm is worse than even I expected. I’d hes­i­tate to call them a “one hit won­der” but you have to admit no Palm device made as big a splash as the first one did.

It’s tough being the first one in a par­tic­u­lar mar­ket. You start with 100% mar­ket share and watch it decrease as com­peti­tors fig­ure out how to make some­thing sim­i­lar. Your only defense is to keep com­ing out with the “next big thing”. Maybe it was the con­stant own­er­ship changes, but Palm pur­sued a more evo­lu­tion­ary approach, when they could be said to have any approach at all, and it got them to where they are now. Let that be the cau­tion­ary tale.