Long-term followers of this blog will likely still recall that Palm was split into two parts some time ago – one half was the hardware maker, and the other part owned the rights to the Palm OS.
An Associated Press report which gained wide-spread distribution recently contains the following quote from Donna:
Dubinsky said all the shuffling took “critical resources and attention from product development.” And even though it happened years ago, she called the decision to spin off PalmOS a “huge strategic error.”
“As RIM, Apple and Palm all have demonstrated, these devices need to be highly integrated hardware and software developments in order to optimize the user experience,” Dubinsky wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press. “When Palm no longer could advance the OS, and had to create a new one, it lost several years.”
Even though I personally think that the idea behind the spin-off was sound, it has horribly back-fired for Palm – they never managed to attract another licensee.
However, hindsight is always easy – what do you think?
Related posts:
The spin-off was a really stupid idea. Palm has no product without Palm OS – why would you want to put a critical element of your business under the leadership of another company?
Q: What happens if that company decides not to maintain or license their OS to you anymore?
A: You’re screwed! You have to write your own OS. Let’s call it “web os”.
Also: It didn’t seem like Palm was having a problem getting licensees before the spin-off — there were gobs of them! So I’m not sure why attracting more licensees would be considered a benefit.
A better question: Why exactly would this be a good idea??