TR Forums

Story here

I don't want to start of Mac/PC flame war, but I wish to discuss the implications of this decision. I think it makes good business sense to allow a third part developer to develop sync software for a smaller segment of its customer base. What doesn't make sense, is catering to your main competitor. Don't Pocket PCs already sync with Outlook better anyway? Is Palm starting to hemorrhage market share to Pocket PCs, and this change is just a desperate cry for help? Some of you guys might know better than I.

I was planning to purchase a 12" Powerbook and a Palm Zire 71 for school in the fall. Arg!

You betcha fink will bring it to Mac. The Open Source guys already did it for Linux/BSD and porting should be trivial.

OTOH I despise Palm for this move.

Mac is supposedly making their own PDA device in secret. Palm might have gotten word of it and make a pre-emptive strike. I remember when people never said "pre-emptive strike", oh well.

here

and here

Palmsource, the company, is skating on the thin ice of financial viability: $30M in cash on hand, $15M in debt, and they lost $15M over the last 12 months. With a burn rate like that, they have to focus on shipping asap using as few resources as possible. If they changed the internals of their software so that it works more like Outlook and less like iCalendar (thus making adapting to the Mac more difficult) and PCs represent the vast majority of their user base, then this is the right decision for them. If they can get Open Source to pick up the slack for them for free, all the better.

Actually, at a measely $224M market cap Apple could just buy them if they thought it was worth it (though I think there are some large shareholders that might fight that).