Palm CEO Ed Colligan Talks Pre with Investors
We're listening to Ed Colligan talk to investors about the state of Palm and what some of their plans are going forward. Some interesting tidbits: — There will be no more PalmOS devices released by Palm (excepting the Centro getting released on other carriers).
Context & Ripple Effects
This investor briefing lands at the hinge point of Palm's platform transition. Two years after Palm's open letter to customers, partners and developers set expectations about where the aging PalmOS was heading, Colligan is now telling investors outright that no new PalmOS devices will ship beyond carrier variants of the Centro.
That makes this a bet-the-company moment: everything rides on webOS and the Pre, a story that continues in coverage of how Palm frames webOS as bigger than just the Pre's installed base, and culminates months later when ex-Apple executive Jon Rubinstein is promoted over Colligan to CEO.
First-order effects
- Palm's developer and carrier partners now have a hard end date for PalmOS investment — anyone building for the legacy platform must migrate to webOS or exit, while Centro inventory lives on only through other-carrier releases.
- Investors get their first formal look at the go-forward plan, tying Palm's near-term credibility directly to the Pre's launch execution rather than its legacy device business.
Second-order effects
- A clean break from PalmOS forces competitors and carriers to treat webOS as a genuine third mobile OS contender alongside established platforms, raising the stakes on exclusive hardware deals like the Pre's carrier arrangements.
- The platform cutover pressures accessory makers and enterprise customers who standardized on PalmOS devices to re-evaluate vendors, opening the door for rivals to poach those accounts during the transition window.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, this is an early case study in the brutal economics of mobile platforms: even a well-reviewed OS relaunch (as webOS's CES debut showed) can't survive without sustained scale, foreshadowing the consolidation where niche platforms get absorbed by hardware giants — as later happened when LG revived webOS after Palm's decline.
- It also prefigures the industry-wide shift toward CEO selection driven by software and design pedigree rather than device-lineage leadership, a template Palm itself followed by elevating Rubinstein.
The trend: This is one data point in the mid-2000s collapse of legacy handheld operating systems, as once-dominant mobile pioneers were forced to rebuild around touchscreen-era software or be consolidated by larger players.