Palm Is Far From ‘Game Over,’ Says Former Chief
When Hewlett-Packard, the world's largest computer maker, acquired Palm, the struggling maker of the Pre and Pixi smartphones, in late April, it was a much-needed lifeline for a company that was battling to stay afloat in a increasingly fierce mobile landscape.
Context & Ripple Effects
Palm enters this story after a bruising two years: a CEO arguing in March 2009 that webOS was bigger than just the Pre base, Jon Rubinstein's January 2010 boast that he had never used an iPhone, and an April exodus capped by the SVP of software and services leaving while others were given cash-and-stock retention deals. Weeks later, Hewlett-Packard stepped in with the late-April acquisition that kept the struggling Pre and Pixi maker alive.
Now a former Palm chief is publicly rejecting the obituary framing, telling Bits the company is 'far from game over' under HP ownership. It matters because Palm's fate has stopped being a standalone handset story: its survival now depends entirely on what the world's largest PC maker chooses to do with webOS.
First-order effects
- The former chief's intervention is aimed squarely at the developer and carrier audience weighing whether to invest in webOS, pushing back on the assumption that Palm's platform is dead on arrival inside HP.
- HP inherits the burden of proof: having paid for Palm at its weakest point in a fierce mobile market, it now owns both the platform and the skepticism around it.
Second-order effects
- Rivals' momentum sets the bar — every quarter iOS and Android add apps and shelf space, webOS must win developers over without a proven volume base, making HP's roadmap the decisive variable.
- Retention cash and stock from the April deal only holds talent so long; continued departures would signal to partners that confidence inside Palm itself is thinning.
Third-order effects
- If HP cannot convert the acquisition into shipped devices and developer traction, the pattern points toward mobile OS consolidation — independent platforms folding into larger hardware companies as table stakes (apps, carrier relationships, component scale) rise beyond their reach.
- Whether a big-PC acquirer can run a phone platform as anything more than a patent-and-talent purchase is the structural question this episode tests.
The trend: Smartphone platform competition is consolidating around a few ecosystems, forcing struggling OS makers like Palm to survive only as acquisitions inside larger hardware companies.