The Future of Palm and the WebOS Now in the Hands of Others

Speculation swirls around the future of Palm and the WebOS. Over at GigOm, Colin Gibb has already presented a well-thought-out (albeit partial) list of prospective acquirers of Palm (or at least its intellectual property. Colin set equal odds (7:1) for either Google or Dell to put money down primarily to acquire the WebOS and other patents that Palm amassed since it began offering an electronic organizer (people still talk about the Pilot) as a subsidiary of U.S. Robotics in 1996. There’s probably sufficient “prior art” among various concepts or processes around synching, display management and connectivity to fortify Google’s defense of almost anything that can be contemplated to support human enterprise using HTML5 or other wonderfulness in Google’s cloud.

When Palm introduced WebOS, there was grounds to be excited, as I noted here. However, many of the design concepts (of easy, browser-based access and navigation to anything on the Web) have been incorporated into Android, not to mention Microsoft Phone. All three make mobile phone users largely indifferent to whether they are invoking an application that is resident on the device or a Web service that is essentially rendered or executed on the device.

But if you’re an application or service developer, it’s an entirely different story. So-called “platform fragmentation” is the bane of the app developing public. Just about every day, we’re asked to handicap or rank “which mobile OS (or OSes) are gonna provide a large enough group of paying users?” The iPhone is a given for many. Not so much for its overall potential, but for the near term visibility, clear path to market (whether you like Apple’s T’s & C’s or not) and revenue generating capability. Android is next, just based on hope and Google’s gravitas. Then there’s anything that can be rendered in Java inside a HTML-conforming environment (fostered by the promise of resources like Appcelerator, which help developers write the code once and have it rendered on many platforms.

Next comes a range of tier three options. Business-oriented app developers have their sights set on BlackBerry. Those with global aspirations put Nokia and Symbian on their roadmap. But it’s hard to imagine how Samsung’s recently introduced mobile OS, Bada, is a good idea at this point.

Further fragmentation of the Apps – and device – market occurs at the retail level. Palm (and the WebOS-based devices) fell victim to insufficient support at the retail level. Its CEO believes that it may be corrected by more and better sales training, but that’s not likely to solve the dual problems of mobile buyer confusion and indifference. Let’s face it, the pro’s and con’s of mobile operating systems are “Inside Baseball” chatter for gadget geeks. There’s no “I want my MTV!” like fervor to be built around Windows Phone or WebOS. Then there’s the issue of loyalty which, in the case of mobile phones or devices, is more like a fashion show economy.

In his article, Colin Gibbs laid out long odds for the likes of Nokia, Motorola, Microsoft and Cisco to purchase Palm or its assets. He admits that it’s a partial list and that others our bound to emerge, especially as the stock price approaches target $0, at which point I would wonder why a tech-savvy turnaround specialist, like Silverlake or its partner TPG, which bought Avaya might not take a look. In the meantime, Palm-loyalists should start looking into how their favorite applications and services can be rendered in other HTML-based environments.