Friday, July 28, 2006

Palm annual report: we're making the next Palm OS ourselves

Palm's annual report was released today. It's pretty revealing about where they stand with regard to PalmSource/ACCESS and the once presumed successor to the Palm OS, the ACCESS Linux Platform. For those who don't follow the Palm OS closely, Palm's OS division was spun off as PalmSource in 2003 and subsequently acquired last year by Japanese mobile software company ACCESS. PalmSource announced the Palm OS-compatible ACCESS Linux Platform in February and promised a release before the end of this year.

From the section of the annual report where Palm must spell out all its business risks it reads at one point:
Contemporaneously with the license agreement, we entered into a co-development agreement with PalmSource to develop a next-generation Palm OS for use in future Palm products. PalmSource did not timely meet certain of the milestones under the co-development agreement, relieving us of our obligation to make minimum royalty payments under the license agreement after calendar year 2006. We are presently in negotiations with PalmSource to expand our development and distribution rights to the current version of the Palm OS. If we are unable to successfully conclude these negotiations, it may adversely affect our ability to develop and distribute new products based on a next-generation version of the Palm OS.

Ok, so Palm and PalmSource were working together on the new Palm OS, PalmSource missed some project milestones, and Palm told them "we need a new agreement." And the agreement they are seeking is... what now? For Palm to get expanded development rights to the current version of Palm OS--not the Linux version that was being developed under the previous agreement. Why would they want this, and why do they say that if these negotiations fail it will affect their ability to ship products with a next-generation Palm OS? The clearest interpretation is that Palm plans to take charge of developing its new operating system instead of PalmSource/ACCESS.

As I've discussed elsewhere (and had confirmed by an insider) Palm has indeed been separately working on their own Linux successor to Palm OS, but the annual report provides the first official information that suggests this development. We can surmise that the need to negotiate for expanded development rights on the existing Palm OS code base is due to a desire to provide backward compatibility with existing Palm OS applications, perhaps to get the rights to distribute a Palm OS Garnet emulator and HotSync technology within their new platform.

Elsewhere in the annual report we have it that Palm hired 130 people for research and development last year, increasing R&D expenditures 51% over FY2005. That's a lot of new people doing research in a company the size of Palm--another hint of Palm's new ambitions.

I can think of some good reasons why Palm has apparently decided not to license PalmSource's ACCESS Linux Platform. Given the language above as well as promises elsewhere in the report to release new Palm OS products, it's obviously not because Palm is planning to go completely over to Windows Mobile (although that could be an eventual fallback position if the negotiations described fail). A more likely reason is this: since PalmSource was acquired by ACCESS, Palm entered a very risky situation of depending on a new and foreign company's business plans--a company with aspirations to license the PalmSource operating system much more broadly than PalmSource was ever able to do. If ACCESS is successful in this ambition it would dilute Palm's uniqueness in a market that is already getting very competitive. Even if the number of vendors allowed to license PalmSource's operating system were limited to avoid this, there would still be no guarantee that ACCESS would share the same priorities as Palm. For example, one of the primary focuses of ALP is on delivering a better user experience for handsets that lack touchscreens--a device class in which Palm has yet to show any interest.

It's no surprise that Palm bid fiercely to acquire PalmSource itself when ACCESS and Motorola started their bidding war last year. Let's hope for their sake that they are successful this time in negotiating the rights they need to bring the next version of Palm OS to market.

Related article: Seven misconceptions about Palm's new annual report

Posted by cervezas at 18:29:54. Filed under: Palm OS

Comments

WOW! I guess you were right all along David! ;) I wonder however, what exactly where the specific "developmental milestones" that Access/Palmsource failed to make? Perhaps UMTS support for PalmOS? In any case, the language in the report seems to indicate that it is very unlikely that Palm will ever lisence and release a ALP device. If true, then what type or version of Palmos could Palm have in mind? Would it share any of the linux kernal of ALP? Would it cross support Max based apps on ALP? OR would it simply be a completely new platform with legacy support for garnet as lisenced from ACCESS?

Anyway, I the whole palmsource-palm aplit seems like a mistake for palm now...

Posted by gfunkmagic at Friday, July 28, 2006 20:06:11

I read the missed "developmental milestones" as referring to PalmSource's work on Palm OS Cobalt or "Cobalt on Linux." I guess I just don't see enough time having passed since the ACCESS acquisition in December and ALP announcement in February for Palm to talk about missed milestones there.

No multitasking platform (Linux or Cobalt) would have trouble with UMTS, so that wasn't the problem.

As for what Palm's "next-generation Palm OS" will look like, your guess is probably as good as mine.

I agree that it looks like the PalmSource/Palm split was a bad idea for Palm.

Posted by cervezas at Friday, July 28, 2006 21:29:47

Pretty interesting reading.

I just hope that this "next generation PalmOS" is not a version of PalmSource's Garnet on all of the possible steriods in the world.

As a developer, I am sick and tired of having to put up with the limitations of Palm's buggy hack job. There are some nice features, but sadly, the limitations of the OS (not tooo great) and the ill effects and bugginess of Palm's hacking of FrankenGarnet has made it pretty difficult to produce anything super innovative.

I give Palm one more chance because they are not Microsoft and I believe in them. I am still hope the pre-palmOne Palm, Inc. will shine through.

Posted by dkirker at Friday, July 28, 2006 23:34:44

They had Cobalt - I wished they went ahead with Cobalt... That would have handled all future/coming challenges w/ 3G or whatnot.. Management just screwed up - they had these opportunities in front of them, and just couldn't decide what to do - no action is the worst action... I have written about this before on my blog. It is a shame. And as I've said before, I believe that someone is going to buy back the Palm OS technologies (including Cobalt) and resurrect it.

ceo

Posted by eortiz at Monday, July 31, 2006 09:20:21

I don't know. I think Palm would have the same problem with Cobalt that other potential licensees apparently did: Cobalt's proprietary driver model meant that all this time-consuming low-level development had to be done every time you wanted to come out with new hardware. Palm is small and they need to be agile to compete. For that Linux makes sense, since new chips and subsystems generally ship from the manufacturer with Linux drivers already developed (not necessarily the best ones, but if you have to improve them it's easy enough to find Linux developers who can do it).

PalmSource was probably pretty far along with porting the Cobalt middleware to a Linux kernel before they were acquired in December. It would make sense for Palm to get that now-abandoned Cobalt-on-Linux project back from PalmSource and build off of that. This may be what is happening.

Having said that, Palm was never enthusiastic about Cobalt and we don't know if that dissatisfaction was addressed by PalmSource's Cobalt-on-Linux platform or not. Palm may have partnered up with one or more other mobile Linux vendors to develop something that's more in line with their own vision for the Palm OS. In that case they may just need the rights to include the Palm OS Garnet IP as a compatibility layer for a new platform. (Also the right to update software like HotSync, Palm Desktop, etc.)

Posted by cervezas at Monday, July 31, 2006 09:43:03

Cobalt was/is superior that Garnet. I spent time with it and I was excited about it. Port to Linux, sure... but, where are they today -- with nothing, well with Garnet. They should have moved forward with Cobalt... My opinion :-)

Posted by eortiz at Monday, July 31, 2006 14:07:46

Oh, I don't disagree that Cobalt was dynamite in a great many respects. It made clever use of the ARM architecture for context-switching, improving multitasking performance, the graphics were awesome, and its object orientation (even though initially obscured by the Palm-OS-like API) would have been exposed over time making a very productive, powerful, and modern API. Considering what it's probably costing Palm now to come up with a path forward for Palm OS they may be thinking the same way you are!

Posted by cervezas at Monday, July 31, 2006 14:59:41

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