At the risk of sounding absurdly optimistic in the face of the declining PDA market and the Palm OS's beleaguered status in the tough smartphone market, I am going on record saying that its renaming is actually something of a milestone in the rebirth of the "Palm" brand. To understand why this could be so you need to know a bit of history.
To start with, while ACCESS has been decried for the renaming, it wasn't actually something they had a choice about. In May of 2005 PalmSource sold the right to the previously shared Palm brand to then-PalmOne, and agreed to phase out its use of the name in all its products within four years. PalmOne immediately changed its name back to Palm Inc. and it was only a matter of time before ACCESS—party to the agreement by dint of its acquisition of PalmSource—would begin the process of removing the Palm name from all of its products. When PalmSource was renamed ACCESS last October this was symbolic of the integration of parent and subsidiary, but it was also the first step toward compliance with that two-year old agreement. Changing "Palm OS Garnet" to "Garnet OS" is just the next step. Eventually ACCESS products like Palm Desktop will have to be renamed or replaced as well.
What's more interesting is what the change means for Palm. As has been widely publicized, Palm reacquired from ACCESS the right to use and develop the Garnet OS source code in pretty much any way it choses as long as backward compatibility is maintained, as established by a mutually agreed upon test suite. Less publicized is the fact that Palm is actually exempt from having to use the name Garnet OS in any products it releases with this OS. In explaining this deal with Palm, ACCESS stated:
Under terms of the agreement, we have given Palm the right to use either "Palm OS by ACCESS" or the product's new name... when referring to the operating system licensed with this new agreement.So from Palm's perspective this renaming exercise by ACCESS would appear to mean next to nothing.
But appearances can be deceiving. As I've mentioned several times before, Palm's reacquistion of the Garnet source code was not just so Palm didn't have to depend on ACCESS to make minor tweaks and bug fixes. The $44M agreement included concessions by ACCESS that give Palm "the right to use Palm OS Garnet in whole, or in part, in any product from Palm and together with any other system technologies." Palm's press release about the agreement was a bit more definite about what this meant:
Palm has secured an expansion of its existing patent license from ACCESS to cover all current and future Palm products, regardless of the underlying operating system. [emphasis mine]
I've gone into some detail in several other posts about the evidence that Palm needed this agreement to enable it to develop it's own Linux-based successor to the Palm OS, apart from that being developed by ACCESS. If I'm right about this, what makes the renaming of Palm OS Garnet so interesting, is that it actually clears the way for Palm to give the name "Palm OS" to its next-generation operating system. Palm owns the brand, it owns its OS, and as of this week no other company will be able to use the name Palm OS.
The Palm brand had become quite a mess in the last few years, what with the ill-fated PalmOne/PalmSource split and the subsequent buyout of PalmSource, but since Ed Colligan took the helm at Palm he's done a great job in putting the brand back together again. More than just the brand, he has hired back many of the original developers of the Palm OS and regained the right to build the next generation of the Palm OS. From where I stand it looks like this project has been under way for at least a couple of years, and I expect we'll be hearing an announcement about a modernized but Garnet-compatible "Palm System 7" (or some such) within the next few months.
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