Businesses are not supposed to be run like non-profits. If you cannot compete successfully and make money, your product is not going to survive. Let's not get all doe-eyed and sentimental here, Palm failed as an entity because it couldn't bring its product to market in a way which sustained the company.
The technology highway is littered with the carcasses of companies that couldn't sustain their business model. Northgate, one of the early IBM cloners, made keyboards that are among the finest (I still have two of them), gone. Quarterdeck, who made the miniscule amounts of memory we used to have available to us do amazing things, gone. Central Point Software, who made PC utilities that nobody else had before everybody else started making them, swallowed up. AST, WordPerfect Corporation, Samna Word, Commodore, Osborne, need I go on? The idea may be great, WebOS, the Pre, the Pixi, the Pluses, but they couldn't move the company from its tendency to bleed money. That's regardless of what state HP is in. The only viable option to liquidation was a buy out, and the best buyer saw the asset as the IP, not the smartphones. I think business schools will study the entire life-cycle of Palm from it's U.S. Robotics days onward as a lesson in how not to run a company or a brand. As for me, I'm glad I jumped off the bus and onto the Android bandwagon before purchasing an orphaned product. (And now I'm putting my two 755p's and T|X on ebay; the train has definitely left the station). Harold [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
