Palm, a brand that was once loved by many who made the company’s delightfully simple and easy to use personal digital assistants an essential part of their lives, has been repeatedly kicked in the face over the past few years. On the brink of death, they got some money from a big mouth long haired venture capitalist named Roger McNamee, who then cashed in his chips shortly thereafter by selling the underdog smartphone vendor to one of America’s biggest corporations: HP. Sadly, Palm didn’t get any love and attention while in the belly of the beast, and the decision was made to stop producing hardware running their incredibly innovative webOS platform. Over 500 employees were fired, and the ones who were worth anything left and got hired by competitors. Most notable are Peter Skillman, who was the father of the webOS design language, but now works for Nokia, and Matias Duarte, also responsible for much of the webOS user experience, who is now working for Google to make Android look less like a product for geeks who live in their parent’s basement.
So what’s going to happen to Palm in 2012? According to an exclusive from Reuters, HP is looking to sell the poor crippled bastard to anyone willing to cough up “hundreds of millions of dollars”. To put that into some perspective, HP paid $1.2 billion for the company back in 2010. Now the question is who in their right mind would buy the company? They’ve got patents, that’s for sure, but we don’t know if HP is going to decide to keep those patents and just sell off the talent. Sony’s trying to reinvent themselves … but past history shows they have no idea how to make software and hardware work together.
We’re at a loss for words, and kind of wish Palm would just die already since right now they remind us of the Terri Schiavo case in the late 90s and early 00s.