Software Destinations

Brett Arends at Boston Herald would like to see Apple pick up Palm for the $1.1 Billion its supposed to be worth, but I dont see this happening.

What is Palm now? Palm sold its operating system to Access Corporation of Japan. Access has a long term business in the OEM market for phone-internet integration in Japan and Java oriented solutions. A smart buy for Access as this would likely seem to herald the first real penetration of the PalmOS into the Japanese phone market. Without Sony selling PDAs based on PalmOS, where was Palm anyway in Japan? They were quite late to market when the iron was hot in the US, and never did seem to recover there. At the time, the only real player in the market was the Sharp Zaurus, a very powerful handheld that was not only expensive but very difficult to develop applications for; Palm had the opportunity to get into the market quickly but elected not to.

There’s no reason for Apple to acquire Palm. Apple’s brand is on the rise;Palm’s brand is on the wane (WinCE devices slowly but steadily filling up the void). Apple already has an underlying operating system that runs on the iPod. What would Palm provide at $1.1 billion that Apple couldnt create itself for much less?

Gamasutra’s feature article today is called Game Law: To Sue or Not to Sue…That is the Question. This is a fine article that is unfortunately almost as relevant for traditional application developers. In my experience, legal confrontations seem to occur far more in games/entertainment rather than in the shrinkwrap apps market.