Palm: 1992-2006?

I got dragged onto the Palm bandwagon in 2000, but the sad fact is that its main advantages over a Filofax are the following in descending order of importance:

• fits in my pocket
• holds tons of data without getting larger
• can beep at me to remind me of something
• synchronizes with my desktop computer
• runs software

There isn't one of these that doesn't apply to smartphones, and Apple forsaking Newton for iSync was the writing on the wall. While a programmer posting anonymously at OSnews is correct that PalmOS development is pretty much "compile once, deploy everywhere," he's also evading the other truth: that in order to make PalmOS small and fast, the firmware sacrifices enough characteristics of a conventional platform to make porting apps a chore.

Platform historians are going to have a hard time resisting the impulse to paint Palm's history as a flawed copy of the Macintosh. As a former Apple employee, Jeff Hawkins never objected to the comparisons made by the press.

It's an apt parallel to what happened with the original Macintosh, beyond the obvious Motorola 68K/monochrome screen. Design decisions made 10 years before held back the platform, and it took dumping nearly everything that differentiated it in favor of a more standardized OS and hardware to sustain the product name, while carefully maintaining five years' worth of compatibility to make the transition palatable. A faster CPU replaced a 68K and the OS shipping for it was essentially a recompile for the new architecture with a bytecode translator.

Unfortunately they followed Apple's mistakes as well. Spinning off software divisions, releasing too many new models with incompatible hardware and not enough improvements, and taking their momentum over Microsoft for granted.

Ultimately PalmSource made the critical mistake Apple avoided: they thought their future lay in BeOS, wasting a year trying to shoehorn its features into PalmOS before realizing they had zero clout with Palm or its hardware licensees. Cobalt died on the vine. Partners like Handera, Symbol and Tapwave either folded or switched alliances to Windows as laptops got cheaper and smaller and SCO's legal troubles made it relatively clear that Linux was a viable alternative for smartphones.

And Linux is where PalmSource claims PalmOS' future lies, with a new kernel but the same API. Unlike the OS X transition that supplied every Mac user with a fully fledged instance of BSD Unix, the Linux PalmOS won't be a Zaurus running Linux with a recognizable file structure. It's merely an architecture change to make PalmOS easier to port to as-yet-unknown smartphone platforms.

Nevertheless rumors abound that PalmSource's corporate masters have no use for PalmOS.

When everyone got on Wifi, Palm lagged until well after every one of their competitors made it a stock feature. The Windows portable platform rides Microsoft's coattails; iPods feed off iTunes' ubiquity. PalmOS lacks an equivalent lifeline, and Palm's decision to stop supporting MacOS cuts the philosophical tie that founded the company.

The LifeDrive is a solution looking for a problem, and a rushed one at that: a cold restart reformats the hard drive -- and it still can't run any OS except the one burned into it.

The most important lesson geeks and nerds need to take away from the 90s if they didn't cut their teeth in the 80s is this: the commercial computer business is not a meritocracy and it never was.

• Better products will be steamrolled by cheaper ones.
• Cheaper equal quality products will be ignored in favor of ones with dumbed down interfaces, European designers and flashy ad campaigns.
• Businesses will choose the bigger company over price, quality or dependable standards, every time.

If you're an idealist, stick with BSD or Linux.