MacDailyNews Take: Or maybe it’s the way he left Apple. No, not the way that press releases imply mutual satisfaction among all parties, but the real way Rubinstein left Apple. From what we’ve heard it wasn’t very pretty – or very quiet – the day it went down.
Waters continues, “The chief executive officer of Palm, Mr Rubinstein is a former top lieutenant of Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, and has been following the Apple playbook closely with his company’s own touch-screen smartphones.”
MacDailyNews Take: Oh, haven’t you heard, Richard? Jon has never even touched an Apple iPhone, much less used one. So he says. Is Jon a liar or incompetent or both? You decide.
Waters continues, “‘I don’t see us as following Apple at all, we have our own DNA,’ Rubinstein says. And he is dismissive of Google, which has created plenty of buzz in recent months with new handsets carrying its Android mobile software… ‘Our target is not the real techies – our target is consumers,’ he says, in a line that is starting to sound practised.”
“He estimates that there is room for between three and five different software platforms in the smartphone market,” Waters reports.
MacDailyNews Take: Three? Probbaly, if not two. Four? Not very likely. Five? Jon would like it to be so, but no.
Waters continues, “Mr Rubinstein does not rule out one possible way to widen the reach for Palm’s technology: by licensing its WebOS software to other groups.”
MacDailyNews Take: Or by finding a buyer for the whole shebang, which, we have always contended, has been beleaguered Palm’s goal since the day Steve Jobs’ unveiled the iPhone.
Full article here.
GigaOM’s Om Malik reports, “When Google announced its Nexus One phone, it… essentially left Motorola and the guy who bet the company on Android, CEO Sanjay Jha, out in the cold.”
“At the device unveiling held at Googleplex, the search giant made a big effort to dispel the notion that it’s not doing an end run around its partners,” Malik writes. “Google even got Jha to show up, get on stage and mutter some polite nothings. It didn’t go unnoticed that he was late getting there — he cited traffic — and left as soon as it was over.”
“Well, paint me cynical, but guys who have corporate Gulfstreams at their disposal don’t get delayed in traffic unless they want to. More importantly, his onstage body language made clear that Motorola wasn’t too thrilled about the Nexus One, especially after publicly betting the farm on Android,” Malik reports. “Indeed, I’ve since had two very senior sources in the mobile industry confirm as much.”
Malik writes, “If I was Jha, I’d sure feel snookered… That is why the Nexus One feels like a knife in the back. So what should Motorola’s Jha do? Call Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO? Nah, that’s a terrible idea. Microsoft isn’t capable of stopping the Android train and even then Motorola is going to be betting on someone else’s OS. Maybe use LiMo or Symbian? Again, not so smart. What Motorola needs to do is take a page from the Apple/RIM playbook and get vertically integrated.”
Malik writes, “And in order to do that, the company should buy Palm.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’ll go you one further, Om: Apple should buy Palm. Doing so would allow Apple to take out two competitors for the very cheap price of one (Palm’s market value is only around $2 billion). Motorola would be left out in the cold to fend for itself as a jilted Android “partner” (or, if possible, sell off their handset business once and for all) and Apple would be able to put Palm out of their misery while getting whatever’s in their filing cabinet which must have something of value besides a bunch of antiquated patents and iPod USB Vendor IDs, right? Plus, Jobs could send Rubinstein back to Mexico again, this time with a pink slip and a whimper.
On the other hand, letting Motorola get Palm’s webOS might be exactly what Jobs wants, if he wants the third player in a three-company market to be the bumbling Motorola instead of RIM. Motorola is already quite weak, with very little share, but letting them get Palm’s webOS will help speed up RIM’s decline. Yes, in the future, we see a dominant iPhone OS, Android with a smaller piece of the mobile computing pie, and maybe – just maybe – a third company or bunch of licensees trying to hoover up the table scraps. Think of how the Portable Media Player market looks today with Apple, a far-distant SanDisk, with a bunch of also-rans crawling around down at the bottom. The question that remains is whether that third player, if there even is a third player, will be RIM (they’ll need a new OS, and quick) or Motorola (with or without licensees) using Palm’s webOS, or if it’s some other platform entirely. Going further, the fact that Apple has not yet bought Palm may signal that they want a Motorola or even Microsoft to pick it up and begin helping squeeze RIM.
All of that said, why haven’t RIM or Nokia, both desperately in need of a modern OS, already bought Palm?
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