I didn't think this was really a possibility - but I should have
As I noted in my recent Information Week column, Palm was in fact acquired, and did not turn into a crash-and-burn. But whereas I expected the acquirer to be an Asian firm, perhaps HTC, the winner instead turned out to be HP. HP has been on an acquisition tear lately, mostly notably getting 3Com and thus fleshing out both their wired and wireless networking lines. With Palm, HP can now address applications all the way to the mobile device. And Palm’s mobile devices, as I also recently noted, are really quite good. They’ll do just fine under the HP umbrella, and WebOS thus now jumps from also-ran to real contender in the race to the top of the Linux-on-mobile-devices heap. This further illustrates that any coronation of Android as the sure-thing Linux mobile winner is premature. And since I still expect Linux to become the dominant OS on mobile devices, with the iPhone version of MacOS and the BlackBerry OS the other remaining significant players, there’s a lot a stake here.
HP is now a clear leader in everything IT – they can sell you a computer, a printer, a handheld, a server, or build you a data center full of servers and even operate that data center or your entire IT infrastructure if you’d like. They can provide all manner of implementation technologies or build you precisely the solution you need. And, with Palm, those applications can be completely mobile. All in all, this is a another brilliant move on HP’s part, and a continuation of the winning strategy I discussed some time ago.
The price of the deal (about US$1.2 billion) both fairly reflects Palm’s value and yet remains a bargain for the buyer. And, as someone here at Interop pointed out to me, in a somewhat bizarre twist of fate, 3Com once owned Palm. They are now reunited under the guidance of a parent that is firm enough to reign in any inappropriate adventurism, visionary enough to enable pervasiveness and prosperity, and fun enough to provide the hope of more interesting and valuable products, services, and solutions to come. As they say, everyone involved – including the customer – goes home happy.
