Palm & Access

As posted at PalmAddicts...

    Well, today's news is definitely interesting. My first thought leans towards the conspiracy theory idea... I don't know if this is good or not. The conspiracy theory side of me thinks, "hmmm, for the smartphone market its down to MS, Symbian, and Palm. MS is known for buying companies just to make them go away (acquire their strengths, but stop selling their product). Could this be an in-direct purchase? In other words, could this be funded by MS to make Palm go away? We know that MS indirectly funded SCO via BayStar to pursue the whole Linux IP thing...". But man cannot live by conspiracy theories alone. Truly this is interesting news. I definitely think it'll be one of those "time will tell" thingy's. And most definitely, the one thing that hasn't been clear yet is the future relationship/deal Palm (the h/w company) will have with Access. In the 80's, especially in the Los Angeles area, there was lots of talk and complaints about Japan buying up lots of American companys and real estate. Heck, Michael Crichton's Rising Sun was about this very subject. I've seen comments and posts about how sad it is to see a largely US company sell out to a Japanese one. Then again, if Access is doing it right and PalmSource isn't, then this should be a good thing. Then again, we all know that when Palm split into PalmOne and PalmSource, there were some very sweet deals between the two, including lots of licensing discounts. It'll be interesting to see if such agreements remain and if Palm (the h/w company) can survive. If they have to pay the same prices that Samsung and LG pay, Palm's profitability will suffer.

On a good note, I recall a while back I went searching for alternate browsers for my 650. I recall reading the newer Blazer is actually based on NetFront (made by Access) which is why its so good. Supposedly there's a NetFront version that supports tabbed browsing and such, but its not available for Palm OS (at least not as a free download). Perhaps some good things will come of this.

Follow-Up:

Access Buys Palm - What We Missed

As posted at PalmAddicts...

Perhaps it was just overlooked, but there's something bigger to Access' buyout of PalmSource. Just a few months back, PalmSource acquired China Mobilesoft (a Chinese company, like the name didn't imply as much). Now Access, a Japanese company, just bought PalmSource which owns China Mobilesoft and everything behind them. Consider this... the Chinese and Japanese are extremely competitive, especially in the mobile device markets. If, say six months ago, Access had tried to buy China Mobilesoft, they would have been laughed out the door. But not so now. This was a very competitive play for Access. They didn't just buy PalmSource. They bought China Mobilesoft and everything they brought to PalmSource's table. This is actually a very huge consolidation and provided an opportunity to Access that never would have been available before. It was about a lot more than just buying PalmSource...

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