a blog by Peter Leonard
The Company Once and From Now Forward Known as Palm put out a press release today announcing their most recent name change, from palmOne back to Palm, Inc.
Actually, it's worse than that: the logo wasn't palmOne but instead pa1mOne, with an arabic numeral one replacing the L. Typo or pathetic attempt at "1337" humor? You be the judge:
A few years ago they split the original company into two and divided the brand (palmOne for the devices and PalmSource for the operating system) with the tagline "Some ideas are too big for just one company."
Apparently after two years of little innovation (other than the Treo 650 technology acquired from Handspring) and steadily ceding ground to Windows Mobile and BlackBerry, the Palm ecosystem has now shrunk to the point where the ideas are once again small enough for one company, and indeed contracting at an alarming pace.
So the hardware company (paONEmOne) bought the rights to the name from their former co-workers, PalmSource. For THIRTY MILLION DOLLARS. The president of palmOne, apparently reduced to apoplexy about how to refer to his own brand, resorted to kindergarten spelling games: "The letters P-A-L-M reflect a prized brand with significant customer awareness..."
What of PalmSource? They can use the name for a four-year "transition period." With the recent decision to scuttle the upcoming next-generation operating system (based on the acquisition of BeOS) in favor of Linux, I suspect that this branding agreement may indeed outlive the platform itself. When the Slashdot crowd loses faith, the writing is on the wall.
The ridiculousness of the situation is brought home by the schizophrenic brand message confronting customers and shareholders on the Palm website today:
