Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Palm is Dead; Long Live Palm

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Palm, Inc. has one of the strangest corporate stories . . . ever. Let’s see if you can follow this timeline:

  • 1992 – Palm founded by Jeff Hawkins, Ed Colligen, and Donna Dubinsky. The Pilot handheld PDA becomes a big success in the subsequent years.
  • 1995 – Palm is acquired by US Robotics Corp.
  • 1997 – US Robotics (and Palm) are acquired by 3Com.
  • 1998 – Palm’s founders, unhappy with 3Com’s direction for the company, leave and form a new company called Handspring.
  • 2000 – 3Com spins the Palm subsidiary off into an independent company with an IPO on Nasdaq.
  • 2002 – Palm creates an independent subsidiary, named PalmSource, to manage and license the Palm OS operating system and renames itself, the device maker, to PalmOne. PalmOne spins PalmSource off into a separate, independent company.
  • 2003 – PalmOne buys Handspring, bringing the founders back into the company.
  • 2005 – PalmOne buys the rights to the ‘Palm’ name, jointly held by PalmOne and PalmSource, and renames itself back to Palm, Inc. PalmSource, meanwhile, is bought by Access, Ltd. PalmSource/Access struggles to create a worthy successor to the badly aging Palm OS operating system (it never does).
  • 2007 – Equity firm Elevation Partners buys a 25 percent stake in Palm, Inc., giving them a badly needed lifeline.
  • 2009 – Palm finally announces its own home-grown mobile operating system, WebOS, and a new ‘Pre’ smartphone. The system is well regarded, but doesn’t sell especially well.
  • 2010 – Palm, Inc. is acquired by Hewlett-Packard.

Obviously, this timeline had a lot of wrong turns. The splitting of Palm into two companies will likely go down in business history as one of the dumbest things a technology company has ever done, and PalmSource’s failure to deliver a worthy successor to the old Palm OS for so many years is a blight on their record and seriously hurt Palm[One]’s ability to compete in the market. While WebOS is still, in my humble opinion, the absolute best mobile operating system available, Palm has struggled to produce competitive hardware at a fast enough pace to compete with the Apple, Google, and RIM juggernauts.

This week—perhaps as early as tomorrow—Palm, Inc. will cease to exist. It will become part of venerable Hewlett-Packard, Inc. (HP). The expectation is that Palm won’t be a subsidiary (as it was under US Robotics and 3Com), but will become an internal unit at HP. It’s unknown at this time if the Palm name will live on, but it looks like Palm, as we loyal customers have known and loved it for so many years, will be gone.

The good news, however, is that with HP’s backing there’s a good chance that WebOS will land on better and better hardware in the months and years to come, and that HP/Palm/whatever it’s called will live on and regain its former standing in the mobile market. Long-time fans like myself are cautiously optimistic. Palm is dead; long live Palm.

Update: It’s official; Palm no longer exists as an independent company as of this morning (7/1), and is being de-listed from Nasdaq. In other news, PreCentral.net stole my post title! :-) At least in the near term, Palm is being labeled as a subsidiary of HP but it’s unclear if this is a temporary or more-permanent arrangement.

Supreme Court Overturns Gun Bans

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In a narrow 5-4 ruling, the United States Supreme Court has overturned the gun ban in Chicago, Illinois, and reiterated its previous rulings that individuals have a right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.

The Court ruled two years ago in District of Columbia vs. Heller that the Second Amendment protects an individual civil right, but the ruling was narrowly crafted and some believed it only applied to federal laws and federal enclaves like the District. In today’s McDonald vs. Chicago ruling, the Court explicitly clarified that states must also abide by the Bill of Rights in their legislation, ending any serious confusion about the meaning and scope of the Second Amendment.

Technically, the Supreme Court did not directly overturn the bans, but it did clarify the meaning of its previous rulings and sent the case back to lower courts for consideration. In practice, this means that the gun ban will either be overturned by the lower court or returned again to the Supreme Court to be overturned later.

This ruling will potentially have wide-ranging impact on state and local gun laws across the country, possibly forcing these governments to bring their laws in-line with the plain text of the Bill of Rights.

M

cDonald vs. Chicago

Senator Byrd Dead at 92

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Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), the longest serving member of Congress, has died at the age of 92. He had suffered numerous age-related health problems over the last two years.

Byrd served West Virginia in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1953 to 1959 before moving to the Senate for an astounding nine terms. During his half-century in the Senate, Byrd has served in various leadership positions including President Pro Tempore, Majority Leader, Minority Leader, Majority Whip, and Chairman of the Appropriations Committee.

His legacy, however, has been tarnished by his racist positions earlier in life. In his twenties, Byrd was a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan and he famously filibustered the Civil Rights Act. He has since repudiated and apologized for these positions, and in later years became a reliable supporter of minority civil rights issues.

Under West Virginia law, Byrd will be replaced by a gubernatorial appointment.

How to Quantify My Politics

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I’ve been giving some thought lately to how I can quantify and/or explain my political views in a short, pithy, simple way. I keep coming up short. What’s most annoying is that I’ve been trying to do this with only limited success since I first started paying real attention to politics, some time around 1997 or 1998. Originally I called myself a ‘moderate Republican.’ This gave way to something like ‘libertarian Republican’ [note the small-L].

In 2000, I first began to really identify myself as an independent since I found that I was in disagreement with a lot of ‘Republican’ policy stances and calling myself a Republican wasn’t really accurate. I didn’t really have any good qualifiers so I just said I was independent. When prodded, I would give an explanation like, “I disagree with Democrats 80 percent of the time and Republicans 60 percent of the time, so I generally vote Republican.” This was both an oversimplification and an exaggeration, but it got the point across. It’s still somewhat accurate.

At some point, in desperation for a 1- or 2-word statement on my politics, I began calling myself a ‘conservative independent’ and this stuck. This is what showed on the ‘about’ page of this web site for many, many years . . . but it never felt totally right. It wasn’t that it was wrong, it just seemed like it lacked clarity. It says I’m somewhere center-right, which is true, but doesn’t really explain what I’m center on, what I’m right on, or, for that matter, what I might be left on! At some point ‘conservative independent’ gave way to the equally obtuse ‘independent conservative,’ reflecting a slightly more pronounced rightward slant (though certainly no sea-change).

Read more . . .

House Passes ‘DISCLOSE’ Act

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The United States House of Representatives narrowly passed the controversial ‘DISCLOSE’ Act last night. The Act would impose a number of new, unconstitutional requirements on organizations that engage in First Amendment protected political speech. More on the Act here.

If you value your civil liberties and your own free speech, free assembly, and privacy rights, you might want to contact your Senators and demand that they vote against this bill when it comes to their chamber.

If your Congressman voted for this (and the many other unconstitutional bills they’ve been passing over the last several years), you might want to contact them too and let your opinions be known. Of course, the best way is to vote with your . . . votes ;-).

Don’t forget, all of our elected officials swear to protect and defend the Constitution; this usually precludes trampling it. It might be worth letting your representatives know that you expect them to do what they swore to do.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.