Comments on: ACCESS Renames Palm OS to Garnet OS

Time to merge!

Average number employees/year for designers, engineers, programmers, staff, and directors dedicated directly to OS development: 119
Estimated human resource dollar cost to develop said OS over period: $95.2 million

Average number employees/year for graphic designers, attorneys, accountants, staff, and directors dedicated directly to OS naming, renaming, refreshing and marketing: 341
Estimated human resource dollar cost to develop said OS over period: $294.3 million

... Sounds pretty balanced to me.

Thanks Access. You are carrying on a glorious tradition that Palm OS users appreciate. We get to use a hacked, whacked, and shellacked OS that crashes, freezes, lags, cannot multi-thread, still cannot handle basic clipboard functionality, looks like it's from the tech stone ages, and is breathing it's last gasps as I write.

So, to see YALANC (yet another logo and naming convention) sprucing up our near stiff dead corpse of a platform, really lifts my spirits. When my next Treo freezes in the midst of an important data retrieval process, I get the express privilege of showing all my friends the hottest and most refreshed logo in the tech world. No way they can keep up.

Take that WM freaks and Linux fanboys!

Pat Horne

Wow. I've been saying this for 6+ years and get criticized for it. Now, it suddenly is considered truth. Did it have clipboard functionality in the past and it lost it recently? Did it multithread in the past and it lost it recently? Did it look modern and fresh a few years ago, or is the truth of the matter that even then, it looked like something from the mid-90's? Seems I was more right than wrong all along. What else have I been saying over the years? That Windows Mobile would surpass PalmOS in marketshare? Hrmm.... let me check and see if that happened... ;-)

Wish I had 100 developers in the development group I run. I could probably throw 50-60 of them at putting together a new Palm OS over the next two years, a dozen to do my team's work, and still have more than enough left to maintain FrankenGarnet for the Treo.

Back in Palm's world, I cannot fathom what all these people are doing. Unless there is some hidden secret project, WTF are they doing??? You see at one point in time, I thought they were developing a new OS, adding some cool Java VM support, new development tools for the new OS, maintaining Palm Desktop, apps for the Treo, etc. Then 100 people would probably be cutting it a little thin. Today, all I can see them doing is maintenance on the Treo and well that's about it. If they need more than 15, maybe 20, people for that ... well you've got to be kidding me.

Really!?!

Really!?!

Interesting. I didn't find such any requirement in the ACCESS press release archive.

http://www.access-company.com/news/press/ACCESS/2005/20050908.html

Please site a source for your assertion. Thank you in advance.

Please site a source for your assertion. Thank you in advance.

Lol. He works for ACCESS. I'd take his word for it. :P

It's morons like this that cause companies like Palm to spend more money on name changes than producing products people want to buy. She wants her money now rather than have an established company for the long haul. Such is the world where the stock market rules over quality and service. Stick a quality product out there for a reasonable price and the investors rake you over the coals for not selling overpriced junk.

Kinda sad to see that Palmsource doesn't have Cobalt listed on their site like before.

Kinda wondering... Maybe this has already been done, but I'm relatively new to this site... Does anyone have any info as to why Palm themselves did not switch to Cobalt when they owned it? From briefly playing with the simulator, it looked good.... Did PIC interview someone from Access who was high up in the Cobalt team? Someone who would know what happened and why? I can't imagine that that info would need to remain hidden any longer since Access and Palm both seem to not want anything to do with Cobalt.

I know your on a self enforced exile right now but i have a question for you. Well a few questions but they all sorta lead into each other. Why don't you believe Palm will ever use ALP?

You're new here, aren't you? :-) The idea of asking TVoR a question like this is a little like the idea that you'd ask the guy under the viaduct who's screaming obscenities and stinking of MD40.

The reason no one is expecting Palm to use ALP is because:
(a) they've never said a single word of encouragement or interest in it, whereas they showed plenty of interest in PalmSource's pre-acquisition Linux OS, and
(b) they've just spent $44M for the right to use the Palm OS Garnet code to build their own next-generation version of the Palm OS. Read Palm's press release.

The fact that they've done this isn't necessarily because they think ALP is a bad product, by the way. Just that they don't see a good enough alignment between their own business goals and those of ACCESS to trust that ALP will go the way they need it to go in the future. For example, they may be wondering if ACCESS is going to be totally focused on handsets, when Palm plans to diversify their offerings into other kinds of devices that won't get the same attention from ACCESS. They also may be worried that ALP could end up in so many products made by competitors that Palm will lose it's ability to differentiate their own products. There are lots of good reasons to have control over both hardware and system software. It's worked for Palm in the past. It's also worked well for Apple.

David Beers
Pikesoft Mobile Computing
www.pikesoft.com/blog

It will be Palm Treo powered by Access Garnet OS.

== "...as has been true in past, Palm will only be able to use the
== Palm OS trademark for products that meet the compatibility
== requirements, verified through the compatibility test harness
== used by ACCESS and Palm..."

I'm not sure how this fits in with all the "recent" news, however it was so stated.

No, I don't think that comments on PIC can move the share price - but that doesn't mean that you don't - hence your constant apologist posts as a feeble attempt to prop up the share price or fortunes of the struggling company.

A silly, confusing, conflicting message and a waste of marketing resources that does more harm than good. The OS is NOT the brand anymore, Beersie. The DEVICE is.

PALM TREO with WINMOB

PALM TREO with GARNET

Choose your poison.

Oh, rubbish. He's just a PalmOS fan. Like anyone who posts here. Group hug, anyone?

"Palm OS on Access Garnet OS"? A silly, confusing, conflicting message and a waste of marketing resources that does more harm than good.

From the Access FAQ RE: the new Garnet license.

Q. Can Palm, Inc., use the name Palm OS?

A. Under terms of the agreement, we have given Palm the right to use either “Palm OS by ACCESS” or the product's new name (still to be announced) when referring to the operating system licensed with this new agreement.

Given that the Palm OS name is still recognised and (generally) respected, it's a safe bet they're going to go with that over "Garnet OS".

Tim
I apologise for any and all emoticons that appear in my posts. You may shoot them on sight.
Treo 270 ---> Treo 650 ---> Crimson Treo 680

This one single application comparison graphically illustrates what is wrong with Linux and Open Source in general. Compare Apple's iTunes to this hideous monstrosity that Linux users actually believe to be "elegant" and superior to iTunes...

http://amarok.kde.org/

I rest my case.

-------------------------------
PocketFactory, www.pocketfactory.com
The iPhone Blog, www.theiphoneblog.com

With regards to Vista; it will receive the same reception XP did - silence and disinterest. Vista will slowly be assimilated into the market with new PC purchases, which still counts as a success in its own right. The last figure I looked at showed that upwards of 100 million Vista licenses will be consumed this year in the form of new PC purchases alone, not counting existing system upgrades. To give you a sense of scale the total (active) Mac user base is estimated to be somewhere between 35-50 million. No other OS can boast that kind of performance.

I was a Vista beta tester for MS and was given a free copy for my efforts. Honestly, had I not received the gift I probably wouldn't upgrade because I really don't feel the OS is battle worthy at this point. From a technology standpoint there is nothing innovative or new about Vista. Translucent UI, window animation effects, vector based composition? I've been using that technology for over six years now - it's called OSX!

The only innovative features in this OS were stipped out long ago due to timetable issues, like a radical new SQL-based file system (WinFS) that would have dramatically improved Windows and put it on the cutting edge. C|Net's Robert Vermosi described Vista as "A warmed over copy of XP". That's too harsh, in my opinion, but not entirely inaccurate nonetheless.

I had high hopes for this project when it was first demonstrated at PDC 2003, back when Microsoft intended for this OS to be something much more than what it ultimately became. Vista, from start to finish was a collasal failure, rivaling PalmSource's Cobalt fiasco in many ways. Vista was originally based on XP code, which was later scrapped sometime in 2004, where a second Vista project began based on Windows Server 2003 code. Effectively Microsoft threw Vista out the Window (if you'll excuse the pun) and strated over from scratch. Analysts criticize Vista for being more than five years in the making, when actually the OS is less than three years in the making, starting from the point of its second recoding.

Unlike PalmSource, Microsoft had the fortune and market strength (not to mention developer talent) to see the OS through. There's a lesson in there somewhere, not that it matters now in the case of either OS. One succeeded where the other failed, and yet both were failures.

-------------------------------
PocketFactory, www.pocketfactory.com
The iPhone Blog, www.theiphoneblog.com

..."And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born".

-------------------------------
PocketFactory, www.pocketfactory.com
The iPhone Blog, www.theiphoneblog.com

What does all of this mean on a practical level? Users who purchase upgrade copies of the aforementioned versions of Vista will find that they can only upgrade PCs that already have Windows installed. KB930985 clearly states: "you cannot use an upgrade key to perform a clean installation of Windows Vista." According to Microsoft, this happens because Windows Vista does not check for upgrade compliance. If you do not have a previous installation of Windows available, Microsoft recommends that you "purchase a license that lets you perform a clean installation of Windows Vista."

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070128-8717.html

If I ever do upgrade to Vista - and that's a big "if", given that in order to use the pretty new interface, I'm going to have to upgrade my PC - I'm simply going to pirate it once it's cracked, as it inevitably will be. I refuse to pay (and pay an enormously hefty sum, at that) for software that is intentionally crippled. So stick with XP, I hear you say. Problem is that Microsoft's desktop OS monopoly means that if I want to be able to run the latest commercial software then in a few year's time I'm going to have to upgrade. So why would I pay for a so-called "Genuine" copy when a pirated one is going to be less of a hassle to run?

The most laughable part is that Microsoft thinks families are able to afford a copy of Vista for each PC they own. At $455 AUD a pop for a copy of Home Premium and a truly outrageous $751 for Ultimate? Sorry, no.

It's worth reprinting twrock's sig link: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt

Frightening. So horrendously anti-consumer. One more reason to stick with XP (which is quite reliable nowadays) for another couple of years.

Tim
I apologise for any and all emoticons that appear in my posts. You may shoot them on sight.
Treo 270 ---> Treo 650 ---> Crimson Treo 680

No, you are correct, that was not my intent.

However, I will say this. I run a Dell Latitude Windows XP machine for work. When I was finally forced into it, the Dell and WinXP was a nice upgrade to my old Win 98 IBM Thinkpad. It's a decently stable OS for me to get my work tasks done. I absolutely hate having to deal with all of the "baggage" that comes along with Windows though.

So when it came time for me to get a new desktop at home, and because I could put together a very nice box without paying the MS tax, I went ahead and decided to give Linux a whirl. Yep, there's a learning curve. Yep, not everything is available. Yep, it isn't Mac OSX (or Windows XP/Vista). But it is a complete OS with "bundled" software for everything I want to do on my home machine (and very much more as well). With an incredibly minimal amount of input from me, it installed and upgraded the complete system and apps in 45 minutes with a single reboot (and the majority of that time was a slow DSL service issue). It runs completely stable. It looks good, and it is highly configurable (if I choose to do so). Mock it all you want, but it works well for me and cost me the price of a blank CD to burn the original image.

I would ask that you please don't build up some "straw man" and say that I am saying that Linux is "equal" to OSX (or XP for that matter). I am not saying that at all. And that was in no way the intent of my original post in this thread, otherwise I would have surely used Ubuntu as the example. (I haven't a clue about SUSE Linux.) But what I will now say is that I enjoy a quick-booting, stable-running, virus-free, free-as-in-free-beer OS with a full suite of apps that meets my computing/entertainment needs at home and feel no need whatsoever to denigrate your choice in an operating system.

But as always, YMMV, and it obviously does.

I'm still waiting for the mythical color HandEra.
Thinking about Vista? Think again: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt

Archos is still, as far as I know, plugging away at their little niche of the market with "upscale" PMP type devices.

You know, Archos would have made a great parnter for Palm to strategically align themselves with a few years ago. Regardless of their UI quirks, Archos units are pretty solidly built and sport a compelling feature set. Palm could have benefitted quite a bit from such a partnership in the short term and the LifeDrive could have ended up being much, much more of a device.

Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Treo 700P

Windows Mobile Smartphone edition just isn't my cup of Earl Grey. The HTC S620 that I own now is small and practical, but it's just now what I'm looking for, so it's off to FleaBay soon. One thing I will say about WinMob devices - they seamlessly integrate with Exchange, which I LOVE! But in terms of flexibility and utility, Pocket PC phone edition is superior.

So now I'm looking fondly at the N800. The only thing holding me back is that it's not a mobile phone, which leaves me wondering what utility it could possibly offer for my needs. I don't fancy paying $400 for a cool device...playing with it for a few days/weeks...then throwing it in the closet as soon as the novelty wears off.

I don't know.

-------------------------------
PocketFactory, www.pocketfactory.com
The iPhone Blog, www.theiphoneblog.com

And ALL of THIS DONE TWO YEARS AGO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPipGn7JmMM

(I put that smiley there for the "slower" among us.)


"twrock is infamous around these parts" (from my profile over at Brighthand due to my negative 62 rep points rating)

a little OT humor -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWsKR2xg6HE

I lurrrrve that movie.

David, you appear to the sinking even deeper and deeper into the muck with each post you make here. You are truly a bitter, bitter, little man. I'm sorry to hear that our arrival disrupted your life so much. Truth be known, until we arrived your group was drifting along without a clue. I've never seen a more paranoid, disorganized, unskilled collection of coders in my life. Your people would never - I repeat NEVER - have been able to produce a functional PalmOS 6 without the contribution/direction of the former Be employees. It's telling that Google has since cherry picked several former Be employees from Access, yet wouldn't touch the non-Be Access coders with the 10 foot pole. I wonder why?

By all means continue your feeble attempts to cast aspersions on the Be alumni, the iPhone, Apple, Steve Jobs, Android, Google and everything/everyone else who has ever threatened your pathetic little existence. Anyone with more than two brain cells sees you for what you are: a loser. I wonder why you've entered complete "panic mode" in recent months, David? Why all the "lashing out"? Could it be that all is not well in the land of ALP-OS? Do tell. How many phones will we be seeing in 2008 running Access' laughable LEGO®-styled OS? Could it be possible that Access bit off more than it could chew? Guess what: producing a second rate browser doesn't suddenly qualify you to be a player in the mobile OS game. Whoda thunk it? Do you really believe that Access has a snowball's chance against Android, Windows Mobile, iPhone OS, Linux or even PalmOS? Are you really that dimwitted?. The sad reality that you face is that ALP-OS doesn't have a Ghost of a chance against its competition. I see the PalmSource legacy of lies, denial and delays are alive and well at Access. Unfortunately for you, no one is drinking the Access Kool-Aid. Posting to web sites bashing Access' competition and your former bosses isn't going to do anything to help Access produce a stable operating system that is actually shipping in cell phones that consumers can purchase. Get a life, Mr. Schlesinger.

I hope you land on your feet if/when Access goes bankrupt. Just be damn sure that no job offers will be forthcoming from Apple or Google next year. You've done a very good job burning your bridges.

TTFN

"When in a rare moment, all of the QA divisions would say thumbs down to shipping the buggy OS, the infamous Dave Nagel would say ship it anyways."

Write 'em a letter, by all means. It'll save me the trouble of telling 'em I'm still not interested.

"Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, but the pig likes it... and soon it's impossible to tell the two of you apart."

"Keep your friends close... and your enemies closer."

Lefty's time-line is a bit weird.

PalmOS 5.x (aka Garnet) was a stop gap for Palm so they'd have an OS to run on their first ARM devices, but a remarkably successful stop gap. It was suppose to bridge Palm over until Palm OS 6 (aka Cobalt) was available, but 6.0 was boring and uninteresting. 6.1 had UI improvements and became a lot more interesting but the BEOS people had botched stuff up under the covers. Instead of fixing that, PalmSource (pre-Access) switched to Cobalt-on-Linux but couldn't really ever seem to make that work so abandoned that for ALP.

Palm OS 6.1 (Cobalt-with-new-UI) was a nice improvement to Palm OS, and generally easy to port applications from Palm OS 5. It really solved a lot of PalmOS issues, but brought in a lot of new baggage from BEOS.

The success of RIM has shown how bogus were the arguments for abandoning 6.1 instead of fixing the BEOS botch-ups. (Can we say "custom drivers")

Actually, the timeline is right, but it differs from the public timeline you're familiar with. What became known as PalmOS 6/Cobalt was supposed to have been the follow-up OS to PalmOS 4 (which itself wasn't much different from PalmOS 3, 2 or 1). Only problem is that Palm's management had around 1000 layers of bureaucracy and the majority of the Palm coders were incompetent. You might not know, but back as recently as 2001 the latest PDAs from Palm and other PalmOS licensees were shipping with the ancient 33 MHz Motorola Dragonball. Palm claimed the Dragonball was being used for battery life reasons when in fact it was because they didn't have the know-how to get a modern OS onto ARM. When it became obvious that there was no way for a next-generation OS to be released by the time Palm and other licensees desperately needed to switch to ARM processors Palm came up with the PalmOS 5/Garnet hack job as a stopgap. It wasn't until the Tungsten T release running PalmOS 5 in late 2002 that Palm finally left the Cave Man era and joined the rest of the world with RISC-based/MIPS/ARM processors. PalmOS 5 was only supposed to be a transition OS in use for 12 - 18 months. Instead it's been pressed into service for more than 5 years, and each year it's had to pull an increasingly heavy load (NVFS, telephony stacks, etc). The instability seen in most of Palm's PalmOS devices released since 2002 can be traced directly back to the fact that PalmOS 5 was a kludge that was not meant to still be running on modern hardware.

You can blame Be alumni all you want, but the fact remains that Palm's own coders were incapable of delivering the goods on their own. They were THAT bad. And the few people they had that actually knew what they were doing had their voices drowned in the Sea of Incompetence that was Palm circa 2000-02. Be was purchased by Palm for $10 million from Be founder and ex-Apple France head Jean-Louis Gassée in August 2001, 5 years after JLG had arrogantly turned down an offer of $200 million from Apple for his BeOS to become the basis of the next Mac OS. Ironically, had Gassée accepted the offer Apple would then never have paid Steve Jobs $400 million for NeXT four months later, Jobs would never have come back to lead Apple and there probably wouldn't have been an iPod or iPhone. It remains open to debate whether or not the failure to license BeOS was a good thing for the industry ;-). When Be arrived at Palm in late 2001, many of the Be people soon took over as supervisors of the bumbling Palm incumbents/incompetents or as leads/senior designers in the OS teams. Basically, the Palm quarterbacks weren't doing the job, got benched and the ball was handed to the Be alumni. As you could expect, there was (and still is) a lot of resentment on the part of Palm's hacks towards the Be people. Admittedly, the Be alumni could be somewhat condescending towards the Palm people, so overall it made for a bad situation. Much of the work that Palm's people had done on the next-generation OS got tossed into the dumpster out back along with a few million Palm Vx ;-) and everyone started from scratch. Coming from a desktop OS (BeOS) background + thinking some familiar frameworks that apply to a desktop model could be transferrable to a mobile model was a major mistake. There were also some problems with the stubbornness and inflexibility of certain (3 in particular) Be alumni who saw the project as a way to recreate the grand elegance of BeOS and achieve redemption.

PalmOS 6 was initially supposed to be the next-generation PDA OS, then was repositioned as the smartphone OS, then became the red-headed stepchild we're-not-sure OS. Dates kept slipping while Palm lost market share and PalmSource (and later Access) made excuses. The embarassing December 2003 "release" of PalmOS 6 by PalmSource occurred because it had been promised that the OS would be shipped by that date, so something had to be released before the end of December. Ever see a child try to do their entire science project the night before it's due? Not a pretty sight. But it's not a good idea to try and tell Sprint and Verizon that you'd like to sell them a phone with an unfinished OS, so the hacking of Handspring's version of PalmOS 5 continues to this day. Truth be known, with a few smarter choices with regards to hardware, an organized approach to cleaning up bugs and a proper preinstalled software suite, PalmOS 5 devices could have been rock solid for at least the past 3 years and could easily have blown Blackberry out of the water by now. Chatteremail, Resco Backup and TealLock should have been licensed and the features seen in Butler should have been added by Palm's own coders with the Treo 650. Yes, Palm/PalmSource/Access failed to execute in terms of OS strategy, but Palm-the-hardware-company should shoulder a large part of the blame for their post-2002 devices being unstable as well. Furthermore, GoodLink or Seven should have been purchased by Palm, packaged with stable Treos and marketed to businesses as a "one stop shopping" cheaper alternative to Blackberry for corporate push email. The subsequent switch in strategy from PalmOS 6.0 to 6.1 to Palm Linux to the addition of the PalmOS Emulation Lego® Block to Access' tragic LEGO®-styled ALP-OS is well known. As is the confusion that begot the schizophrenic OS powering the prematurely-birthed, stillborn, genius Hawkins child known as Foleo. What an incredible history Palm has had. So much potential, all flushed down the toilet by arrogant, stupid management. And even today the shameless plundering and manipulation continues.

Anyway, the die is cast and it's time to move on. Access is holding an empty bag, as most people have now figured out for themselves. Palm is hemorrhaging money, practically giving away Centros in an effort to maintain its market share + visibility, has given away its war chest to finance the Elevation deal and with no prospects for its own version of Palm Linux arriving in anything but pre-alpha stage within the next year, is slowly bleeding to death from the 1000 paper cuts inflicted by the 100 different so-called executives that have tried to ru(i)n the company over the years. Android (free, Free, FREE!) is gradually rounding into shape and has the luxury of time and $$$ in its goal to reach eyeballs. Windows Mobile has became what Palm should have been, but will be changing (yet again) into what Jeff Hawkins dreamed of. iPhoneOS is slick execution incarnate, but style > substance and proving that Steve Jobs still knows what people want better than anyone else in the business. Exchange integration with iPhone is the next stage, with better thin client computing to follow. Again, Apple will perfect that which Palm literally fumbled away on the opponent's 1 yard line first 5 years and then 2 years ago. A little over a year ago Palm's "Simple" Ed Colligan infamously claimed, "We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in." Looks like the chickens are coming home to roost, Ed.

A few final words about Google and the other big players here in the Valley: first of all, there's a limited amount of local talent and the Valley is very "incestuous", with employes shuffling amongst the major players with predictable frequency. People tend to hire the people they know or else recruit from companies where they've worked, resulting in a massive amount of inbreeding that ultimately stifles true creativity. Some days it seems like everyone here has worked for Apple at one point or another in their career. Google has tried to change the status quo to some degree - partly out of necessity given the sheer number of new employees they needed to attract in a short period of time - but they are also guilty of some of the "my sister/my wife" Ozarks-style Human Resources decision-making seen at most other tech companies in the Valley. Secondly, it's not unusual for companies to make "strategic" hiring decisions based more on how a particular individual's loss will damage their current employer (a competitor) than how much that individual's skills will assist the company recruiting them. Such was the case with some (much?) of the recruiting Google did to Palm's/PalmSource's/Access' detriment over the past few years. Take that with a grain of salt, but THINK whenever you hear people running their mouths on Internet forums or elsewhere about how badly Company X is trying to recruit them.

It's sad to see Palm decompose into the putrid entity it has now become. The finger pointing could go on for all eternity, but what's the point? Like (future) President Obama said, "What we shouldn't be doing is tearing each other down, we should be lifting the [platform] up." Can I get me an "Amen!", Reverend Wright? ;-)

PKD FTW!

;-)

To sum-up:

1) iPhone still going despite carping

2) Palm still sinking despite all hands-on-deck

3) ACCESS is still going nowhere

4) I have a new respect for Android OS and will now move it closer on my radar screen

5) WinMob: As usual, yawn and yecch.

Pray continue!

Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon 755p

I just looked. Oh yeah!

http://www.angryredplanet.com/~hackbod/

>>>I currently work at Google on the Android platform.

I'm gonna have to pay some attention to Android now, I see.

(Of course, get onto a *real* phone, not this frikkin button-heavy HTC thing that's been leaked with its cheap-ass WinMob-like teeny-weeny Viagra-needing screen!)

Puhleeze. He's in his bunker, hunkered down with the Last CLIEs On Earth.

I would point out to fake-skippy that by the time Access came into the picture everybody but one unfortunate vendor knew that Cobalt was over with and Access never gave any indication that they thought otherwise themselves.

As for Android versus iPhone: Google has bit off the same insolvable mess that Symbian and Microsoft have - they're trying to establish a platform rather than build a product. You put people with the academic purity bent of the former Be folk at Google on a problem that nebulous and they'll pound sand until even Google runs out of money, without ever hitting on a solution. But it will be very beautiful, the thing they never quite build.

Besides the industrial design, the other thing Apple got right is building a product, not a way of life.

By the way, had JLG accepted Apple's offer, it would have meant another Taligent, and Apple would have probably missed the entire generation of Power-PC based Unix-ish MACs, only getting around to OS/XI just in time for dual-core.

Alas, phone-os land is starting to look like another playing field where the all-together-but-not-all-the-same camp will be played by linux phones rather than Unix workstations, Intel will be played by ARM with a hoard of fab-house understudies, most notably TI, Qualcommn and Broadcomm, with Marvell as the dark hourse, and the role of Microsoft will be played by Microsoft.

May You Live in Interesting Times

How sure are you that FJH is deVoidofReason?
Completely.

Confirmed.

Pass me the smelling salts.

Not very likely. I expect that's just another disinformational effort on DeVoid's part.

Though he has indeed "confirmed" this, that does not necessarily mean he knows what he's talking about. Same IP address? Email interaction with the opposite side saying "Yeah, I'm TVoR" in some perfectly believable manner? Ryan IS TVoR so KNOWS for SURE that FJH and TVoR are the same?

You get the idea...

[I can believe the two are the same, BTW, I'm simply pointing out a need to be a Doubting Thomas for All Things Internet]

OT: here's the full episode -

http://www.veoh.com/videos/v6312970kEhrcEQ8

a classic

Forgive if I'm not terribly concerned by your childish "predictions", Chuckles. Go to Best Buy and "fondle" a CloudBook or something, get your frustrations out of your system. As for me, I'm flying back from lovely Seoul this afternoon. I'll leave it to you to imagine what I might be up to here. Did some shopping on Insadong last night, visited a couple of Buddhist temples, and had a very nice dinner at an excellent Korean barbeque place. Quite a successful visit, all in all.

I'll be doing an interview on a nationally syndicated radio show next week, and then I'm off to Austin for the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit. Weekend after that, I'm presenting at LugRadio Live USA in San Francisco.

You keep fightin' them oysters, Mikey. Ordinarily, I'd put my money on the vertebrate, but I'm increasingly less certain that you actually qualify.

You pathetic frikkin psychotic proto-stalker weasel, David Schlessinger of ACCESS Corporation. Keep twisting in your rubber-room frustration that you don't know anything about me to latch onto and taunt me with, like the little spoiled brat you are.

I looked at the traffic stats for your blog - THERE AREN'T ANY. And yet YOU continue to blog. Talk about EGO! Who the fek LISTENS to you except when they trip across your embarrassing - especially for your EMPLOYER - posts here?

Like any small man who needs an overdose of Viagra for his impotent ego, you come here to try to lord it over everybody. "I used to work for APPLE!" But you had your pants pulled down a few days ago, didn't you, showing you for the dickless cripple that you are.

Maybe a few printouts of your online gems sent to your bosses in Japan will put things in a better perspective for you? How's that sound, pal?

When they question you, will you have the backbone to ACKNOWLEDGE those sick things are FROM AND BY YOU?

Your job hunt may be coming sooner than you expected.

Sounds like they be asking me who the lunatic sending them spittle-encrusted emails is. If that kind of cheap threat is the sort of thing you're reduced to, knock yourself out.

Also, I did think this was interesting (from the article you linked):

But other analysts familiar with Apple's order patterns say the production reports are typically overestimated by the company, largely to keep component suppliers fully stocked should demand take off. By this reckoning, Apple will probably make about half of the 11 million iPhones the initial production plan calls for. It will probably have about one million 3G phones ready at launch and 4 to 5 million to follow later this year, says one analyst.

Hm.

Do you mean stuff like the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board, the Open Media Now! Foundation, the Linux Foundation, the LiMo Foundation and the Linux Phone Standards Forum...?

Or do you mean folks attending conferences like Open Source in Mobile, GUADEC, FOSTEL, LinuxWorld, JavaOne, the Ottawa Linux Symposium and LugRadio Live USA (April 12-13, at the Metreon in San Francisco!)...?

Or do you mean industry analysts like Canalys, ABI and Ovum...?

So I dunno, Mike, I guess it's not a ton of people, but I'm not complaining. And, go figure, none of those folks seem to think I'm terribly irrational. I suppose the question is who the fek LISTENS to you?

sorry, lefty, you and the gang at palmsource/access have no credibility left. you've used up all your goodwill with customers. you haven't shipped a real, viable OS in what, six years? yet you come on here and boast and pontificate and badmouth your competition - like apple - who have consistently over-delivered. frankly, i'd think you'd be embarrassed and quiet until you actually delivered something. but you sir, you just have no shame.

Oh stop. When you do that you're looking at pr0n on the Net. No wonder your palms have hair on them. Oops. Right: You're LEFTY. Just the left one, then.

Gekko: The guy won't recognize reality. People buy the iPhone not because it WORKS, but because they're stupid. The stuck-in-the-20th-Century ALP Obsolete System is Just Better. Why? Because he whiiiiiiines that it is.

I mean, we're just too too dumb to recognize its glory in YouTube videos such as this:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=SIY45ASfFO8

OMGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!111111 The world is just undeserving!

I simply don't believe that the iPhone is the be-all-and-end-all of mobile devices, nor do I believe that it holds anything like an unassailable position in the market, especially moving forward. We'll see what the landscape looks like in a year.

Samsung, LG, Motorola and the others aren't getting out of the cellphone business because of the iPhone. Nokia isn't going to shrug their shoulders and go back to selling lumber and galoshes.

I'm just saying that Apple (and Google, for that matter) are in for some surprises and a lot of challenges. Just sayin'.

I always say, "If a moron call you 'an idiot', what's that supposed to prove?"

Still waiting to hear "who the fek LISTENS to you," Mikey.

Like I said, 99.992% of the time (i.e. pretty much any time other than a few days the week before last, while I was in New York), I can't be bothered with your blog. The oyster-porn thing was pretty over-the-top for me, I stick to my own species... That was the last time I took a look, and that'll hold me for a good long while.

I named industry groups, conferences and analysts when you asked. Got anything in response but bluster and childish insults? I expect not. And no, I'm not "mentally retarded" and it's an excellent display of just how little character you have, and just how low it is, that you'd attempt to use something like that in such a fashion.

I had a motorcycle accident a number of years ago and crushed my left ankle. On bad days (which are, thankfully, very rare) or when I'm going to be doing something involving high exertion (like climbing up Inwangsan at the north end of Seoul) I've been known to use a cane. Why don't you call me a "gimp" or a "cripple" or something, huh? Knock yourself out, get it out of your system. Don't imagine it's going to bother me, though: I came by that limp honestly, and I'm not ashamed of it.

I think I'm really all done with you; you've certainly added nothing of substance in any comment you've had to make here in the past month or more. Don't let that impede you from raving in an apparently unbalanced fashion for a week or two more if you're inclined to.

Lefty, I know you can't give away trade secrets, but could you go out on a limb and say what kind of numbers of handsets Access expects to be installed on that have been sold a year from now? Or maybe how many 1n 2009? That wouldn't give away anything specific but it would give us a sense of how much is really in the pipe.

And if I can goad you a bit, Apple gave that kind of yard stick with the 10 million in 2008 figure.

You'd think that wouldn't be so difficult.

No, I'm pretty used to senseless and pointless responses here (although I haven't counted any of Baalthazaar's among those, honestly.) It's simply that I got off a plane from Korea Friday, and I've been paying some attention to life at home (this is like my second day home in the past two weeks...), catching up on paperwork and expense reports, etc...