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