Why is Palm using Windows Mobile for their new Treo phone?
It’s complicated. Or at least, analysts would have you believe it’s complicated, and that the announcement of the new Treo is shocking news on the level of Mac’s switching to Intel. In fact, it’s a pretty straightforward progression, and one of the rare cases where the company line tells the whole story. Palm’s initial success wasn’t just because the PDA market was a new one, as we over-simplified it in last week’s column. It was because they managed to sell the concept of the PDA as something useful to have, as opposed to just an expensive electronic address book, and they had the simplest, smallest, most efficient, and most attractive unit available. The PalmOS was designed specifically for the original PalmPilot, and it did its job better than the bulky Windows CE. While that convergence made Palm the best on the market at the time, it also put them in the position of being a designer of operating systems and handheld devices. With the latest announcement, they’re acknowledging what
