Palm: The lament of the past and present life

Finally, the buyer is Hewlett-Packard. Palm, the No.1 of the once-PDA market, has lost nearly three years in a row after losing money in the smartphone sector. On April 28, Hewlett-Packard announced the purchase of Palm at $1.2 billion per share of $5.7, which is expected to be completed by July 31. HP has been impatient to say that it will increase its research, business and market budgets, and that Palm will continue to do well in the tablet and netbook markets before it has officially completed its acquisition. But HP remains silent as to whether Palm will disappear as a brand.　　Even if this is not the case, the troubled Palm has been bought two times in 18 years (the buyer is u.s.robotics and 3Com), split (divided into software and hardware two independent companies), Palm's past and present life is very sad. It times reporter Linfei figure CFP legend "Palm father" to the wood talking palm story from Jeff? Hawkins (Jeffhawkins) said.　　Although the name is far less well known than Bill Gates and jobs, it is undeniable that Hawkins still leaves an important page in the history of Silicon Valley.　　After more than 10 years of experience at Intel and other companies, Hawkins resigned, founded in Silicon Valley palmcom-puting, with the goal of successfully designing a lightweight, user-friendly PDA. October 1993, Palmcomput-ing took out the first product "Zoomer", after the listing of the bad commentary constantly, too big, cumbersome operation. And before that, Apple first launched a similar product newton. In the end, neither of the two boat received any market recognition and the sales were lackluster. After the first attempt to fail, Hawkins did not give up.　　1994, he invented a "graffiti" English alphabet handwriting Input method, simply learning, people can quickly grasp the rules of writing, on the PDA can be almost the same as normal handwriting recognition speed and accuracy, effectively solve the problem of PDA handwriting. There are rumors that during the development of the graffiti period, whenever the company meeting, Hawkins always take a pen in the paper stamp to poke. No one can understand this bizarre behavior, but in fact he is imagining a real-user experience to test graffiti--"Can I make a note at a meeting with this thing?" "There is also a rumor that during that time he always carried a piece of wood with him, pressing on it a few nonexistent buttons, talking to it and so on."　　So that people think he is a little crazy, in fact, the wood in the eyes of Hawkins is the next grand PalmPilot. April 1996, the first Palmpi-lot handheld computer Pilot1000 came out, it uses the PalmOS1.0 operating system, 256K memory. It's a very successful product., the launch of the 18 months after the sale of 1 million units, beyond the history of electrical appliances color TV and video recorder best-selling record.　　More than 3 years later, Palm launched a series of best-selling models, but the success of this time does not belong to Hawkins. Rise and fall with PDA market tide ebb and flow 1997 years, network equipment manufacturer 3Com acquired USRobotics, joint palmcomputing into its own.　　At first, 3Com didn't care about palm at all, because the PDA and the company's core business--the network product completely does not match. November 1998, the long neglected and neglected Hawkins and palm another founder Dubinski decided to bid farewell to 3Com, founded Handspring. In less than a year, in September 2, the 3Com decided to separate Palm from a separate company, then palm listed on Nasdaq at $38 trillion, offering 23 million shares, which went higher, with a peak of nearly 300 dollars per share. At this point, Palm reached the peak, the use of PalmOS equipment to occupy the handheld market share of more than 90%, in people's minds, Pda=palm.　　Of course, there is no denying that it is in an era where the share price will soar as long as it is linked to it and the Internet.　　The success of Palm did not see the trend of the disappearance of the PDA, and gradually lagged behind the BlackBerry and Microsoft wince and other competitors. At this time Hawkins, he keenly grasped the trend of PDA and cell phone fusion, follow the BlackBerry, PALMPDA and mobile phone together, launched the Treo series of smartphones. Unfortunately, however, Hawkins later focused on the individual's study of brain-thinking principles, while neglecting Handsping's operations, which eventually led to Handspring's takeover by Palm on October 28, 2003.　　Luckily the Treo product line was eventually retained, and Hawkins returned to Palm as CTO (Technical director). The takeover and Hawkins return did not lead to a change in the market, with two companies in Palm and Handspring lost $588 million in 2002. Palm was then split into two, with software and hardware divisions, but it did not change sales and market share, the only bright spot was the Treo series of smartphones designed by Hawkins.　　Over the next 4 years, palm changes can be described by the word "toss", constantly renamed, Will PalmSource sold and bought back. After the defeat of Apple's desperate Palm in September 2005 chose "Dances With Wolves," with rival Microsoft launched a windowsmobile system using the Treo700 smartphone. This is heartbreaking for die-hard Palm fans, "as Coca-Cola sells products to Pepsi-Cola bottles." ”But this is far from the impact of the subsequent iphone listing on palm and the smartphone market as a whole. It has to be admitted that the experience of Hawkins and jobs is strikingly similar. Also the founder of the company, the same passive or active left the founder of the company. The new company then competed with the old club and then returned to the new company after being bought by the old club.　　But, compared with Jobs ' powers at Apple, Hawkins is now ready to play the role of "product director" instead of mastering Palm's direction.　　Seeing the ipod and iphone Gongchenglvede, and since Hawkins is unwilling to go to the front desk, a "hostile camp" to the helm, known as the "father of the ipod" Joen Rubinstein, joined Palm in 2007 to lead the team to develop a new generation of palm smartphones. It took two years, at the CES Fair in early 2009, that CEO Rubinstein personally unveiled the mystery to palm, causing a stir in the industry.　　Palm, the iphone killer, uses a multi-touch screen like I-phone and has a full keyboard that the iphone doesn't have, which trumps the iphone in many other hardware details. PalmPre6 month 6th after the official sale, the initial popularity, but not long, palm sales soon began to decline, because this is not a hardware system can conquer the era.　　Apple's App Store is close to 200,000 apps, with downloads breaking 2 billion, googleandroidmarket over 30,000 and palm less than 2000. Palm fell to the freezing point, and investors and analysts put pressure on it, and the end result was already known. HP picked up a big bargain and bought palm for 1.2 billion dollars. is palm as an independent brand about to disappear or will it revive in HP's hands?　　No prophet can predict that we can only send this elegy to palm. 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