Some of you may already know that the Palm has partnered with M$ to collaborate on new smartphone - Treo 700W. The article below states that this is a major victory for M$ and it spells certain doom for the Palm platform. The authors list their top five reasons for Palm's demise.
However, I'm not sure I agree with their rationale. I suppose my view could be somewhat biased, as I've been using Palm products since 1999 (ie Palm IIIx, and Treo600). I've always appreciated that there are large amounts of development tools(smartphone || Palm OS) for the Palm platform. Moreover, the author makes a false assumption that corporations have secretly marveled at smartphones powered by WinCE. I would argue that the Blackberry was more widespread than any other PDA in the office place. Recently, Palm has begun to gain traction in some corporations.
Palm partnered with M$ to extend its customer base and leverage some of M$ existing market.
Make no mistake, Gates and Co., had to share some of the M$ secret bits to close the deal. Obviously, that strengthens Palm's position in the partnership. I highly doubt that you will see a flock of users abandon Palm as a viable platform. The authors appear to be on some weird FUD campaign.
PalmSource was purchase in multi-million dollar deal, so obviously there is a great deal of value in Palm as a platform. If PalmSource is committed to pushing Linux as its platform of choice, I only see greatness for its future.
At the end of the day, the customer will decide which platform offers the best value proposition.
