4. Palm and its numerous liaisons

In 1996 Palm computing was purchased by US Robotics, a company that produced data communications products. Soon after the deal the well known PalmPilot PDA was manufactured and sold. But bad fortune started when US Robotics was bought by 3COM, a networking company. The new owners were not happy with the way the company was going and thus decided to go their own way and produce clones of the Palm Pilot.

By 2001 after 3COM had spun off Palm as an independent entity, the company had already lost 90 percent of its market value.

Then in 2001, Palm was bought by Be Inc, a company that produced computers that were competing with Apple. Later on Be was bought over for $11 million in the same year. Thus ended the last ray of hope that something would become of Palm.

In 2003, Palm was split into 2 companies, PalmSource and PalmOne. The former was bought by a Japenese company ACCESS in 2005 to develop a new generation OS for mobile phones. Even this idea gave no fruits.

In 2010, HP acquired Palm and it was later discontinued. This messy history makes us wonder what did Palm do wrong to have such a sob story.