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Ed Colligan tipped to take over PalmOne CEO slot as Bradley steps down

Ed Colligan was always the "invisible man" of Palm when it started up, being the one who did most of the pro-active marketing into the channels, but not the one who shared the limelight with Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky.

He may be about to become the top name in the hand-held market leader, after CEO Todd Bradley decided to leave PalmOne. Colligan is currently President of the corporation.

Strangely, stock markets didn't respond well to his appointment - possibly reflecting his relatively obscure history. However, when Hawkins and Dubinsky left Palm (when 3Com bought it with US Robotics) he was the one they trusted to keep their new startup, Handspring, connected with the original company.

Handspring pretty much runs PalmOne these days, with the phone-based Treo family handsomely outselling the ordinary unconnected Tungsten family. But Colligan wasn't associated in the public mind with Handspring, which was seen as the "wireless innovator" licensee of the Palm OS.

As a result, he has been damned with faint praise. When he took over the CEO slot (temporarily, for now) CNet news writers Fried and Shim felt it necessarily to quote Pablo Perez-Fernandez, a research analyst at Stanford Financial Group, as saying "Colligan is considered to be very knowledgeable about wireless."

These days, Colligan won't talk publicly about the dark days when 3Com was running Palm as a cash cow, and nothing was being ploughed back into R&D or market development - but it is a fact that he was personally keen on doing a wireless version of the original Palm when it first launched.

The trouble he faced was that the American market for wireless devices was pre-primitive, and that even if he had been able to create a market, his corporate investors would never have considered spending the money needed to get moving.

This mostly reflects North American ignorance about the mobile markets in the rest of the world- a legacy of the days when American Qualcomm-based technology was expected to easily displace the upstart GSM systems in the rest of the world.

Colligan replaces Todd Bradley, who was recruited from Gateway. One report of Bradley's departure said (correctly) that  Palm has been increasingly focused on its Treo line, and then added: "Although well-regarded, the products face increasing competition from rival device makers such as Research In Motion and Hewlett-Packard, as well as from traditional cell phone makers such as Samsung and Nokia."

In fact, PalmOne, the hardware side, has increasingly been providing "increasing competition" to exactly those providers, who had been left in charge of the market innovation while 3Com let the corporation languish.

And Palm's software engine these days is in the hands of PalmSource, which has done deals with RIM, and is selling PalmOS to Samsung.

The appointment of Colligan to the CEO slot isn't a done deal; the company has described him as "a candidate" for the job. It's hard to imagine anybody else who could take over with a better understanding of where PalmOne is going, and needs to go.