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How to do a keynote the day after resigning - by Nagel and Linux

Timing is all. Palm's big programmer-fest could be said to have had a bad start: it's very hard for the CEO to take the podium and preach the glory of the company, the day after announcing that he's resigning. But that's what David Nagel did at Palm DevCon.

And he then said that "Linux is our platform for the future," which isn't what the PalmOS developers wanted to hear.

To say that it lacked conviction seems an understatement. "I come here every year to find out what's going to be in the next version of PalmOS," said Bryan Nystrom, CTO of Natara Software, quoted by PDAlive. His company makes project management software that synchronises with Microsoft applications. "Last year, the message was 'move up to Cobalt,' but there are no Cobalt devices. For us, it would be a lot easier to move to Windows Mobile than to Linux, so we want to find out if Linux is for real."

And Nystrom concluded: "It's reaching the point where application developers can't afford to support only PalmOS any more."

According to the disappointed Ewan Spence at All About Palm, "When your keynote starts asking more questions than it answers, then everyone is going to start reading between the lines. What aren't you saying? What do you not want us to ask?"

The Linux focus of the convention, too, has been disappointing; the smartphone business is taking a back seat to the "feature phone" business, where PalmSource is hoping to boost its revenues after the takeover of China MobileSoft last year. Worse, it failed to impress the Linux world, too.

"What really caught my attention was what wasn't mentioned. PalmSource is currently pushing four different platforms, Garnet, Cobalt (Arm), Cobalt (Linux) and the Feature Phone Platform (China Mobile's Linux). It was the last of these that got the majority of time in the keynote. After the announcement of Cobalt last year, we've still to see a modern device available running something other than Garnet. It's not good enough to build a modern OS if your hardware partners don’t make the jump forward with you," concluded Spence.

eWeek's take  (by the Editor of Newswireless) was that it was hard to be optimistic. "The optimist in me says: 'The China Mobilesoft takeover gives PalmSource the breathing space it needs to grow in the midrange phone business while the licensees and the developers in the top-end smart-phone market move forward.' And it adds: 'Nagel and his team know what to do and have started most of what needed to be done; his successors will now inherit the fruits of his labours'."

The op-ed piece concluded: "The realist in me hears the chorus of informed voices saying: 'If they'd done this five years ago, they'd be unstoppable.' I fear that success is now the albatross around PalmSource, and that it can't move forward fast enough to survive — before the investors decide to quit while they're still ahead, and pull the plug."

Announcements are flooding out of the Devcon meeting. Inevitably, even the big ones - such as a subscription-based developer program called PalmSource Inside Track, as well as a localised developer partner program, have been eclipsed by the excitement over Nagel's departure.

The announcement that Smart Global was taking its wide range of (rented!) enterprise applications across from O2 to Palm should have raised more than eyebrows; Smart Global has applications that run on Blackberry, for example - a spelling checker being noteworthy.