HP must have a whole forest of money trees and nowhere to stash the leaves.

They're going to pay 1.2 BILLION for Palm. That's about 50% more than Palm's current market cap and probably 4 (or more) times what they're worth, IMO. A "23% premium" on the share price as of close today ($5.70 per share buy compared to 4.63 close). I'm not sure where the extra millions are going (1.2B versus 961.5M for all shares valued at 5.70).

I suppose if you don't want someone else to grab them you have to pony up a good offer right away instead of waiting for the inevitable firesale. Palm was on a fast ride to the bottom.

Can HP do something with the Palm technology? Maybe. But I don't think it's going to be any more relevant compared to Android, iPhone and Blackberry than it has already been.

Interesting. If this goes similar to other things HP has acquired, the Palm name and devices are pretty much dead, but the tech will show up in other devices somewhere, including in non Palm like devices. I could easily see WebOS powered touchscreens on printers and such. HP blends departments together when it makes sense. For example, the drive bays inside the gaming enthusiast Blackbird PC were designed by the Proliant server team.

I can see how the OS might make a great fresh start for imbedded use, but 1.2B for that? Seems rather high. The press release makes it sound like HP wants to jump into the smartphone pool with a brand new bathing suit.

I'm always suspect of acquisitions of high (or somewhat high) profile companies and brands, for the new company to only piss away much of the value they just purchased. Seriously, half of Palm's worth is in its brand. I know that's not saying much these days...

IMO, HO should keep the Palm brand and focus on a single strong product based around it and WebOS. Basically HP's Palm to Apple's iPhone. Tossing the WebOS name is trivial, but losing the Palm brand is equivalent to flushing a lot of money. They'll have to spend so much more to build back any type of meaningful brand for that product segment. "iPAQ" is not it.

At least it frees them from MS and Google, giving them a leg up on companies like Dell (who is probably going to fail miserably in mobile).

Reading the coverage of the conference call, it does seem HP is doing this to keep WebOS alive and expand it out beyond the phones.

Thats pretty big. That means Palm will be seen internally alongside the printer, storage, server, workstation and consumer PC groups.

They kept talking about tablets in the call, something tells me HP is somewhat frustrated working with Microsoft on the Slate. HP wants to compete with the iPad, but is restrained by what Microsoft does. Now they have their own OS to play with and expand, and build a device similar to the iPad in battery life. And they can try and make something unique, instead of just another Android or Chromium powered tablet.

On the server and storage side HP (and going back to Compaq) was really focused on not allowing one other company to impact the business. Supporting Netware was just as important as supporting Windows, and it's a core reason why half the worlds Netware installs ran on Prolaints in 2000. Same goes for Linux, they made a big investment in ensuring the servers ran Linux well. Microsoft could have sunk, and HP would have been ready to still sell servers and storage, whereas Dell back in the day would have been devastated.

Wow! All four of them?!?

Having their own OS is the only way anyone can even hope to compete with the iPad. Nothing running a desktop version of Windows will do any business at all.

There was some explanation on the Palm value vs share value thing. Something to do with Elevation's shares being preferred and not counted in the public pool plus debt obligations etc etc. My eyes glazed over but it seemed to make sense

I'm glad that the guys I know at Palm have security now, it'll be interesting to see how quickly stuff will get turned around (eg: will HP fund the Pre 2, or will they just concentrate on getting WebOS on devices their smartphone division has designed?)

There were still quite a few installs out there, mostly Netware 5, and some moving over to the newly released version 6. I probably took just as many Netware calls as I did Linux for my first year or so there. All the calls I got were either for driver assistance, or hardware replacements, as I wasn't on an OS assistance line. Keep in mind this was when Windows 2000 and Active Directory was new.

Very interesting. I can't imagine how this'll turn out, but I'm glad Palm will still be around.

Apparently HTC crunched the numbers and decided they couldn't do it. Based on this 1.2B price I'm not surprised. I'm sure they would have loved to get their hands on those patents, though. I really would have loved to see an HTC WebOS device too. Not really because I'm excited about their design, but anything is better than the Pre and Pixi hardware.

Don't worry, Bruno, you won't get any Slate defense from me. That product is not going to sell. I love how essentially the very first press (other than the announcement) that they've done was to release a specification comparison between it and the iPad. Apparently they don't realize that the specs aren't the real importance of the iPad (as good as they are). It's the platform. From what I've seen, Windows 7 could offer a better tablet experience than prior versions of Windows, but that doesn't say anything at all. Besides, they didn't release info on battery life (or weight, I think).