Palm released its Q3 results yesterday and the results were not good. The company is as lost as it's ever been and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it. Today their stock is down 26.67% and there's no sign of a turnaround.
CEO John Rubinstein admitted that they had a hard time competing against the DROID at Verizon:
"Our recent underperformance has been very disappointing, but the potential for Palm remains strong. The work we're doing to improve sales is having an impact, we're making great progress on future products, and we're looking forward to upcoming launches with new carrier partners. Most importantly, we have built a unique and highly differentiated platform in webOS, which will provide us with a considerable - and growing - advantage as we move forward."
That may be true, but it's worse than that. They've taken too long to get to other carriers like AT&T, and they need new hardware. The DROID has a much higher screen resolution and larger physical size. WebOS is the most promising OS, but on such small devices it just does not have a shot.
In times like these with so much on the line, it might be time to reorganize at the top. Jon Rubinstein is a fine engineer and the brains behind some pretty darn successful technology like the iMac and iTunes, but is he a good CEO? Maybe Palm should consider what companies like Google and eBay did. Bring in a CEO to run the company, and let the developers do what they do best.
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