palmOne to change name to Palm Inc.
You can read all details in this story but basically
palmOne, Inc. has announced an agreement with PalmSource, Inc. for palmOne to acquire full rights to the brand name Palm. The brand had been co-owned by the two companies since the October 2003 spin-off of PalmSource from Palm, Inc. palmOne will pay PalmSource US$30 million for PalmSource’s 55 percent share of the Palm Trademark Holding Company. Payment will be made in installments over 3.5 years. palmOne will change its company name to Palm, Inc. later this year.
Yeah, that’s clear. Because they’ve had such great success in the past with their names. I think people still refer to the entire category as the Palm Pilot (which could be a success, except that they dropped the Pilot name about 6 years ago), but then it became Palm, but then the company split into PalmOne and PalmSource (although I guess Palm was still an umbrella organization) – but really I was never able to tell which one was which, and mostly that just meant that the email addresses of contacts who were employees of Palm were suddenly no longer usable. Now, they are switching again.
And me, I’ve still got my Handspring Visor Edge, a spin-off from the Palm empire that they got brought back in and then dropped. I don’t think they make any Handspring products any more, let alone a Visor model, let alone the rare Edge sub-model category.
One would need a PDA to organize all of this information!