Napalm Facepalm

Picture a two dimensional drawing by some kid with a half of a really steep mountain on the far left and a long flat valley on the right, eventually leading into the sea. Now scan it to your imagination’s computer and add an outline effect to it in your mental photoshop. What you’re looking at is Palm’s stock since 2000, drawn to scale.

Are you an angry shareholder? Don’t blame them, there’s an explanation: “If we could have launched at Verizon prior to the Droid, I think we would have gotten the attention the Droid got. And since I believe we have a better product, I think it could have even done better,” their CEO clarified in response to their latest financials (picture a lot of blood, now pour it into a bathtub — there you go).

Before I decided to buy a Nexus One (did I tell you about that yet?) someone asked me to articulate why I tought Android was better than Palm’s webOS, knowing I didn’t have an educated answer. That was true; I hadn’t tried either, I didn’t watch Youtube videos and I didn’t read the Wikipedia articles. All I could say, and maybe this was a valid enough point to shut down the argument victoriously, was that Google was behind Android and Google has a stunning history not of sucking but of constantly coming up with service after service and now a tangible product that I love so I’d rather embrace that than try to afford another company the benefit of the doubt that they finally got something right. Especially given that they both are Linux at heart, like me, I should note that I’d buy either one knowing that nothing could be worse than Windows Mobile and nothing interests me less than Windows Phone.

They call that a 180.

On Friday after the closing bell Palm slipped 29% while everyone talked about their doom over the weekend. This morning AT&T angelically threw them a pair of swimmies by not stopping Palm from announcing that AT&T would, at some mysterious point in the future, start selling Palm’s Pre and Pixi Plus.

No launch date of course, not surprising given the timing of the announcement. But given that AT&T will probably already be selling iPhones, iPads and Android phones themselves by the time someone tucks some Prixi Pluses in the corner of their stores, though it generated a little excitement for the first few hours of trading, the only thing I’m surprised about is that it’s up even a nickel higher from Friday’s close.

Anybody got a fork?

Doug Simmons