Mercury News: Palm CEO Yankowski resigns. It has been a brutal year for Palm. The economic slowdown and poor product planning combined to leave the company with an inventory glut. Palm stock has fallen 91 percent from its peak, and the company has failed to deliver the new wireless device analysts have anticipated for months.
Yankowski wasn’t entirely responsible for Palm’s sinking fortunes — the tech economy’s collapse did come along at the wrong time — but he’s been a particularly bad CEO for this company. There hasn’t been anything resembling a strategy for several years.
What does Eric Benhamou think he’ll accomplish? Maybe he can pull off the odd idea of dividing the Palm OS from the hardware unit, a move Benhamou reaffirmed on Thursday (ZDNet). The truth is that Palm should pick one or the other — be like Apple and do both, or sell software only.
Maybe the best thing would be to merge Palm’s hardware division with Handspring, the Palm OS maker of handhelds that consistently outshine Palm’s own devices for innovation. Right now, all I see is chaos.