Word: palme
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Even assuming PeopleSoft fends off his offer, Ellison may yet have the last laugh. This is the era of consolidation in computerland. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo and USA Interactive have spent billions of dollars snapping up smaller competitors. Others, like Palm and Handspring, have tried to stave off the hungry advances of these giants by merging. Now it's the turn of Ellison's realm, the complex world of business software, to go through some serious cyclical slimming. The outcome will be crucial to owners of widely held tech stocks and people who use their products, which includes just...
...prodigal corporate founders go home again? In the volatile tech industry, necessity sometimes heals old wounds. Back in 1992, engineer Jeff Hawkins and marketing-whiz partner Donna Dubinsky founded Palm Computing to bring handheld computers to the masses. Hawkins built a Palm Pilot prototype in his garage. After the electronic organizer became the shirt-pocket accessory of the 1990s, Palm was sold to U.S. Robotics, which in turn was snapped up by 3Com...
Feeling stifled by their corporate masters, Hawkins and Dubinsky left in 1998 to found a rival handheld-device maker, Handspring. After its IPO in 2000, the pair's stake was worth more than $1 billion. Palm, meanwhile, had been spun off three months earlier and was freestanding again. But the handheld market crested in 2001, when 13.3 million Palmlike devices shipped, and both firms now faced new competition from Microsoft's Pocket PC platform...
Hawkins' response: the Handspring Treo line of handhelds with a cell phone built in. The devices were critically acclaimed, but as Dubinsky says, Handspring "didn't have the marketing muscle to tell people." The firm lost $92 million in 2002; Palm, by then focused on its low-cost Zire models, lost $82 million. Suddenly, a cost-cutting marriage looked attractive...
...found me at Zeebob's, on Utorda beach, not thinking too hard. Architecturally speaking, Zeebob's barely exists: when the monsoon comes, everything except the concrete kitchen block gets swept away. Yet, when hammered and nailed back into existence, Zeebob's serves magnificent grilled seafood amid a setting of palm trees and twinkling lights just above the tide line. And there are hammocks there for that postprandial collapse...