Ed Colligan is one of the key reasons for Palm's existence, and it seems like he'll get an even more vital role for Palm now. Compared to its competitors, Palm is currently a migit with only a few hundred employees and heavily limited revenues. Having a strong investor in Elevation Partners is the only way Palm can survive right now - it'll take time to build a strong WebOS presence.
In the time ahead, there'll be limited need for Ed Colligan's mobile skills at Palm, but by taking on the position as CEO of Elevation Partners, he'll basically aim to secure the future of Palm and WebOS.
In Palm's press release issued late last night, the company's new CEO, Jon Rubinstein, says that WebOS will help the company to succeed way into the LTE era, and that the platform will redefine the mobile Web. With the iPhone 3GS now moving towards native applications and better gaming capabilities, there's definitely an opening for WebOS to take the lead in Web apps.
That said, Google recently added support for script languages such as Python to Android, with Javascript to follow soon. Moreover, Google just announced Microsoft Outlook synchronization with its Google apps. As it stands now, there's no doubt that Google is just as interested in attracting Web savvy mobile users as Palm. Rumors are also suggesting that Android will soon appear on netbooks, which could become another key market for the platform.
As we all remember, Palm scraped its own "netbook" project, the Palm Foleo, a few years ago. As one of few publications, we believed in the Palm Foleo concept, but sadly for Palm, they made a big mistake of shutting it down. Let's hope for Palm's sake that they'll be more forward-thinking in the future. You don't get far enough just by following others, you simply have to lead to survive in today's market.
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