Palm pulls the plug on Palm OS

John Cox over at Network World has an interesting article based on comments made by Palm CEO Ed Colligen at a conference this Wednesday.

Here is a brief excerpt. You'll want to follow the link to read the entire 3 page article.

Palm pulls the plug on Palm OS, bets the future on Pre's webOS

Palm CEO Ed Colligan this week confirmed that “there will be no more Palm OS products.”
By John Cox , Network World , 2009/02/11

Palm has pulled the plug on its Palm OS operating system.

Instead, the company will bet its future on its newly unveiled but still mysterious Palm webOS, built to power the new Pre smartphone, according to company CEO Ed Colligan, who spoke Wednesday at an investor conference in San Francisco.

The current Centro smartphone will be the last to use the Palm OS. “There will be no more Palm OS products,” Colligan said. “We will transition to webOS as our core OS, in addition to supporting Microsoft Windows products in the enterprise segment of the market.”

Palm is working hard to convince some 30,000 Palm OS software developers, who have created over 100,000 applications, to move to the new operating system, even as it reaches out to “more than 10 million Web developers” globally, Colligan said

[snip]

Though the name “webOS” can suggest a browser-based program, webOS applications install and run on the Pre itself.

[snip]

The Mojo SDK, due out later in 2009, will have sample code, documentation, and development tools, including an Eclipse-based IDE. Developers can choose what tools they want to build the webOS programs.

[snip]

Despite the fact it supports widely used Web standards, webOS is not open source, and Colligan confirmed Palm has no plans now to license it. “We’re completely focused on delivering an integrated solution to consumers,” he said.

The Pre will be the first in a series of webOS-based products, for which Palm does have a roadmap in place, Colligan said. He didn’t offer details, and made it clear there won’t be a flood of products soon. “We’re relentlessly focused on getting this [the Pre] out the door, and our platform and SDK,” Colligan said.