Arguably, what ultimately brought Palm down was their early success and the huge library of existing shareware and freeware tools:
They desperately needed to try something new (Palm OS was just showing its age as a single-threaded, in-RAM, non-virtual-memory-based OS), but couldn't, since it would have alienated long-time fans by stranding their existing software libraries.
They could never work their way through that chicken-and-egg problem (and all of the split ups (OS vs. hardware), forks/spin-offs (Handspring), and re-mergers didn't help either) until it was too late: Cobalt OS never saw any devices, and the Pre was an ambitious new start but would have had a tough time against the iPhone even if it would have launched earlier than that.
Arguably, what ultimately brought Palm down was their early success and the huge library of existing shareware and freeware tools:
They desperately needed to try something new (Palm OS was just showing its age as a single-threaded, in-RAM, non-virtual-memory-based OS), but couldn't, since it would have alienated long-time fans by stranding their existing software libraries.
They could never work their way through that chicken-and-egg problem (and all of the split ups (OS vs. hardware), forks/spin-offs (Handspring), and re-mergers didn't help either) until it was too late: Cobalt OS never saw any devices, and the Pre was an ambitious new start but would have had a tough time against the iPhone even if it would have launched earlier than that.