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Quit - the day before your big devcon?

Mike just IM’ed me a link to a piece that said PalmSource’s CEO David Nagel quit yesterday. Starting today and the rest of this week is the big PalmSource developer conference. What incredibly bad timing for such a disruptive announcement.

Supposedly it’s amicable enough that Nagel’s staying around for a few months as a consultant, but this is a ridiculous time for a CEO to quit. If this was in the cards - that is, known and planned for ahead of time - the timing couldn’t have possibly been worse.

We had Ewan Spence of All About Symbian and the newly launched All About Palm over last night along with some other mobility people, and Ewan talked about how Nagel was highly visible for his strong support to community efforts and seemed really appreciate his leadership within Palm. Think of all the developers who made their way out here only to be met with an announcement that surely puts the future of the company (and developer’s continued investment) in question.

If only we were checking our newsreaders instead of kiboshing and rearchitecting poor Russ’ homebrew java blog software!

What a message to send to your developer community and partners! Now, of course Ewan’s partner Rafe working away back in the UK posts this am wondering aloud if it’s a strategy mismatch. Everyone else seems to be just looking at it like a normal result of the company’s internal struggles, even the usually conspiracy-theorist Register.

You’ve got people like Russ who, even before he knew the news, took a shot at Palm for being “doomed” and even Mike saying how inconsistent their treatment of developers has been (I’m sure he’ll post on this later - check Bitsplitter for his thoughts). I’m not a developer, but the world of Garnet, Cobalt, OS changes, dev kit support and such permeates even the user experience. I should be able to find a tabbed browser for the Treo 650, but only one browser exists - in part due to how lethagic the developer community has become.

And it’s such a shame because the Treo 650 is a great device. Now I’m a huge fan of Palm going way back, but they’ve really earned it for me — this time with the hardware more than the software. And the split of the company into hw-sw means that when I say I love my Treo, the part I really talk about is the hardware. But how do you separate the hw of a device from the sw that runs on that device only? Companies can go thru mitosis, and Wall Street loves it, but sometimes it makes more sense than others. Like I love how I listen to music with my headphones, and when a call comes in, the display shows who it is, and lets me answer it with just a button. Who controls the magic there that makes the experience? Probably in that case PalmSource. This doesn’t bode well for me ever getting a tabbed Treo browser.

Hmmmm - speaking of Industry Standard - down the left side of the page, there are a lot of orphaned tech pundit blogs. A failed experiment?