3Com and Palm earnings announcements today

[Xoc]

[biz.yahoo.com ]
[biz.yahoo.com ]

[Brett_Tabke]

I can't help but think Palm needs to be rolling in cash right now and they aren't.

eg: ms is going to do for PDA's, what they did for spreadsheets, wordpros, databases, operating systems, and browsers.

[mivox]

What's that? Pummel everyone into submission? So if Palm ends up being a sort of combo *nix/Mac of the handheld market, it's still not going to go away.

But frankly, I think MS is still at a serious disadvantage in the PDA market... One of the big reasons Windows became and remains SO dominant over Mac in the PC market is the pricing issue on the hardware, and WinCE machines are at the top end of PDA pricing. Don't know about software pricing between the two plaforms, but the free/sub$20 software resources available to the Palm market are huge. And Palm isn't making the MacOS mistake of limiting their OS only to their own hardware.

[Xoc]

No Microsoft just holds on until their competition self-destructs. My favorite quote about Microsoft:

Competing with Microsoft is like playing pinball--when you win, you get to play again

Part of the reason that Microsoft is so successful, is that they have such deep pockets that they can just keep playing until the competition does something stupid under the pressure. You know, like hiring a Scully and firing a Jobs. Or releasing WordPerfect for Windows. Or buying Ashton-Tate for a wasted $1 billion. Or letting IBM buy you (e.g. Lotus). When you've got $59 billion, in assets, $31 billion in short term assets or cash, you can wait out a lot of bad versions of software.

[Macguru]

PALM beat Wall Street's expectation of a four-cent loss, prompting investors to send Palm's shares soaring 21.8% on Friday. I am just glad that PALM returned to profitability after a whole year of losses. They announced cost cuts too wich mean they can compete for a while.

3com is still in losses and can't garantee they will turn a profit for the next quarter.