All this talk about stop gap measures does make much sense, especially if Palm has to hire in new programmers to make it happen. 20 coders at $100 000 is $2 000 000 per year, all wasted in two years when Palm goes ALPOS. And all this to get on the ALPOS royalty bandwagon in two years.
When Palm renewed their PalmOS license in 2005 till 2009, this was the deal.
Quote:
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PalmSource will receive minimum royalty commitments of $148.5 million and source code license fees in the amount of $3.2 million over the remaining course of the contract as follows. The minimum annual royalty commitments for the contract years ending December 3, 2005 and 2006 remain unchanged from the Prior Agreement at $41.0 million and $42.5 million, respectively. The minimum annual royalty commitments under the extended term of the SARSLA for the contract years ending December 3, 2007, 2008 and 2009 are $35 million, $20 million and $10 million, respectively, subject to the Company meeting certain development milestones.
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Thats $148.5 million between 2005 and 2009. Thats nearly $30 million/year. The cost of the license decreases as POS obviously depreciates with age. However for a new ALP license, especially if the Treo is very popular, they will obviously charge more again.
If Palm goes for a per device license, and they sell 5 million Treo's, at a conservative $10 per device, thats still $50 million/year. Even at half that its still $25 million/year.If they own the OS they save that money. Thats the salary of a few hundred Linux hackers/year (and many more in Asia
).
Symbian currently charges $7.50 / device for the first 2 million devices, and then $5/device after this. Even under that license Palm would have to pay $30 million for 5 million Treo's/year. Nokia is estimated to have paid Symbian $140 million in 2005. Thats up from $55 million the year before. Why do you think the Nokia 770 is Linux? If that experiment succeeds they could drop Symbian like a hot potato. I believe Microsoft charges between $12-16/device, but then you get components you have to license separately included, such as a web browser (blazer in POS), media player (Ptunes in POS) and Office Suite (Docs to Go).
License fees for the OS is obviously a major cost for OEM's, which the real reason why Linux is such a threat to the various closed mobile OS's. PalmSource (before acquisition) has 518 employees. Palm has 700+, 80% programmers. If PalmSource can do POSLinux, so can Palm. The original creators of PalmOS are on their payroll, for heaven's sake.
Your suggestion is like buying a flat for a few years while waiting for a rental complex to open, demolishing the flat in two years and then renting a flat in the flat complex in perpetuity. Why not just buy a bigger flat and stay there forever, and for a lot cheaper to boot?
Ed Colligan has already said he wished he owned POS. Now he can.
Surur