Valleywag
hires
Posts Tagged “
Jon Rubinstein
”
hires
wireless
Palm misses earnings, despite Centro sales
Did I just buy my last Palm smartphone? My aging Treo 600 — yes, I hear your snickers already — died at SXSW, and I picked up a cheap Centro to replace it at a Sprint store. (A tip: Skip the $50 rebate and pay $149 instead of $99; the monthly data plan will be less expensive.) Chairman Jon Rubinstein is revamping the company's hardware and software, but does he have enough time? Until the former Apple exec's inventions hit the market, the company has to make do on Centro sales, which swell its unit sales but hit its profit margins. Palm sold a record 833,000 phones in the most recent quarter, but its $312 million in sales came in below Wall Street's hopes. For what it's worth, I love the Centro; if it hadn't locked up at just the wrong moment, I would have beaten Mashable's Pete Cashmore with his iPhone in a text-messaging duel.
mike bell
With latest hire, Palm's poaching at Apple comes to a boil
Palm has hired Mike Bell, a 16-year Apple veteran, as its SVP of product development. But you'll never hear that from Palm. The hiring of an industry veteran for a top executive spot is something normally trumpeted as loudly as possible. But Palm is desperately trying to keep quiet the fact that it won over Bell shortly before Christmas. Why the silencing effort? Jon Rubinstein, Palm's chairman, was part of Steve Jobs's turnaround team before he left Apple in 2006. Since he joined Palm last year, the smartphone maker has been hiring a number of Apple engineers. There have been "screaming matches and threats of lawsuits," says a plugged-in source. More »
mysteries
Did Palm's Jon Rubinstein know the MacBook Air was coming?
"Does it remind you of the Foleo?" Palm's never-released "smartphone companion" laptop, killed on the eve of its introduction last September, does look a bit like Apple's new MacBook Air, though the latter is thinner yet and far more powerful. Under the casings, there's little comparison. Which raises a question: Did Jon Rubinstein, the former Apple executive who's now Palm's executive chairman, get some inkling that Apple would be coming out with the MacBook Air? More »
scoop
Layoffs at Palm come in OS development
A anonymous tipster tells us Palm will lay off 250 employees, confirming our previous report. "The biggest cuts are from OS development," our source says. "[SVP Mark] Bercow wants the OS sold by April or worst case scenario — abandoned." Which seems strange, considering Palm went through some gymnastics just to get is old operating system back from the Japanese company, Access, which had bought it. The rumor, however, jibes with the Wall Street Journal's report last week on former Apple exec and current Palm executive chairman Jon Rubinstein's plans for the company. More »
palm
