Business is a lot like politics. Things are never as bad as they seem, and they're never as good as they seem either. Palm's down a lot from $17 because they s

Business is a lot like politics. Things are never as bad as they seem, and they're never as good as they seem either. Palm's down a lot from $17 because they should have never been at $17. (I bought in around $6 so am a little underwater, but hanging in). I really think it's their marketing. Palm's never been very good at this, and now they're competing with Apple, a company whose ads have been case studies in college programs for over a quarter century. And the Motorolas and Nokias, who have much more clout with carriers, which still counts for a lot because most people still get a phone (even a smart one) by deciding what carrier they like then going to the store and seeing what looks good. They seem to have had a fire lit under their ass. I don't know if they'll make something work, but I do know they've got hands-down the best OS on the phone market. Unfortunately as a shareholder I'm a lot more confident in their ability to produce great phones than their ability to sell them lately. Their turbulent period before WebOS pretty much ceded what little control they had of the "One thousand apps is peanuts compared to the iPhone, which has well over 100,000 apps on offer, or Android's 10,000+ apps." How many fart apps do you really need? 100x the apps is not 100x as good. In fact, it's probably not even 2x as good. The main thing I do on my Pre is listen to a podcast app that will not be allowed to exist on an iPhone. I'd rather have that one app than 100,000 others. I'm a special case, certainly, but the point is that it's not just a numbers game, and even if it were it would not scale linearly.