As recently as late 2008, Pandora Networks’ Chief Technology Officer Tom Conrad still had big doubts about the prospects for smartphone maker Palm. In November, Conrad was among a coterie of software developers invited to Palm headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., to take an early, up-close look at an operating system for use in the company’s phones. “I was totally skeptical when I walked in,” says Conrad, who met Palm execs along with representatives of MySpace, Intuit, movie site Fandango, and Epocrates, a maker of mobile software for physicians.
Conrad and fellow programmers accepted Palm’s invitation partly out of curiosity about the new mobile OS. And partly they were there to take the pulse of a once-proud Silicon Valley pioneer many had long since written off. Conrad still had a fondness for Palm products and figured the brand still had cachet with consumers. “If by some miracle they had come up with something special, I knew there would be a market for them,” he remembers thinking. And Palm delivered. After two days of briefings about its WebOS software, “I left a total believer.”
Palm has been winning over a lot of skeptical software developers lately, an unlikely turn of events considering the Pre, the first smartphone that will run WebOS, has yet to hit stores. Attracting programmers to Palm is also notable given excitement over competing mobile operating systems from Apple, Research In Motion, Nokia, and the Google-backed Open Software Alliance. Normally, developers flock to devices with the most market share. But many developers contacted by BusinessWeek say they would rather write for Palm than other platforms such as Microsoft Windows and in some cases, Google’s Android. “From my point of view, Palm is No. 2,” says Ge Wang, co-founder of Smule, a maker of popular iPhone apps.
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