Palm Takeover: Mobile Computing Consolidation Continues

The news of yesterday seems to be that Palm is in takeover talks with a number of people including Nokia. Motorola is also looking on to see if a strategic bid, to keep Nokia out, is worthwhile.

This announcement follows on from a long list of consolidation purchases made by Nokia, Motorola and to a lesser extent Microsoft in the mobile arena. Consolidation is always a sign that a market is maturing and moving into the mainstream. So if you are struggling to keep up, here are some of the purchases:

• Symbol goes to Motorola giving the a huge breadth of industrial strength mobile devices.
• Good Technologies go to Motorola giving them reliable e-mail connectivity.
• IntelliSync goes to Nokia giving them reliable e-mail connectivity.
• Palm goes to…
• RIM Blackberry continues to grow…

So what is driving this consolidation?

Is it because Nokia and Motorola are afraid of the rise of RIM? I don’t think so.

Is it because they Nokia and Motorola see an existing market that they want a portion of? No. It’s because the market is growing and broadening. And the growth in the market is being driven by two forces – network performance and device performance.

Network performance and availability is driving down the cost of data networks so that the always connected dream is becoming more of a reality.

Device performance and capacity has reached the point where the devices can actually do something useful.

This means that we are only just seeing the beginning of the explosion of connected mobile devices.