Palm CEO Thinks Company Can Survive Independently

In the face of constant struggles and buyout rumors the past couple of weeks, Palm CEO Jon Rubenstein is holding the line he’s held ever since he’s taken the helm. In a chat with Financial Times today, the CEO said that he still believes that “Palm can survive as an independent company” and that he’s got a plan to get the company spitting black ink rather than red. He also mentioned that “if someone came to the board with a reasonable offer of course it’s something [they’d] have to consider,” which isn’t anything really different than anything he’s said in the past – it’s just a good business sense, and it’s worded very cautiously.



Rubenstein did mention a few key things though in his note, though. First, he mentioned that they’re working “fast and furious on new handsets” with a “strong pipeline” of new goodies, which gives us good hope that we’re finally going to see something that doesn’t like a Pre or a Pixi soon. He’s also opening the idea of licensing webOS to third parties, confirming sentiment we’d heard a few days back. He’s looking at it from a pretty objective business perspective, saying that “if there’s an appropriate strategic relationship or business deal that makes sense to us then of course we would license the webOS because obviously the more scale we get the more benefit there is to us.” That sounds food from our end, especially thinking back to the overwhelming cool factor of the mighty Sony NX90 back in the Palm OS days. Any way you look at it though, independent or acquired, it sounds like Rubenstein has every intention of making more waves in 2010.