Palm Hands Out Shares To Executive Roster

No one really knows exactly what’s been going on inside the walls of Palm headquarters this week – whether the company will sink or swim is perhaps the bigger question right now than it has been since its rebirth last year, and if it does swim, whether it remains independent is another matter altogether. In an SEC filing today, Palm quietly revealed that its senior VP of software and services – Michael Abbott, a man who has been largely responsible for webOS as a platform and the critical Mojo and Ares SDKs – will be gone as of April 23. More interestingly it had to hook up a couple of other key players with stock packages and $250,000 in cold, hard cash to get them to agree to stick around for a couple of years: Jeff Devine, SVP of Global Operations and Doug Jeffries, the CFO. Yes, that’s right – Palm’s chief financial officer ma have split in the past few days, which is never a good sign for a company whose financial stability is in question.

A number of SEC Form 4s have crossed the wire, indicating that Palm is handing out various quantities of shares to pretty much everyone on the executive roster. Acquisitions frequently involve retention deals for key company players to make sure that the buyer’s new assets aren’t instantly drained, so it’s entirely possible that this is all a harbinger of an impending deal.

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