I think they could have flooded the market with Palm OS devices in the long wait for alternatives to become stable. The first few generations of Windows CE were fun for geeks to play with but not nearly stable, fast, or well-designed enough for typical users. these devices rather than giving Microsoft a bad rep merely made HP and Dell look incompetent.

As an original Palm user I would have been happy to have a more powerful device with the Palm OS, but without the insult of paying $600 for a device that had to be recharged every night (the original Palms after all would go for weeks even with heavy use).

Clearly all of Palm’s opportunities are in the past at this point, and hardly due to circumstances beyond their control.