Palm may be too far gone for Jon to save.  His company has been hemorrhaging money – most recently to get the Pre to market.  The bleeding has necessitated a transfusion: the private equity firm Elevation Partners shot up Palm to the tune of $325 million – a 27% stake. It sucks to have an staking millstone hanging around your company’s neck. When that millstone is warming a seat for the person that ran your company into the ground (Colligan’s next move is to join Elevation) – well that really blows.  At least the Pre gives the company its best chance: a great product.  That’s not always enough‚ but if Apple – and Rubinstein – have taught the consumer electronics industry anything‚ it’s that you shouldn’t underestimate the power of a great product to save a company.

I tip my cap to the man responsible for the iPod – and to the man who brought creativity back to Palm.  I wish him all the best.

Now Roger’s bias is understandable: he and the folks at Elevation have a lot of money riding on the Pre’s ability to save Palm.  That said‚ you’re really not doing your investment any favors when they have to swab up your representations of their product to the point where only the prepositions in the transcript remain unaltered (I may have to file my own prospectus for that one). My personal favorites from the interview followed by their corrections in bold:

“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two- year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone.  Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.”

The statement in the second paragraph of the article that “not one” person who bought an Apple, Inc. iPhone on the first shipment date “will still be using an iPhone a month” after the two-year anniversary of that day is an exaggerated prediction of consumer behavior pattern and is withdrawn.

“If you want to go to the web, it’s just going to be a million times—well, not a million times—several times faster (than the iPhone)”

…the Palm Pre is still under development and it is premature to state the speed at which the device accesses the web or the relative speed of the Palm Pre compared to the smartphone products of competitors.

A Palm spokesperson‚ who requested to remain anonymous‚ confided that Roger was asked “What’s your encore? Anally raping my mother while pouring sugar in my gas tank?”.