Speculation On Palm Buyout Continues

The idea that Palm might be up for sale won't raise too many eyebrows in the mobile industry, as the company's small scale and size makes it a reasonable target. Indeed, the company has been the subject of buyout rumors for a while, but lately, they've been stoked by stories on a single web site, citing our perennial favorite, "sources close to the situation". The site has now said such a deal could be done by Thursday, the day Palm is due to report its latest quarterly results. Where things start to get silly (beyond the way the press has run with the story) is that it says Nokia is the leading candidate to buy Palm. Such a move really wouldn't make much sense at all, given Nokia's long-standing reliance on Symbian (of which it owns a majority share), and Palm's use of the Palm OS and Windows Mobile. The supposed rationale is that buying Palm would give Nokia an instant foothold in the US market, particularly among enterprise users, but the price being thrown around ($20 per share or more than $2 billion) would let Nokia pay for a lot of marketing and development of its own products, that wouldn't come with the integration and operational hassles. Should a sale finally happen, a private-equity buyout is perhaps the most likely outcome, but Motorola has also been mentioned, and a buyout by it would make much more sense than Nokia. Further confusing that scenario and compounding the silliness, though, is talk that Motorola itself might be up for sale to private equity firms. With a market cap of $45 billion, it would be a monster deal, but its $11 billion cash balance could make it a juicy LBO target. Still, what seems the most likely is that these "sources" are just looking to pump up Palm shares -- after all, they're up about 15% since all this buyout talk started in earnest about a month ago.

Locale Isn't The Only Relevant Context For Mobile Search

A story from Reuters declares that Yahoo has "jumped ahead" of Google in mobile search with the release of its latest mobile search product, called OneSearch. Yahoo's focusing on the ability of OneSearch to perform local-centric searches: users input their city or zip code, and search results are geared toward that locale. So if they search for a movie title, they'll get local showtimes, for instance. It also pulls results in from a number of different sources; some useful (news headlines, business listings) and some not so useful (Flickr photos). Still, OneSearch gives a nod to the idea that mobile search is fundamentally different than web search, and that mobile users want their search results to be information, not just links to web pages that might have some information.

However, it seems to come up just a little bit short by considering locale as the overwhelming context for mobile search. It's much more important to determine the context of a mobile search than it is a web search on a PC, simply because of physical factors like a smaller screen and more difficult navigation. There's also little doubt that local search is an important aspect of mobile search -- but it's not the only one, so products designed largely around local search, while ignoring other contexts, may not find so much favor with users. Given the claim about Yahoo surging ahead of Google here, it's interesting to compare their efforts. While it's clearly thinking of how to predict and determine the context of mobile search, for now, it seems content to let users define it by accessing different Google services through different applications. For instance, its SMS services are geared towards listings and other brief snippets of information, while a richer local search experience can be accessed through its Google Maps for Mobile app. The context is indicated by the application the user chooses, rather than being determined by some algorithm.

Yahoo's OneSearch certainly is ahead of Google's web-based mobile search product, and the all-in-one vs. dedicated application approaches are fairly divergent, but both companies are showing an understanding of the different demands on mobile search than on their standard PC-based products. That said, the perfect mobile search application remains a ways off.