Now that Palm has shipped its much vaunted Pre smart phone, Ed Colligan, the company’s CEO and one of the company’s three original founders has stepped down and is being replaced by John Rubenstein, whose title will be “chief executive.”
Mr. Colligan had been with Palm since well before the launch of its first PDA product, the Palm Pilot, more than 15 years ago. Before being named CEO, Colligan was in charge of all Palm’s marketing activities. Colligan said he would be joining Elevation Partners, a private equity firm that bought a 27 percent equity position in Palm for $325 million in 1007.
Mr. Rubenstein was recruited by Palm to be the company’s chief technology officer more than two years ago. Prior to Palm, John Rubenstein was the senior vice president of hardware engineering at Apple Inc. He’s been widely credited with overseeing the development and design of Apple’s iPod.
While externally Palm and its executive team appear to have been focused solely on the Pre, Mr. Rubenstein takes the helm of this pioneering company at a time when it has at least one more smart phone aimed at consumers under development and is also nearly ready to unveil its Palm OS software development kit (SDK).
Sources within Palm confirm a consumer version of the Pre is still under development and could be released later this year. The sources declined to be named in this report and a Palm spokesman yesterday declined to comment on the reports of the unreleased device.—Jim Forbes 06/10/2008.
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