Here’s another interesting tidbit: 3Com had spun off the division responsible for the once popular Palm Pilots during the tech bubble. The price of Palm was so high that for a short time it was actually worth more than General Motors (easy to believe now, but quite a feat back then). General Motor’s quarterly dividend was many times bigger than Palm’s annual sales.
Meanwhile, back on the farm… 3Com owned most of Palm’s shares, yet 3Com was trading below the value of its holdings in Palm – which means that the market essentially assigned a negative value to 3Com’s other operations.
I had totally forgotten (maybe even didn’t know) that Palm was 3Com’s. I remember thought, all of the rage of the Palm Pilot back in the day, seemed like everyone wanted one. Back then, Palm would be today’s Blackberry.
Here’s a useless tidbit. Just before Steve Jobs’ NeXt was bought by Apple (and he returned to save them), Apple offered Be Inc. something like $125 million to buy BeOS (which was created by an ex Apple guy), which would of been part of what we now know as Mac OS X.
Be Inc. turned down the offer (and Apple then bought NeXt and Steve Jobs for $400 million), and a few years later Palm bough Be Inc. for something like $11 million for Be’s web application OS, which would run the Palm.