This agreement gets full marks from me, and is a step forward in providing an optimized mobile platform for salespeople to conduct business. RIM gave us universal, easy access to information in the form of e-mail. Palm gave us the ability to run complex business applications from a very small footprint. The ideas in sales automation done right have already been running on the Palm platform for three years, and they work well. When they run on the Treo with RIM software, they show the promise of working even better.

Palm is also bringing out a Treo that will run on the Microsoft operating system. If you were to ask Steve Jobs today if his highly protective stance on licensing out the Apple operating system decades ago was the best thing to do – he would say NO.

Palm has got it right.