Palm’s announced that its successor to the graying ‘Garnet’ version of PalmOS, a PalmOS II running on a Linux kernel, is delayed until some time in 2008.

Palm decided to go its own way, diverging from the owner of the PalmOS, Access, which is also working on a Linux core successor to PalmOS. And thus, we come full circle, for when Palm and PalmSource (since bought by the Japanese company Access) divorced, the justification for splitting was the market wanted it. Well, that surely has not proven to be the case, as demonstrated by Palm’s purchase of rights to Garnet, followed by Palm’s decision to code its own next-gen PalmOS II instead of using the Access pending Linux-based PalmOS.

I’m going to go against conventional wisdom here and say that’s good. IT workers are often running as fast as they can just stay in the same place, as evidenced by the Gartner study showing half of all large organizations will outsource mobile device management by next year. Staying with the same OS a little longer allows further development of what’s already a tremendously popular handheld OS, but it’s also one less change we must learn.

Am I right that this is a blessing? Join the discussion.