The company was actually on the crest of the wave, so you shouldn’t think that the guys were leaving a drowning ship. Jeff just wanted to create different devices and Donna… She just wanted to head small companies. As the third member of the team, Colligan (we’ll talk about him later) said: “They didn’t leave because the situation was bad. They left because they could, not because they had to”. Benhamou unwillingly accepted the offer – he couldn’t do the other way. No one knows whether they talked about separating Palm as an independent division…

So, in July Jeff and Donna left the company already knowing what they were going to do in their JD Technologies (they called the new company by the first letters of their names). Hawkins said from the start that they would license PalmOS and would make cheaper PDAs than Palm. After a short pause, in the middle of September 1999, Handspring (they had already changed the name) unveiled its first product – Visor. Who was responsible for marketing? Of course, Colligan, who had left 3Com for Handspring, thus reuniting the brilliant trio of the PDA world.

The second peculiarity of the moment happened a week before the announcement of the Visor, when Jeff and Donna came to show the prototype to Eric Benhamou. He had something to surprise them with. A day before the announcement of the Visor, 3Com was going to announce that Palm was to be made an independent division. I don’t know what Jeff and Donna said or thought on the occasion. However, some time later Hawkins said, “If they had separated us then, when we asked for it, I'd still be working there.”

Why did 3Com change its position? The company had just run out of money. From December 1998 to September 1999, the 3Com stock fell 40% down: stale sales, falling prices for modems and communication equipment. And here they have an opportunity of making public a division costing about $5-10 billion and selling 20% of stock to investors. Extra one or two billion dollars wouldn’t be bad. Moreover, the company changed its policy and was selling subsidiaries to make itself as mobile as before.

So, in March, 2000, Palm Computing went public. PDAs were the hot talk of the day and PalmOS-devices accounted for 4/5 of the market. It was the third biggest public offer of a technological company in history. Here is how the companies ranked after the closing of the exchange on the day Palm was first quoted:

• Dell Computer - $113 billion;
• Compaq Computer - $43 billion;
• Apple Computer - $20 billion;
• 3Com – $28.6 billion;
• Palm - $53 billion! (The stock price jumped to $160 throughout the day, but ended at $95.06).

Of course, this was mostly due to the rush of the investors for the new toy, but anyway that was quite characteristic. As a result, Palm acquired $874 million, while 3Com remained an owner of 94.8% of its stock. The rest of the stock was sold to such companies as Motorola, America Online, Nokia.