Apple-buys-Palm theorists take note: as faithful viewer Jen Griffin pointed out, just yesterday Palm CEO Carl "Inventory? What Inventory?" Yankowski stated that his beleaguered company hasn't been approached by any potential buyers looking to make an offer. Evidently Steve, having had his prior Palm buyout offer rebuffed, now feels that Apple has better things to do with its $4 billion in cash than spend $3 billion of it on a handheld company. So if Palm was hoping for a bailout from down Cupertino way, it would appear that that ship has sailed. (For its part, Palm has always maintained that it's not looking for a buyer, anyway.)

Instead, Palm hopes to dig itself out of its big dank hole by ruthlessly cutting costs-- and according to a CNET article, poor Carl openly admits that any solution that might actually fix the company would likely involve "more or less dramatically changing [Palm's] business model." That could mean scaling back the Palm.net wireless service and portal, selling off the Palm OS and just making handhelds, ditching the handhelds and just licensing the OS, or even splitting itself down the middle-- one half would be responsible for making and marketing the actual Palm devices, while the other would focus entirely on developing the Palm OS and related technologies.

We at AtAT are no businessmen, but to our unschooled eyes, none of those options really seems to go quite far enough. The way we see it, Palm has two paths most likely to save the platform from extinction. The first is to go crawling back to Steve to beg for a buyout offer; Apple would then run Palm as a wholly-owned subsidiary (think FileMaker) while licensing the Palm OS to itself so that it could release a kickin' Apple handheld with elements of the Newton in effect, but with full Palm compatibility. The second is to bring in Gil Amelio as a turnaround artist. He may not necessarily get the job done, but at the very least maybe he'll hire the person who does...