Seen in those terms, and given the speed at which mobile is developing right now, this is worth way more than $100m.
Think of it as $100m for a great mobile OS and $1.1billion for a time machine.
Yep but something really interesting can happen in the process of creating something new. Buying a company that was not able to provide great things for a log time is not exactly exciting IMHO.
Probably a lot quicker than it will take to save the sinking ship that is Palm. Sure this is a market penetration play, but why? Palm was a failure. PalmOS was a failure. WebOS might be cool, but the damage is done. Google is making good penetration into the mobile market, and they didn't need to buy grandpa to do so.
I know it does not exactly compare, but they too have purchased Android, not developed it from the scratch.
PalmOS was hardly a failure. It was far and away the most popular mobile OS for the better part of a decade.