There are some very smart people who work at Palm, and if they are dumb enough to change the company name from Palm to something, they would loose all brand power, and any real market traction they have. It will be sort of Coca Cola saying that they will stop calling themselves Coke and pick a new name like Dr. DoSomething. Well you know what is going to happen to their sales. Ditto for Palm - they don’t sell a great product (we all know Clie’s are better) but they sell a thing called Palm.

bq. In case you hadn’t heard, Palm is formally splitting up into two companies: PalmSource which develops the Palm operating system, and Palm Solutions Group, which will make handhelds and hardware. The spinoff of PalmSource won’t be done for a few more months, but Palm Solutions Group, to avoid the inevitable confusion, is changing its name. The new moniker is expected to be announced sometime later this week. And while after the Handspring merger the obvious pick would be PalmSprings or something like that, Brighthand expects that the new name will won’t have the word “Palm” in it at all. Read… [Gizmodo]

The company does anything like this, well they are giving Microsoft a chance to once again dominate a market category they have been struggling to dominate.