Nosce te ipsum

Combine one of my all time favorite geek movies, along with my favorite Mac columnist and toss in an all around great Mac website and you've got a podcast of a different flavor altogether!

The Spoilers is a podcasting experiment where Bill and I will riff on a film while we both watch it so that, later, you can download the audio and play it simultaneously with the film. It's our unofficial commentary track available on the web.

This week, Andy agreed to join us as we ran commentary on John Badham's 1983 hit, WarGames. We had a great time recording it and we hope you'll enjoy listening as we take a geek's perspective on a classic geek film.

When Palm ruled the handheld-computing market, few thought it would ever have to partner with Microsoft.

But a series of missteps, from manufacturing gaffes to strategic blunders, eventually made Palm's partnering with its longtime rival seem like a possibility--and, for both parties, a palatable one at that. While no one mistake can be blamed for Palm's difficulties over the last five years, many analysts agree that a combination of events both strengthened Microsoft's hand in the mobile market and made Palm more open to partnering with its old adversary.

So what happened?

• Palm executives were slow to see the convergence of cellular phones and personal digital assistants.
• Palm has had a hard time making its corporate customers happy
• The separation of Palm's hardware and software units failed to boost Palm's prospects.
• Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky took their knack for innovation with them when they left in 1998 to start Handspring
• Palm had a costly product-planning snafu that stalled its fast-growing sales.