PalmSource, the Palm OS subsidiary of Palm, Inc. has named its board of directors, which includes two Apple vets.
The first is Satjiv S. Chahil, who has served as chief marketing officer of Palm, since its inception as a public company. In his 27-year career prior to Palm, he held executive positions in finance, strategic planning, sales, marketing and P&L management. Prior to Palm, he held executive positions in the enterprise sector (IBM, Xerox, Newbridge/Alcatel) and in consumer markets (Apple, Sony).
A second board member is the Jean-Louis Gassee, president and chief executive officer of Computer Access Technology Corp., a provider of protocol analyzers. Prior to CATC, he was president and chief executive officer of Be Inc., the maker of an operating system that powers information appliances that could have been the engine for Mac OS X had Apple not bought NeXT. Prior to Be, Gassee was a 9-year veteran of Apple, where he served in a variety of executive positions, including president of the Apple Products Division.
Be Inc. is best known to Mac users as the company Apple considered buying back in 1997. Speculation was that Apple would buy the company and use its operating system as the basis to build a next generation operating system. Instead, Apple ended up buying NeXT, the computing firm Steve Jobs started after leaving Apple in 1985. Last August Palm bought Be’s intellectual property and technology assets for US$11 million.
Also named to the PalmSource board of directors was Robert Finocchio, Jr., a corporate director and private investor who is the former president, chief executive officer and chairman of Informix Corp. He’s also worked for several other companies, but not Apple.
However, David Nagel, PalmSource president and chief executive officer, is an Apple vet. Prior to Palm, he was chief technology officer at AT&T. Before that post, he was a senior vice president at Apple and led its worldwide research and development group.