Desperate times for Palm

From CNET News.com: When you report earnings in March, madness is not exactly the term you would like associated with your announcement. However, that's exactly what is surrounding Palm a day after it reported that its comeback hopes are dwindling as consumers fail to respond to the Palm Pre, Pixi, and its WebOS operating system in general.

Palm sold just 408,000 smartphones to consumers in its last quarter. But it shipped 960,000 smartphones to its retail partners, meaning there were more Palm phones sitting on the sidelines during the quarter than were actually sold to real people, well over a year after Palm captivated the tech industry by unveiling the Palm Pre at CES 2009.

There's really no way to sugarcoat this: Palm is heavily leveraged in a fiercely competitive market and unable to generate interest for a well-received product as it burns cash amid mounting inventory. That's a whole lot of bad stuff to deal with at one time.

Palm's stock was down 26 percent in midday trading Friday. Financial analysts are recommending that their clients dump the stock while there's still time. Two went so far as to cut their target price for the company's stock to $0, essentially declaring it worthless.

It's almost like watching a legendary boxer well past his prime summon the will to come out for the 10th round. There's a part of you that's rooting for him to find that spark that's still somewhere inside. There's another part of you that is cringing at the prospect of the beating that's to come.

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