When news broke last night that Hewlitt-Packard had purchase Palm, a great cry of "WHAT?" went up throughout the geekosphere. Okay, we all knew a Palm sale was coming – the surprise was the buyer. HP made no logical sense. The company hadn't even been mentioned in the rumor mill, which, as of late, had focused on Lenovo.

The "WHAT?" was inevitably followed by a "WHY?" But the merger does make more sense when you don't look at the whole, and break it down into its parts.

The big question is what HP sees in Palm, a struggling company seemingly unrelated to its core businesses. The answer lies not in the Pre and Pixi themselves, which have come under fire for being allegedly unnatractive and unwieldly. It's in what's powering the phones – the Palm OS.

I wasn't aware that the Palm platform had so many ardent supporters until I read an article on the company's struggles on CNN Money yesterday. The Facebook members who posted comments in response to the article expressed strong loyalty to the OS and hope that it would find a home on better, more attractive devices.

The loyalty is highly reminiscent of that shown by fans of Apple, who have rallied around all its computer and smartphone OSes (even when they tried their patience – hey, longtime Mac fans, remember System 8.5? If you're headdesking right now, you definitely do!). And they're continuing to rally around Apple's latest device, the iPad.

And here, folks, is where HP's logic comes in. It looks like they want the Palm OS to power a series of HP tablets – a PalmPad, if you will. And when they see the Palm brand hooked to a trusted hardware maker like HP, the Palm disciples will come running – even those who have fallen away from the flock.

Sometimes, even something that looks like a lost cause – like Palm – will have one feature that can be extracted, reworked and put back out there in a new, winning form. It's what HP is betting on here, and it's a lesson that can be applied to just about anything that seemingly isn't working. Maybe that manga that you can't get off the ground has a supporting character who should be in his own story, or that cloud computing software suite has a great spreadsheet program, even though the other elements just won't come together. Find the one thing that works, and build on it.

I think we'll all be watching to see what happens if the PalmPad does materialize. It may do what the Pre and Pixi failed to do – mount a serious challenge to Apple on its own turf.

- Bonnie Walling