Palm, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., announced in July plans to split its hardware and software businesses.
Design is the domain of Jonathan Ive, a shy Briton; engineering is split into hardware and software; logistics is run by Mr Cook.
An executive at a large Sun customer said Mr. McNealy had recently spelled out company strategy, stressing that it would lead to a reversal of the current 70-30 split between hardware, and software and services, over the next five years.
Palm split its hardware and software divisions into separate firms and has failed to gain significant software share on non-Palm gadgets.
Palm split itself into hardware and software divisions, and Nokia helped set up Symbian, precisely to enable a move from a vertical (owned and mostly closed) organisation to a horizontal one (open licensing).
David C. Nagel, chief executive of the Palm software unit, which has not yet announced its new name, said the split from the hardware division would help ease the competitive fears of potential software customers.
Diversity rating: 1/5 The event: Microsoft's press conference featured some controversial diversity as it split its current hardware into a family of three, with the announcement of the Xbox One S and Project Scorpio.
Starting last July, Rick Thompson, who had led the company's hardware unit, split off a team of 20 people to work on the X-Box initiative.
But the new CEO had plenty more to talk about, namely that he has no plans to split the software and hardware businesses.
Just in the last two weeks, we learned that eBay was spinning off PayPal into its own company, HP is going to split up its consumer hardware and corporate services into separate companies, and Symantec will cut itself in half as well.
