A report from BusinessWeek was published today detailing Palm’s drive to gather well known developers to implement their applications on the Palm Pre.  This is in hopes of giving the Pre a fighting chance against the iPhone’s App Store and their very well-established developer community.  Palm has emphasized that any code writer with knowledge of Javascript and HTML will be able to write an application for webOS and the Pre.  Developers and company heads such as Tom Conrad of Pandora, the popular online music-streaming site, came to Palm’s invitation and witnessed a two-day brief on webOS and the Palm Pre.  Conrad believes that since Palm was able to create something special, they would be able to regain their once prominent status.

The excitement over the Palm Pre has been strong, but the predictions are grim for the success of the Pre because of iPhone’s well established App Store, and the recent announcement of the iPhone 3.0 software.  Palm has done everything to make the webOS and the developer experience as smooth as possible, especially with the Javascript and HTML programming standard.  However, if webOS turns out to be buggy, Palm will find that the excitement will die just as fast as it grew after the announcement.

However, back in 2000, Palm had 70,000 firms creating software for the old PalmOS, and it is likely many of these developers and firms will be more than willing, as well as capable, of bringing quality applications to the Palm Pre.  As long as Palm has webOS working as smooth as possible in the first weeks of the Pre’s release, Palm should be able to recover some of its lost marketshare.

[Via BusinessWeek]