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Google adding former Palm HQ in Sunnyvale to its office space

Palm HQ

Before smartphone marketshare was a race between Android and iOS, the smartphone market was dominated by players like BlackBerry and Palm. In the years since, the handset race has largely become between Samsung (and other Android-powered handset makers) and Apple as BlackBerry’s presence has shrunk and Palm has been sold to HP and consequently retired as a brand.

Nothing is more tangible an illustration of the change in landscape than the key players of today taking over the office space of the former leaders, and that’s exactly what Google is doing with Palm’s former headquarters, the Silicon Valley Business Journal reports.

The lease of the PalmPilot maker’s former two-building, 285,000-square-foot project in Sunnyvale brings Google’s holdings in the city to well over 1 million square feet.

Sources familiar with the transaction said Google leased the complex at 950 and 1000 W. Maude Ave. last week.

Google’s primary campus, of course, is located in Mountain View, California, and the move into Palm’s former headquarters will increase its presence in the neighboring city of Sunnyvale, California.

Palm, you may recall, was purchased by Hewlett-Packard in 2010 in a $1.2 billion acquisition including its webOS operating system. As noted, HP has retired the Palm brand and sold the webOS software to LG.

The report from the Silicon Valley Business Journal includes some interesting history into the building Google will soon fill:

The project Google just leased was built in 1999 by Jay Paul Co. and was originally occupied by Philips. Palm took it over in 2005, the same year that the property’s ownership traded to an affiliate of Deutsche Bank. When HP bought Palm, it acquired Palm’s real estate leases as well.

HP stayed put, renewing its lease through 2014, but the Palo Alto-based tech giant has been moving its employees to other offices it has leased recently (including at Sunnyvale’s Moffett Towers), and I’m told Google’s deal was direct with Deutsche. I couldn’t learn the length of term or the rent; HP declined to comment, as did Google.

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