Here’s a fun hypothetical for your Sunday. Let’s say you’re Palm, and you’ve poured untold sums of money and time into developing the Pre; the early response has been positive. But when you launch the phone, hopefully still sometime before July, it completely and utterly bombs. For whatever reason—people unwilling to give up the iPhone, people unwilling to switch to Sprint—it just doesn’t do the numbers you expected it to, or needed it to. Then what do you do?

But let’s step back for a minute: is there any evidence to suggest that the Pre won’t do well? Hard to say. During CES in January, anyone even tangentially interested in gadgets and technology seemed to be mightily impressed. Dumb Peter Ha even went on G4 to say, yeah, the Palm Pre looks pretty darn good; Peter is a Charles Montgomery Burnsian cynic, it must be said. Developers seem to like its operating system, webOS. (It has a physical keyboard!) But let’s temper the enthusiasm.

First, and let’s make no mistake about this, Palm really needs the Pre to be a hit, with a Gartner analyst calling it a “bet-the-company product.” If it tanks—again, there’s no reason to assume it will tank—then Palm is in a bad way. The company just posted its seventh consecutive quarterly loss (to the tune of $94.7 million); revenue is down nearly $100 million from the previous quarter ($77.5 million vs. $171 million last quarter). Palm could use a hit right about now.

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