Word: palme
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...targeting Palm's turf, Microsoft has introduced a new version of its condensed Windows CE operating system and enlisted a phalanx of manufacturing partners that plan to launch WinCE-based challengers against the Pilot in the coming months. "This is when the marketing battle begins," says Dataquest analyst Mike McGuire, who sees handhelds growing into a $2.7 billion business...
...Palm grabbed an early lead because the power junkies in Silicon Valley couldn't believe users would want a computer with less, not more. President and co-founder Donna Dubinsky spent 18 fruitless months trying to convince venture capitalists and potential manufacturers that the key to selling handheld computers was simplifying them, not adding features. "Time after time, I'd go into meetings, and they'd say, 'You can't do a device like this without a PC card slot or a spreadsheet or whatever,'" she recalls. "But where was the evidence? It's very, very hard to go against...
Fortunately, she had Jeff Hawkins to back her up. Hawkins, 40, Palm's chief technologist and Pilot's creator, designed one of the first handheld computers, the GRiDPad, a decade ago. It was an engineering marvel but a market failure because, he says, it was still too big. Determined not to make the same mistake twice, he had a ready answer when his colleagues asked him how small their new device should be: "Let's try the shirt pocket...
...Palm also conducted more conventional research with focus groups, but Hawkins' original vision turned out to be uncannily close to the final product. Its internal functions were designed with the same practicality. He invented his own simple shorthand system, called Graffiti, because handwriting-recognition software was too unreliable. (Since everyone writes letters differently, he reduced some of the most troublesome letters to basic elements: an A looks like an upside-down V, and an F resembles an upside-down L.) He powered the Pilot with AAA batteries, available everywhere. And he settled on four function buttons--for calendar, addresses...
...computers. So he made sure that looking up the day's schedule was no more difficult than opening a Filofax: one push of a button and there it was. Details about an appointment could be called up with two taps. "The way you look at your day on the Palm is the way you look at your watch," says Dubinsky. "That's the sort of performance we felt we needed...