Word: piloted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
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...
...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, to-do list and memos--because those were the most commonly used applications. Whenever someone urged him to cram more functions into the unit, Hawkins held fast. "There were a lot of battles," he says...
...April 1996, the Pilot 1000 debuted. Dubinsky and her colleagues watched anxiously to see how the gadget freaks would react. Word of mouth was critical. "If they vote thumbs down, it's over," she said. For the first four months, the sales reports were "flat, flat, flat, flat." Then, magically, they took off; the Palm was a hit. Hollywood moguls started using it. Pilots began showing up on television (Murphy Brown) and in the movies (recent sighting: Wag the Dog). Within 18 months, more than a million were shipped, a faster launch than the first cellular phones and pagers enjoyed...
...wave of competitors rushed in, but most missed the point of the Pilot's success. With few exceptions, like the Sharp SE- 500 and Texas Instruments' well-designed Avigo, the competing devices still tried to do too much. Those that tried to do it with Microsoft's first, hastily cobbled together version of Windows CE 1.0 posed little threat to the Palm. Their keyboards were tiny, and entering data was a hassle. WinCE 1.0 was clearly not ready for prime time...