Ship of Palm Looking for a New Captain

Anyone who's ever captained a boat knows the unique blend of joy, peace, and exhilaration of directing your craft with skill across an expanse of water. That's true be the craft a kayak, fishing boat, whitewater raft, clipper ship, or powerful motorboat. Anyone who's tried it, though, will tell you that no matter how exhilarating all watercraft can be, there's nothing like hanging from the wire of a catamaran sailboat standing on the side of the hull in a fierce wind with the water eight feet below you as wind and waves crash by, and all that's keeping you aloft is your own skill at the rope and rudder--only one of which is in the water. Those who've discovered this thrill tend to form together in what they call fleets: groups of people who share a passion for white-knuckle sailing.

The Palm Community is like that. We share a passion for a way of computing. We even have a common leader. Jeff Hawkins, the creator of the Palm Pilot, is a lot like Hobie Alter, the creator of the Hobie Cat. Neither of them invented the category. Hawkins didn't invent the idea of a small computer, and Alter didn't invent the idea of a catamaran sailboat. What they did was make them just right, and they managed for some time to continue making them right.

We are bound together in a common style of computing and working. This style, of course, is not limited to owners or even fans of the Palm OS. Those who own Pocket PC's or other small handheld computers are after the same kind of mobile computing, regardless of the make. It's the community that has dragged the Palm hardware along, because third party software and hardware manufacturers made the simple Palm do so much more than was envisioned, and we in the community liked their ideas. Still, as the main hardware maker, the direction palmOne takes will affect the entire market, whether it leads to failure or success.

It's the coming departure of Todd Bradley that has spurred this commentary, though I've ruminated on many of these points for some time. But I'm not a business analyst, I'm more of a product analyst who's watched this market for years. I can't comment on business projections or who's going to take over whom in marketshare, except to say that this kind of talk is too often designed to stir up investors and make short term profits on the stock market, when the real focus should be on making great products for the people who'll use them. I can judge, based on product, the performance of a given leader.

From what I can tell, based solely on the products introduced under his leadership, Todd Bradley was the kind of leader who gave the engineers and designers the freedom to make great handheld products, and on a schedule that kept customers interested. The Zire 71, the Tungsten T, T2, E, T3: all successful, increasingly powerful handhelds. Yes, there was the disastrous Tungsten W and the questionable Tungsten C, but not everything is going to be a success. Fifty percent success would be great, but Palm, Inc. under Bradley clearly exceeded that. It's through his leadership that the company turned a profit for the first time. For all of these reasons, I'm not sure it's good that he's leaving.

Battered by the Waves

From its inception, Palm, Inc. has been tossed about mercilessly. A small team of innovative and ambitious folks tried to take the logical course for the emerging handheld market. They worked with handheld manufacturers, writing key software components to make the products a success.

The first Palm software I ever saw ran on an Apple Newton. When the first and second wave of hardware made by others had failed, the Hawkins-Dubinsky-Colligan team made a bold play. They designed and built a scaled down handheld device and adapted a simple OS to meet a limited set of goals. They unveiled their first creation exactly nine years ago today. What they built as an organizer blossomed into a computing platform, without much intervention on their part.

They should have ridden the wave to the top of the computing heap with piles of money to go with their high profile success. Had they, the handheld of today might be a lot further along. Instead we've watched the fledgling company with the world's most popular and successful handheld operating system bob in the sea taking salt water up the nose time and again.

For financing, they let themselves be subsumed into a friendly and similarly innovative company, one where they'd likely be able to innovate and flourish: US Robotics. Unfortunately, US Robotics was sucked up by cash-rich 3COM who sadly had no interest in our beloved handheld. That is, until 3COM's own product line started to take a dive. Suddenly the man behind the rise of 3COM's public profile, Eric Benhamou, took an interest in the little handheld after neglecting it and its creators for so long. When Hawkins and Dubinsky went to him to request a spinoff, he refused. So the rightful heirs to the increasingly popular handheld left the company that made the product they'd created and formed Handspring, Palm's first OS licensee.

This opened the door for other companies to license the Palm OS, and new hope appeared like a rainbow when Sony, maker of excellent gadgetry and a fine line of Windows PCs agreed to license the tiny Palm OS. Soon the list of licensees grew, and the Palm Community with it.

The Sony brand attracted Sony fans, and users were swept along by this product-driven powerhouse's frequent upgrades. With companies like Sony and Samsung participating in the community, concern arose that the software side of Palm might be playing favorites with its own hardware division, so a line was drawn, with an eventual plan to divide Palm, Inc. into two completely separate companies.

Some years later, my own personal desire was realized when Palm, Inc. announced it would merge with the company founded by its founders: Handspring. Simultaneously the software separation would be complete, with the Palm OS operating system's new guardian to be called PalmSource, and the re-merged hardware companies were called palmOne.

Suddenly everyone seemed to have what they wanted. The original team was back at the company they founded, yet the other licensees also had more confidence that everyone had equal access to innovations in the Palm operating system.

Then in 2004 the market contracted, and industry darling Sony left the U.S. -- and world -- handheld market, focusing instead on the Japanese market alone. They'd even purchased part of PalmSource to have more of a say, but either internal or market forces drove Sony away. After using its influence to force Palm to spinoff the OS in the interest of fairness, Sony took its ball and went home. The Palm Community's source of hardware was cut in half as palmOne's key competitor -- the one arguably forcing palmOne to innovate in both hardware form factor and software -- left the field.

What was surely a monumental, energy-consuming, carefully crafted business maneuver -- merging two companies while simultaneously spinning off another for the benefit of all -- left the community's best hope for fine hardware torn asunder.

Not only would all of that energy have been better spent making great handheld computers and promoting them, the OS would still be one operating system instead of an increasingly incompatible patchwork constructed only to defeat other licensees in the marketplace through the disaster of differentiation. On a platform whose beauty is interoperability, this is easily analogous to the Tower of Babel, where people who had learned to cooperate could no longer understand each other.

Along this epic of nearly Biblical proportions, we have indeed come to a place in the Palm's history where the path leads to unity of purpose and a strong, clear direction, or to disarray, confusion, and dissolution of a community that has weathered really ridiculous storms that have had absolutely nothing to do with our favorite handheld computer.

Please keep reading Ship of Palm Looking for a New Captain -- Part II