Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring and the Birth of the Billion Dollar Handheld Industry [Hardcover]

Andrea Butter (Author), David Pogue (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 8, 2002

The definitive behind-the-scenes story of the visionary team that launched the handheld industry.

Palm insider Andrea Butter and New York Times columnist David Pogue -- with full, exclusive cooperation of the company's founders and more than fifty key Palm and Handspring executives -- tell the riveting tale of the start of an industry constantly in the headlines. The origins of this volatile industry began with the tiny team who beat staggering odds to turn the PalmPilot into a billion-dollar market and later took their ultimate vision to Handspring, now Palm's most powerful rival.

Many of today's current events relating to the competition in this industry are forecasted in this important business drama. The authors take an unprecedented look at how the visionary founders of the industry led one of the most successful startups in history to succeed against all odds-including a shoestring budget, shortsighted corporate partners, and competition from Microsoft. The roller-coaster ride is full of insight into the bungles of venture capitalists, the allure and pitfalls of partnerships with giant corporations, and the steely determination needed to maintain entrepreneurial and visionary independence. With gripping accounts of the last-minute crises that almost torpedoed the PalmPilot on the eve of its unveiling, and the triumphant, unprecedented reception of Palm in the marketplace, as well as the glimpses into the future of this industry, this book is as entertaining as it is instructional. Key revelations include:

* The principles of business, economy, and product design that led Palm to succeed where billion-dollar corporations like Apple, Motorola, and Casio had failed.
* Important moments in technological development of the handheld such as the secret "Easter egg," a software surprise planted in the Palm software that nearly sank launch plans.
* Unique insight into the showdown with Microsoft, and 3Com's tragic decision not to make Palm independent that led Palm's founder Jeff Hanwkins and CEO Donna Dubinsky to take their vision elsewhere.
* The ongoing competition between Palm and Handspring. The new rivals to contend with including Sony.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The swift Internet-like alterations in Palm's corporate structure make the company an excellent case study of the late 1990s technology-driven boom and bust. True, Palm was not precisely a dot-com stock, but who can argue that the consumer impulse to drop $500 on a spruced-up date book was anything but high-tech froth? Palm was founded in 1992 with hard-won seed money, just a few years before venture capital rolled across Silicon Valley like a tsunami. It began as the junior partner in an unsuccessful consortium effort to compete with Apple Computer's Newton, the breakthrough handheld device. This failed strategy inspired the software executives to build their own hardware without relying on strategic partnerships, until financing troubles forced them to sell out to a larger firm, modem-maker U.S. Robotics. When USR was acquired by 3Com, Palm became the junior partner in a megamerger. Eventually, Palm was spun out in an IPO during the heady days of early 2000, and employees drooled as the stock price spiked to $165 on the first day of trading. (Today Palm shares trade between $2 and $4.) The authors give detailed portraits of both high-tech product launches and investment banking negotiations without once getting bogged down in the jargon of either world. No doubt readers can thank coauthor Pogue, a New York Times columnist, for the smooth, lucid prose. Former Palm marketing v-p Butter is an unabashed fan of the company's founders technologist Jeff Hawkins, CEO Donna Dubinsky and marketing director Ed Colligan and she makes a compelling case that these three launched the handheld computer industry. (Mar.)Forecast: This title will easily fit into the B-school curriculum on corporate finance or marketing, since it offers insights into both. Hardcore techies should enjoy it, too, because it's filled with colorful portrayals of leading industry figures.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Since Americans love gadgets, they should be interested in this book, which chronicles how Jeff Hawkins had an inspiration that led to the handheld industry, the greatest gadget creator of them all. Former Palm Computing executive Butter and New York Times technology consultant Pogue recount how Hawkins and a few others started Palm Computing, surviving crisis after crisis until it was eventually sold to another company and ultimately spun off in an IPO but not before Hawkins and several of his followers had left to start another handheld company called Handspring. Along the way, we learn that Silicon Valley start-ups are at the mercy of venture capitalists, that the launching of new products is fraught with peril, and that small-tech companies can occasionally compete successfully with larger companies (e.g., Microsoft). But, more tellingly, the authors calculate the human cost of sacrificing one's life in order to realize a dream. There's plenty of drama here, and, given the expertise of the authors, one would have expected a gripping read rather than simply a connecting of the dots. Not so, unfortunately; the book suffers from workmanlike writing. Handheld organizers are here to stay, but their real story remains to be told. For larger business collections only. Richard Drezen, Washington Post News Research, New York
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (February 8, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471089656
• ISBN-13: 978-0471089650
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #132,927 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #63 in Books > Business & Investing > Industries & Professions > High-Tech

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Read, Edited So They Can Still Work in Silicon Valley, March 6, 2002

By A Customer

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This review is from: Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring and the Birth of the Billion Dollar Handheld Industry (Hardcover)

For those of us in Silicon Valley who only knew Palm from the outside this book is a great read. The true hero of the story is Donna Dubinsky; her travails makes the Perils of Pauline seem tame.

However, the book was obviously written by people who still care to work in the computer industry. It pulls so many punches that the story reads like light fiction.

Too polite and politically correct the authors simply dance around some issues that were clearly crying out to be discussed.

1. Palm's first venture capitalists essentially bailed on the company by not leading a second round of funding. This forced the company to sell itself to US Robotics. There is a lot of "happy talk" about why the VC's did not want to lead the round, but if they truly believed in the company they could have, and would have. How did Donna Dubinsky really feel? What was really said when they turned their back on the company?

2. Before there ever was a Cisco, 3Com (Palm's second owners) owned the networking market. (I'm sure there's a great book in someone on how 3Com managed to blow this huge lead.) While never quite coming out and directly saying it, Eric Benhamou's (3Com's CEO) constant dithering about whether to spin-off Palm seems to be indicative of his management style in running the rest of 3Com. How did Donna Dubinsky and Palm really feel?

3. Carl Yankowski comes off as if someone wrote a whole chapter on how he personally sank Palm, and then removed it for legal liability issues.

4. Did Jeff Hawkins use Xerox PARC the same way as Steve Jobs did? Xerox had demo'd two of the unique Palm innovations; a constrained handwriting recognizer, and the keen observation that the PDA would be a PC attachment, not a standalone device, well before Palm. Give Hawkins credit, he was the only one to read or see the Xerox PDA stuff and get it, but there is zero acknowledgement in the book that these ideas did not spring full blown out of Hawkin's head. (Probably a good reason, since Xerox finally sued Palm for patent infringement. Given the Xerox track record for belated cluelessness, it's doubtful they'll collect.) The deification of Hawkin's at the expense of the truth might maintain the authors personal relationships, but not mentioning these issues as at least the current hot topics in Silicon Valley, is disingenuous at least.

5. Handspring's success is still predicated on Palm's ability to innovate in its operating system. Palm's glacial speed was fine when Palm was the only game in town, but Microsoft's inexorable progress should be nightmarish. Handspring and the other licensees are known to be pulling their collective hair out as Palm painfully updates their operating system. Not a word on this issue.

6. Now Palm has split into two parts. An operating system group and a hardware group. The new head of the Palm Operating System group is Eric Nagel, best known at Apple as the head of research for 10 years who let Microsoft catch up and leave them in the dust. How do Donna Dubinsky and Jeff Hawkins really feel about being dependent on Palm?

Overall, still a great book.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars You can't escape the feeling that it's not the whole story, March 23, 2006

By 

Jerry Saperstein (Evanston, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring and the Birth of the Billion Dollar Handheld Industry (Hardcover)

Andrea Butter worked for Palm. David Pogue is by all accounts a nice guy who wouldn't deliberately besmirch someone. Thus both may have had understandable reasons for not telling the entire of what has become the Palm and Handspring debacle. At least that's my feeling: the whole story just isn't here.

The Palm story, of course, is dramatic. A man with a vision, Jeff Hawkins, started off to implement his idea of a handheld computer. Not a mere organizer, but not a substitute for a full-blown PC either. Keep it simple was the mantra, the so-called Zen of Palm. It wasn't an instant success story. There were many hurdles to be overcome.

Hawkins teamed with Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan and they fought the battle together. Lacking sufficient capital they sold the company first to US Robotics, a high flier at the time, which in turn sold out to 3Com. Much of the story is about the battle of the trio with management at US Robotics and 3Com.

Pogue and Better paint the story as being the three Davids against the evil Goliaths. Anyone following the industry, of course, knows that is not the truth, the whole truth and nothing else. Hawkins, Dubinsky and Colligan weren't and aren't the altruists painted here. Like so many others they had a streak of greed and selfishness. But as is the fashion in Silicon Valley, the players and their companies cloak themselves as saviors of humanity, as entities that want to do only good. (The height of this self-serving hypocrisy is Google's mission statement of "do no evil."

In reality, Palm, Handspring and everyone else in the industry do what first what benefits them. In the calculus of Palm and Handspring the customer often came last.

Better and Pogue generally ignore this.

However, the story is still compelling. The Palm device and then Handspring did literally invent an entirely new category of computing and have made the lives of millions more productive and, frankly more fun.

Still, considering what happened to both Palm and Handspring, shortly after this book was published is evidence that all was not well at Palm and Handspring. Both companies encountered difficult times and much of the ensuing disaster could be laid at the feet of Hawkins and Dubinsky. There's no overt hint of that in the book.

I bear no animus toward Palm or Handspring. I use Palm products, wouldn't give them up, but I also know that neither company was as perfect, well-intentioned and customer friendly as Better and Pogue would want you to believe. This is a good business biography, but veers too much toward hagiography.

Jerry

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Pleasant page-turner with interesting business insights, October 16, 2002

By 

Sam L. Elowitch (Farmington ME United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring and the Birth of the Billion Dollar Handheld Industry (Hardcover)

This book represents a powerful collaboration between industry veteran Andrea Butter and well-liked technology journalist David Pogue. I really enjoyed the book's engaging, fun, yet substantive style. It doesn't shy away from describing technical issues in detail without getting overly abtruse. The only possible blemishes are: 1) as others have pointed out, the ending is a little abrupt, but then, any ongoing printed history runs that risk; and 2) the book steers clear of passing any judgments on the various controversies surrounding Palm, Handspring, and the handheld industry. It bends over backward trying not to offend anybody, which could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your point of view. All in all, a good-natured, well-researched book that definitely makes you look at your PDA with more respect and curiosity.