Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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

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.

Having just finished reading Piloting Palm I found the book to be very informative, and enlightening. I compared the book to one I read many years ago titled "Small Wonder: The Amazing Story of the Volkswagen Beetle" The reason I say this is because both the Beetle and the Palm Pilot share one thing in common, they both almost did not make it into production. I would recommend this book to anyone who is any interest at all in this amazing handheld computer, I believe you won't be disappointed.

From Hawkins initial vision until early 2002, Piloting Palm chronicles the birth of the handheld industry's first real success story: Palm. The triumphs and set-backs are re-lived in detail in this page-turner that is augmented by numerous quotes from Hawkins and the others who lived it. The book is more of a chronology, and with the exception of evidencing a very pro-Palm and later pro-Handspring bias (one of the authors worked for Palm's marketing division previously), the book avoids drawing any conclusions about the companies and their successes and failures.

Insight, however, abounds from the quotes which appear on literally almost every page. The authors' access to the managers of the two companies is quite impressive; however, the book is little more than a narrative of what happened and doesn't really comment on how the principals felt that they could have improved on their performance or what lessons can be applied from their struggles to other businesses. In fact, the book talks more about how to build a PDA than a business.

The book will probably be regarded as the definitive history of the companies, but it really doesn't go far beyond that, and forces the reader who is looking to apply the lessons to search deeply within to extract the gold nuggets that are hidden throughout.

This is the story of the handheld PDA and its development. Originally an idea of
Jeff Hawkins, he brought Donna Dubinsky on board as CEO to start a company to develop what became the Palm Pilot. Along the way both struggle to get enough capital to continue to make the product a success. They eventually get backing from
3 Com and while the capital is available, dealing with 3Com management becomes a major issue. Both eventually leave to from Handspring, and the story stops about a year into the new company, with Palm the dominant supplier of PDAs, but seemingly mismanaged, and Handspring's future uncertain.

The punches are surely pulled when describing the investors of capital in the business (there were many) - why would the story be so torturous if there had been more belief among the major investors in either the product and/or the management?
Another issue which I read into the story, is the sheer difficulty of working with the vision team that is Hawkins/Dubinsky - each non-Palm manger who is brought in by
3 com to develop the product seems to be confused, visionless or plain wrong. I began to have sympathy for the folks who had to manage Palm during the long-running dispute that led to their departure. From this book's viewpoint it looks as if only the original team of true believers could deliver the product, the process and the profits. I was not convinced.

Hawkins seems to have developed the operating systems and handprint recognition software that was the basis of the original product. He and Dubinsky argued against licensing this software while at Palm and yet were the primary beneficiaries of such a license when they formed Handspring. Hawkins in particular seems obsessed with the product rather than the system, and this I feel must limit the
Proliferation of the PDA concept - surely the reason that the PC overcame Apples' first mover advantage was the decision by IBM to license the operating system. Most of the early Palm personnel were ex-Apple, so maybe the lesson was not well learned.
[There is, incidentally, a deliciously vicious description of the failure of the Apple Newton, the first attempt at a mass market PDA]

I came away from the book feeling that Hawkins/Dubinsky were an excellent, driven duo, who can inspire fierce loyalty and overcome challenges to develop a product, but their vision may not be wide enough to make the PDA a ubiquitous system, as opposed to a handy device for technophiles.

I read that book like I watchd Columbo series. I knew the end but I didn't know why. Now I do and I will certainly pick that book as a required reading in my coming graduate course on "Creating Breakthru Products". The recipe for success is clearly presented here. Take a great product visionary add a great business strategist and manager who respect, admire, and want the success of each other. Add great people, respect them, challenge them, and create a strong team spirit. Starve them to death (yes, too much money kills products). Focus on a customer type and make all your decisions based on that. Strive for simplicity. Add one or two genius innovative ideas (the story opf grafiti is a case study by itself). And ... Let them loose.

In comparison, the story of Palm under 3'com is an example of how not to do it although not all is bad. But I could feel the pain of the original creators as they saw one manager after another shoot at the golden goose. I feel very pessimistic on the chances of Palm after reading this book and I would not be surprised to see Handspring buying them down the road, but technology always reserve surprises, so we will see.

This book covers the complete history of Palm and Handspring (which was founded by folks from Palm). One of the authors worked at Palm through the bulk of the period, so the insight is real and relevant. Though the writing style is not at the level of other fast-paced, informative business stories (The New New Thing or Blockbuster, as two examples), it does cover the essentials and moves steadily forward. If you love your Palm or like high tech business profiles, this book will not disappoint you.

If you like your corporate biographies short on technological details and long on struggles for survival and success, Piloting Palm is the book for you. Andrea Butter, Palm's marketing director in the early days, provides backstage access to Palm's evolutionary drama, complete with political infighting, searches for cash and the simple quest for survival. The story is told largely from the point of view of Jeff Hawkins, whom Butter and co-author David Pogue dub the father of handheld computing. The involvement of such dynamic firms as Casio, Tandy, GeoWorks, America Online, Intuit and various venture capitalists makes the story all the more interesting. We from getAbstract recommend this book for its straightforward - although not all too objective - account of the creation of a modern technological phenomenon.

As someone who regularly keeps up with Palm, Handspring, etc. through all of the daily-updated websites devoted to the Palm Platform, I figured that I'd know most of the stories in this book. I was wrong. The few stories I knew were fleshed out with far more detail, and there were tons of interesting insider accounts that I had never heard of before. Best of all, the writing style is fantastic (not a surpise with David Pogue as a co-author) making this a real page-turner, something that not a lot of non-fiction books do for me. Highly recommended; if you're interested enough in this topic to be reading this review, then you'll love the book.