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There are the companies you love to hate: Apple. Microsoft. Google. Their size, arrogance and aggressiveness have made them all targets of ire despite the amazing inventions they’ve brought to the world.
And then there’s Palm. Here’s a company which has remained a Silicon Valley success story, a much-loved underdog, even as its early brilliance faded and it began relying too heavily on a succession of ever-staler retreads.
Nobody hates Palm because, for all its success, Palm never managed to really piss anyone off.
Instead, its growth problems were all directed inward, into a bewildering and soap opera-worthy series of mergers and spin-offs and re-mergers, and a tragic, fruitless quest to build a new operating system. Even the triple-threat genius of founders Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan — three of the smartest people in Silicon Valley — and the infusion of lifeblood from the geektastic BeOS didn’t help. All of it added up to nothing more than a long, slow decline. In the meantime, Palm’s competitors leapfrogged far beyond it.
Maybe that’s why so many people have invested so much hope and expectation in the upcoming Palm Pre. We know it won’t knock Nokia, RIM and Apple off their smug little perches at the top of the smartphone world — at least not right away. But like Eddie the Eagle or the Jamaican bobsled team, who could root against Palm?
Before the hoopla starts, let’s pause a minute to remember some of the Palms that have gone before. From the brilliant to the not-so-brilliant, they’ve all had a place in our hearts.
(Note: The morgue that follows is necessarily incomplete, drawn as it is from the bottom drawers of Wired staffers’ desks. What highlights of Palm’s history are we missing? Please let us know in the comments!)
Above: Before there was a Palm, there was the Pilot. U.S. Robotics, a maker of modems (remember those?) owned Palm Inc. at the time of the Pilot’s debut in March 1996. There were two models: The Pilot 1000 had 128KB of memory and the Pilot 500 had 512KB.
The Pilot overcame the problems that plagued earlier handheld computers — notably Apple’s Newton — by being smaller and lighter, and by doing less. Most notably, it forced you to learn Graffiti, a special form of handwriting, rather than trying to read your chicken scratches, and the result was surprisingly effective pen input.
Soon after the launch, Palm soon changed the name of its products to “PalmPilot” and, later, to just “Palm.”
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
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