.FLYINGHEAD THE PALMPOWER INTERVIEW
.TITLE Jeff Hawkins, creator of the PalmPilot
.FEATURE
.SPOTLIGHT FIGPAIR A
.SUMMARY It seems fitting to kick off our Premier Issue by having a candid conversation with Jeff Hawkins, the man who started Palm Computing (now part of 3Com) and created the PalmPilot. Prior to his chat with Hawkins, 3Com PR personnel gave Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz some interesting background on Hawkins’ success: over a million PalmPilots shipped in 18 months, a 66% market share, and the fastest growth of any computing product in history, faster than the TV and the VCR.
.BEGIN_TABLE 2
.GRAPHICPAIR A Jeff Hawkins, PalmPilot Inventor | .BLUENOTE It seems fitting to kick off our Premier Issue by having a candid conversation with Jeff Hawkins, the man who started Palm Computing (now part of 3Com) and created the PalmPilot. Prior to his chat with Hawkins, 3Com PR personnel gave Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz some interesting background on Hawkins’ success: over a million PalmPilots shipped in 18 months, a 66% market share, and the fastest growth of any computing product in history, faster than the TV and the VCR. |
.END_TABLE
.Q DG
You started a software product and ended up with what is an amazingly successful piece of hardware. How does that make you feel?
.A JH
(laughing) It feels good. What really feels good is that people like the product. Since we’re all product people here, there’s nothing else that makes me happier than people saying "Hey this is great, it’s changed my life." That feels great. On the other hand, looking forward, I think we’ve just begun. There’s a huge opportunity here. As much as I like the PalmPilot and the way the product is now, we’re probably in the Apple II days of the handheld computing business. So there’s a lot of future ahead of us.
.CALLOUT Looking forward, I think we’ve just begun. We’re probably in the Apple II days of the handheld computing business.
.Q DG
Can you give me an idea of where that future is?
.A JH
Well, I won’t give you product release information. But if you go back to the beginning of Palm, when I started the company, essentially the pitch I had when I raised funding was that handheld computers on a unit basis were going to be far larger than desktop and laptop computers combined. I felt that the appeal of a handheld, a pocket-size device, was very universal. People will have them, their kids will have them.
And I see it in different markets with different needs, going everywhere from kids in grade school, to college, to business people. In a broad sense we have a very big vision about where our market’s going to go, without seeing any of the particular technologies. But we think pocket-size access to data, including communications data, is almost a fundamental need. Almost like the telephone or something. So we’re just optimistic and excited about trying to come up with products that appeal to a lot of these people.
.Q DG
Do you think that having that much access to data all the time sort of creates more information overload? Or do you think that makes it less of a problem?
.A JH
I think that information overload comes from, borrowing from current terminology, "Push" technology. Things that are pushed at you are things that overload you. That can be magazines in your mailbox…physical magazines, printed magazines piling up. It can be E-mail. It can be people leaving you voice messages. These are all things you can’t control very easily. Those are what you get overloaded by.
You tend not to feel overloaded when YOU want to go get something. That’s not a problem. The thing about PalmPilot and the technologies we’re developing is that they’re primarily pull technologies. You get something when you want it. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be some push parts of it, but in that sense, I don’t think it’s an overload. It doesn’t bother me to carry around tons and tons of stuff in my pocket. If I don’t want to look at it, I don’t have to look at it.
.Q DG
That makes a lot of sense. Something just came to mind, off topic a little bit. A recent survey done by your company says the number one reason people buy this device is because of the form factor. On top of all the other reasons, on top of what it does, how it works, all the other things. Would you agree with that?
.A JH
I certainly agree that…well, it’s not the reason they buy something, cause there are other things that are small. But it’s the reason they like the product. You remember when the Newton came out. People were very, very excited about that too. There was a tremendous amount of interest, not just hype on Apple’s part, but real interest from people. But for a variety of reasons, one of them being that the products are too large, people have said "That doesn’t work for me."
So the size alone doesn’t create demand, but it is a key criteria about people being able to use it for whatever they want to use it for. I hope I’m making myself clear about that. It’s a critical part of the equation, although the functionality has to be compelling as well. But if the form factor isn’t right, they won’t use it.
.CALLOUT I think there may be some surprises here in the form factor arena. I’m not going to tell you what those are…I’d like to say that the current PalmPilot is the biggest thing we’ll ever produce.
.Q DG
Do you think that your other competitors are kind of missing the boat in terms of form factor?
.A JH
Some are, some aren’t. I think it’s taken a number of people quite awhile to really understand that. It took us at Palm awhile to understand how important it was. But we’ve clearly set a target for people to go after. They can look at us and say "PalmPilot’s been really successful, let me do something just like that." So I think if they’ve missed this point in the past, they won’t continue to miss it forever. On the other hand though, I think there may be some surprises here in the form factor arena. I’m not going to tell you what those are…
.Q DG
As long as it’s not a Java Ring, it’s fine…
.A JH
(laughing)…I have yet to see the Java Ring, although I have read about it many times. So, I don’t think we’ve seen the end-all of this. I’d like to say that the current PalmPilot is the biggest thing we’ll ever produce. I kinda mean that. But that doesn’t mean that’s what they’re going to look like 5 years from now, even 2 years from now.
.Q DG
What’s to prevent somebody who is relatively well-funded and has their act together from creating something very similar? What’s the competitive advantage that you see the PalmPilot having now and into the future beyond its physical shape?
.A JH
There are multiple answers to that. I’ll have to go through them all because there are a lot. Clearly, it’s not just the size, but we do have an advantage in that we do have a much better knowledge base about the usability of the products than it seems like our competitors have. It’s part of our culture here, understanding what’s important to users and what’s not. It’s not just size. People can learn that, but we clearly have a head start on that.
One really big area from a technical side is we understood that what we were building would be a platform. It would be a place that people would write software for and add value to. That was something that some of the entrenched consumer electronics companies didn’t understand at all: Sharp, Casio, TI [Texas Instruments] and so on. There are a lot of companies that just don’t get that, they don’t understand the importance of developing tools, the importance of developing communities. This is really the first product in its category you can really write software for. There are literally thousands of people and hundreds of applications written. That’s something we’ve got.
There are obviously marketing advantages of being first and having the right market share. We are recognized as a leader in the category, we have the most customers, the most customer loyalty. People look to us for innovation. We have distribution, which is a big issue. Trying to get distribution for a product that is just like the PalmPilot is hard! Every retailer says "Why bother? It’s just like the one I’ve already got. I’m selling them, and I’m trained on them."
These are all classic barriers. There are some technical barriers in the intellectual property are that I don’t need to go into. But we do pursue intellectual patents and so on.
And what else can I add to that list? I think, as I mentioned earlier, we’re really early in this business. And you’re going to see the handheld market evolve very rapidly. It’s going to look very different a couple of years from now. Anytime you have very rapid change, it’s an opportunity to cement your leadership or an opportunity to lose it.
And so, I just believe that our organization is very well equipped to do some very surprising, innovative things in this field ahead of our competition. I don’t want to say what those are, but we’re working on them. You’re going to see some of them in the not too distant future. And so it’s like nothing is won yet. Even though we have a large market share and we’ve got all these customers, we could lose it tomorrow. We could make some really boneheaded mistakes. Or we could cement it even further if we make some brilliant moves.
So I’m not sanguine about this being a piece of cake. There is a lot of risk here.
.Q DG
Can you paint a sort of generalist picture of where this kind of thing is going to go two years, five years, ten years down the road? The vision thing.
.A JH
(laughing) Yeah, I can. The vision thing. I used to not like that word, but I have to deal with it all the time. The V word. But I guess in some sense, I and the rest of the team here do have some vision about the future. I’ll give you some big pictures without giving many details.
One sort of big picture is we think of the handheld device, the PalmPilot, as this window on data that exists elsewhere. The trick is to make it look like you’ve got it all locally. But in reality, the data is someplace else. The simple model, when we started out with the original PalmPilot was just PIM data that resides on your PC. The whole synchronization process makes it looks like when you change it on your handheld or the PalmPilot, it changes on your desktop. When you change it on your desktop, it changes on the PalmPilot. So its like a window of data that is actually saved and backed up and you print and manipulate it from the desktop if you will. But you have this little window on it.
We’ve expanded. Now we can say "Where else does data exist?" Well, there’s corporate data on the LAN. And we are doing numerous things to make this a window on to LAN-based data. E-mail is one of those. LAN-based E-mail in particular. There’s us and some other companies doing some very clever things with corporate databases and syncing over servers and things like that. That’s a corporate sort of interest. Then, I think there’s a huge opportunity with the Internet. The Internet really does change everything. And its going to be a dominant factor in the future of handheld devices, having a seamless picture of data that exists there and that’s distributed there and that’s manipulated using IP protocols and Internet tools.
And that’s a tremendous opportunity for us. That’s really going to influence the future. Along with that comes transactions. Financial transactions and so on, where you can use the handheld device to look at data that may exist in a financial institution or in some sort of transaction-based system. Wherever you find data in the world, you want to basically have a seamless view of it in your pocket. That’s a really big 50,000 foot view.
.Q DG
Let’s take this into a different direction. This is going to position me pretty clearly in your mind. I carry around this black leather kit that contains a PalmPilot, of course, a MessagePad 2000, a keyboard, a pager, a cell phone and a dictating device. Do you see at some point that I’m not going to have to carry all this stuff with me?
.A JH
The answer is yes and no. I’m not one of these people who preaches convergence and everything. Take a pager for a start, that’s an easy one we can talk about. We can talk about what we’re doing. A pager in a PalmPilot makes a lot of sense. There are a lot of people who’d want that. Motorola just announced one and they’re getting great reception to it. I think it’s going to be a great product.
That doesn’t mean that the paging business goes to being like PalmPilots with pagers. The vast majority of pagers are still going to be much smaller, cheaper, clip on your belt type of things. It doesn’t mean that they’ve converging, but there is an overlap. Someone who really carries around a pager all the time and a PalmPilot all the time and their usage model is such that they’re not using it while they’re climbing telephone poles as a contractor, but it’s acceptable to have the pages delivered on a slightly larger device, they’ll like that! They’ll buy one device and be happy with it.
The same thing you might apply to integration with a cell phone. If I’m a heavy cell phone user and that’s really what I use most, I want the smallest cell phone. I want a StarTac [a Motorola cellular phone]. But if every time I use my cell phone, it’s with the PalmPilot, that’s what I do all day long, maybe I do want the two combined.
.Q DG
The question is how do you talk on the cell phone while the PalmPilot screen is in your ear.
.A JH
There are all sorts of interesting user interface issues with all these combinations. What I believe, and we see this with our current base today, that the PalmPilot, for its current users, is a very integral part of their lives. It becomes a very, very important part of the things they carry around. For many of them it is the most important thing they carry around. They become more addicted to it than to other things. In that scenario, those people will want more functionality added to the PalmPilot. If I’m really a cell phone user and I just occasionally use a PalmPilot for something else, I probably wouldn’t want them combined.
There are going to be a lot of hybrid products. But its not one size fits all. It’s not everything’s going to converge. But there are some very interesting combinations which can be sold in very large volume, to meet certain people’s needs.
.Q DG
Such as, in the obscure area, the folks that are building a business card scanner that they want to plug onto the back of the PalmPilot device.
.A JH
That’s another example. I don’t know what the overlap between the people who need it is, but there are probably some who do. Others may want the scanner on their desktop. What we’re finding is that the market we are creating in our products alone is getting large enough and looks like it’s going to be so large that the market for products which are a PalmPilot, plus something, gets pretty big. You’re not hitting a new customer, you’re hitting a PalmPilot customer, who wants a pager, or two way this, or something. That gets to be interesting, the size of that market. The number of those customers.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
Our interview with Hawkins continues in the February 1998 issue of PalmPower Magazine. If you’d like to be automatically notified when the issue becomes available, subscribe to the PalmPower Tip of the Week at http://www.palmpower.com and you’ll get an E-mail notification delivered right to your mailbox.
.END_SIDEBAR
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