I worked at Motorola on the team building the Envoy GM device. When GM first proposed the idea of a handheld digital assistant in the immediate pre-WWW era, e-

I worked at Motorola on the team building the Envoy GM device. When GM first proposed the idea of a handheld digital assistant in the immediate pre-WWW era, e-mail was catching on as the hot new novelty, and GM's pitch to its partners was that you could go to the store, buy a device and have an e-mail account by doing little more than turning the thing on. Easy enough for Grandma to do was the idea. When I came aboard the project was 18 months along and they thought they were on the verge of shipping. But the software was buggy and the API unstable, so partners had a hard time integrating it with their hardware. Another 18 months went by before devices finally shipped, still buggy. But in that time AOL had grown exponentially and captured the concept of easy e-mail access in the minds of the masses. GM had no compelling alternative story they could replace their original pitch with, and their partners had lost patience and interest. Motorola put only minimal money into marketing the Envoy device. That's my recollection of the dynamics that led to GM's failure.