3 ms·

on General Magic: > But despite all the talent, clear obsession, technical prowess, and a lot of money, the infrastructure just wasn’t there to make it work.

on General Magic: > But despite all the talent, clear obsession, technical prowess, and a lot of money, the infrastructure just wasn’t there to make it work. Almost everyone was trying to make a handheld device then, and by the time Palm came along, the category was cursed as far as VC's were concerned. The infrastructure WAS there, as Palm proved. You just had to scale down your expectations and find a set of functionality people actually wanted. You also needed to give up on cursive recognition and trust that the users would learn a simpler method of entering text. The monster egos in General Magic just refused to do that, as did their big corporate partners, and all the other failed startups.

ghaff 3y ago
Arguably, a lot of pieces were still missing at the time. Yes, Palm had a large enough early adopter market. But I also remember the Palm Pilot being the cool device all the engineers wanted but a lot of people stopped using it because keeping it synced in near-realtime was such a pain. It really took cellular betworks with relatively cheap data (and app stores) to bring the vision to fruition.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  No, it didn't. Read Piloting Palm (you have to get a used copy, since it's not on Kindle and print is expensive). The first Palm had only a sync cradle with the PC. It did not have any wireless, and it was a huge success. The sync cradle gave users what they wanted. We could quibble whether all those users were "early adopters." Whatever you call them, there were plenty.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Compared to smartphone users, they were very much early adopters. No wireless sync, graffiti input, etc. They were not really mainstream devices even if they were pretty successful by the standards of the time.
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      Invalid comparison. There were no smartphones then. The market was desktop computer users.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        And my point is that, as a Palm Pilot owner, it just wasn't really a very satisfactory solution at least for me and a lot of other buyers. It really took cellular networks and various other innovations before it was satisfactory for a mainstream audience. Sometimes technologies just aren't baked enough to be interesting even if there aren't any real alternatives.
        Retric 3y ago
        They sold 1 million of the things in a year. The device had plenty of flaws, but by the millionth customer products are mainstream.
        ghaff 3y ago
        I won't seriously argue. They had a good enough run. I even upgraded the one I got for free at a tradeshow at one point. But the synchronization and input was always enough of an issue that I can't say I ever found it all that useful in retrospect. And it always seemed to be in the "cool gadget" but not anything that was really critical.
        samatman 3y ago
        The Palm Pilot reminds me of the Zip drive, another product from the same rough era. It met a felt need: floppy disks had pathetic storage, now you can buy a 100MB floppy disk! They sold very well for awhile. But people didn't want 100MB floppy disks, they wanted a way to transfer data. Flash wasn't cheap enough to sell in bulk, and as soon as it was, the Zip drive fell off a cliff, replaced with the still-ubiquitous thumb drive and SD card. You can argue that the Zip was a success, or mainstream, but you can't argue that it was equally successful and mainstream as thumb drives or SD cards, not honestly. Same deal with the Palm Pilot. For a couple years, I had a flip phone, a Palm Pilot, and an iPod, all three of which I would pack to go to classes at university. Of those three, the only one that felt clunky and overly limited was the Palm Pilot. I liked it, I used it, real boon to an ADD-brained kid trying to get through higher education, but it was notably limited and I wanted something better. Even tried programming it, got the O'Reilly "pigeon book", never got that far with it though. It wasn't until 2007 that those three items were successfully combined into one mass-market gadget, although there were preludes like the Danger Hiptop. Palm even tried to get into the smartphone game, in the first generation. But the original device category PDA was obsolete, whether or not (as it turned out, not) the company made the jump to the new one.
  - themadturk 3y ago
    Yes, there were a lot of us. Graffiti was an interesting thing, but after that came the FITALY keyboard, and infrared external keyboards. Some of us got serious writing done on our Pilots.

ghaff 3y ago

Arguably, a lot of pieces were still missing at the time. Yes, Palm had a large enough early adopter market. But I also remember the Palm Pilot being the cool device all the engineers wanted but a lot of people stopped using it because keeping it synced in near-realtime was such a pain. It really took cellular betworks with relatively cheap data (and app stores) to bring the vision to fruition.

AlbertCory 3y ago
No, it didn't. Read Piloting Palm (you have to get a used copy, since it's not on Kindle and print is expensive). The first Palm had only a sync cradle with the PC. It did not have any wireless, and it was a huge success. The sync cradle gave users what they wanted. We could quibble whether all those users were "early adopters." Whatever you call them, there were plenty.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Compared to smartphone users, they were very much early adopters. No wireless sync, graffiti input, etc. They were not really mainstream devices even if they were pretty successful by the standards of the time.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    Invalid comparison. There were no smartphones then. The market was desktop computer users.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      And my point is that, as a Palm Pilot owner, it just wasn't really a very satisfactory solution at least for me and a lot of other buyers. It really took cellular networks and various other innovations before it was satisfactory for a mainstream audience. Sometimes technologies just aren't baked enough to be interesting even if there aren't any real alternatives.
      - Retric 3y ago
        They sold 1 million of the things in a year. The device had plenty of flaws, but by the millionth customer products are mainstream.
        ghaff 3y ago
        I won't seriously argue. They had a good enough run. I even upgraded the one I got for free at a tradeshow at one point. But the synchronization and input was always enough of an issue that I can't say I ever found it all that useful in retrospect. And it always seemed to be in the "cool gadget" but not anything that was really critical.
        samatman 3y ago
        The Palm Pilot reminds me of the Zip drive, another product from the same rough era. It met a felt need: floppy disks had pathetic storage, now you can buy a 100MB floppy disk! They sold very well for awhile. But people didn't want 100MB floppy disks, they wanted a way to transfer data. Flash wasn't cheap enough to sell in bulk, and as soon as it was, the Zip drive fell off a cliff, replaced with the still-ubiquitous thumb drive and SD card. You can argue that the Zip was a success, or mainstream, but you can't argue that it was equally successful and mainstream as thumb drives or SD cards, not honestly. Same deal with the Palm Pilot. For a couple years, I had a flip phone, a Palm Pilot, and an iPod, all three of which I would pack to go to classes at university. Of those three, the only one that felt clunky and overly limited was the Palm Pilot. I liked it, I used it, real boon to an ADD-brained kid trying to get through higher education, but it was notably limited and I wanted something better. Even tried programming it, got the O'Reilly "pigeon book", never got that far with it though. It wasn't until 2007 that those three items were successfully combined into one mass-market gadget, although there were preludes like the Danger Hiptop. Palm even tried to get into the smartphone game, in the first generation. But the original device category PDA was obsolete, whether or not (as it turned out, not) the company made the jump to the new one.
- themadturk 3y ago
  Yes, there were a lot of us. Graffiti was an interesting thing, but after that came the FITALY keyboard, and infrared external keyboards. Some of us got serious writing done on our Pilots.