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

by David Pogue and Andrea Butter

Book Overview

The definitive behind-the-scenes story of the visionary team that launched the handheld industry. Palm insider Andrea Butter and New York Times columnist David Pogue -- with full, exclusive... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471089656
• ISBN13: 9780471089650
• Release Date: February 2002
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Recipe for success and failures

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.

Great Job!

Piloting Palm is what I would call the missing link in the story of Palm Computing. From Palm's humble beginings to its great successes this book is hear to tell it all. I got a rollar coaster of a ride reading it as my emotions were swayed back and forth. The news never convered this story of Palms history the way this book does. Ultimately the basic story of the book is known to any Palm fan but I would this book as a great way to fill in the blanks on palms history. I would recommend this to anyone who who is interested in pen computing.

Piloting Palm, right on course

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.

An in depth page-turner!

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.

Great Read, Edited So They Can Still Work in Silicon Valley

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 i