The conversation

samatmanHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

Same deal with the Palm Pilot

… 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.

Original discussionThe mystery of the garage104 source comments · at import
2

What was this responding to?

Parent context · original excerpt

RE
RetricHN

They sold 1 million of the things in a year. The device had plenty of flaws, but by the millionth customer products are mainstream.

Full original

Community replies 0

No community replies yet. Add your perspective.

Replies from the source 2

Direct replies available in this import. Original-language excerpts.

GH
ghaffHN

That's a great analogy. Iomega made a bunch of people a lot of money and provided multi years employment to others. But they were an evolutionary dead-end. Whether because Zip drives (or other forms of higher-density non-harddrive storage) ultimately weren't very interesting or because networked storage ended up as something of a niche (although some companies play int that space). You can certainly make the case that they were a "successful" company for their time but they also ultimately failed.

Full original
AL
AlbertCoryHN

The original post said: > But despite all the talent, clear obsession, technical prowess, and a lot of money, the infrastructure just wasn’t there to make it work. and all of the ensuing discussion was what "it" was. If you're an engineer, "it" can reduce to "will I make money from the stock?" In fact, that was my approach. So ZipDrive? Great, those people probably made money. Palm? They got $5 a share from US Robotics, plus some USR shares, which in turn made money from 3Com. You can demand more out of life, of course. Nothing wrong with that.

Full original
Continue on Hacker News

Respect different perspectives. Share concrete experiences.

Sign in to post, reply, repost, and quote.