Software Everywhere — David Beers on Mobile Computing

So you've no doubt read that Palm canceled the Foleo. A lot has been said about this and I could write volumes myself. But as you've noticed, time and energy for blogging has been very scarce of late. I did make a few comments on a couple of forums the day we heard about the cancellation and in the interest of time I'd like to piece them together into a coherent post that says some things I haven't heard said anywhere else—why Foleo was really canceled and what it means for Palm.

Foleo and its Linux OS were born at a time when Palm's founders were returning to the helm of a Palm that had been ravaged by poor management and divested of its own OS supplier. They looked at the successor to Palm OS 5 that PalmSource had built (Palm OS Cobalt) which had huge built-in risks because it was proprietary everything—kernel, drivers, middleware, UI layer...at one point they were even developing their own compiler. They looked at the fact that an independent PalmSource would have its own business priorities. They identified it as a potential acquisition target for their competitors. And when they finished saying "Holy crap!" they decided three things.

First, they would hedge their OS bets by talking to Microsoft about using Windows Mobile; second they would keep a sharp eye on any acquisition activity directed at PalmSource and be ready to defend against it; and third, they would have a backup plan in case they were unable to keep control of Palm OS. They didn't want to be in a position where Microsoft was the only way to go forward. Working on Foleo was a way for Palm to implement a back-up OS plan that would fold into product development no matter what became of Palm's relationship with PalmSource. If PalmSource for any reason failed to deliver a smartphone OS that satisfied Palm's requirements, they probably reasoned that the work and in-house expertise developing Foleo could become the basis of a new in-house Palm OS. Foleo was Palm's "Next Big Thing" and it was also an insurance policy for their bread-and-butter smartphone business.

That's probably how I would have figured it, too. But Palm didn't have the luxury of being dealt their best-case scenario. First they failed to keep PalmSource from being acquired when ACCESS made a $324 million bid that Palm knew its shareholders would not be willing to match. Now Plan B had to become Plan A because Palm needed to keep control of their OS destiny if they were to differentiate and survive. If I'm right, at that point the Foleo team was developing the OS that Palm planned to use on future smartphones as well.

The next problem was, well... we don't know, exactly. But I have pretty good idea.

I think we can surmise that when Palm made a big deal to the media back in March about bringing in Paul Mercer, a guy who is famous for architecting the iPod OS as well as that of some very slick iPod competitors from Samsung, there was already a big rethink going on at Palm. Mercer is the kind of guy you'd hire to be a lead in a new OS project, not to join one mid-stream where most of the big architectural issues had been settled.

Still more telling, Mercer's outspoken views on system design are quite a departure from the traditional Palm approach, which is to keep application code close to the metal for maximum efficiency. "This is a ridiculous notion that’s been left behind by history," he once said in an interview on Intel.com. "On a network device, you simply can’t afford native code." He founded Iventor in 2000 to develop a "high level runtime environment for deployment of advanced, dynamic user interfaces." That's certainly the direction that Palm's competitors have taken, with Microsoft and RIM moving away from C/C++ native application interfaces and toward virtual machines that execute "managed code" for greater security and reliability.

Sure enough, Palm has posted more than a dozen device software positions over the last two months that list Java experience as a requirement. One from July read in part:

Development engineer for implementation of Java based mobile system software on new product development project. Responsible for all mobile development (design through implementation and release), working with other device engineers and design lead on overall system architecture and design.

It looks very much like Palm reached a decision back in February that it would not be repurposing the Foleo operating system on its smartphones after all. Instead they would have a go at adapting Mercer's platform technology to the smartphone Linux OS and let the Foleo team finish out their work.

That's crazy on multiple levels. Ed Colligan admits as much when he explains the cancellation of Foleo as a way to refocus Palm's development efforts. Supporting two operating systems, with separate toolchains and SDKs is more than a company Palm's size can handle. But just as important, the Foleo is a smartphone companion: its applications should be source compatible, if not binary compatible with those that run on the phone so developers can create paired applications easily. And it's not like Palm has no need for urgency in shipping a new OS on its smartphones. What could have prompted a decision to make a fresh start?

Now, Mercer is a magician when it comes to coaxing stunning graphic effects and elegant, performant user interfaces out of resource-constrained devices. If you have seen some of his recent work you'll know to expect a beautiful UI on the next Palm OS. But I've spent some time with the Foleo operating system and it's a very nice piece of work, too. I'd go so far as to say that Palm's lightweight DirectFB windowing system sets a new standard of responsiveness and simplicity for mobile Linux. As far as I can see, it would have made a great smartphone OS. Given how far Palm had got with Foleo, there's really only one solid reason I can see for Palm pulling the plug on it.

That would be the wireless carriers.

I have some grave doubts that the carriers in the US are enthusiastic about releasing phones with a new, open native Linux platform. Sheesh, they're even twitchy about sandboxed Java MIDlets running on their phones. AT&T completely blocks access to the file system by a Java application. No files for you! There are mass market phones with native APIs, namely BREW, but getting an app onto those handsets is a little like mustering a siege on a well-fortified castle. Certifying a single BREW C/C++ application to run on Verizon handsets costs several hundred dollars and requires at least a couple months of testing by NSTL, often much more. Then if you tweak a feature or fix a bug, you must certify again. The carriers do not want support hassles, and it's the native applications, which are vulnerable to buffer overruns and security problems, that concern them the most. Dollars to doughnuts, more than one Tier 1 carrier came to Palm with a requirement that native applications would have to be digitally signed and undergo rigorous carrier testing to run on their phones. That would have thrown a huge bucket of ice water on Palm's developer ecosystem. It's even quite possible in my view that one or more carriers said "no native 3rd party applications at all" as I bet at&t said to Apple. "Why can't you bring us an OS with a nice Java runtime environment for applications like your competitor, RIM?"

Ouch. Was Palm faced with a choice between torching it's 3rd party ecosystem and torching the OS it had been working on for two or three years? I have a feeling they were.

So there sat Paul Mercer, "dreaming about a personal device that offered complete access to information and media" where he could put his eye-popping, secure mobile runtime environment to work.

And there went the Foleo OS.

Foleo will be back. I doubt very much that Colligan would have mentioned a "Foleo II" if he wasn't pretty darned confident he wouldn't suffer the embarrassment of a second Foleo cancellation. And when it does come to market Foleo will surely be running Palm's tweaked Linux kernel, just like the new Palm smartphones will in a year or so. But the evidence points to the high-level intefaces being some flavor of Java, not native C. (Don't worry, I'm sure there will be a Garnet emulator for backward compatibility—for a couple years anyway.) If you're a developer and next year you're able to write "Palm OS" applications that you can distribute without carrier testing and pricey digital signing, you'll probably have Paul Mercer to thank for that.

And if your apps start fast and are as snappy as the original Palm OS when they run on the phone, thank Ben Combee and the Foleo team for that. You'll know their work on the Linux underpinnings was not in vain.

I'm putting a good face on this. Frankly, the cost in time, money and reputation is awful. It's not just that we don't know when we'll ever see the Foleo again (and I do think the concept is important and viable). It's that there will be still more delay before we see a Treo running a new Palm OS—12 to 18 months, says Colligan now. On the (slight) upside, since it typically takes that long for a new smartphone with an existing operating system to make it through all the carrier testing and approvals, this actually means that Palm is pretty close to being done with the new new smartphone OS and has hardware ready to begin that process.

The ultimate decision to cancel Foleo "in its current configuration" was right, but the embarrassing debacle was avoidable. If I'm right about the change of course coming down to carrier requirements, Palm could and should have known its customers and seen this coming a long time ago.

In my last two posts I offered an explanation for why Foleo sailed right over the heads of most of the technical media and why the vision behind it actually opens a major new front in the battle for the future of personal computing—one that puts the smartphone at the center of your personal computing universe rather than its current status as a wandering satellite. There are a number of objections to the vision behind Foleo—the fact that it hasn't been well understood by the techies being itself an indication of a problem for Palm. But I'm going to suggest here that most of these objections are challenges that are within Palm's capabilities to overcome. I hope Palm's new ownership configuration and John Rubinstein's hand in product development bring some sure execution on this post-PC plan, because I think it's a pretty compelling picture, even if it's crazy to be coming out of a company with the small size and somewhat faded reputation of Palm. Read my last post to understand why.

On to the objections:

Who wants to lug around two devices?

Foleo is for the millions of people who are already carrying around a mobile phone and a laptop, a mobile phone and a PDA, or most common of all: a mobile phone and a notebook or pad of paper. Most knowledge workers already carry multiple data tools with them when they move about the office or campus, take their work home, or take it on the road. Foleo is just a more integrated and functional pairing than the bag of tools they have today. The "two device" objection is something for marketing to address. Palm really needs to emphasize what you get to shed when you're carrying a Foleo with your smartphone. The heavy, fragile, slow-booting laptop, the binders of paper notes and reports, the novel you wanted to read when you got some down-time. That message will play well to the people for whom Foleo is designed.

I also think Foleo could have a decent market among people who don't even care to own a smartphone and just want a simplified standalone computer for writing and light Internet usage over WiFi. I've already talked with a surprising number of people who seem enchanted with it almost on sight, but it's difficult to know whether Palm can have success reaching these customers when their primary target audience is so different. They'd probably need to launch a specific model for this group, kind of the way they aimed the Z22 PDAs at (mostly female) users who wanted ultimate simplicity and basic PIM above all else.

Great, but what if I need Application X?

From what we've heard so far it sounds like Foleo has the same 80/20 mix of the most required features in MS Office and Outlook as you find on the Treo (assuming they have a synchronized calendar and contact list in there, which I'll bet they do by the time it ships). If the Treo is any indication, with Documents to Go you should be able review and edit Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations and save them in their native formats. In fact, MS Office support has long been better on Palm OS devices than on Microsoft's Pocket PCs. These applications are practically all of what many working people do with their PCs and if they can shed several pounds or several hundred dollars of the cost of making these applications both portable and ergonomic, a great many will be happy to do it.

But that phrase "practically all" is a sticky one for Palm. People do have other applications they like—or are required—to use on their PC and I agree with Michael Mace that there's a pretty insistent voice that says "well, I better carry a full-blown Windows machine, just in case." Palm obviously needs to do a great job supporting 3rd party developers to fill in as many gaps in the application ecosystem as possible, but they also ought to do something clever to quiet this nagging voice of resistance.

I think one thing that would help is to license a PC remote control product like pcAnywhere or LogMeIn and ship it with the Foleo. Make sure it's a native application, not something that runs in the browser and requires a site registration and a bookmark. Make sure users can tunnel securely through port 80 on the firewall (or partner with Cisco to line up a VPN client) so they can get to their office PC and control it with the pointer and keyboard from any place they're connected to the Internet. Then market this as a use case: "your office PC from anywhere."

I use a remote control application with an open protocol called VNC a lot, sometimes spending entire work days connected via a virtual private network to a workstation on the site of a client. It enables me to run Eclipse, WebSphere, MS Project, Office, a native CRM application, and so on, without having any of these applications actually installed on the computer I'm connecting from. Many businesses are uncomfortable with letting certain sensitive data live on hard drives that leave the building, and they see allowing this kind of remote access as the right mix between mobility and security. On a broadband connection you can almost (not quite, but almost) forget that you're working on a remote PC. I have a VNC client that I use to conduct remote PC sessions on my Nokia N800 tablet, too, but with the Foleo's big screen and keyboard this would be infinitely more practical. It's not a perfect solution (for one thing, the experience would suffer on a slow connection) but I think it would be enough to convince a lot of business users and IT departments to give the "what if" voice a rest and see that Foleo is finally a mini-laptop computer they can afford.

Foleo is a niche within a niche

I've read this objection a few times: "Smartphones are still a niche in the overall mobile phone market, so selling to some fraction of that niche isn't exactly a marketing plan for a disruptive product." I get it. And, yeah, it's a challenge for Palm. But I'm not convinced the math works out as badly as it sounds. 70 million smartphones is a pretty healthy niche, and one that promises to grow more rapidly with the splash from the iPhone and its competitors. Treo has been extremely influential (and profitable) in that market with a very small piece of that pie. And Foleo isn't just a Treo companion: it's designed (optimistically) to work with all of the smartphones out there. Personally, I think the "niche within a niche" characterization is a negative spin on a situation that's actually pretty good. I'm more worried about the next objection.

The micro-PC space is already crowded by formidable competitors

It's a pretty exciting time when experimental form factors that split the difference between handset and laptop PC are starting to get the muscle of Intel, Microsoft and Nokia behind them. It's also a confusing time for consumers, who are trying to figure out what these things are and whether they are cool toys or things that might solve real problems for them.

In my opinion, the UMPC-type devices are not going to drive a lot of adoption because they are too generic to present a real solution to users. Sure the prices will be coming down, but the problems they address are too diffuse for most people to say "hey that's what I need to do XYZ that is a pain for me to do now." Palm is right to highlight one thing that Foleo does really well and build the marketing message around that. The other use cases will flower up around it.

The problem is, once Palm gets through to someone with that vision, Foleo's physical similarity to a standard mini-laptop is crying out for comparison. The same techies who panned the Foleo as pedestrian and uninspired are going to be hyping new gadgets like the Intel Mobile Internet Devices, bringing peoples' attention back to feature lists, specs and shiny, fresh-looking hardware. It doesn't take long before a lot of folks who "get" the Foleo concept start thinking these other devices could be pressed into service on the same use cases. I know that it's not feature lists that sell products, but like a lot of folks I sometimes worry that even the best marketing pitch from Palm could end up selling a lot of non-Palm products. This can cut both ways, and with a new device category the last thing you want is to be small and alone in the market. But the resources arrayed against Palm are daunting and there are other visionaries out there.

The only thing I have to say on this one is that despite their apparent underdog status, the Palm guys really do get the value of simplicity in a way that I don't think Intel, Microsoft or Nokia will ever understand. No one out there has a more user-centric focus than Palm. The original Pilot followed on a long, long line of failed handheld computers, many of which had much better feature sets. It prevailed because it took the path of simplicity at every single fork in the design process. I don't know how Hawkins understood this back then, but he knew something that few technology product designers understand to this day: a product is defined more by what it leaves out than what you put in. Simplicity in technology is much harder to create than you think, but if you succeed, it sells. Add features after you've hooked people with it.

If Palm can deliver a full-screen mobile computing experience that exudes the same ethic of simplicity and instant response as the Palm Pilot, then get people's hands on it with a strong retail presence (partnered with the carriers and the Big Box retailers) I now think they have a fighting chance at a great third act. And they may very well play the pivotal role they have aimed at from the company's very inception: turning your mobile into your primary PC.

I promised some speculation about an even longer view for the Hawkins vision. That will have to wait for my next post.

[Updated Jun 17, 2007]

Yesterday I wrote that Palm's recent product announcements, especially the Foleo (which was really a pre-announcement) are indicative of a bigger, more disruptive vision than most people give them credit. The strategy I see Palm taking is one that opens a new front on the battle between the two prevailing visions of computing today, the one that puts your PC at the center of your computing life and the other that sees "the network as the computer," commonly known as Web 2.0. First, I'll take a look at what that battle has been about and then show why and how I think Palm is trying to change the game. In my next post I'll look at some of the obstacles Palm needs to overcome for this vision to become a reality, and add some foolish musings about a fourth act in the remarkable drama that Jeff Hawkins is writing and producing.

Why do people care whether their data and the software they use to work with it live on their PC or on an Internet server that provides a rich AJAX browser interface to it? A lot of people don't, which is one reason why web-based applications (often but not always free) are leading the software adoption landscape today. But if we wanted to really analyze this shift we'd want to look at the relative virtues of native PC versus Web 2.0 applications along several dimensions that people care about. Since I have a penchant for the pompous I'll call them the "Eight Computing Virtues." (Hey, just be grateful that "The Noble Eightfold Path" had already been taken.)

The Eight Computing Virtues

• Richness. Short for feature-richness. What input and output options are available? Many computing features come from a computer's operating system, so what kind of access is there to the OS?
• Capacity. How much stuff can you store for any given cost?
• Security. How safe is your stuff from being lost, stolen or corrupted? How easily can your computing environment be hijacked by the bad guys?
• Privacy. How safe is your stuff from prying eyes? How easily can you have a computing session that's private from other people in your home or office?
• Availability. Is your stuff at your finger-tips wherever you go? How reliably?
• Sharing. How conducive is your stuff to being shared with others? Does it enable you to tap into the "hive mind?"
• Simplicity. How easy is it to learn all the things you can do? Can you do them with minimal effort and thought? Is your environment free of clutter from things you don't care about or that demand frequent maintenance?
• Responsiveness. Does your software respond instantly to your every gesture? Does your computer jump to life instantaneously when you need to interact with it?

Using these virtues as dimensions for comparison, I would map out the relative benefits of natively installed PC applications and web applications like this (closer to the edge of the circle means a higher rating along that radius):

It's subjective, but qualitatively I think most people would agree that the big attraction of web applications has been the enhancement of sharing and the fact that your apps and data are available from any PC with an Internet connection. People are more mobile than ever, and they have more PCs in their lives—office, desktop, laptop, the PC in the hotel lobby, the client's office, the best friend's house—so it's quite liberating that their web applications and data are "on" all of them. I'd also contend that many web applications have gained traction because of an ethic of simplicity among Web 2.0 developers. And I may have exaggerated the security benefit, but I do think a lot of folks see Google as being a safer place for their data than their PC hard drive, even if it doesn't relieve them of the pain and uncertainty of securing their PC from malware.

What still holds people back from using Google or Zoho in place of Outlook and MS Office? Native applications are still more feature-rich, more responsive to input, and they live in a box where (for now) your storage dollar goes a bit farther than on the web. They also can run off-line, a partial compensation for the fact that their attachment to PC hardware rather than "the cloud" makes their accessibility inferior under many common circumstances. APIs like Google Gears may be eroding that advantage (some say they are game-changing) and AJAX is making inroads on the rich, responsive UI. Still, it'll be quite a while before we have something like Photoshop or immersive 3d games running in a browser.

But I think one of the biggest factors that will inhibit adoption of web applications is privacy. The companies that hold our data on their servers simply have too strong an incentive to peer into that data and too little accountability for lapses or active violations of our privacy. This week, Google, the company that has more of our data than anyone, was rated as the worst privacy offender on the web. And too few months seem to pass between revelations like AOL's exposure of personal data of 650,000 of its own users.

So what's this got to do with Foleo?

I've read a number of comments from folks who watched the Foleo announcement and thought that Palm's "bigger picture" for the device was (or should be) running web applications. I think Opera 9 will be a capable AJAX-compatible browser for such use, but Hawkins and his team have their sights set higher. Others, myself included, have said that Foleo in and of itself is really a new take on the PC and that Palm should just come right out and say this. But this isn't it either, really, despite the fact that Foleo is attractive to people who are looking for a simpler, more portable PC.

For Hawkins, it's the smartphone that is the new PC. The Foleo is just the piece that completes the vision.

Here it is in his own words, from the "Experience Foleo" Flash video on palm.com:

When we started this company in 1992 it was based on a very simple vision: that the future of personal computing would be mobile, that over time more and more of your personal computing needs would be satisfied by a device that fits in your pocket or purse.... We want to make the computer smaller and smaller, and we can do that. We can put more memory in it, we can put more data in it, we can put movies and pictures and so on. So we thought about the future, and we said, well, in the future people are going to have these very powerful portable computers in their pocket. But, they have these two limitations: there are times when you need a large display, and there are times when you need a large keyboard.... In our mind the future of mobile computing has and always will be small devices that are in your pocket, that contain all your data, access to the Internet and so on. And there is a need for a large screen experience..... We believe [Foleo] is really a beginning of a whole new wave of finally and truly making the mobile device that's in your pocket your primary PC.

This makes a hell of a lot of sense, and it's only going to be making more sense as storage gets denser and cheaper. Also as wireless gets faster and more affordable. For a lot of PC users today, the two to eight gigs of Flash you can affordably put in the SD slot of a smartphone is already enough to hold all their data. If you're a heavy media user you need a lot more, but the ability to access your full media library speedily over a high-speed wireless connection is fast closing that gap. There's really not much left that keeps you from having everything you care about in your pocket wherever you go. Palm may very well have correctly identified the last piece of the ideal personal computing setup for a lot of people.

Let's look at this in the light of the Eight Computing Virtues.

Nothing is more available or private than what's on your mobile. You can't beat it for instant-on responsiveness, either. While even the best cellular wireless networks still introduce more latency in the use of the mobile web than a PC connected to fixed broadband, WiFi is highly available in a lot of the use cases that Foleo is targeting, and WiMax is just around the corner. The factors that bring people back to their PC more than anything else are its immersiveness, ergonomics, and seemingly unlimited capacity. While Foleo is not an always-on-you device like your phone, it shows great potential for making that fuller PC experience a lot more portable, responsive, and simple. No one is saying it's going to replace your PC, but supplemented by Foleo, your smartphone could start to occupy a lot more of the time you once spent at your PC, as well as expanding your digital life with some new use cases you probably never thought you cared about.

I'm guessing it will take a couple of generations of this product, coupled with attendant growth in smartphone and wireless data adoption and solid execution by Palm, for it to break into the mainstream (more on this in my next post). But Foleo is a very carrier friendly product because of its expansion of the utility of wireless data and the fact that the value it adds to a smartphone doesn't necessarily come from installing 3rd party software on the phone. The latter is something that the carriers still have reservations about and that hasn't in any case taken off with consumers as many had hoped. The carrier angle gives Palm a potential leg up when it comes to marketing and should expand Foleo's retail footprint well beyond what they could do on their own. The fact that it could work with almost any smartphone on the market is also big. The idea that little Palm would be taking a run at the PC itself is still totally audacious and sounds more than just a little crazy, but I really think there are a number of important stars coming into alignment here, and it's going to be exciting to watch what happens. Much more exciting than you might think from the cool reception Foleo received in the blindered technical media.

In my next post I'll look at some of the objections and challenges to this vision. Plus I have a few musings of a more speculative nature to throw out there just because they're too tantalizing for me to resist. There's a lot to discuss here!

Ben Combee is well known among Palm developers as the architect of the best-ever toolchain for Palm OS development and as an ever-helpful and seemingly omnipresent voice on the various specialized developer forums that sprang up around that system over the last decade. A little over two years ago, Ben was tapped to join an unspecified team at Palm, which we now know was the group tasked with developing the new Foleo product line. While he didn't exactly disappear, he definitely became a lot more quiet. Now that the cat is out of the bag, he's back too, writing a pretty strong reply to a negative Foleo "review" by Jakob Nielsen.

I admit that I'm not immune to the Jeff Hawkins myth and am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt on Foleo. But it's not from any hero worship that I say I was amazed how far out of touch with real mobile users that Nielsen seemed to be. He criticizes Palm for "showing a big mobile companion next to a big phone featuring a second keyboard."

For mobile, you want to cut how much you're schlepping around, so you don't want the same feature twice.

Here's the guy whose name is synonymous with technology usability, and he can't see that millions of smartphone users today are in fact also carrying around laptops that either cost or weigh 3-4 times what the Foleo does to accomplish what it is designed to do. That Jakob Nielsen, of all people, doesn't recognize a serious usability issue crying out for a solution isn't just a problem with Nielsen, it's a huge problem for Palm.

The problem can be seen embedded in his use of the phrase "for mobile." For Nielsen, like so many of us technologists, "for mobile" hides a Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. We who live and breathe gadgets and computers in our work (including most technical journalists) have long ago stopped thinking of "mobile" in terms of the myriad things that people actually do and experience when they are away from their desk. We're instead focused on the gadgets themselves. Nielson, for example, talks about an "ecological niche between the laptop and the cellphone" as if these devices were animals grazing a technology savannah rather than tools that must fit human hands and serve human purposes. We all do this: we say "mobile" to refer to properties of concrete devices that we consider emblematic of mobility. Mobile is pocketable. Mobile is wireless. Mobile is converged. Mobile is always-on-you.

And what's wrong with that? These were indeed the properties that made the current generation of mobile devices a success. A lot of good companies were broken on the road to learning them so for Pete's sake, let's not forget history.

But these aren't first principles of mobility or infallible guides for future mobile products. They are touchstones that helped us recognize particular facets of what people want to do when they are mobile. There are many other facets to attend to.

As was the case in the past, the successful mobile products for the next generation will result from paying more attention to how people cope with movement when communicating or capturing information, than to the latest chipsets, operating systems or display technologies. Palm thinks they've done this. They did it with the Pilot, and to some extent the Treo, to great success. But here's the problem: that success has conditioned the expectations of a generation of technology thinkers to believe they finally "get" mobile (i.e. that laundry list of success factors for the last generation) and therefore that Palm itself is now abandoning these first principles when they explore other facets of mobility.

Part of the problem is that Palm is not being altogether straight with us about where they are going with the Foleo and I think they're coming off as being less than convincing. Yes, it's marketed for road warriors who'd rather leave their slow-booting, hot-running, battery-sapping, ball-and-chain laptops back at their desk if they had a better, cheaper way to do serious work with email and documents. There's a market there and on those terms I think Foleo has a chance to succeed. But as Hawkins himself has admitted, this is a ploy. What Palm really wants is for Foleo to plant the seeds of a personal computing revolution.

In one important sense, they're staging a revolt against Web 2.0. Looking further, it's a vision of post-PC computing.

I'll explain tomorrow. For now, go read Ben's reply to Jakob Nielsen and see what you think.

Jeff Hawkins talks about his new "mobile companion" product, the Foleo, with the unshakeable assurance that he knows something the rest of us won't "get" for at least a couple of years.

This is a whole new category. I think it's the best idea I've ever had. The further out you are, the more people have trouble understanding. It's hard to go back in time, but when we did the Pilot, there were a lot of people that thought that was a stupid idea. I mean a lot.

I'm very confident about (the Foleo). It's a challenging product to design. It's a great idea that's got a huge amount of legs to it.

Hawkins thinks of product marketing like a chess player. He envisions the position he wants to have later in the game and then figures out how to maneuver his opponent (or really, customers and developers) into unwittingly fulfilling his objective. He gives the example of the Palm Pilot:

We created this organizer. That's what it was. Now, we didn't want to create organizers. We wanted to create handheld computers. We wanted to create personal computers, actually.

But to get a product accepted you have to find somebody who wants to buy it. Then you get it going. Once you get it going and you have a lot of people writing software for it, then it evolves into something else. We knew in the very beginning that it was supposed to be a little computer. But we didn't say what it was. We basically said it's an organizer and we'll find the people who want to buy an expensive organizer. And it was an expensive organizer. It was $300 or $369. Then it turned into something else.

So what is the "something else" that the Foleo could turn into?

Long term Hawkins' states that Palm's goal is to make your mobile computer your primary computer. Ok, that's a fairly ambitious goal and I'm pretty sure I recall there being some other significant players in that market. ;-) It happens to be an idea I'm partial to myself, and for all their size and resources, I'm not sure the aforementioned competitors have the DNA to do this right. So I don't read this as complete crazy talk. But I'm most interested in the steps to get there.

One thing that dawned on me yesterday is that for the first time Palm owns the operating system on both sides of the sync—the pocketable computer and the big screen computer with the mass storage capabilities. This is an advantage that Microsoft has always held over them, and Palm just closed the gap. Synchronization has always been one of Palm's strong points versus its competitors, but it's never been completely bullet-proof and Vista whacked Palm's HotSync and Desktop software good. With full control of the OS on both sides, they are already starting to do some interesting things with synchronization that we haven't seen from them before. The option to keep your Foleo and smartphone continuously in sync sounds very promising if it's implemented in a way that you could safely save a document you're working on at the Foleo, grab your smartphone and run out of the office, knowing the revised document is there on the phone (or at least didn't get corrupted if you broke the connection too early).

But what if Palm uses its new beachhead on the PC (can we agree that Foleo is really a PC?) to extend the notion of the "companion" relationship with your phone a little farther? Foleo has WiFi so it can connect to the cloud just like your smartphone. And it sounds like Palm may be using a new or heavily revised sync protocol, based on the talk about the continuous sync option I just described. Could the two devices establish a peer-to-peer connection over the Internet? If so, and if this ability is built-in, easy to configure, and reliable I see wonderful usages. I'm a big flash drive user—I always have a few gigs hanging off my keychain—but the problem is I always seem to have forgotten to sync up the files I need the one time I really need them. If my phone was my new flash drive and I could sync up part of my file system with a remote Foleo I would be very tempted to start keeping a lot of my stuff on that Foleo where I could get at it remotely.

I know this is possible with a PC and smartphone today, but the fact that I've never bothered to set it up tells me that it's not going to be something that most other people will bother with either. Palm has an opportunity to make something like this work straight out of the box.

I also realize that Web 2.0 applications claim to eliminate the need for synchronization. But I'm not convinced that everyone is going to be happy to have the one copy of all their important data living on someone else's server. I know I'm not there yet. For one thing, Internet connectivity, especially wireless, is not ubiquitous or 100% available. At those times when it's not there, there's a lot of data of which I'd like to know I have a copy locally. When the network craps out while I'm trying to use a web app I always wonder what condition I'm going to find my data in when I am able to reconnect.

Brain-dead easy, bullet proof synchronization. That would be a huge innovation from Palm. Even if Foleo 1.0 isn't up to this remote sync scenario yet, the fact that Palm owns a big screen and a little one now paves the way.

I was looking at the Flash demo and still scratching my head a bit before the webcast of Palm's new product announcement when my wife walked into the room. It took her about 15 seconds to figure out that the Foleo is the small personal computer she's been seeking for a few years now. She is not at all a gadget freak. In fact, it was only after I explained to her how the Foleo works that she finally relented and said she now wants a smartphone, too. Hey Palm! She's available if you need someone to do infomercials about this thing!

My wife is a writer of literary fiction and her world is a pad of paper and a word processor. She's also a licensed architect and an artist with a strong aesthetic sensibility. She wants a small, light, elegant computer that will let her work on her writing without tethering her to her desk. You might think that I could have bought her a nice Dell laptop and declared "mission accomplished," but I could never convince her. She's looking for something that's a more personal environment (far away from QuickBooks!) and that is a dedicated tool for writing. And she really wants something that looks attractive and feels good in her hand. I don't know how good the Docs to Go word processor implementation is on the Foleo, but I suspect she'll be just fine with it.

For me the conversation with my wife felt like the Palm Pilot all over again. A simple, low cost device dedicated to doing a few things well becomes a platform for a thousand niche use cases. But wait a minute, I tell myself. As much as Foleo is being touted as a new device, it's obviously a familiar one: it's a personal computer. I've been worrying about how it can possibly stack up against the mature and massive PC industry and survive the inevitable comparisons. But in the meantime there are people out there whose personal computing needs have not been met by PCs and Macs. My wife is one of them. I'm betting there are others.

Palm may be marketing the Foleo as a "mobile companion" (an idea I've been thinking about myself for some time) but it's also the first fresh vision of the personal computer we've seen in many years. That's pretty amazing if you stop to think about it for a moment. I've got a lot more to say about Foleo, but I've got a lot more thinking to do as well, so this will do for now.

Update: 6/1/07 There's an excellent interview of Jeff Hawkins on CNET that gives more insight into the thinking behind this product than I've seen anywhere else yet. Of particular note are his thoughts on how to market new technology product categories and how Foleo gives Palm freedom to fundamentally rethink the Treo. I comment on this, and more broadly on Foleo's prospects in my next post.

First really raw responses to the Palm Foleo, as the information comes off the web:

I see where they are going with this. With a decent enough third-party developer ecosystem it could even work. The smartphone is supposed to become the "soul pad" of the new personal computer: the central repository for all your critical data around which everything else is just input/output devices. And I do think that's where personal computing will go.

Eventually.

But out of the box... I don't know. Is the lead solution on this thing—email—really going to be enough to make someone who doesn't carry a laptop around say "I need this thing"? I can see developing some great business software that syncs between this and a smartphone. But I need Palm to get people to buy these first, and I'm not seeing the market driver here.

The software looks beautiful and simple. The instant-on, instant-off aspect is more critical than I think some people will understand. And it looks like it will be lighter weight than a PC laptop. But I was really hoping we'd have a touchscreen.

This is going to look to shareholders like Palm is trying to go head-to-head with Microsoft. And it's going to look that way because that's exactly what Palm is doing!

The webcast is starting now, so I'm going to go watch.