Monday, March 05, 2007

Jeff Hawkins: Palm now controls its destiny

Jeff Hawkins is a hero to anyone with an interest in mobile computing. Inventor of two watershed mobile devices—the wildly successful Palm Pilot that made "PDA" a household word a decade ago, and the Treo smartphone, the device that really kicked off the smartphone revolution—Jeff is someone you've got to keep an eye on if you have any interest in the future of mobile technology. While a lot of folks are down on Palm and wondering if they've lost their mojo in the last few years, close watchers of the company have been awaiting a new revolution that Hawkins and others have hinted at for almost two years now.

It sounds like the revolution will be announced, like most revolutions worth their salt, in May. Read this excellent interview of Hawkins and get a glimpse into the thinking of one of the top minds in the business. Here are a few tidbits:

About his work at Palm:
I basically work on new projects…projects that aren’t in the public view as of yet

About Palm's rumored "third business":
We’re going to be announcing something…but I won’t tell you what it is…we will be launching this year, not in the distant future. I’ll give you a much bigger hint: I’m going to be speaking at Walt Mossberg’s D Conference in May. It’s a high-end industry conference. Anyway, I’m going to be giving a talk there, and that would be something for the Palm fans to keep a close watch on.

[Some tantalizing rumors and speculation about this new product category here]

About the state of Palm Inc.:
Palm, in my mind, is in the best shape it’s been in, in a long, long time. It’s amazing this company is still around. It was split up, the founders were kicked out, and they sold off the operating system. It’s nothing that I or Ed or Donna had anything to do with; but, this company has been operated in…many different ways.

Now, look at Palm today: we have Ed, practically a founder, running the business. Donna (Dubinsky) is on the board, and I’m still involved. We have our name back. We just bought the rights back to Palm OS from ACCESS; so we now have control of the Operating System again. One of the main reasons we did a Windows-based product is because we were worried we wouldn’t have access to the Palm OS. Palm is in complete control of its destiny again.

There's also a good discussion of Jeff's work at Numenta, which, by the way, has just announced the release of NuPIC, a computer "operating system" and toolchain for developing applications that use the same memory structure as the human neocortex to perform pattern recognition and prediction. I can't help but wonder if these two strands of his work—mobile computing and machine intelligence—will at some point join down the road. The prospect is mind-blowing!

Meantime it's nice to know that Hawkins will be having a few words for us about his "secret project" in advance of the iPhone release in June. ;-)

Posted by cervezas at 07:31:00. Filed under: Palm

Comments

Great post David. During last week's presentation by Andy Brown at the 2007 Merrill Lynch Communications Forum, he kept stressing the same theme of Palm now controls their own destiny now that they have acquired the rights to use/modify/innovate on top of Garnet.

"We purchased a perpetual license to the source code, which allows us to basically do any innovations that we want on top of that. And what that allows us to do is control our own destiny..."

"It does allow us to control our own destiny so that we can now specifically customize that operating system for our products and our products only."

"Strategically, it's important. We haven't gotten into the details, but I think the ability to control our own destiny on that platform is strategically important, so we can customize specifically for Palm and Palm Treos, that user experience on that platform."

I also found this quote particularly interesting:

"What we like to say that if you look at the UI on the Palm operating system, it's still a great UI. It works seamlessly, it's a great house, but the foundation's a little bit rocky, and what we're going to do initially is shore up that foundation, is really the key."

Clearly, Palm feels that its destiny is inextricably tied to the Palm OS.

Posted by Brian at Monday, March 05, 2007 11:52:34

I agree. I think it's an ideal strategy for Palm to focus on its brand through its operating system. Not just because that's how the company became so successful in the first place, but because innovation is the only way a company like Palm can stay in the game, and control of the OS is an important way of keeping the options for fundamental innovation open.

Talking about Linux back when Palm was waiting for PalmSource to finish porting Palm OS Cobalt to a Linux kernel, Ken Wirt said "At some point in the future, we would obviously prefer to be on one platform." (link: http://www.vnunet.com/itwee...) Listening to Hawkins talk about the reason for Palm's adoption of Windows Mobile, and realizing that that reason has now disappeared, it makes me wonder if Palm isn't on a path back to a single-OS strategy. Palm OS with a Linux kernel "shoring up the foundation" as Andy Brown put it, still seems like a great idea.

Posted by cervezas at Monday, March 05, 2007 12:45:39

cervezas wrote:

"Listening to Hawkins talk about the reason for Palm's adoption of Windows Mobile, and realizing that that reason has now disappeared, it makes me wonder if Palm isn't on a path back to a single-OS strategy. Palm OS with a Linux kernel "shoring up the foundation" as Andy Brown put it, still seems like a great idea."

I agree, and I think it is important to put it into the following context: Jeff Hawkins is clearly the driving visionary as the key founder of Palm (and Handspring). His influence and vision *still matter*. Here's a quote from his oral history http://www.cwhonors.org/arc... :

"I really dislike Windows software. I really think it’s a disservice in many ways; the way the industry’s turned out is unfortunate. And there’s a theme in my life, by the way, which I really want to correct this. I want to correct- underlying a lot of this, besides the brain work, another theme (maybe this is one of the questions we get to at the end here) is really how do you make personal computers that are better and useful for a larger audience."

Making mobile computers that are easy to use, or "better and useful for a larger audience" is Palm's destiny, and in order to control their own destiny they need their own OS.

Posted by Brian at Monday, March 05, 2007 13:36:58

In the just-over two years I've been at Palm, I've had the chance to work with Jeff a couple of times, and I know his feedback has been very influential in directing a number of marketing and technology decisions. He's not just a leader, he's also a great beta tester.

Alas, that's about all I can say right now :) More in June!

Posted by bcombee at Tuesday, March 06, 2007 20:10:08

I'm glad to hear you say that, Ben. Since Jeff's official title was changed from "Chief Technology Officer" to "Founder" a while back some folks have been wondering whether his focus wasn't entirely on Numenta now. (This interview makes it clear that that's not the case.)

Oh, and by the way... I'm a pretty good beta tester myself! hint hint :)

Posted by cervezas at Wednesday, March 07, 2007 07:38:43

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