Software Everywhere — David Beers on Mobile Computing

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.