Palm Inc.
After a year's sabbatical in Paris to study French, Dubinsky met Jeff Hawkins through the introductions of Bill Campbell and Bruce Dunlevie. Hawkins was looking for a CEO to manage Palm Inc., which would join with other companies such as Tandy Corporation and Casio. The consortium produced a PDA called the Zoomer PDA on October 1993, just after the Newton MessagePad was released by Apple. Zoomer was a market failure along with similar products developed by Hewlett-Packard, Sharp, and Toshiba.
By 1994, companies had spent a billion dollars to develop PDAs without any of them becoming commercially successful. Hawkins took a hard look at the previous products, and at all the feedback from the market, and proposed the idea for the product that eventually became the PalmPilot.
Palm, Inc. decided to take full responsibility for the manufacture, programming, and distribution of the new product which was code-named Touchdown. However, it struggled for a couple of years to find the financial support needed to bring the product to market. In 1995, U.S. Robotics acquired Palm Inc. for US$44 million, bringing the Touchdown to market, originally as the Pilot 1000 and Pilot 5000.
The first PalmPilot went on sale in April 1996. After a few months, sales started ramping quickly. In its first 18 months, more than one million PalmPilots had been sold. 3Com acquired U.S. Robotics, with its Palm subsidiary, in 1997. In 2000, Palm was spun out via an IPO into an independent company.
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Famous quotes containing the word palm:
“The body, what is it, Father, but a sign
To love the force that grows us, to give back
What in Thy palm is senselessness and mud?”
—Karl Shapiro (b. 1913)
“How did you get in the Navy? How did you get on our side? Ah, you ignorant, arrogant, ambitious—keeping sixty two men in prison cause you got a palm tree for the work they did. I don’t know which I hate worse, you or that malignant growth that stands outside your door. How did you ever get command of a ship? I realize in wartime they have to scrape the bottom of the barrel. But where’d they ever scrape you up?”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)