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 oft-repeated Roman story is written in still legible characters in every quarter of the Old World, and but today, perchance, a new coin is dug up whose inscription repeats and confirms their fame. Some “Judæa Capta,” with a woman mourning under a palm tree, with silent argument and demonstration confirms the pages of history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.”
—William Blake (1757–1827)