Well I know what happened. I guess my question is why.

Look at the success of the iPod and look at the size and growth of the PDA market, 3.3 billion dollars and outselling PCs by a ton.

I had a MessagePad 2000. Maybe the first one in Boston. Certainly one of the first. I upgraded it to a MP2100 when that option came available. I kept it until Apple killed off the entire platform and then worried about being able to maintain it, find replacement parts etc., I sold mine.

I recently re-bought an identical upgraded MessagePad 2100. This is 5 years later and I'm happy with it now. It's responsive. The functionality is still comparable to other options, it doesn't necessarily compare favorably in every case but it is comparable still and in a space that has seen such active growth and devlopment in the past 5 years that saying a lot.

The handwriting recognition works as well on my Newton as Ink in Panther, granted Apple isn't crowing much about Ink. I find it to be far more usable and certainly more flexible than the character recognition on the newest Palm devices.

People had web servers running off of Newtons back in the days of the original PalmPilots.

Back then, I read article after article claiming that Palm had hit the sweet spot with the PalmPilot, this ugly little runt of a ergonomic mess of a PDA. Windows CE devices did too much and were too complicated. That's not what people are looking for in a PDA and Microsoft had missed the mark. All of that made no sense then and of course now Palm is playing catch up and losing now. I don't think it will ever shake it's reputation as a limited and ugly OS. There are a ton of apps but the dirty secret is that 70% of them do few things, and of the remaining 30%. 15% are games. As a whole 85% of the apps are lousy and unfinished. I don't question the ability of the developers or their intentions, I blaime the platform.

I have a Zire 71 now because I have few options. I also have a Sidekick (T-Mobile branded Danger Hiptop) which is flawed in the other direction, beautiful and well conceived but while the Palm platform has been beaten to death, the Sidekick is still sitting on the shelf. Though it may make sense from a business standpoint in the short term, tying the platform to cell carriers is a giant mistake. You lose contact with customers, give away your flexibility and bind innovation to some of the most mired corporate thinking that you're going to find. Cell carriers exist by cannibalizing each other. There isn't much you could say to make dinner with a bunch of cannibals sound appealing to me. This seems like a play out of Apple's book... well sort of. Not that Apple thinks it needs anyone's help but 1. When they do partner with someone they tend to pick the wrong partner and it never seems to go well and 2. This devotion to innovation and nothing else that leads to a superior product that seems destined to go nowhere, but will definitely end up in a museum and as the inspiration for other far more successful products... this is pure Apple.

The Sidekick is unique enough. Nothing is going to run past it because nothing else is approaching it. Danger should have taken their time to do the platform justice. Now they find themselves in an odd situation with the device for several reasons:

1. The Hiptop itself is celebrated but it's so isolated that it looks like a fad or a gimmick.
2. Their users all suck. Their users are all cell phone users and they hate the Hiptop like they hate their cell phone carrier. These are the same people who do nothing but salivate over the next phone, which they expect to be free, while they complain about their current phone, which they got for free, because it wasn't made especially for them out of their own genetic material.

Go take a look at the discussions. It's a nightmare.
There are some supportive comments, but they come off as defensive statements from users on behalf of the platform.
There are some requests for help, but these are too easily lost.
And then there is an ocean of grips and threats and statements from Danger saying that ultimately platform decisions fall to the carriers.

Danger, don't spend a lot of time scratching your head if ultimately you don't have the type of success with this that you wanted to have and don't complain about the fickleness of consumers. You've shot yourself in the foot. It has nothing to do with the device which is, other than features that are missing, practically perfect.

Everything else you've done has been absolutely wrong. You couldn't have done much worse if you took all of prototypes, encased them in concrete and dropped them into a river. The thing about innovation is that if you don't have the business plan to back it up then you don't get to innovate for very long. You your run at the Lisa, not the Macintosh. Of course there are endless examples of this. But the first two that come to mind are Wildfire (RIP) and NGage (soon to be dead and buried I guarantee it).

Wildfire was and is (where ever it is) amazing technology. It to is practically perfect. There were shortcomings. but judging it only by what was there and not what was missing, it was really pretty great. Wildfire had almost nothing to do with all of the pretenders that came along after... Onebox, Webley, and the 1/2 dozen or so others... and then all of the generic label shops that sprouted up for a short time. The motivation behind the develop was different. The product itself was radically different and the mission was different. The one problem with Wildfire? They couldn't or wouldn't sell it. They went after carriers.

Again, in my opinion, carriers are brain dead beasts who survive by bashing their heads together and bullying customers back and forth between each other. People would have loved this technology but they never got to touch it because you couldn't convince carriers that it was in their best interest.

There was then a pathetic attempt at an Enterprise solution after they already had both feet in the grave and even this was delayed badly. Finally there was an attempt to appeal directly to the consumer (I was still there) but you're not going to dig yourself out of a big hole by selling what by then was seen as a niche product to consumers with zero marketing and advertising.

The real shame of it is that Wildfire couldn't be more relevant now. Wildfire was a voice enabled interface with scheduling and conatct management hooks, call routing and management etc. Everyone needs this now and every product is missing great voice navigation. With the arrival of wireless headsets among other trends Wildfire is a real winner. Except that it dead and I saw it coming the day I first heard about it, tried and failed to subscribe and then waited for years and years while they grinded against carriers.

I won't even bother with NGage. Ill conceived, poorly implemented and just bad all the way around. Why anyone stuck development dollars into this... It's a joke. Yeah you can wireless communicate between two devices to play games. I hate to tell you, but people don't do this. And even if everyone in the World wanted to do this, you would still need and decent platform and NGage is not that.

To pull this back around again. The Palm platform is limited and fractured badly. They are selling devices by making them cheap or enhancing them with functionality consumers are looking for now. People would carry a turtle around in their pocket if it had a camera on it right now and if it was cheap enough. Even if everyone did start carrying a turtle in their pocket it would be a phenomenon certainly, but it would be a stretch to call a turtle a good PDA platform.

Back to Newton... this is another example of Apple being just very dumb.

You get the feeling that they luck into whatever success they have. I'm not taking anything away from them from a design standpoint but what they choose to focus on can be a little hard to follow.

To make this about the Newton and not a general rant about Apple...

At a time when PDAs were really developing into an honest market with a giant upside Apple walked away. That market has of course flourished. More importantly Apple had a genuine shot at it. People have been chasing a good PDA experience from day one. Anything that works, and from what I've seen they're willing to give just about anyone a shot. There haven't been any OS wars. There are device wars, sort of, and three familiar looking camps, Microsoft and PocketPC devices, The Palm camp and then everyone else. But I would argue that this only looks similar to what you have with PCs. This isn't the same as a Windows, Apple or Linux, and everybody else feud.

When they dumped The Newton Steve Jobs made quite a few bad arguments to my way of thinking.

1. He said that they wanted to focus on a very small number of core technologies. They wanted the "A team" on everything. That's fair enough and I bought it, but of course now they're doing everything. More computers, servers and admin tools, development tools, consumer and pro apps, consumer electronics, media distribution etc. As a user I can say definiteky that the A team is not on all of these projects .

2. He said that a few core products meant only one OS. Again it makes sense. Of course they immediately started looking at a bunch of different operating systems and ultimately started working on two completely distinct operating systems in OS 9 and X. And if they were going to pick one OS it probably should have been the Newton OS.

I'm sort of joking but not entirely. I'm not implying that the Newton OS offers more, it clearly doesn't. I am saying that people have been willing to give the Newton OS a fair shake like a large percentage of people have been unwilling to do for the Mac OS. Remember Apple's 5% down 95% to go push when they started the retail effort. That's something that makes more sense with the Newton OS.

3. Steve Jobs has consistently said that he thinks cell phones will absorb PDAs, or something to that affect. I couldn't disagree more. This has never sounded right to me. I think I know where it comes from.
Cell phones have grown very quickly as an extension of an ingrained technology;
it makes sense that a lot of people will always carry a cell phone;
people will probably ultimately balk at carrying multiple devices;
people prefer smaller devices and have in the past been more willing to sacrifice functionality for size than the other way around;
no matter what you do with a PDA it doesn't look and operate like a phone without becoming a phone primarily.

I disagree.
A phone is the lowest common demonator as far as demands on the handset are concerned, there is of course at lot going on behind the scenes.
Just about every thing else that you'd want from a PDA demands more... larger and better displays, a keyboard/some sort of intelligent input, signficantly faster processors, better audio, connectivity, etc.
It makes more sense that a more capable device will absorb phone features than the other way around.
There is still the arguement that regardless people will not accept a phone that doesn't look like and operate like a phone. You could make that argument. Ultimately I think this will be proven wrong.

People will demand a good phone, but a microscopic little nothing handset that you can shove in your front pocket is not a good phone and a good phone does not imply a single design characteristic.

A good phone can look like anything as long as it qualifies as "good". People argue that ergonomically a phone has to fit well in your hand when you're holding it up to your ear. The problem with this argument is that holding anything up to your ear is unpleasant. Headsets existed long before cell phones. Also, the small phones that people primarily use today aren't comfortable to hold to your ear. They're not big, but they're awkward to use. And when using the Nextel 'walkie-talkie' feature, most people don't put the phone close to their ear at all (by the way, thanks for nothing Nextel).

These are all examples of people prefering some new feature or advantage over the familiar. Wireless headsets and voice enabled interfaces change all of this anyway.

What is the perfect shape, size, weight of a phone that you never hold up to you ear, that you rarely even take out of your bag? If you don't need to handle it, would people prefer something larger and slimmer with drastically better battery life? Who knows.

I do agree that people will opt to carry only one device and that It will allow you to place calls, but it won't be a phone.

Nearly everyone if not everyone who uses a PocketPC device, Palm, Blackberry, Hiptop etc. uses it heavily as both a data device and a phone. Very few people who carry a phone use it as both a phone and a data device heavily. It's just impractical.

At his point the Newton MessagePad 2100 series would have had 7+ years worth of development under it's belt. It would be an iPod with a more flexible UI, and larger display. At the time of the MessagePad 2000 you were talking about serial ports, PCMCIA slots for PDAs, 4MB Flash storage cards, no wireless to speak of except for proprietary IR. Now you have a 40GB hard drives in the iPod, FireWire and USB 2, great removable data storage options, bluetooth, WiFi, radically faster processors, and much improved everything else.

The Newton would be an adoptable winner.

And of course the development budget would be drastically less, a fraction and small percentage of what Apple has to dump into the rest of it's business. So you focus on the Mac OS and where is the Mac OS today? If I'm being negative, it's wedged right between Microsoft on one side, and with XP they can claim that they finally have a decent OS, and Linux on the other, including Red Hat and now Novell.

What happened to the Newton? Stupid happened to it.

12:00:47 PM  

   TrackBacks