Sunday, September 16, 2007

People just don't understand the Foleo. It's not about the hardware.

"There is a third business that I've been working on but I'm not going to tell you what it is. It's in mobile computing. It's something different and it's in its early stage. We have three businesses at PalmOne. One you don't even know about, which is just a child. Another is the teenager and the other one is the mature 45-year-old."

"I'll give you a couple clues [about what this "child" technology is]. I always think of mobile computing as personal computing. This long-term vision has led us through everything -- first the organizers and now through the smart phone space. It's like everything a personal computer is. Continue down that path. What are the implications of a world where everyone has a super high-speed Internet connection in their pocket and many gigabytes of storage, super-fast processors, audio, visual and multimedia? What are the consequences of that? How will that change computing when you have all that stuff available to you all the time? I try to think into the future. That's how we come up with new products. So I'm not going to tell you what it is, but it's following the consequences of mobile computing."

http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2005/07/11/smallb2.html?t=printable

People thought the secret "third business" was the Palm LifeDrive™ Mobile Manager. It wasn't. The LifeDrive™ was just a PDA with an undersized Microdrive.

People thought the secret "third business" was the Foleo™. It wasn't, even though I had to pretend as if it was to cover for the failure of our software people to bring my vision of the "third business" to reality. The Foleo™ was just an underpowered 415 MHz, 128 MB, 10 inch screened, crippled Linux laptop that would not easily run regular Linux software.

The secret "third business" is about omnipresent access to data without the constraints of proprietary operating systems, the need for powerful hardware, or even a traditional computer. It's about demolishing the Wintel/Mac computing paradigm and liberating us all from dependency on Big Brother and Big Business.

The secret "third business" is the revolution.

FJH