How ironic that Sony should have the future of computing and not realize it. How ironic that less than a decade later Sony would license an OS that it helped inspire. And how ironic that Sony is now perceived as a "better Palm than Palm."

These sorts of ironies and strange twists of fate are interlaced throughout the history of Palm, which is recounted in delicious detail in Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry, a fine book by former Palm Director of Marketing Andrea Butter and well-known technology-industry writer David Pogue.

Before Pilot, Hawkins created the Zoomer, the first consumer PDA with partners Tandy (retail sales), GeoWorks (OS), and Casio (hardware manufacturing). It was a frustrating experience of "design by committee" which doomed the project from the start. And it did not help that Apple touted and then released Newton in the same timeframe. The scathing press Newton received -- including the notorious Doonesbury "egg freckles" strip -- rebounded to the Zoomer, killing any possibility of generating enthusiasm for it and ending all hope for an improved Zoomer II.

Out of such a disaster was born the determination -- indeed, the dire necessity -- for Hawkins to create the Pilot. Palm Computing had no other choice if it was to remain in business. And Hawkins had no other choice if he were to realize his conviction that

"[i]t's inevitable that all computing will be mobile. [. . .] There are so many colliding things that say, 'small, cheap, robust, on-your-person is better than big, slow, clunky, on-your-desk.'"

But we all know what eventually happened. It's daily in the palm of our hands.

Yet in-between, it was never a sure thing. Another irony in the tale is that Compaq could have produced a version of the original Pilot (iPilot?), but the contract terms it offered in exchange for its investment were onerous. It really left Palm with little choice but to be acquired by U.S. Robotics.

Even guaranteeing that the original Pilot could be manufactured was uncertain. It would require a type of RAM that was regarded as passé. Toshiba had the only remaining plant that manufactured this RAM, and someone had to twice fly to Singapore to beg Toshiba in person to keep their plant open and the RAM flowing.

That someone was Bill MacKenzie, Palm's Director of Product Programs. He's one of the many heroes of Palm's history whose names and roles are finally revealed in this book.

Two others are Ron Marianetti, who worked on Graffiti and PalmOS, and Product Manager Rob Haitani.

Marianetti is described thusly by co-workers:

"Ron is absolutely brilliant. He's the best engineer we've ever worked with, [. . .] Probably 80 or 90 percent [of engineers], even given an unlimited amount of time, could never do what he does. The problems are just too complex for them to solve. Not only does he solve them much quicker, but he's capable of doing them, whereas a lot of [other engineers] aren't. That's why so many products are in development for years and years and years. They're beyond the ability of the people trying to do them."

Part of Rob Haitani's task was designing the user interface -- the actual screens, buttons, and menus for the five built-in primary programs: calendar, address book, to-do list, memo pad, and a database program (which was eventually dropped) -- so that it fit into a space 160 pixels square.

[. . .]

His goal was to display an entire workday's worth of appointments, from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., on a single screen without requiring scrolling. For days, Haitani struggled; even the calendar programs on the relatively enormous Apple Newton screen, at 320 by 240 pixels, could show only the hours from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. on a single screen.

Ed Colligan came up with a mantra that guided Haitani, and soon the entire team, in his design decisions: "Delight the customer." Delighting the customer meant minimizing the number of steps required to perform some function, putting the options the customer wanted right under his or her nose, doing the right thing.

Along these lines, Haitani developed a religion of counting taps. The idea was to reduce the number of steps to achieve any function to the absolute minimum, even avoiding the use of the stylus, when possible (making a button big enough to tap with your finger, for example).

"We would be trying to decide if some function should be a button on the screen or a command in the menu," says Haitani. "And the engineers would say, 'Why does it have to be on the screen? It's only one more step if it's in the menu.' And I said, 'OK, wait, how is your own desk organized? You have things on the top of your desk and you have things in the drawers. Why is that? Things on the top of your desk you need all the time. Take your mouse and stick it in a drawer. Then anytime you need to use it, take it out of the drawer. It's only one step, but I guarantee it'll drive you absolutely crazy.'"

"Delight the customer" is a wonderful mission and goal. One that seems to have been lost in recent Palm actions (i.e., that "desk drawer," VFS -- ironically, created by Sony!).

And imagine counting taps! Something so simple, yet so deeply thoughtful. For all of Microsoft's might, for example, this kind of thinking seems to have been avoided in creating Pocket PC. (Microsoft's entire Windows CE effort is hilariously characterized by Butter and Pogue as "revise and advertise.")

Further, it was Haitani who coined "The Zen of Palm."

There are other delightful tidbits of this sort. Revealed also is who created the term, "Palm Economy." How paper, which they were trying to replace with the Pilot, seemed with almost sinister intent to nearly kill the company twice. Why Springboard expansion could be so easily added by Handspring. And then there is the ghastly revelation of what ex-CEO (and former Sony employee) Carl Yankowski wore on the day of Palm's IPO. (He should have been fired on that day, on the spot, while on live national TV! He goes on to even greater depths of dumbness later in the book.)

Probably the most important revelation is that the seeds of many of Palm's current perceived shortcomings were planted in the compost of Zoomer. According to a post-mortem survey

[Zoomer owners] used the $700 computer almost exclusively as an organizer: the date book, address book, and memo pad. [. . .]

Another finding: Almost no one printed from the Zoomer. So much for the premise that a handheld should be, at its core, a scaled-down PC.

Is it or isn't it?

This is much the same dilemma -- and set of contradictory impulses -- that Palm, Inc. (hardware) and PalmSource (OS) face today as they move to upgrade the entire platform. Is it simply a "connected organizer" (a phrase devised by Palm's original marketing team to make sales to retail stores easier) or does it aspire to be a "Pocket Mac" against Pocket PC? And what's multimedia doing in an "organizer," anyway?

These issues also begin to drive home the hazards in Palm splitting and spinning off into two autonomous companies. Palm, Inc., the hardware maker, becomes little more than a container maker for the PalmOS. And if Palm, Inc. retains that name, shouldn't devices then be called "PalmSource-Powered" devices? And why would an independent Palm, Inc. want to narrow its focus on making PalmOS devices with so much competition? "Being the best PalmSource-Powered hardware manufacturer" is the same mission statement as its competitors. The future begins to get strange and tricky.

Easily, this book could have been twice as long and lost none of its impact. Items that are not covered but which cry out for elaboration include:

• The decisions that led to four hardware bottons and silkscreened icons in the final Pilot versus the vastly different configurations shown in the two pictured prototypes
• How and why the Kadak kernel was licensed for PalmOS
• The rumors of the offer from Bill Gates to acquire Palm
• IDEO's role in designing the Palm V
• Why there's no Flash ROM in Visors
• The first 65K-color PalmOS unit, the Visor Prism
• The design of the Visor Edge
• The successes and failures of Springboard licensees (Innogear comes to mind)
• The decisions that led to the m505's screen and dim backlight
• How Palm decided on Secure Digital for its slot
• How and why Sony chose PalmOS
• The design decisions that resulted in the criminally-ugly i705
• The machinations of the purchase of Be Inc's assets (it turns out Jean-Louis Gassée was never far from the scene!)
• Who invested $50 million in Palm and why

To be fair to Butter and Pogue, they were probably contractually obligated to a set number of words and such details had to go. As well, some items may have been too technical to comfortably fit within the narrative. But it's a tribute to their masterful work that one is left asking for more -- much more. Perhaps, say, in five years they will revisit Palm and its licensees and publish a revised and expanded edition? It would be welcomed! (Right now, they are offering a brief update on the book's site at http://www.pilotingpalm.com -- adding pertinent information since the book's November 2001 conclusion.)