Penning a Tale on Pen PC and ‘Other Walking Dead’ : Computers: Jerry Kaplan, founder of ill-fated Go, says in book that timing was wrong, not the device.
Apple Computer’s Newton. Compaq Computer’s Mobile Companion. AT&T;’s EO 440.
What’s the common element shared by these three disasters (one of which never made it to market)?
“It wasn’t the size that was the significant issue,” said Jerry Kaplan, founder of the ill-fated Go Corp. that devised software for “pen” personal computers. “It was the social issue of how the machine was used.”
Back in 1987, when Kaplan, then chief technologist of Lotus Development, shared a transcontinental jet ride with chairman Mitchell Kapor, the two software gurus had the idea that what the world needed was a pen PC that didn’t require a keyboard.
“The PC was like a piece of office equipment, like a typewriter,” Kaplan said. Kapor, lugging a 27-pound Compaq 286 in the jet, needed an electronic diary.
On that ride, the two colleagues decided to set up a software company that would devise the right software operating systems for a pen PC.
Kapor sponsored Kaplan at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, one of the premier San Francisco venture capital firms whose success stories include Sun Microsystems and Tandem Computers. The money went into Go, which went down in flames in 1992.
Kaplan, 43, recounts the failure in “Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure” (Houghton Mifflin, $22.95) and says that the problem with Go and PenPoint wasn’t the company but the timing.
“In a start-up, timing is extremely important,” the alumnus of Lotus, Teknowledge and the information sciences program of the University of Pennsylvania recalled. “We were quite a bit earlier than we ought to have been.”
Kaplan tossed his personal leather portfolio onto a table to make his point about the utility of a pen PC. “It seemed in the conversation to become almost a talisman, a symbol of attention,” he said.
Backed by the passion of Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr and the promise of orders from State Farm Insurance, Go raised as much as $75 million and made PenPoint work.
For the next four years, Go’s staff worked around the clock with Intel’s 286 chips to create a small, tablet-sized PC that accurately clocked in commands tapped in with an electronic pen.
“The day came when someone called me to his cubicle and said, ‘Try this,’ ” he recalled. “I could actually take a pen out and write on a tablet.” That was a “eureka moment” that proved that marrying chips and software worked.
The trouble was that Go wasn’t alone.
Microsoft, which still dominates the operating system world for PCs, was interested, too. Kaplan recounts how Microsoft people, including chairman Bill Gates, called or popped into Go to see how things were going.
“A philosophical debate was taking place inside the computer industry,” Kaplan said. Microsoft believed that a pen “was merely an additional peripheral added to a PC, when we were trying to show it was a fundamentally different concept and needed a new operating system.”
For that different “social interface,” Go’s people designed a new operating system that captured the nuances of cursive writing and other dynamic movement.
At the 1991 PC Forum, an annual spring event hosted by Esther Dyson, a venture capitalist and high-tech publisher, there was “a battle of the pens,” Kaplan recalled. Robert Carr of Go demonstrated how PenPoint could transcribe writing and commands onto a tablet.
A few minutes later, so did someone from Microsoft.
Kaplan recalled being “surprised to see . . . so many of the concepts we had developed into their software.” While he doesn’t label Microsoft’s behavior theft, the book contains several accounts suggesting that the software giant obtained many Go technologies or bullied potential partners.
The Go founder said he feels intellectually vindicated, at least, because even Microsoft now believes a pen-based system requires “native” systems based on handwriting.
Apple, with its fumbling Newton MessagePads in 1991 and 1992, “hurt the entire industry” because then-chairman John Sculley couldn’t deliver a reliable product. “If you over-promise on technology and under-deliver, you get taken to task, “ Kaplan said.
Go desperately sought and won backing from AT&T;, which had its Hobbit chip that ran the PenPoint software and took over EO Corp., which devised two reliable “personal communicators,” the EO 440 and E0 880.
Kaplan and Doerr orchestrated a shotgun marriage between Go and EO, while AT&T; tried to develop a market for a product priced above $1,000.
“We had a certain pride of authorship,” Kaplan recalled. Nevertheless, Go and EO collapsed and AT&T; pulled the plug on the venture.
Today, PenPoint software is “among the walking dead” of the software industry. It works fine but neither AT&T; nor anyone else is spending money on it.
“He who can invest the most in improving and moving his technology forward is the one who wins,” Kaplan said.
Meanwhile, the technologist and author has started another company, Onsale, a Mountain View, Calif., firm that will try to sell consumer goods and services on the Internet.
