Merger Would Bring Palm Creator Full Circle
Jeff Hawkins hopes to one day unlock the elegant technical details of the human brain and spur on a whole new generation of thinking machines.
But the inventor still has his mind very much in the present. His challenge today is to energize his struggling Handspring Inc. in Mountain View, Calif., by merging it with Palm Inc., the Milpitas, Calif., company he founded years earlier.
Considered the father of hand-held computing, Hawkins is returning to Palm at an auspicious time, when powerful processors and more tightly integrated circuits can put all the computing that most people need into a shirt pocket.
Hawkins, 46, has long predicted an untethered, mobile future for computing. Now, he plans to make hand-helds the central device in people’s lives.
It was Hawkins who conceived the original PalmPilot, carving a prototype out of scrap wood and a stylus from a pair of take-out chopsticks.
He wanted a hand-held that did not replicate all the battery-draining functions of a PC. Users would have to learn a new kind of writing to put in data, which would synchronize with a PC. And it would be affordable.
Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky founded Palm in 1992 and debuted the PalmPilot in 1996, launching the personal digital assistant market after other companies already had spent a combined $1 billion on flops.
The four years prior to launch were rough. Deals with prospective hardware partners fell through, financing was tenuous at best, and Palm’s staff of 27 lost confidence at times.
For Hawkins, the PalmPilot and subsequent hand-held endeavors are byproducts of his larger ambition to figure out how the brain works.
After graduating from Cornell University’s engineering school in 1979, Hawkins landed a job at Grid Systems, one of the first laptop computer makers. At the same time, he developed a deep fascination with neuroscience and quit in 1985 to study the brain at UC Berkeley.
But no professors would support his proposed postgraduate work on human memory, and Hawkins returned to high tech, hoping to make enough money to fund his brain research. His work on cognitive patterns became the foundation of his patents on pattern recognition and the handwriting recognition program used on Palm devices.
Seeking autonomy, Hawkins, Dubinsky and Ed Colligan left Palm, then a unit of 3Com Corp., to found Handspring in 1998.
Hawkins again designed a successful PDA -- this time with an expansion slot that could turn the device into a cell phone, digital music player or digital camera. Handspring remained the No. 2 PDA maker for years behind Palm, even as big-name companies such as Compaq Computer Corp., Casio Computer Co. and Hewlett-Packard Co. joined the competition.
Handspring’s latest venture, in so-called smart phones, culminates years of development to converge the power of a personal organizer with the near-ubiquity of cell phones. But the leap last year from selling PDAs to only smart phones was costly amid the downturn and looming competition from rich rivals such as Nokia. The small company decided in June to return to Palm’s fold. If shareholders and regulators approve, the two firms will merge in the fall, bringing Palm’s core team of founders full circle.
Competitors privately concede that Handspring is an innovator in the smart phone category with its Treo, which is compact enough -- even with its built-in keyboard -- to be an attractive cell phone. But analysts say Handspring, which has never been profitable, lacks marketing and financial power to propel this largely unproven segment.
Hawkins would have liked to see Handspring succeed independently. But he sees the merger with Palm as just another logical business step.
Hawkins hopes the Palm merger gives Handspring the resources it needs to make the Treo a top seller. “We are planning more products now than we would have felt more comfortable building on our own,” he said, declining to elaborate.
And though the PDA pioneers left Palm over 3Com’s refusal at the time to spin off Palm, “there’s absolutely no bitterness” in returning, Hawkins said. “I’m emotional about the future,” he said. “I’m not emotional about the past.”
