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| Columns - Management Corner: Technology Trends | |
| Written by Jim Mays | |
| Tuesday, 04 March 2008 | |
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It was 1995 and a man was walking around with a wood block in his shirt
pocket. Occasionally he would take it out and fiddle with it as if he
were checking appointments. Some might have thought him crazy, but he
was not. The man was Jeff Hawkins, and he would soon revolutionize the technology industry with a device known as a Personal Digital Assistant, or PDA. It would be called the Palm Pilot and sell over one million units in its first 18 months alone. Jeff Hawkins didn’t invent the PDA, but his Palm Pilot would be the first to attain widespread acceptance. There were other PDAs before the Palm Pilot: Apple produced one that came to be called the Newton in 1993, but it failed to achieve the success of the Palm Pilot due to its high price and the fact that it was just too large to fit inside a pocket; a Windows-based PDA was introduced around the same time as the Palm Pilot, using a software called Windows CE, which enabled one to open and create Word Documents and Excel Spreadsheets. The interface resembled Windows 95 with the familiar Start menu. Unfortunately, these devices were much more expensive and drained way too much battery power. The block of wood in Jeff Hawkin’s pocket represented an approach to design that would serve him well. He did not want to just design yet another electronic gadget, but something that was eminently usable; a tool. His experiments with the block of wood helped him to determine the right size for the Palm Pilot — small enough to fit in a man’s shirt pocket. Want to read the entire article? Don't miss out...Subscribe now to Counselor Magazine—or buy the single issue! It's easy. Just follow the links below:
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