Piloting Palm Quotes

“The nightmare had only begun. Predictably, the Handspring 800 number was immediately flooded with calls-thousands per day. The phone representatives, who had planned to type phone orders into MAWS directly, had no other computerized order taking system to fall back on; in desperation, they wrote down the orders on paper. It was a sure recipe for disaster.”
― Andrea Butter, Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry

“I need to speak to Accounts Payable," a caller asked one day. `Just a minute, please," Dubinsky said. She put the caller on hold, waited for a few seconds, and then picked up the line again. "Accounts Payable, may I help you?”
― Andrea Butter, Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry

“small groups of employees expressed angst over the business logic behind licensing. "How is it good for Palm if we license to a competitor?" they demanded of their managers. "If we get five or ten bucks for every unit they sell, it'll take a long time before we even make our own costs back. And if they hit a home run, they'll bury us!”
― Andrea Butter, Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry

“And I walked into Janice's office and I just said, `We're out of here!' She said, `All right.' That was as dramatic as it was." There was only one problem: Donna hadn't yet told Jeff that they were resigning.”
― Andrea Butter, Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry

“In the handheld world, however, simplicity ruled. Pressing one button on the Palm III instantly showed the day's schedule-processor power had nothing to do with it. Windows CE, they pointed out, just meant "the complexity of Windows in the palm of your hand.”
― Andrea Butter, Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry

“Microsoft's master plan is to control-or at least put Windows inside-every access point to information and entertainment, whether it's a desktop computer, telephone, TV, or handheld device," Time magazine reported in a three-page article titled "Palm-to-Palm Combat.”
― Andrea Butter, Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry

“Microsoft's public line: Palm PC was merely descriptive; it wouldn't confuse anyone. Any suggestion to the contrary was "beyond bizarre." (After his appearance, Gates left the room-and accidentally left behind his palmtop. To the amusement of the assembled media, Gates's assistant rushed back into the room, saying that she had to retrieve "Bill's PalmPilot.")”
― Andrea Butter, Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry

“We immediately started getting all sorts of calls from people trying to understand if we had licensed our software to Microsoft," Dubinsky says. "We had just renamed the entire product line heavily with the Palm name. We had Palm OS, we had Palm Computing, and here they were with Palm PC! There was clearly going to be massive confusion in the market.”
― Andrea Butter, Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry

“Dubinsky could point at the example of Microsoft's CE licensees: Seven companies sold devices based on Windows CE 1.0, competing with each other fiercely for customers, and yet Windows CE's market share had not grown, and none of the licensing companies were able to make a profitable business.”
― Andrea Butter, Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry

“Even the heavy wood furniture was removed from her office once the U.S. Robotics/3Com merger was consummated in June 1997. "I felt so much better the day I got the same furniture as everybody else," she says.”
― Andrea Butter, Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry

“However, developer support positions are notoriously hard to fill. After all, people who know enough about programming to qualify for a developer support job could just as well be software engineers themselves, and would probably be happier writing their own software than helping others.”
― Andrea Butter, Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry

“She also knew nothing about 3Com. Even as McCartney, on the conference call, continued to explain the imminent merger, Dubinsky cradled the phone on her shoulder and logged onto the 3Com Web site, in hopes of finding familiar faces among 3Com's executives and board of directors. Sure enough, the flamboyant Frenchman Jean-Louis Gassee, who had run Apple's product development in the mid-1980s and knew her well, was on 3Com's board. This, she thought, could be useful.”
― Andrea Butter, Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry

“There was a whole list that contained the word Palm, including PalmPad, PalMate, and PalmPal. Some names, such as Taxi and Passport, suggested mobility and travel. The last page showed a category Lindberg and Londy had titled "off the wall." It contained such ideas as Whussup?, Way to Go, and Pilot.”
― Andrea Butter, Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry

“Doesn't that mean we'll be a hardware company?" asked Ron Marianetti, who seldom spoke up in company meetings.”
― Andrea Butter, Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry

“Finally, to the rowdy applause of the engineers, their executives sang, to the happy tune of `Jingle Bells": GeoWorks,”
― Andrea Butter, Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry

“The product testers in Tokyo described the bug: "If you write a four-line memo and then backspace all the way over it, then write another line, then close the memo, and then repeat these steps several times, the memo won't be there.”
― Andrea Butter, Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry

“In the Zoomer's case, Purmal would have to demonstrate entering an appointment, looking up a phone number, checking a to-do item, and reviewing a memo-all without permitting the audience to notice how unbearably slow it was.”
― Andrea Butter, Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry

“Dubinsky left the meeting on a high. When she returned home, she sat down at her Macintosh and wrote Jeff a letter. In it, she told him how much she wanted the job.”
― Andrea Butter, Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry