Jean-Louis Gassee about the Newton
Daniel Rey
http://www.be.com (Be Newsletter Volume 2, Issue 9)
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The Newton Experience
By Jean-Louis Gassée
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The Newton is no more. This is a little sad for the few
people at Be who once worked on that project in an earlier
life, people such as Bob Herold, Peter Potrebic, Steve
Sakoman and yours truly. But we live on and we are grateful
for a few lessons which found their way into our work here
at Be.
The Newton story started late Spring of 1987. After
successfully directing the engineering efforts resulting in
the Mac Plus, the Mac SE and the Mac II (the Open Mac),
Steve Sakoman sat in my office in the De Anza III building
in Cupertino and calmly told me he was going to leave Apple.
To do what? To start a company that would build a new
portable computer. The size of a notebook, you'd write on
the screen with a stylus and the computer would recognize
your handwriting. I asked Steve if he would hire me as a CEO
for his venture, he said yes, and we started looking for
money.
I'll cut a convoluted story to the known next milestone, we
stayed at Apple, Steve started what became known as the
Newton project in a building on Bubb Road. We liked the
Newton concept very much, we saw the Newton as "scalable":
the idea of a computing device capable of recognizing
handwriting could be implemented, in theory, on a product as
small as a checkbook, or as large as a drafting table or
even a networked whiteboard.
Furthermore, the Newton concept did not threaten to
cannibalize desktop sales. As a result, we could develop a
complete hardware and software architecture and, if the
market graft "took" -- that is, if we succeeded in
attracting enough developers and customers -- we could
mutate a version of the new platform into a more classical
desktop product.
The latter thought was directed at our concern over the
limitations of the Macintosh architecture and the perceived
need to, first, develop a replacement in case it would age
prematurely and, second, to do so without wrecking the
existing desktop business, without, in other words,
"osborning" the Mac.
We liked the Newton so much that when John Sculley gave me
the benevolent physical and financial kick to get in
business on my own, I offered to lead an effort to "claris"
the Newton into an independent subsidiary. Benevolently
again, the offer was turned down. Still, for several years,
as we kept our work at Be under wraps, many were convinced
we were developing some PDA, as the term gained currency
after the Go/Eo, Winpad, Zoomer and finally Newton were
announced.
We started collecting the benefits of the Newton's lessons
early. One of several reasons we didn't start a PDA company
was we had grown disenchanted with handwriting recognition.
We had started to suspect recognition would never reach
"transparency." By this I mean the kind of performance that
never stands between you and your goal, your task. Most of
the time, error correction on a hard disk or a CD is
transparent, it takes place but stays out of the way. At Be,
we decided our project would only integrate known
technologies, there were enough other kinds of risk in it
already.
The other lesson we learned, we hope, was setting
expectations. The Newton was announced with the greatest of
fanfares, with proclamations of trillion dollar
turn-of-the-century markets. Imagine for a moment a
different kind of announcement: This is from our advance
technology division, this is only for the hardiest of
explorers, this is not yet a product for the mainstream.
Instead of becoming the butt of Doonesbury cartoons, not
necessarily bad publicity, the Newton could have iterated
towards a nice PDA with the support of the early adopter
community. In other words, the Surgeon General warnings and
pocket protectors we associated with our product come from
our concern to represent our product as we think it is, good
genes, but not an adult yet, not ready for the mainstream.
--
&xterm