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Palm also conducted more conventional research with focus groups, but Hawkins' original vision turned out to be uncannily close to the final product. Its internal functions were designed with the same practicality. He invented his own simple shorthand system, called Graffiti, because handwriting-recognition software was too unreliable. (Since everyone writes letters differently, he reduced some of the most troublesome letters to basic elements: an A looks like an upside-down V, and an F resembles an upside-down L.) He powered the Pilot with AAA batteries, available everywhere. And he settled on four function buttons--for calendar, addresses, to-do list and memos--because those were the most commonly used applications. Whenever someone urged him to cram more functions into the unit, Hawkins held fast. "There were a lot of battles," he says. "But I just said no, we have to keep it simple."
Hawkins figured his main competition was paper, not computers. So he made sure that looking up the day's schedule was no more difficult than opening a Filofax: one push of a button and there it was. Details about an appointment could be called up with two taps. "The way you look at your day on the Palm is the way you look at your watch," says Dubinsky. "That's the sort of performance we felt we needed."
Dubinsky, meanwhile, finally found an angel. U.S. Robotics, the leading modem seller, based in Skokie, Ill., was looking to extend its brand. "They weren't in Silicon Valley, so they didn't know the conventional wisdom that these things were dogs," she says. In September 1995, the Midwesterners bought Palm Computing.
In April 1996, the Pilot 1000 debuted. Dubinsky and her colleagues watched anxiously to see how the gadget freaks would react. Word of mouth was critical. "If they vote thumbs down, it's over," she said. For the first four months, the sales reports were "flat, flat, flat, flat." Then, magically, they took off; the Palm was a hit. Hollywood moguls started using it. Pilots began showing up on television (Murphy Brown) and in the movies (recent sighting: Wag the Dog). Within 18 months, more than a million were shipped, a faster launch than the first cellular phones and pagers enjoyed.
A wave of competitors rushed in, but most missed the point of the Pilot's success. With few exceptions, like the Sharp SE- 500 and Texas Instruments' well-designed Avigo, the competing devices still tried to do too much. Those that tried to do it with Microsoft's first, hastily cobbled together version of Windows CE 1.0 posed little threat to the Palm. Their keyboards were tiny, and entering data was a hassle. WinCE 1.0 was clearly not ready for prime time.
Back at Palm, officials heaved a sigh of relief. When the first WinCE devices came out, Dubinsky recalls, "we said, 'Uh-oh, it's all over for us now.'" But consumers weren't as interested in what came to be known as "tweeners"--computers that are neither full-featured laptops nor true handheld pocket devices. "They were sort of in never-never land," she says. By the end of 1997, Palm had grabbed two-thirds of the market for handheld devices, and those running on WinCE 1.0 were far behind.