A decade before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, a tiny team of renegades attempted to build the modern smartphone. On May 6, 2022, 91自拍 Live shared the story of Handspring with a 30-minute documentary called Springboard: The Secret History of the First Real Smartphone followed by a discussion with cofounders Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan. Moderated by Dieter Bohn, the film鈥檚 executive producer, an engaged crowd cheered them on as they revisited the ups and downs of the early smartphone journey and their pioneering product.
Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, noted in his introduction to the film that 鈥淢aking new things is hard. It is joyful. It is terrifying. It is risky. It often ends in disaster.鈥� The Handspring story is a cautionary tale about how new things are fragile and must be nurtured to succeed.
Dieter Bohn kicked off the conversation by asking what has surprised the cofounders the most about how the smartphone market has turned out. For Donna Dubinsky, it鈥檚 how the big players in the industry, like Motorola, Nokia, and Sharpe, didn鈥檛 end up having a major role in the sector.聽
For Ed Colligan, what was most surprising was that the market for smartphones was bigger than their wildest dreams. Despite his 鈥渉yperbolic nature,鈥� he says, he was off by five billion units.
Looking back, the cofounders considered what it was that sunk them. Donna believes it wasn鈥檛 competition with Blackberry and others but rather corporate machinations. Ed agrees that 3Com, which acquired Palm and Handspring, was the culprit.
Handspring Cofounders Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan explain what sunk Handspring.
The cofounders offered insightful details about the decisions they made around what products to focus on and how that played out in market and investment conditions of the mid-1990s. They couldn鈥檛 win because investors had been burned.
Handspring cofounders Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan describe the investment landscape they faced.
Ed says he鈥檚 proud of the period of time after the Handspring team reunited with Palm. They built a beautiful smartphone called the Palm Pre with a multi-touch screen and sliding keyboard that launched in 2009 and did an incredible job on the web OS that was ten years ahead of its time. Although the popular narrative is that the Apple iPhone killed the company, he disagrees. He lays the blame on Google.
Handspring cofounder Ed Colligan explains Google鈥檚 undermining business model.
Ultimately, only a few smartphone companies were ever going to win out. It鈥檚 very hard to get national coverage and capital investment in terms of carrier relationships, stores, etc. in such a hands-on, high-touch market was high, notes Donna.
Ed agrees. But knowing the difficulties doesn鈥檛 take away the sting of failure. He was so mad after Google and Apple crushed them that he used a Windows mobile phone for quite a while. And liked it.
Ed and Donna have both moved on. Donna joined the third Handspring cofounder (and founder of Palm), Jeff Hawkins, at Numenta. It鈥檚 a company that鈥檚 trying to figure out how the brain works and applying what they learn to computing and true machine intelligence. Ed is working on renewable energy to help make an impact on climate change.
They鈥檙e focusing on big things that have the potential to change the world for the better. One might wonder if they鈥檇 still be contributing their considerable talents to these efforts if Handspring were the dominant smartphone.
The Handspring Story: Renegades, Aspirations, and Disasters | 91自拍 Live, May 6, 2022
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