Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring and the Birth of the Billion Dollar Handheld Industry
Author: Andrea Butter, David Pogue
List Price: $27.95
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ISBN: 0471089656
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (08 February, 2002)
Sales Rank: 85,395
Average Customer Rating: 4.19 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 4 out of 5
Pleasant page-turner with interesting business insights
This book represents a powerful collaboration between industry veteran Andrea Butter and well-liked technology journalist David Pogue. I really enjoyed the book's engaging, fun, yet substantive style. It doesn't shy away from describing technical issues in detail without getting overly abtruse. The only possible blemishes are: 1) as others have pointed out, the ending is a little abrupt, but then, any ongoing printed history runs that risk; and 2) the book steers clear of passing any judgments on the various controversies surrounding Palm, Handspring, and the handheld industry. It bends over backward trying not to offend anybody, which could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your point of view. All in all, a good-natured, well-researched book that definitely makes you look at your PDA with more respect and curiosity.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Read it and had to have a Palm
Great book and a real page turner!! I bought the book from a business perspective and can't believe how well it read. The Palm story is inspirational and a complex business tale. Let's face it IPO's and corporate takeovers can read pretty dry. I am a Pocket PC user and I am throughly surprised. I wanted a Palm!! Mission accomplished!! I picked up a Palm VIIx on eBay! Of course, I am not giving up my Pocket PC.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Definitive Chronology
From Hawkins initial vision until early 2002, Piloting Palm chronicles the birth of the handheld industry's first real success story: Palm. The triumphs and set-backs are re-lived in detail in this page-turner that is augmented by numerous quotes from Hawkins and the others who lived it. The book is more of a chronology, and with the exception of evidencing a very pro-Palm and later pro-Handspring bias (one of the authors worked for Palm's marketing division previously), the book avoids drawing any conclusions about the companies and their successes and failures.Insight, however, abounds from the quotes which appear on literally almost every page. The authors' access to the managers of the two companies is quite impressive; however, the book is little more than a narrative of what happened and doesn't really comment on how the principals felt that they could have improved on their performance or what lessons can be applied from their struggles to other businesses. In fact, the book talks more about how to build a PDA than a business.
The book will probably be regarded as the definitive history of the companies, but it really doesn't go far beyond that, and forces the reader who is looking to apply the lessons to search deeply within to extract the gold nuggets that are hidden throughout.
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