Since buying a PalmPilot hand-held organizer several years ago, I’ve used it mostly as a replacement for my paper address book and calendar. But I could do much, much more with the device if I wished.
That’s because its maker–Palm Computing, now a unit of 3Com Corp.–did something smart. It turned the Pilot into a platform.
Think of a platform as a standards-based foundation, onto which others can easily build new functionality. Many technology companies have tried to turn products into platforms, realizing that they stood a better chance of survival, or much more, if a self-reinforcing business ecosystem grew up around their own offerings. While such companies have strengthened themselves immeasurably in the hyper-combative technology market, they’ve learned that it takes even more to assure long-term success.
Personal-computer users and software developers have adopted several platforms over the years, including the Apple Macintosh. But when you talk about personal-computing platforms, you’re overwhelmingly talking about machines powered by Intel-compatible microprocessors running Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating systems.
While allegedly anti-competitive business practices, particularly from Microsoft, have played a role in the Wintel ascendancy, no one should underestimate the importance of the Wintel standard’s support from third-party developers who have added their own ideas to the base package. Because PCs were intended to handle many different chores, the more flexibility they offered, the better they would sell.
The PalmPilot was always meant to be a somewhat more limited device, and it had major advantages over its competition. It was pocket-size and served as a peripheral component to a PC, synchronizing data with the PC but not trying to replace it. In the best sense, it was an information appliance: reliable and easy to use.
But Palm Computing, after some tentative early steps, has worked hard to ensure that other programmers and device-makers could make the Pilot more useful.
And did they ever: Today, Pilot owners can find scores of add-on software for the Pilot, most of which is available only from various Web sites–an intriguing web of interests, below the radar of the traditional retailing world. Users can also add certain kinds of hardware, such as modems, that expand the machines’ capabilities.
I’ve added only one piece of non-Palm software to my Pilot: a free program called LaunchPad, a replacement for the built-in program launcher. I downloaded it from a World Wide Web site operated by the program’s author, Eric Kenslow (www.nwlink.com/emilyk/index.html). It’s a useful improvement over the original. For links to this and other Pilot-related products, check out the company’s Web site at www.palmpilot.com.
Creating a widely supported platform isn’t simple, however, because helping third-party developers takes a lot of skill and work. As Netscape learned and 3Com is learning, keeping a platform healthy is even harder in a world where Microsoft wants its various flavors of Windows to be the only operating-system platforms of any significance.
The Pilot, once the only sensible system of its kind, now has some competition from devices running Microsoft’s Windows CE operating system. (Hand-held computers with tiny keyboards have always struck me as nearly pointless, though they do have their fans.) So far, those hand-held computers have been sluggish competition for the Pilot because of Windows CE’s limitations.
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But it’s a certainty that hardware performance will keep improving, and a near-certainty that Microsoft will learn from its mistakes so far with CE. Soon, 3Com could face a tough dilemma: whether to make Pilot architecture become even more of a platform, in the broadest sense of the word.
Wintel is just such a platform. If you want to make a Wintel computer, you buy chips from Intel or its clone-making competitors, as well as other chips and hardware from a variety of competitors, and you license Windows from Microsoft. Literally anybody can make a plain-vanilla Wintel PC.