Compared to smartphone users, they were very much early adopters. No wireless sync, graffiti input, etc. They were not really mainstream devices even if they were pretty successful by the standards of the time.
And my point is that, as a Palm Pilot owner, it just wasn't really a very satisfactory solution at least for me and a lot of other buyers. It really took cellular networks and various other innovations before it was satisfactory for a mainstream audience. Sometimes technologies just aren't baked enough to be interesting even if there aren't any real alternatives.
The Palm Pilot reminds me of the Zip drive, another product from the same rough era. It met a felt need: floppy disks had pathetic storage, now you can buy a 100MB floppy disk! They sold very well for awhile.
But people didn't want 100MB floppy disks, they wanted a way to transfer data. Flash wasn't cheap enough to sell in bulk, and as soon as it was, the Zip drive fell off a cliff, replaced with the still-ubiquitous thumb drive and SD card. You can argue that the Zip was a success, or mainstream, but you can't argue that it was equally successful and mainstream as thumb drives or SD cards, not honestly.
Same deal with the Palm Pilot. For a couple years, I had a flip phone, a Palm Pilot, and an iPod, all three of which I would pack to go to classes at university. Of those three, the only one that felt clunky and overly limited was the Palm Pilot. I liked it, I used it, real boon to an ADD-brained kid trying to get through higher education, but it was notably limited and I wanted something better. Even tried programming it, got the O'Reilly "pigeon book", never got that far with it though.
It wasn't until 2007 that those three items were successfully combined into one mass-market gadget, although there were preludes like the Danger Hiptop. Palm even tried to get into the smartphone game, in the first generation. But the original device category PDA was obsolete, whether or not (as it turned out, not) the company made the jump to the new one.
Iomega made a bunch of people a lot of money and provided multi years employment to others.
But they were an evolutionary dead-end.
Whether because Zip drives (or other forms of higher-density non-harddrive storage) ultimately weren't very interesting or because networked storage ended up as something of a niche (although some companies play int that space).
You can certainly make the case that they were a "successful" company for their time but they also ultimately failed.
> But despite all the talent, clear obsession, technical prowess, and a lot of money, the infrastructure just wasn’t there to make it work.
and all of the ensuing discussion was what "it" was.
If you're an engineer, "it" can reduce to "will I make money from the stock?" In fact, that was my approach. So ZipDrive? Great, those people probably made money. Palm? They got $5 a share from US Robotics, plus some USR shares, which in turn made money from 3Com.
You can demand more out of life, of course. Nothing wrong with that.
I won't seriously argue. They had a good enough run. I even upgraded the one I got for free at a tradeshow at one point. But the synchronization and input was always enough of an issue that I can't say I ever found it all that useful in retrospect. And it always seemed to be in the "cool gadget" but not anything that was really critical.
