jeff-hawkins

The folly of Jeff Hawkins

Owen Thomas · 09/05/07 10:56AM

For years now, Palm cofounder Jeff Hawkins has been promising his company will come up with "a new product category" — some leap of the imagination, akin to the original PalmPilot handheld organizer, that will define an entirely new submarket of gadgets. The Treo smartphone was, genuinely, such an advance. And the way Hawkins talked up the Foleo, the lightweight, underpowered Linux laptop he revealed at the D: All Things Digital conference earlier this year, you'd have thought it, too, was a real breakthrough. Hawkins may have fooled himself, but he fooled no one else, including, at long last, Palm's own management. Palm is taking a $10 million charge against earnings to cancel the development of Foleo — and this on the eve of its release.