I did interview at GO, and did not get the job, thank the gods. “Dan” in this book is me, more or less, and I ended up at Oracle, working for Smokey Wallace (RIP), whom I’d known at Xerox.
Jerry Kaplan, who wrote Startup about his experiences at GO, was a contact of mine. In fact, I have him appearing in person in this chapter (although not with any made-up “quotes"). I sent him that excerpt and offered to take it out, and he said it was fine.
The Smart Money
There were a number of companies and VCs back then who thought that recognizing cursive handwriting was the way to do a handheld computer: GO, Momenta, Apple Newton. It never worked, and the Newton was even the subject of mirth at the time
Nowadays, not all kids even know how to read cursive, let alone write it. Doctors are writing advice articles for texting thumb
So thumbing a virtual keyboard is what we’ve settled on, but that wasn’t obvious in the early 90s. The smart money went into handwriting recognition. Remember that when “everyone” says “AI is going to conquer everything!” It might indeed, but on the other hand, you just never know, do you?
Microsoft Lurks
Lurking in the background here is “what will the Big Guys do?” In this case, Apple and Microsoft are the villains. GO might have been leaders in “pen computing,” but that wasn’t a small enough niche to escape Bill Gates’ and John Sculley’s attention. When a startup is doing something that a Big Player (“BP” for short) thinks it’s going to want eventually, the clock is ticking for the startup:
BP might buy them out early
BP might start up its own effort in competition with them
BP might pretend to be “partnering” with the startup in order to learn the technology, and then start up its own effort. Then it would offer to acquire the startup for a rock-bottom price.
BP might let them launch their product and see if it works or not. If it does, then build or acquire. Essentially the startup is doing their market research.
Apple did #2 with General Magic and also with GO. It came out with its own handheld, the Newton.
Microsoft was notorious for #3 and #4. Gates’ attitude was “Who, us? No, our thing is totally different from yours! And ours is included with Windows!” The startup could sue them, but that was a losing game.
We will see this later on in the book with Netscape. This time, Gates went too far, and the US sued for antitrust violations.
Janet and Len
At the end we return to Len (indirectly) and to his daughter Janet. She’s hinting that she isn’t too happy with her management career at 3Com. She’s also worried about Len, thinking that he might be drinking (he’s not), and wants to move him out to California. All this is setup for the rest of the book.