YouSaid · the spoken record

Dieter Bohn

lines on the record: 27
first: 2021-11-04
most recent: 2021-11-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“For sure. I think the subtitle for Springboard is The History of the First Real Smartphone, and we're aware that Sidekick exists. We're aware that Symbian was around. But this was the, they had a, the vision for the way that phones should work today. And it was the clearest vision, I think, at the time. But that's not enough. You need to understand what the forces are that will prevent your vision from happening. And some of those forces are more than just, can you get the parts? Can you build a good product? Some of it's, you know, stuff like the carriers, stuff like, does the supply chain exist? And so on. When we talk about product market fit, like that's a shorthand for a much bigger conversation of what could prevent your good idea from becoming reality.”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A bunch of them didn't. Most of them didn't. Microsoft didn't. And that to me is like the overall lesson here is that you can have the idea early. You can even try to copy the idea, but actually executing the idea is extremely difficult. And one of the themes of springboard that is very resonant for me is that these things are very fragile, especially when they're early. And the success actually might not be market success.”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I don't know, you can judge whether or not he was right about that, but I think that in general, the PC company that had figured out was Apple and a bunch of the others kind of didn't.”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Despite that fact, even if Apple's included in that grouping, what I meant was that these are hard devices to create and to really nail it, especially the radio side, it's going to take some real effort. I didn't say it was impossible. I just said it's not going to be super simple. And in fact, if people look back at the original iPhone, it was actually a pretty horrible phone day one. And it did take some iteration for it to get right. Now they had enough other compelling elements around it that people overlooked that to a large extent. So, you know, they did really well. And I really didn't believe, I never in my wildest dreams would say Apple can't create a product in this space. I would have never said that and I would have never felt that. But I probably just was saying, hey, you know, This is a hard business.”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's pretty silly because if people actually go back and look at that interview, they'll see that it was probably an hour long. And I thought it was really great, which is one of the sad things about this one thing came out of it. You know what I meant by that and what is, I think it was taken out of context was that I did not feel like, and first of all, I've been an Apple proponent for my entire life, my entire career has been built on Apple products. My first company was an accessory company for Apple. My second company was accessory company for Apple. Radius was an accessory company for Apple. So I'm a huge Apple guy and I always have been. So I wouldn't disparage them And so when I use PC guys, frankly, if I was using that term, it probably was HP, Compaq, Dell, and whoever.”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you're right. It didn't make it in the documentary because explaining the context around this is quite a lot, but it was ahead of the iPhone, but everyone knew it was coming. It was at a Churchill Club breakfast. He's asked this question. His contention is that he was speaking about the PC industry in general, that making phones was very hard. He knew just as well as anybody because they had been trying to make a smartphone before supply chains for any of these parts even existed. And he also understood, based on his history with Palm, that people had been trying to shrink PC interfaces into tiny mobile interfaces for a while. And that also was the wrong idea. So his contention is that he wasn't speaking specifically about just Apple. He was talking in general about PC people coming in and trying to make phones. So here's that clip.”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Famously, Ed Culligan. I know that you try to actually get this audio, but it's quoted everywhere famously, Ed Colligan, who was running Palm. Said the PC guys are not just going to walk in and figure this out. At the time that Apple was introducing the iPhone and other big companies were introducing their phones You talk to him about that quote. It turns out at least one PC company figured it out. The other ones did not”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Phone at the center of it. You know, this was well before Apple had been talking about the iPhone at all. And it may be that this was one of the things that convinced Apple and Steve Jobs in particular to get serious about coming back to the idea of mobile after walking away from the Newton because that had been such a mess.”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Donna used to work for Steve Jobs, Sanjabinsky, Ed Colligan, who ran marketing and later on became CEO of Palm for a time, also worked for Apple for a time. And so they had relationships with Steve Jobs. More than once, there would be a phone call where it's like, is this phone call about Apple maybe buying palm or handspring or not? It's unclear. Maybe it is. Maybe it's not. And then the pivot point of the Springboard document is there was this meeting where Jeff and Donna and Ed, they went into speak to Steve Jobs about getting the Mac to support their visor PDA. And Steve Jobs didn't believe in the PDAs. He didn't believe in their vision. And Steve Jobs tried to present his idea of the digital hub, if you remember, had the Mac at the center of it and he thought everything was going to circle around the Mac. And Jeff Hawkins said, no, Steve, I think you're wrong. And right next to Steve's chart on the whiteboard, he drew his own with a”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Palm figured out was you need to make the simplest possible thing that can do the stuff that you want and don't do more than that. And that aggressive willingness to say no. They were one of the first tech companies making consumer products who really evangelize the idea that you say no before you say yes. And that like that hones your product into achieving specifically the things that you want it to do and have it do those specific things very, very well. And then you can start growing and making it into a more general purpose platform.”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Were competing visions, to be clear. So, I mean, Pocket PC was a thing win CE, I guess technically we're talking about, which was a very Windows-esque interface. It had a start button, like a literal tiny start button in the lower left-hand corner. And of course, Apple famously made the Newton and that didn't go so hot because it was also a little bit overloaded. There was general magic that everyone has probably heard of that story as well. That was also overloaded. So one of the things that”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's funny that we now live in a world. I'm very confident that lots of product managers listen to this show, I hear from you. We live in a world where a lot of this stuff is organized. There are systems are competing philosophies of product design and product management. At that point in time, they were just very nascent. The beginning of thinking about how to architect computing systems and interfaces. And I invented a lot of this stuff.”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You find the diamond. That's the one that goes in the teacup. That's the only thing you care about. That's what goes in your mobile app. Everything else can get buried in a menu.”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so one of the people we interview is Rob Haitani, and he was the interface designer for Palm OS and later at Hand Spring. And his philosophy, he was trying to convince these software engineers that they'd come on. This is how you make mobile software. No one knew in the 90s how to make a mobile app. And so he would have to be really rigorous about, no, no, fewer taps and big buttons. And it needs to be understandable. It has to fit in 160 by 160 pixels, by the way. This was the screen resolution on these devices. And he got tired of explaining how mobile worked to people. And so he finally wrote a book that was based on like the ideas that got attributed to him. It was called The Zen of Paul. And he had all these cones. So an example is like, how do you fit a mountain into a teacup? And people, software engineers, I don't know, something, something, something like, no, you don't. You just.”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The team that made the sidekick founded a company called Android. Google bought that company and then they brought over a bunch of X-Palm people as well. That it was the beginning of Android. That theme to me, right? You have ideas, you get them wrong, you keep working at them ultimately some combination of wireless carriers crushes you out of existence It's a pattern that repeats over and over again, but you can see the lineage is right there. And some of the core ideas of how you would operate a phone that connected to a network and was also a computer started at Palm in a very real way.”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just to be clear, the Android project at Google was an acquisition. Google bought Android. And that company was made up. If you remember the T-Mobile sidekick, which was a phenomenon for a hot minute.”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So a few of the key characters. So Jeff and Donna went off to do the thing that Jeff always wanted to do in the first place. Jeff Hawkins, for him, smartphones and PDAs was always the side hustle. His real interest is in brain research and trying to figure out how neuroscience works and how the brain works. And he's got some unique theories on that. finally went off and founded this company called Neumenta and a bunch of the Hansberg people came along with him because they all really enjoyed working together so they're still over there doing that. Other players went to other places. One thing that's interesting this isn't quite the handspring thing but you can follow some of the software history from Palm over to this other company Palm Source all the way to some of the founding team for Android. So it wasn't just the sidekick team that came over. It was also a bunch of expats from PalmSource that originally were trying to make Palm.”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The ideas that happened at Hanspring, and then that company was reacquired by Palm, and then Palm did a bunch of stuff. Those ideas are sort of everywhere in computing now. Where are the people? Have the people had long careers after the handspring collapse?”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of it was, you know, those gatekeepers were more powerful than they were, well, maybe not today, but there was a period when after the iPhone, you could get something out to the market without having so much carrier interference. And they did not live in that world whatsoever. So, for example, they had a hard time getting the phone to sell in some European markets because it didn't have a 10 key keyboard. They didn't believe that Cordy keyboards would be. Actively fighting the success of this thing.”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is the thing I end up talking about on decoder a lot you and I talk about it a lot the best products don't always win and there are often gatekeepers visible or invisible that are actually shaping the market. This seems like a clear even though they had kind of the best one in this very early category they were gate kept out of the market in various ways But it was still popular people were still covering it John Fort who's been on decoder he's now an anchor at CNBC he was a cub reporter at the San Jose Mercury News Springboard has is full of clips of his byline as a newspaper reporter there was a lot of attention being paid to this company why were they not able to overcome those gatekeepers”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Viable business. Everything went through the carriers and the problem there is before the iPhone, the carriers had absolute control over phones, not just which phones they decided to sell or not sell, but how they worked and what they were allowed to do from a capability perspective.”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really interesting thing about the technical challenge in particular is the parts didn't exist so they wanted to make a phone, a smartphone that had a radio that could handle data and they just they couldn't buy it. It did not exist. The entire infrastructure of factories and supply chains that now exist in Shenzhen and Vietnam and wherever didn't exist. So they ended up finding like one company, I believe it might have been in France that happened to make the radios that they needed and they just started to have to cobble stuff together. And they had to make bets on what actual radio network would exist because there was all sorts of weird pager networks and other sorts of data networks. So they got through a bunch of that. But then the question became how do we sell this thing? And selling phones direct to consumer was not a real.”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were early to the idea of a smartphone. The thing they wanted to make was a smartphone. They had some major challenges just on the technical side of building a smartphone that early. It seems like their bigger challenges were just finding a market, finding the right people who could sell this thing to other people.”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. So the CEO has done a Dubinsky and they had launched the Palm Pilot, which you have probably heard of, and through a series of corporate acquisitions, they ended up being stuck at a modem company called 3Com. So they spun out and started handspring and convinced 3Com to license Palm OS to them. And they launched the visor, a PDA, and it was wildly successful relative to other PDAs on the market. And so they had a huge, huge, initial rush of interest and sales. And things were rocking and rolling pretty fast for them.”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Springboard is the story of, as you mentioned, a company called Handspring. This was one of the very early companies to try and make one of the very first smartphones. It had a storied legacy. It had genius founders, and it had just a non-stop stream of like corporate catastrophes that prevented it being successful. The long and the short ones. The story of innovation and a scrappy startup trying to do something incredibly ambitious, but there were many reasons why it was not destined to succeed.”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every little pocket device in the future is going to have a fast, inexpensive internet connection, and you're going to use it for voice and data and transactions and so on. Just that audacity of a group of eight people making a phone. You know, it's like eight people is like a dinner party. So imagine your next dinner party and the host says, hey, let's make a phone. One of the venture capitalists literally wrote a check to Jeff saying, I'm invested before we had a set of slides. There weren't chips that you could go buy. You couldn't go to the market and say, build me one of these things. We took off like a rocket everybody wanted this product. Now guess what? You can take a photo right on this thing and send it to somebody. And they said, no, we don't want to do that. Our other devices can't do that.”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's also a big amount of effort in addition to the app development in terms of rights, things that you can distribute on, say, YouTube when you get it on streaming TV platform. There's like a whole other set of worries that you got to make sure that you're doing.”
2021-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The secrets of the first real smartphone, with Dieter Bohn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT