What might have been

I remember vividly reading the autobiography of great Houston Rockets center Hakeem Olajuwan. He recounted how the Rockets organization passed on several trades they could have made in the late 1980s and early 90s that would have given the Rockets the following rookies developing together as a team:

  • Hakeem at center
  • Karl Malone at power forward
  • Clyde Drexler at small forward
  • Michael Jordan at shooting guard

You could have added my grandmother at point guard and still had team that would have put the classic Lakers and Celtics dynasties to shame. But the Rockets didn’t pull the trigger on those trades and the rest is history.

Now we find out that something similar went down 11 years ago in the mobile technology industry. According to Jean-Louis Gassee, formerly of Be and runner up to revive Apple after John Scully’s reign (a job he lost to Steve Jobs):

A perhaps little known fact: in the Summer of 1997, Steve Jobs called Eric Benhamou, 3Com’s CEO (the company owned Palm).  “Give me the Palm and come and join my Board of Directors.  Only Apple can make Palm a true consumer brand.” Nothing happened.  Apple’s foray into the product segment had to wait ten more years.

http://www.mondaynote.com/2008/10/26/android-first-impressions/

As it turns out, Jobs’s arrogance was, as it often is, misplaced. Palm was able to become a potent consumer brand on their own, having a market valuation at the peak of the dotcom bubble higher than General Motors. But even so, imagine what Apple, working with all the Palmies formerly of Apple now brought back into the fold, could have done with the successors to the Palm Pilot. With a ready-made Apple-branded replacement for John Scully’s ill-fated Newton, Apple could have been a leader in handheld computing for the last decade, leading to devices like the iPhone and iPod touch years sooner. I’m no fan of Apple, but I have to marvel at what might have been.

November 3, 2008 · Filed under Technology

1 Comment »

  1. Richard Cartwright Said,

    November 3, 2008 @ 7:37 pm

    Jeff, interesting find. I have to disagree with you on the role of Apple. First, I suspect that PalmApple would have been an also ran as Apple would have overpriced it and it would have been tough getting into the corporate door considering the view of Apple in the corporate world. Further, the iPhone could not have come much sooner than it did as I would submit that the timing was a result of the technology, price point (for the cost of ownership of a cell phone) and public acceptance of cell phones as a necessity rather than a luxury.

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