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.