Essay on Palm Computing

Submitted By sophielyrian
Words: 697
Pages: 3
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To my point of view, there are three main reasons that Jeff Hawkins succeeded in launching the palm-sized PDA, Pilot, while others failed: he learned from his mistakes and knew what customers wanted, used the orchestrator business model which fits the situation best, and finally he did a very good job in protecting his intellectual property. These three main factors along with some minor points contributed the success launch of Hawkins’ PDA. The first reason that Hawkins succeeded was that he did a great job in catering to customers’ need and guided them when they don’t know what they want. He also did very well in learning from his mistakes. After the core products (the Z-7000 and the Zoomer) that Hawkins’ technology mostly depended upon failed, he did plenty of surveys to get customers’ feedback and figured out the failure reason for the Zoomer. While other companies are still focusing on applications in the PDA, Hawkins shifted his gears to cater to the customers and began to focus on four factors that customers cared most including connectivity, form factor, data entry, and performance. Hawkins did encounter some difficulty in introducing a brand new technology to everyone. This technology called “Graffiti” has never been adopted before, however, Hawkins did a great job in guiding the customers and teach them what they really want. Due to Hawkins’ guidance and the easy use of the Graffiti, Graffiti succeeded in the market. Thus, Hawkins’ focus on customers’ need contributes to the success of Pilot. Another reason for Pilot to succeed is that it utilizes the fittest business model: Orchestrator. Orchestrator simply means keeping the core technology to the company itself and outsourcing some other work to other companies. After the initial success of Pilot, Hawkins maintained Pilot’s design and development process and shifted the packaging and manufacturing work to a small company. Since Pilot was in its early stages and much more development could be realized, utilizing the orchestrator model enabled the company to maintain its core technology while saving more time and money for developing the product. In addition, there were many big companies working on the similar products in the market at that time, which made the market a really competitive one. By outsourcing the packaging and manufacturing instead of doing all the work by the company itself, the company saved more time on development process to compete with other companies. Also, the orchestrator model requires less investment, which is crucial to a new product in a start-up like Pilot. Less investment reduces the cost and results in a lower price of the product. The utilization of Orchestrator model assists Hawkins’ successful launch of Pilot. Utilizing the Orchestra model without knowing well how to protect intellectual property will be a catastrophe to a product. However, Hawkins did very
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