Special Feature The Series 5 pocket computer from Psion was launched 10 years ago this week. It was a remarkable achievement: entirely new silicon, a new operating system, middleware stack and applications were developed from scratch in just over two years.
This was the last time anyone undertook such a daunting task: it may be the last time anyone ever tries, either. Companies or projects that are formed to achieve simply one of these four goals typically end in failure: to achieve all four successfully, and put them in a product that was successful, too, was a triumph of creativity and management.
We now live in a world where our general-purpose computers are created from generic, off-the-shelf components. New technology systems take the form of mass market appliances, such as the TomTom navigation system, or the iPod music player. The “Protea” project, as it was called, now seems destined to be remembered as the last time anyone will create, from the ground-up, a new general-purpose computer.
As we discovered, however, this story is about much more than the life of a product. It’s about the fate of a once-inventive and fearless computer company. Twice, Psion launched products into the teeth of a recession, products that defied accepted technical limitations and market wisdom to become success stories.
But just as it had with PDAs, the Psion Group also made plans to develop GPS navigation systems, hard-disk based music players, digital radios, and even set-top boxes — long before these markets existed.
Today, the people who drew up those plans at Psion now underpin successful businesses in the very fields Psion rejected. In four years, Psion’s former hardware chief turned a tiny Dutch software company into the leader in SatNav systems: TomTom this year will generate $2bn in turnover, using a core of former Psion staff, and led by the computer division’s former managing director Harold Goddijn, and its star sales chief, Corinne Vigreux.
And the Psion engineer who eight years ago scouted component factories in England with a dream of making a hard disk-based MP3 player, today heads the engineering for Apple’s iPod division. The only one of these consumer electronics products to make it to market was a DAB Radio. While smaller than satnav and portable music, the digital radio market is expected to be worth $1bn next year.
So Psion had the chance to become something few imagine was ever possible: a home-grown consumer electronics giant with a global brand: a British Sony, or a British General Electrics.
Today, seven years from its bloody retreat from the consumer business, Psion is a larger business than it was in its apparent heyday, and is growing at a clip. But little of this is based on technology developed by itself: most of it was acquired with the purchase of Teklogix during the telecoms boom. Psion’s lasting legacy has been to provide the core component for a 125 million smartphone market. Few people today would bet against this component — a sophisticated and resilient operating system developed in two years by a small team led by Colly Myers — to be the most used piece of system software in the world. That’s no mean achievement and, of course, it’s Psion’s “genetic legacy”, as Potter proudly calls it.
Meanwhile, former Psion staff ponder a list of “couldas” that never had a chance of being “shouldas”: projects that never reached the market, that were success stories for other people.
Engineers often make such retrospective claims — but on closer examination, the company lacks the skill, design, or marketing experience to turn a bright idea into a successful product. However, in Psion’s case, these claims have much merit, as the company had these skills in abundance. Mark Gretton, at TomTom, and David Tupman* at Apple, each oversees the engineering for a hugely successful consumer product. In each case, success was achieved on a budget, compared to some of the more recent big budget consumer electronics projects — think PlayStation 3. Psion even turned down pleas to acquire its eventual nemesis in the PDA business, Palm (a story not recorded in Palm’s biography).
Many of the stories here are being told for the first time — and as they unravel, we can ask why Britain had a consumer electronics giant that never was.
Why not?
I’ve tried to answer the question in three parts. A look at the Protea project — which produced the Series 5 and gives an insight into Psion’s skills. Then we pick up the story after the launch of the computer, up to Psion’s exit from the consumer electronics business after 18 years, in 2001. Finally the key figures tell the story in their own words.
It’s the longest story we’ve ever run at The Register — we’ll be making a PDF version (and of course, an Epoc Word format version) available shortly.
Navigation
The Protea Story
After Protea: Psion from 1997 to 2001
In their own words: Mark Gretton; Martin Riddiford; Nick Healey; David Tupman; Sir David Potter:
The Protea Story
When Psion embarked on “the last computer” in 1994, it was riding high. As the Protea project got underway, the company had two successful products — the Organizer II and the Series 3a handhelds — under its belt, and looked set to exploit the 16-bit architecture of the Series 3 for a good few years.
However, the team was uneasy.
“No one could say how long the Series 3a would sell for. It was an uncomfortable time for us at Psion — it was possible that the Newton would take over the market, or perhaps the next HP palmtop, or something rumoured to be coming from Microsoft,” says Nick Healey, who became the user interface lead for the project, and who oversaw the applications development.
Apple’s Newton MessagePad, announced in 1991 and introduced the year before, had given the world the term “personal digital assistant”, but little more. While it was hugely inventive — with new 32-bit silicon from a joint venture with Acorn and VLSI called ARM, and a clever object-based development environment — it was expensive, unreliable and was quickly ridiculed. The first MessagePad was a huge flop. Psion knew the feeling, having had a near-death experience of its own.
Today, Mark Gretton, Psion’s silicon guru, describes Psion’s MC series range of laptops as “completely insane… you couldn’t get away with that now”.
Psion had begun investing heavily in designing its own silicon. “David Potter had a belief that real computer companies design their own chips,” says one former Psion project manager. “It was incredibly expensive to design your own ASICs, but it could pay off.” The catastrophic MC laptop was proof. The new 16-bit architecture Gretton had created, along with the team’s experience went into creating the Series 3 in 1991, which put the company back on track.
So Psion knew better than anyone that it couldn’t afford to be complacent. Twice in Psion’s history, the second iteration of a product was the winner — and Apple had the resources to come back swinging. As it turned out, however, the Apple of 1994 had other things to worry about.
Yet today, the decision to move to an entirely new 32-bit architecture looks vindicated. The operating system, now called Symbian OS, ships in more than 100 different phone models, generating the company that develops and licenses the software around $40m a quarter. More than 125 million units have been bought over the years, and of all intellectual assets created by Psion during its consumer hardware era, the Symbian OS is the only one that today generates new revenue.
“We were very upfront,” says Healey. “We said we wanted this to last 10 years.”
As it had before, when it moved from 8-bit to 16-bit, Psion was making a clean break with the past. Protea — named after a South African flower — wouldn’t be backward compatible with the Series 3. CEO David Potter and his technical team felt there were too many compromises in maintaining compatibility with an old architecture. And they felt more confident than before, thanks to a far-sighted decision taken in 1986. Psion’s Organiser II had shipped with a BASIC-like database language that proved popular with users, and Psion had continued to enhance it. Easy tools don’t necessarily result in quality software: Apple’s Hypercard is a notrious example. But perhaps because of its professional and enthusiastic user base, OPL resulted in a huge range of applications of the highest quality. In an age when we’re expected to laud “user-generated content”, OPL had enabled a “user-generated software industry” to flourish.
Extreme Engineering
Although his hands-on coding contribution to Protea was relatively small compared to other Psion projects, the influence of Charles Davies on the Series 5 was immense. (For more background on the dynamics at the top of Psion — see the extended piece we’ll publish shortly in PDF (and Epoc Word) formats).
Davies was responsible for the ethos of code reuse that outsiders might view as obsessive — but that was instrumental to the company’s success.
Davies had been Potter’s doctoral student in physics at the University of London, and Psion’s first employee in 1980. Davies had written Psion’s first commercial hit, a flight simulator game, and he’d subsequently assumed the role of technical visionary, and dispersing the intelligence throughout the company. Having followed up the Sim game with an integrated business suite for the Sinclair QL the following year — in a four-man team that included Colly Myers — Davies knew what office applications had to do. And by the time of Protea, he’d had plenty of time to think about doing them with extreme efficiency.
Time and again, Psion’s software proved itself capable of astonishing capabilities with only a minimal footprint. Davies had insisted the 16-bit team use object-oriented techniques — long before the languages or tools for standard 4G object-oriented development were finalised. By the time Protea was underway, aggressive object reuse was deep in the company’s development outlook. And for the Series 5, the developers set themselves even more ambitious goals.
Software components were the latest buzzword, as “Web 2.0” is today. Experts predicted that the application would disappear, with users selecting from palettes of functional components. Huge investments went into frameworks such as OpenDoc (backed by IBM, Novell, and Apple) and Microsoft, with its OLE. Byzantine and immensely complicated architectures were devised to implement them.
Since Psion had the opportunity to implement this on a fresh project, it applied its reuse policy from the primitive middleware components right up to the applications. As a result, the Series 5 shipped with a word processor that could also embed sketches and spreadsheets within a document, just like Microsoft with its OLE. It also featured a spell checker, an outliner, and multiple zoom levels. The word processor binary, however, took up just 20kb of ROM space: less than an empty Microsoft Word document — and considerably less than an ASCII file containing the 1,600 page programming guide to Microsoft’s OLE.
Psion was justifiably proud of this achievement, and published the source code for the word processor in its Software Development Kits for Epoc.
The last hurrah
Although the Series 5 swelled to more than 100 engineers, many of whom were in their twenties or thirties, the project depended heavily on the influence of leading lights such as Davies, Myers and Gretton.
;The Series 5 really was the last hurrah of the hero engineer,” says one Psion project manager. Colly Myers wrote much of the kernel himself for the first year — without a PC backup according to legend. The small kernel team also included Graham Darnell and Jane Sales.
Charles Davies and Colly Myers in 1984
Nick Healey oversaw the applications and UI design, and David Wood the middleware architecture. As Healey says, however, by the time the project started the key figures were so well known to each other, they “interfered” in all parts of the project. Wood ended up training the new recruits by day, rewriting their novice code by night, and sealing the ROMs.
“It was a classic good operating system written with confidence,” says Wood now. “We had to do things differently where we saw that there were special needs for a mobile device”
Mark Gretton had devised the first “system on a chip” for a mobile computer for the Series 3a, and set about finding a 32-bit core for its successor, code named Eiger (in our interview he describes how he chose ARM, then a relatively unproven design).
“Martin’s a genius at making these crazy mechanisms work.”
Martin Riddiford’s industrial design company, Therefore, was given the job of putting it all together. Riddiford had never been a Psion employee, but brought a singular talent that engineers loved: improvising impossibly creative mechanical designs.
Riddiford had worked on all Psion’s products since the Organiser II, and operated as an independent in what was then a pioneering venture. Psion part-owned the company, had first crack at the designs, but Therefore could work with other clients (except obvious rivals), and keep the IP for designs Psion rejected.
“Martin’s a genius at making these crazy mechanisms work. So Martin’s job was to figure out the mechanism — and our job was to figure out how to fit everything in,” is how David Tupman, now head of engineering for a successful music player, described the relationship. Riddiford created the sliding keyboard for the Series 5, which involved new keyboard IP.
Bill Batchelor and Martin Riddiford in 1997, with the new Psion Series 5
Amid this atmosphere of battling technical intellects, Healey had the job of keeping the user’s experience of the final product simple. Many of the design decisions for the Series 5 are so subtle that one only appreciates them when using a handheld or smartphone of today. There was no need for the user to distinguish between RAM and disk. Dialog boxes resembled a flat plane that could be navigated by the arrow keys, rather than voodoo key combinations. Messages were conveyed by subtle and non-intrusive hints, rather than dialog boxes or persistent pop-ups (as on Windows XP), and Healey insisted on plain English throughout.
At one stage, the “Thought Police” team discussed banishing the word “file” from the system entirely. In the end, that was considered a step too far, but the rejection of computer jargon can be seen in the decision to call the database fields “labels”, for example.
“Fields are where cows live,” says Healey.
Bill Batchelor had the job of co-ordinating the three software projects — kernel, middleware and applications, with Gretton’s hardware, and Riddiford’s mechanical designs.
(Only Batchelor and Myers declined to be interviewed for this feature. Your reporter’s previous interviews with Myers can be found here [2000, 2004 and 2006]. And you can rule out Batchelor as the source for any unattributed quotes in this article. His only words to this reporter, one evening in Cannes several years ago after being introduced by a mutual acquaintance, were the splendidly terse: “I don’t know you. I don’t trust you. And I’m not going to tell you anything”.)
In the end, when the Series 5 finally shipped, it was like being transported into the future, only through a very murky tunnel.
Gretton’s hardware clocked in at a meagre-sounding 18Mhz — but performed like a desktop Intel PC from just two years previously — and it could still maintain 30 hours use on two AA batteries. Once the circuitry was complete, the Series 5 performed the same tasks as its Windows CE rivals but used only a quarter of the power.
Applications were ready before the slow LCD screen technology of the day could draw them, and they showed a richness and depth only glimpsed on much more expensive desktop computers.
The most important application, Agenda, was left open-ended. Eccentric users could choose to enter all their tasks and appointments as sketches, for example, or clip-art. More practically, users could drop a to-do list into the day view at a set time, so “Personal” entries appeared at 5pm. No organiser since has quite offered the same flexibility. For Colly Myers, the Series 5 user interface has never been bettered.
But it was Riddiford’s touch typing keyboard that came to define the product. The Psion Series 5’s keyboard remains the principle reason for the design’s enduring utility today. There’s still nothing on the market like it.
But people grumbled.
Shadows of Doom
Among the first grumblers were some of Psion’s most loyal users.
In the rush to complete the Series 5, features that Series 3 users loved had been omitted. The Series 3 design had its peculiarities, but once these were met, it felt personable, and became an indispensable personal tool. Psion’s earlier computers had a diamond or “Psion” key that allowed owners to flick between Agenda views instantly. That had gone. The previous Agenda software had Busy and List views that users found essential, and these were absent too. And with an entirely new platform, it would be some time before Psion’s third-party application developers caught up to fill the gap.
Even Martin Riddiford had misgivings.
Looking back now Riddiford says Psion abandoned the Series 3 platform too early.
“They were following a technology trend, leaving behind a really fantastic operating system that fizzled out and died,” he tells us. “It could still be relevant today. That’s what’s so sad.”
At least one market indicator suggests he’s right. On eBay, Series 3 machines can command a higher premium than their successors. Psion’s last 16-bit consumer PDA, the Series 3MX launched in 1998, may fetch over £100 on auction, while a 32-bit Revo can be picked up for as little as £20. The old machines are held in great affection; Healey himself says he traded in his Revo for a 3MX recently.
So much affection, that one former Psion director told us that inertia affected the business.
“That product was almost too good,” the Psion executive says now, wryly.
“I was sitting on a plane in 2001 next to a man who had a Series 3. We got talking, and I introduced myself as working for Psion. He told me: ’It’s so sad, your PDAs are beautiful machines and they work so well — and you’re not making them any more. Why is that?’. I had to tell him the problem was people like him — who wouldn’t upgrade to our later models,” he says. “That makes business much more difficult.”
Psion was confident the users would — and it was largely correct. However, as a public company, it was the City of London which provided the most skeptical critic.
Engineering vs The City
Although the press saw Psion as fighting two competitors, it was really having to counter two deeply-held ideas.
The City of London had long held the view that Britain should be a service-based economy. This reflected a particular view of the world, which found itself expressed in a deep class-based disdain for inventiveness and the production of tangible goods. A 1998 editorial in The Daily Telegraph entitled “Metal Bashers Should Shut Up Shop” summed up the post-war orthodoxy of The City. Since the war, British businesses had to contend with interest rates twice as high as their European rivals, so investing in plant was much more costly, and their exported goods much more expensive than they needed to be.
Although Potter, with his own capital, had unleashed a world-class development, design and marketing team that punched far above its weight, Psion nevertheless found itself lumped in with the “Metal Bashers”.
The other idea was more recent, but was expressed with a religious zeal. It was a view about what computer markets should look like.
Going horizontal
After several attempts, Microsoft had begun licensing a handheld operating system to a wide range of OEMs. The products were extremely poor and failed to sell, but there were lots of them, and Psion management took the threat seriously. At a product level, Psion responded by trying to make the Series 5 appear less idiosyncratic, and conform more to a “corporate standard”. There was no corporate standard for handheld computing, of course, and if such a thing could be argued to exist, then Psion had already defined it.
Microsoft had a powerful weapon at its side: a way of looking at the way computer markets work that had become a simple, religious battle cry. Microsoft threatened to knock Psion out of the market using the brute force of this new view of the world: the “horizontal economic model”.
According to the argument, the OEM products built with Windows CE may have been inferior, but the horizontal model that drove prices down in the PC world would be turned onto the handheld world, too. As a result, Psion would become a boutique manufacturer of superior products that few people wanted — because Microsoft’s many OEMs produced handhelds that did the job, well enough, for most people at a lower cost. In this simplified view of the world, cost always beat quality — and there could be no exceptions.
Ever since digital technology had “liberated” capital at the turn of the 1980s, leaving it free to roam around the world looking for higher returns, Wall Street and the City of London had championed this view, lauding component suppliers for horizontal industries — at the expense of vertically integrated computer companies such as Psion or Apple. The City saw the horizontal model as more effective at squeezing costs out of the system, lowering prices — and therefore inflation — and giving a higher return on capital. Great vertically integrated computer companies such as Tandem and DEC had been hit hard by the rise of the PC, with illustrious names going under.
The truth was much more complicated than this simplified view of the world suggested. In many cases, these companies had failed to leverage their IPR assets as the market had changed: and in most cases they failed to meet the demand for “open systems” in time — the PC world represented by Microsoft and Intel had little or nothing to do with it. And today, we can see there are thriving exceptions.
But this “model” became a religious mania; the City and the experts blessed Microsoft, even though it often had poor competitive products to offer — or nothing at all. Psion, it was predicted, would have to “go horizontal” and license its crown jewels.
A free pass for Palm
On the other hand, Psion’s other principle competitor seemed to be exempt from this Holy War. Palm pitched itself not as a rival handheld computer, but a low-priced, pen-based PC companion: a peripheral.
The product “did nothing”, in the opinion of Psion’s senior management, who after all were designing their technology to be useful to people in 10 years’ time. Palm had approached Psion hoping to be acquired — and Psion had rebuffed the offer. Charles Davies concluded that the Palm Pilot was merely “a software application boxed in hardware”. It was a consumer electronics appliance.
It had consumer appliance numbers attached to it, however: the Palm PDA had become the fastest-selling technology item of all time in the US in 1997. And in the summer and autumn of 1996, there were few Psion users in the UK who didn’t admire the brisk proposition offered by the new Palm Pilot.
In Palm’s world, the technology in the handheld didn’t really matter: it merely had to perform certain simple operations quickly and well, and was essentially subserviant to the “real” computer, which was the PC.
“You’re basically saying the data lives on the computer, you can sync the device with the computer, you can take it out and fiddle around with it,” is how Riddiford describes the Palm proposition.
Reflecting now, Healey says Palm taught Psion what it was really like to create a mass market user interface. Although the data input capabilities of the Palm PDA were extremely limited, the Palm allowed users to “fiddle” with an ease unsurpassed before or since: it was well-loved, and a deserved success.
Palm also benefitted from the “horizontal” mania. To Palm, all those years Psion had spent investing in making its handheld computing platform so very reliable had been wasted, ran the argument, because if you lost your data, you only lost your “fiddles”. And if the devices were cheap (and getting ever cheaper) — well, then you’d simply buy another one. The US had far higher PC penetration than Europe — and Palm validated this market. What higher endorsement of the PC can there be, other than a successful “PC companion”?
That’s not how Psion saw it. To Psion, Palm was an ill-prepared computer company that was pretending it wasn’t a computer company at all. The “Zen” of Palm was an enormous deception.
Ten years on, Psion’s original verdict on Palm may still be proved correct. Palm belatedly embraced phones, added (inferior) keyboards, and through its own mismanagement failed to update its technology base.
No British Sony
Psion couldn’t help noticing a giant hole in the logic. The “horizontal” orthodoxy didn’t really extend to consumer electronics companies. A giant like Sony is a vast collection of vertically interated divisions — often fighting each other viciously — but no one ever calls for Sony to cut its R&D or “go horizontal”.
Psion Group executives can be excused for feeling beleaguered. By the logic of the critics, backed by PC-centric pundits who’d caught the horizontal mania, Psion simply couldn’t win.
When Psion compared its computers to the Microsoft-backed competitors, it was told its product superiority didn’t matter — because horizontal economics would win the day. At the same time, while Palm was feted as a “consumer electronics” success story, the same grace wasn’t extended to Psion.
A confident Psion would have met both threats head on. Psion could have argued, in response to the Microsoft threat, that handheld computers are essentially personal, and in such an unforgivingly judgemental environment, a poor tool is a poor tool — and unsellable at any price.
A confident Psion would also have blown the smoke away from Palm’s proposition by responding that the upstart was really a computer in a peripheral’s clothing. And if “PC companion” was to ever be a viable market, it was one in which it would itself rapidly find itself a target, to be driven out of existence by larger and better-resourced players.
A confident Psion might also have remembered its engineering expertise, which was packing high functionality into a very low cost device, and marketing it well — and gone on the offensive, launching a slew of consumer electronics products.
In the end, Psion attempted to do all three: but its confidence began to ebb away. Potter, who had started Psion with £70,000 of his own capital — and watched it grow entirely due to its inventiveness and courage — now faced a City which didn’t want to hear any such bold response. Potter began by addressing the “Microsoft” threat first.
The confusion blew Psion’s consumer electronics planning off course.
One summer morning in 1998, more than 100 Psion staff discovered they had a new employer with a strange name. One hundred and thirty staff at Psion Software were transferred to a new entity, called Symbian, with new owners: Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, and Psion. It was an amazing endorsement of the operating system the team had created — not just for Protea, but the years ahead. Symbian now had far greater resources to develop the OS, and license it widely as an industry standard.
Depending on who you to speak to, Psion either intended to spin out its crown jewels from the start — or simply realised it couldn’t afford to keep them.
According to Myers, Epoc (now called Symbian OS) was created with the idea of licensing it to a mass market, right from the outset. Gretton says Psion realised it couldn’t afford to develop the operating system on its own if it was to realise its potential: the development costs were simply too high. These accounts aren’t necessarily contradictory, of course, and in 1996 senior management unanimously agreed to reorganise the Psion group to focus software as a dedicated licensing operation. Gretton describes here how he spent a year selling the proposition to Nokia, and other large mobile handset manufacturers.
The Symbian story is well known — and beyond the scope of this article — but the consequences of the Symbian divestiture were dramatic for Psion’s computer business.
Overnight, Psion found itself with no software engineers. In addition, the Psion Group’s brains trust was broken up.
“Colly Myers, Charles Davies, Mark Gretton — these people really are visionaries,” says Alan Ferdman, who ran Psion’s test department. “And when you had them together, the effect wasn’t linear — it was exponential”.
Myers went to Symbian, while Davies and Gretton (the latter, in a last-minute twist of fate) stayed at Psion.
But Psion’s ability to create integrated products, with close liaison between hardware and software experts, disappeared overnight.
“Symbian just sucked Psion dry of software know how overnight,” another senior figure recalls.
“David Potter took all the brains and software guys out of hardware, leaving it as just a shipping and production entity — so it had no control over its destiny,” is how Gretton remembers it.
(For its part — Symbian was now creating a generic component, and couldn’t bring the obsessive attention to detail required to perfect the final pixel-level user experience that Healey, Batchelor and Myers had brought to bear on successive Psion computers. Symbian only resolved its UI strategy years later.)
The overnight loss of almost all Psion Computer’s software engineers wasn’t to prove damaging financially or logistically right away. But it meant a new round of recruitment and training. Eventually, the split would have a profound long-term effect on what became Psion’s most intangible asset: its confidence.
The group’s industrial and telecoms businesses were doing well — Psion Dacom’s PC card modem became a global best-seller in 1999, while industrial sales were steady — so the results didn’t show up in the bottom line right away. But for Gretton, who’d been landed with the job of re-assembling a cohesive technical team, the delay wasn’t welcome. On its home turf, Psion was facing its fiercest ever competition from Palm and Microsoft, and needed to increase the frequency of its leisurely product refresh cycle (it was three years before the Series 3a was upgraded with more memory and an iR port).
Two follow-up products to the Protea, a slimmed-down model aimed at consumers and an upgraded Series 5, were already in the pipeline. Both ASICs were designed by ARM, in a new partnership for Psion, but they wouldn’t hit the market until two years after the original Series 5. And it would be 2001 before the successors to these products (including a colour Series 5) were near ready. During that period, Palm brought 11 new handhelds to market, including a wireless model.
David Potter had taken a step back from the business, appointing David Levin, a City expert with a close ear to the financial markets, as the group’s CEO. Davies immediately assumed the leadership of the computer group.
Behind the scenes, Psion began to think the unthinkable.
Retreading the tyres
Psion responded to the new threats in two ways.
Ken McAlpine, a brilliant product engineer who went on to head Apple’s PowerBook division, was put in charge of an “incubator”, or “nursery”, looking at new consumer ideas. McAlpine brainstormed, and examined many opportunities that could grow into consumer markets.
“We already had the consumer brand,” says Davies of this period. “We needed the will to go into areas where we didn’t have a phone competitor.”
Despite the loss of the software engineers, Psion had much going for it, and the incubator was a recognition of its assets. Psion had an unrivalled talent for low cost consumer electronics hardware; it had close relationships with ARM and the burgeoning wireless silicon startups of Silicon Fen; in Martin Riddiford it had a mechanical design genius and product designer whose could connect with the public — and it was a trusted high streeet name.
Psion was also looking to appreciate its computer assets. The split had left it free to pursue partnerships with rivals.
This led to one of the most unusual “nearlys”. Psion began a skunkworks project to allow Linux to run on its hardware. This wasn’t difficult, the first 10,000 Series 5s were flash-based, and hackers could install whatever they wanted to on them.
But Potter also saw Microsoft as making inroads into the industrial and enterprise markets (Psion today is Windows CE-based), and before Symbian was even founded, had made an unusual approach to Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
“Our positioning on this was that Microsoft should position as Tier Zero, and we would get the market. We were brilliant at mechanical design; we had great product design and would therefore make the market for Windows CE,” explains one former executive familiar with the strategy.
“We’d looked at CE, and figured out that Casio and Philips [CE OEMs] were predominantly impaired by the quality of the I/O drivers — they were clumsily done. So we started hiring CE driver writers.”
Potter approached Gates with a proposition. Psion would make Windows-based hardware, if Microsoft would license its operating system to Psion for free.
“Microsoft said it never licenses software for free, so the deal never took place,” he says. “I still maintain that if that deal had come off, Symbian would never have happened.”
Today, Psion continues to sell an upgraded netBook as a Windows CE-based device to the industrial market. Only a few insiders know it was envisaged as a triple-boot computer with a choice of Linux, Windows CE, or Epoc inside.
Riddiford remembers more advanced projects too — which like the triple-boot netBook, have never before been disclosed.
“You’ll have to remember that Psion wasn’t religious about Epoc — it didn’t have a choice. All the software people had just moved to Symbian,” he says.
“We did the first Windows CE embedded GSM device — it was a joint Psion Siemens venture. That didn’t work out either.”
’One box or two?’
Under Levin, the group was constantly being reshuffled. A succession of managing directors followed Davies in leading the computer group: Harold Goddijn came in and encouraged left-field thinking, but was sidelined in late 1999. Goodijn subsequently moved to the helm of TomTom, and presided over its meteoric rise.
“Harold’s gone on to prove what a terrific visionary and businessman he is,” says Gareth Hughes.
“By the end we’d find out who our new MD was from the internet,” recalls Tupman.
“The argument that raged in the corridors at the time, was ’one box or two?’” recalls Davies.
The argument was that integrated communicators would subsume other functions, making them uneconomic to produce — as people would only want to carry around “one box”. The other was that a more focused device, for example a PDA with a better screen and keyboard than a phone could offer, could act as a complement.
Both cases had great merits, says Davies, and the market hasn’t settled the issue to this day.
Smartphone sales are way down on the projections made at the turn of the decade, and as most smartphones are bought for their status appeal, the “smart” features go unused. The third-party mass software market that many anticipated, never materialised.
“The forecasts haven’t come to fruition,” notes Gareth Hughes. “The only application for smartphones that can be anywhere near is email — and the market for BlackBerry’s is small.”
Meanwhile, the “second box” business has flourished, with diversity being the keyword. Apple’s iPod and TomTom’s Navigator are hugely successfully standalone devices. The most successful “communicator” is RIM’s BlackBerry, and yet that’s really a secondary device, too, as most BlackBerry users today also have a primary mobile phone. Even Palm, which hasn’t refreshed its PDA product line in two years, and gives it negligible marketing attention, still continues to make a handsome profit on residual sales of its PDAs.
Opinion has turned full circle: Palm founder Jeff Hawkins’ latest “big idea” is to re-create the netBook as a “smartphone companion” called Foleo: an explicit rejection of the “One Box” he previously advocated at Handspring.
“With 20/20 hindsight, the difficulties in integrating a smartphone are extreme,” says Davies. “RIM have achieved that, but don’t forget they came from a deep radio heritage. Apple are an inventive company with a lot of spirit and good staff — but they will struggle with the iPhone.”
Healey thinks the argument is needlessly dogmatic, today: “A great two-box solution beats a good one-box solution: and vice-versa. It’s far more important to keep churning out groovy products.”
House of Invention
McAlpine’s incubator examined a wide range of what have subsequently become successful consumer electronics markets — and several more, too, that haven’t.
“Psion were being approached by many startups who realised the brand value Psion could bring to a new area,” recalls Hughes. “Before one had even appeared on the market, we were approached by a company that had an MP3 player that was Flash-based. It held only half an hour’s worth of music, but we saw how that could evolve into a large market.”
Tupman recalls devising a hard-disk based player around this time.
“Ken and I spent a number of months just driving around the country trying to pull together a plan to make hard disk drive MP3 player,” he says. “Creative had their big CD-sized player with 2.5in drive, and there were lots of little Rio players; we thought we could make a play in that area because we had the technology. It was very much an investigation.”
In October 2001, with Tupman now at Apple, the iPod was launched. In 2003, its sales exploded.
A suggestion to use the Series 5 system board, running Epoc, for a set-top box was also considered. Another skunkworks project envisaged was a gateway tablet device that acted as both a cordless digital DECT phone and a GSM handset. Ericsson had created such a product, and British Telecom with its then mobile subsidiary Cellnet (now O2) brought it to market in spring 1999. Priced at £399 with base station, it flopped, but it was a forerunner of fixed-mobile convergence products like BT Fusion. Psion also examined a wide range of possible Bluetooth products: Cambridge had emerged as the leader in radio silicon, and early VoIP products.
But the only project from McAlpine’s incubator to reach the high street was a digital radio. The WaveFinder, as it was known, was launched in October 2000. This USB device required a PC, but it broke new ground in several ways.
“’Revolutionary’ products are announced daily in the IT business, but Psion’s latest, the Wavefinder, could genuinely merit the tag on a couple of fronts,” we reported at the time. DAB, wrote John Lettice, had potential as a data delivery platform — a fact not lost on Psion’s management.
A follow-up almost a year later told a familiar story: one of neglect and retail apathy.
“The WaveFinder radio was typical Psion,” remembers Gretton. “It wasn’t a great product, it had lots of flaws — but it was completely revolutionary in its time — and DAB radio eventually became a valid market.”
Ironically, the DAB radio market today is smaller than the SatNav and MP3 Player markets which Psion rejected. Its potential as a content platform has yet to be exploited.
“We had so many great ideas, and so many of those industries have taken off,” says Tupman. The engineer recalls working on 13 projects in less than three years, from the Symbian split to his leaving Psion in early 2001.
Psion had other priorities, too. However as the largest shareholder in Symbian, it had to fund the operation proportionately, even though it was much smaller than its partners Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola and (by 1999) Japanese giant Matsushita.
“At the time, all the R&D money went to Symbian,” remembers Tupman.
Planners for the core PDA business did plenty of radical thinking, too. Two projects were started codenamed “Houston” and “Texas” which integrated Dragon’s voice technology into PDAs.
But management turmoil, and constant reorganisations beset the computer group. Gretton scored one success, however. For years he’d been trying to get Psion to withdraw from owning its own manufacturing plant. The “cowshed”, as the engineers called it, caused lots of problems, and Gretton regards the foray as one of Psion’s most damaging strategic errors. In 1999 the rest of management agreed, and the Greenford plant was sold off.
In autumn 1999, Davies’ successor as Psion Computer MD Harold Goddijn was sidelined, to be replaced Margaret Rice-Jones from Motorola.
Ominously, David Levin had made his mind up on the “one box or two” question.
Odin and Halla
The deal announced in early 2000 with Motorola was wide ranging. Not only would the two jointly develop a range of pen-based smartphones under the umbrella name “Odin”, with the first of which scheduled to hit the market in mid-2001, they’d use an entirely new silicon architecture developed by Psion, a young Irish semiconductor company called Parthus, and Samsung. The “Halla” chip (officially known as InfoStream) would be the first ARM9 based processor, and was packed with multimedia features. In an extensive cross-licensing deal, Motorola would have first dibs on the resulting silicon.
According to Gretton, and his account is corroborated by others, much of Psion management and almost all the Psion staff, strongly opposed the deal.
“I was deeply against the Motorola contract — for me it was the final nail in the coffin,” he says.
In addition to funding the burgeoning Symbian operation, Psion was now officially in the semiconductor business. So overnight, it placed itself in competition with two of the largest and fastest-growing companies on the planet. From duking it out with unproven newcomer Palm and Casio’s handheld division, Psion was now set head on against Nokia and Ericsson on one side, and Texas Instruments and other chip manufacturers on the other. An even more dangerous enemy existed in its new partner’s camp: Motorola had its own semiconductor division and began moving at once to kill the Psion deal.
Fear of competition is often cited by former staff as a Psion characteristic. But for an insane moment, Psion appeared to stand on the table and want to fight everybody in the pub.
The relationship with Ericsson deteriorated. Ericsson had long nurtured the idea of a pen-based smartphone, and was the first phone vendor to ship an Epoc device in 2000. The Swedish giant cancelled Psion’s contract as its preferred PDA supplier. Ericsson had rebranded the Psion 5MX, with some additional phone-friendly software, as the MC218. The next stage would have seen Ericsson rebadge Psion’s Revo. The cancellation of the deal was costly for Psion.
Odin brought a fresh set of anxieties. Psion management was paralysed as the prospect of the scale of the battle it had bought into, and fatalism set in.
“There was a feeling of ’what’s the point?’ Nokia’s going to kill us anyway,” says Gretton in an view echoed by many executives at the time. “Which was totally self-fulfilling and which I don’t subscribe to, then or now.”
He points out that Nokia has yet to master enterprise IT channel sales even today. By the time of Odin, Psion had amassed 15 years’ experience selling handhelds as part of an IT infrastructure sale. He regarded the Motorola deal as one backstab away from termination — and in January 2001, his worst fears were confirmed.
“I was in Germany…when Margaret Rice-Jones took the call from Motorola — and her face went white. She told me Motorola had cancelled Odin, and that we were on our own,” he recalls.
“I knew that was the end of our business. We had no other roadmap.”
As a cathartic gesture, Psion staff made a bonfire of their Motorola mobile phones.
Nevertheless, the product pipeline was at last full, and would give a long-overdue lift to Psion’s PDA business. A colour Bluetooth Revo and a cost-reduced model were in an advanced stage: a TV documentary filmed Psion’s marketing team auditioning advertising agencies for the launch.
(One of the agencies, clearly having failed to read the brief, hilariously proposed to market the new Revo as a “one box solution”).
However Levin had no intention to pursue this option. He moved quickly to abandon the Psion Computer moniker, moving the staff to the more ambiguously named Psion Digital.
A statement issued on 11 July 2001 read:
“The decision to implement a significant restructuring of Psion Digital has been driven by the division’s continuing poor performance in weak and oversupplied markets for handheld computers and related cellular phone markets. Further commoditisation of these markets is expected next year. As a result of the Board’s decision and in the light of slower than anticipated establishment of a mass market for Bluetooth products, Psion Digital will not launch its Bluetooth PDA or range of Bluetooth connectivity products planned for the second half of 2001.
David Potter is quoted:
“The IT industry is experiencing its worst downturn since 1985. Against this background, it is essential that we take the hardest approach to costs, control and a return to profitability while avoiding exposure to oversupplied commodity markets. The enterprise markets of Psion Teklogix offer sound long-term growth opportunities, while Psion Digital will be focusing on its core assets in innovation and exploiting new premium markets for mobile networked devices.”
“It had been an awful two years,” says Gretton, who’d had to build up Psion’s software expertise after the Symbian spin-off. “We were getting to the stage where we had programming resources at last, a stable platform, and were able to start turning out some product at last. There was great spirit there — then people scattered far and wide.”
Davies now agrees that Psion “overestimated the competition”.
Psion’s strategy had been established the previous autumn. The markets had finally smiled on the Psion Group’s “horizontal” strategy, and thanks to its 28 per cent stake in Symbian, they gave it an astronomical valuation. Psion was trading on the FTSE 100, and its 28 per cent stake would give it a handsome reward from a Symbian IPO: some guesstimated at least £1bn.
But instead of using Psion’s astronomical FTSE valuation to move into a new area, Levin shored up the defences to buy the established industrial IT vendor Teklogix for around £240m.
Setting a torch to 18 years of consumer electronics success wasn’t cheap.
Levin spent £29.2m exiting the consumer business, while a further £11.2m was written off to general restructuring — adding up to over £40m in exit costs in the first half of 2001 alone. Two hundred and fifty of Psion’s 1,200 staff were lost, in addition to the 100 shed when Odin was cancelled.
Psion’s users have mourned the decision ever since, and subsequent events suggest the decision wasn’t so much rational, as driven by fear.
“We had a pile of cash that the company didn’t want to spend,” bemoans one of Psion product development team.
“The arrogance came back to haunt us. Psion was offered Palm on a plate and we didn’t believe in it — so we told them to get lost. We still didn’t believe in it even when we were being hammered by them.”
“In the end we got ourselves,” says Gretton.
“There was so much we could have done; we could have been a handset and yes, we could have been TomTom, we could have been a handset vendor; we could have been RIM — but all the appetite and all the aggression was gone,” says one manager who left at the time.
Potter, Davies, and many other senior management now agree Psion left the business too early. The “depression” that hit global telecoms sales so hard in 2001, turned out to be barely a frown on a credit-powered British economy. UK sales of PDAs rose again in 2003 to their highest level for three years — but Psion wasn’t there to take advantage of the Indian summer.
Psion’s unreleased Revo, with Bluetooth
Scheduled products such as the Bluetooth Revo and the modem-equipped Series 5MX would have made the product viable for much longer. Levin’s anticipated “commoditisation” took much longer than a year to materialise. Even today, Palm sells two PDAs based on a a mainboard and OS whose spec hasn’t changed since it was launched five years ago. Palm’s belated addition of rich colour and Bluetooth in 2002 gave it a lasting lease of life. It’s pure profit.
“David Levin had no feel for consumer electronics,” says Gretton.
“The great stuff was done out of a can-do spirit that was gradually lost in the latter years… Psion died by a succession of blows, people with less and less ambition — and more fear.”
Asked why management lost its confidence, Gretton suggests: “They got too rich probably and too involved in the City — that’s another world that didn’t understand Psion.”
“There was so much waste, so many ideas, and so many talented people. It’s amazing what was achieved — and then thrown away.” ®
The Protea Story
After Protea: Psion from 1997 to 2001
In their own words: Mark Gretton; Martin Riddiford; Nick Healey; David Tupman; Sir David Potter;
“It’s amazing what was thrown away.” — Mark Gretton
During 17 years at Psion, Mark Gretton designed the hardware architecture for both the Series 3 and Series 5 organisers. He designed numerous ASICs along the way, and also took a management role that led to the formation of Symbian. In Mark's words: .
In the early days David Potter was very involved in the company and he was prepared to take big risks. He bought into the idea and believed in it himself.
Gradually he lost that passion in the business, and decisions were made by people who didn’t understand the consumer electronics business, and didn’t have the stomach for it.
He let it go away.
There was so much waste, so many ideas, and so many talented people. It’s amazing what was achieved — and then thrown away.
How I joined Psion
I joined Psion to do cross compiling in 1986. We were in the last stages of launching the Organiser II. The whole system was emulated on a VAX in C. This code was used as an executable spec for people who hand compiled the machine code for this tiny little washing machine processor. It was the only way to get it into a small enough space. It was incredibly labour intensive but some very bright people took an almost religious pride in the quality of their cross compiling.
I then started work on a 16-bit architecture with a completely blank sheet of paper. It wasn’t clear what the first product would be, it was simply an architecture for 16-bit handheld computing. The first product turned out to be a massive project — the MC, a revolutionary new solid-state laptop computer.
“It was a bridge too far… we couldn’t get away with that now.”
The MC project was completely mad; it was insane. This was an entirely new laptop, a new architecture four new ASIC chips, a new OS, a new GUI, and a new suite of business applications, all in a new product — and we thought we could do it with just 30 people. Looking back I can’t work out why we thought we could. Colly Myers had a saying at the time: “Don’t look down!” That was the trick.
We launched anyway, even though the hardware was dodgy and the software was dodgy. It wasn’t reliable. You couldn’t get away with that nowadays.
Mark Gretton
But it was bristling with innovations. Flash memory was new, so we invented a serial bus, and created the first solid state disks. We invented a new touchpad. We invented all sorts of new power management techniques, and a whole GUI was drawn up.
It was a bridge too far everywhere you looked, and it didn’t work out. But it let us hone that architecture.
Success out of failure
We then said let’s do a small QWERTY based product on this 16-bit architecture — that was the birth of the Series 3 — my particular project. We’d designed ASICs before — I designed three for the MC. So I started a project to put 3 ASICs and the CPU on one chip.
It’s standard practice now to make an ASP [application specific processor, or “system on a chip” — ed], but it was absolutely unheard of at the time. I spent a good few man years of my life on this project — by this time I had a CAD workstation (as opposed to a mainframe for ASIC simulation) putting an 8086 processor and all the gubbins, such as LCD controller, on that one chip. It was actually about nine months I was chained to that workstation. That chip made the 3a possible, and by then we had a stable, robust platform.
The 3a was the first time everything came together and it was a really great product — and it sold very well. So the massive undertaking of a whole new architecture was finally paying off — it went on to survive for over 10 years.
We can’t do it all alone
As sales of the 3a were taking off, more long term questions were asked, such as “do we need a new 32-bit architecture?” This lead to a relatively small team starting development on our 32-bit platform (Epoc32 as it was called then).
Again, I started on the hardware. Again I looked at lots of CPUs, but in the end chose ARM. Again, this was not the obvious, mainstream choice it would be now. Then, ARM was unheard off outside of Acorn and ARM (Newton). But technically it was strong in terms of MIPS per watt and die area: people still counted [transistor] gates quite carefully in those days.
That was Eiger, an ARM710 based ASP or SoC. In parallel, a complete new 32-bit OS was developed, a mammoth task. This went on to become the Symbian OS which has shipped in over 100 million smart-phones. In fact, it was such a massive task that it soon became clear the expected revenues from PDA sales alone could not justify this level of R&D investment.
I worked with a couple of others including Colly Myers to prepare something for the board that basically said, “we can’t compete with the hardware business alone, we should consider a licensing model, and restructuring the company around that”.
There was an expression going around at the time: “Is Psion going to die like IBM, or is Psion going to die like Apple?” Would we open up and license our technology, or — and remember Apple was really, really suffering at the time — would we die like a closed proprietary system? So we decided to die like IBM!
(Now, at TomTom I can say we’ve survived like Apple!)
So the company split up into four [Psion Computer, Psion Software, Psion Industrial, and Psion Dacom] and I joined the board of what was then Psion Software, which went on to become Symbian with Colly, Bill, and David Wood, who’s now a senior VP at Symbian. For the next year, I spent a lot of time in Tampere in Finland at Nokia, doing pre-sales, selling the idea. There wasn’t a lot to show them — prototype Series 5s and development boards for the OS — but the premise was “Look how great our 16-bit stuff is!” And Nokia went and benchmarked it and saw that yes, it really was highly efficient and highly reliable.
Psion splits
Back in London we were having a terrible time ramping up production of the Series 5 at our own factory in Greenford. Everything was going to shit. David Potter pulled me aside one day and said, “we need some good guys in the PDA business” and put me back into the hardware business. So I left Psion Software and joined the Computer side, running the engineering side. After the restructuring and formation of Psion Software most of the brains and software guys had been stripped from the PDA business, leaving it as more of a shipping and production entity — it had no control over its destiny and was totally wrapped up in its production problems. I desperately tried to get Psion out of the manufacturing business — there was no shortage of people in Asia willing to help us — but David Potter was against this. Again, it was one of his big strategic errors.
Then in 1998, Symbian was announced. Everyone thought they’d take over the world, while I thought ,”Shit — I’ve made a bad career move [moving back to the PDA business].”
Let’s do a smartphone!
It was a tough time. The PDA business was not performing and it had lost its technological core and control over its destiny. Symbian were not interested in our business as they were focused on smartphones and Nokia. I survived on the management board but only just and we went through a lot of MDs.
At one level things looked up, we now had a mature and stable 32-bit OS and a cost effective platform and at last, following the Revo introduction, high quality outsourced manufacturing.
I was in charge of the Psion Computers roadmap and presented countless new products. These included a colour version of the Series 5MX, a road warrior 5MX with a built in modem from Dacom, a Blackberry style device, like the Revo, with wireless push email, called Project Blade. There was also a cost-reduced Bluetooth enabled Revo on the roadmap.
But the commonly held belief then was that PDAs were dead and everything would be connected: ie, a smartphone or Nokia Communicator-like device. At the same time David Potter recruited a new group CEO, David Levin. He was convinced we could not be successful with a smartphone without a powerful partner from the wireless world, and so we signed with Motorola to do Odin.
There was a feeling of ’what’s the point?’ Nokia’s going to kill us anyway — which was totally self-fulfilling and which I don’t subscribe to, then or now”
I was deeply against the Motorola contract — for me it was the final nail in the coffin.
Even if doing a smartphone was a good idea, Psion could have done it on its own. At the time we were working with Inventec and other companies that had their own cellular technologies. It was an investment, but compared with some of the stuff we’d taken on in the past it was nothing.
The iceberg looms
David Levin, the new CEO had no feel for consumer electronics. So against the advice of most of the Psion Computers’ management team, including me, we signed the deal with Motorola.
Motorola were notorious for shafting other companies or indeed other parts of the group, it was a highly political organisation. Either the semiconductor people were shafting the handset people, or the other way round.
Now the argument was that Motorola had the sales channels, that was the rationale. But the phone channel was the network operators and they didn’t understand smartphones; arguably, they still don’t. But PDAs were sold through the IT channel. We could have sold Odin through the IT channel quite effectively.
I was in Germany in 2001 when Margaret Rice-Jones, Psion Computer MD, took the call from Motorola — and her face went white. She told me Motorola had cancelled Odin, and that we were on our own. I knew that was the end of our business. We had no other roadmap, no plan B.
It had been an awful two years.
We were getting to the stage where we had programming resources at last, a stable platform, and were able to start turning out some product at last. There was great spirit there.
Yes, PDA sales peaked in 2003 and it wasn’t for lack of trying that I tried to revive the business.
A third revival?
Even by itself, the Bluetooth Revo which was ready for launch [cancelled 11 July 2001] would have continued to be a profitable niche, I’m quite convinced of that.
The Revo made even smaller would definitely have made a good wireless email terminal and there’s no reason that couldn’t have gone on to enjoy sales. Almost all the things were there: you need good keyboard, good battery life, you just need to put in a GPRS modem. The sales channel didn’t have to be the operator. Where there was a bit of work needed was on the server side; but there were smart people in the company and we could have cracked that. We’d just lost the ambition.
Following 2001, I worked for two years in the wilderness doing push email software, Again, there was no stomach for taking this to the consumer so it got given away to Visto.
And Visto killed that as well — David [Potter] just wanted shot of it and gave it away, the people and everything.
In the end, fear triumphed.
During the whole Symbian hype, when the Psion share price was high and the Dacom side of the business was doing well, a group was set up called The Incubator Group.
People wrote business plans for new ideas. One was Blade, the push email system. One was a Hard Disc based music player, that Ken [McAlpine] wrote (before Apple launched the iPod). And another was a DAB-based receiver, a PC peripheral, that Ken proposed. That was the only one to make it to market. Even navigation devices were discussed.
The WaveFinder radio was typical Psion: it wasn’t a great product, it had lots of flaws — but it was completely revolutionary in its time — and DAB radio went on to became a valid market.
“They got too rich probably, and too involved in the City.”
Psion did this more than once. They create a market, but you’ve got to keep at it. They made a huge technical investment with huge innovation but lost the will to keep at it. The senior management board lost interest in the technology, and they weren’t engaged in it personally.
Why? They got too rich probably, and too involved in the City — that’s another world that didn’t understand Psion.
The great stuff was done out of a can-do spirit that was gradually lost in the latter years; the split didn’t help. It wasn’t fatal in itself. Psion died by a succession of blows, people with less and less ambition — and more fear.
This fear became self-fulfilling. The mentality was that everyone will get us: “Nokia will get us, Palm will get us, or the Japanese will get us”… in the end we got ourselves!
It was OK when were in a niche — that was fine. But if you’re successful in a niche and sell some stuff, then naturally you get competition. To me this isn’t a problem — it validates the market.
The idea at Psion was that this was a bad thing and you had to move on. It’s in a marked contrast to TomTom. We’re in a real market, meeting a real market need — and we’ve sold an order of magnitude more than Psion ever did. And of course we have over 300 competitors — and still hold on to 50 per cent market share! If a niche ever grew so it wasn’t ever a niche, Psion abandoned it.
There was this fear of competition that was right in the heart of David Potter.
After leaving Psion, Mark joined a small Dutch PDA software company TomTom in 2003 run by former Psion Computer MD Harold Goddijn. As chief technology officer, Gretton assembled a team of former Psion engineers to create its first hardware products. In fiscal year 2006, TomTom reported revenues of €1.36bn making a net profit of €222m.
’Less is more’ — Martin Riddiford
(with Jim Fullalove)
We’re not particularly techie as people, we’re not chasing the next technology bus. But we think we’re useful because we see things through the eyes of your average consumer, not a techie. Most clients are techies too.
With the Series 5, we simply looked at the Series 3 and focused on anywhere we could do things better. The keyboard was the most obvious.
When we first created a keyboard that size, people said, “you can’t use that, it’s too small!” But people thought they’d be sitting at a desk. There’s really two modes of using it. In one, you hold on to it and do what we call “squirrel” — type with your thumbs. Or you sit down and you touch type. A successful device does both of those.
We quickly realised that by angling the keyboard towards you, you don’t need a display that changes, that moves to or away from you, because you already know where your hands are. It’s just a matter of getting rid of the glare. Unfortunately, once you had a touch screen, you had more glare than the fantastic Series 3 screen, which had great anti-glare. With a pen the only complication was that it didn’t tip backwards.
The size of