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EO

EO Personal Communicator 440

Joined: Aug 1992 Role: Head of product management for hardware Status: Shut down (~1994, reabsorbed into GO Corporation) What it did: Pen-based personal communicators

Overview

EO was a startup building pen-based computing devices — handheld touchscreen computers operated with a stylus. The company was a spin-out from GO Corporation, separated to avoid competing with GO's software licensing customers. GO Corporation was founded by Jerry Kaplan (see his book Startup for a detailed account). EO was funded by Kleiner Perkins, with AT&T behind the venture.

Ted joined because people he knew from Apple had gone to EO, and as a hardware product manager it felt like a logical next step into a new kind of hardware. His presentation frames EO's products as "Pen Computers (smartphones)" — a remarkably prescient description.

The EO 440

  • Price: ~$2,500 for the low-end EO 440
  • Size: About an iPad Mini
  • Connectivity: Could snap on a cellular CDMA radio, could fax and send emails
  • Design: By frog design — had playful "ears" on the sides, designed to look like a consumer product
  • Use case that might have worked: Sales reps in the field taking orders, utility workers checking lines — a focused corporate sale

Why It Failed

The pen computing wave collapsed in the early-to-mid 1990s:

  • Too expensive for consumers — $2,500 was far too much for the average buyer
  • Not rugged enough for corporate — designed as a consumer product, so it was neither fish nor fowl
  • Handwriting recognition was ~92% accurate per letter — sounds impressive, but that means errors in almost every paragraph. "You get pretty frustrated"
  • No always-on network — no internet, no infrastructure to make a connected device compelling
  • The evangelical hope was that pen computing could do an end-run around Microsoft by building a completely new platform ("all they're good at is copying")

Ted pitched the EO to Gartner Group as head of product management for hardware — "they just made me feel like an idiot." Smart, tough questions that exposed the product's market weakness. That experience "killed my faith in the whole thing." He was one of the early people to leave EO.

What Vindicated the Category

Palm Pilot ultimately proved the handheld category was real, but with a pragmatic approach. Jeff Hawkins and the Graffiti simplified handwriting system succeeded where pure handwriting recognition failed. The EO team had mocked the Graffiti approach ("no way people are going to change their handwriting"), but Hawkins was right — the practical solution beat the ambitious one.

General Magic also failed. Newton was shut down. Palm Pilot was the survivor — "the rebirth of pen computing, but not like we thought it would."

The full vision was vindicated 15+ years later by the iPhone (2007) and iPad (2010).

Significance

EO established the defining pattern of Ted's career: arriving early with a correct vision. The Gartner Group experience was a formative lesson — "it doesn't matter if really smart people from Kleiner Perkins and AT&T are behind something, it can still fail." You drink your own Kool-Aid when surrounded by believers. See also When.com, OnLive, Boswell — the same pattern repeating.

See Also