So, the billion dollar question is, what in the world did U.S. Robotics do to capture 70% of this market and begin to make money hand over fist?

#1) Keep it simple.  Learning to drive the Pilot is a 10-minute exercise in simplicity.  The designers figured out what the top 10 features users would want and focused on the top 5.  The result is a simple interface which equates to immediate productivity.

#2) Attract the geeks.   Knowing that they’d only focus on the top 5 uses of the Pilot, the USR folks knew they had to make the Pilot an ideal development platform.  The SDK appeared shortly after the arrival the Pilot from the boys at Metrowerks, the makers of sexy compilers for the Mac.  Shortly after that, a literal flood of third party add-ons showed up.  At the Company, industrious geeks have ported our internal phone list over to the Pilot as well as provided a link to our scheduling program.   All of the sudden, the Pilot in my pocket has all the information I need while I’m away from the desk, from my phone, and lacking electricity.  Sweet.

#3) Provide an avenue for growth.  USR had two strategies here.  First, they relied on their “Keep it simple” mantra to develop a no-brainer upgrade set-up for the Pilot.   Plug it into the back of your PC and hit a single button.  Viola!  You’ve just upgraded your OS and add three new add-ons.   I mean it, it’s that easy.  Second, they’ve continued development on the hardware, as well.   The newly redubbed PalmPilot sported all kinds of a memory and backlighting to boot.

It’s difficult to find a flaw in Pilot design as well as it’s marketing plan.   Perhaps the only problem they’ll run into as the go after corporate entities that need “on the go” computing is the size of the screen.  For example, a UPS delivery person will feel cramped on 2x4 inch screen.  Fortunately, for USR, they’ve got all the mind share they need and the deep pockets of big daddy 3Com to push the Pilot into markets no has even thought about

[sift this]  Nobody knows what language Word for Windows is written in.   Sure, if you thought about it'd you probably guess it was C and C++… that would make sense, but you don't really care.  All I want from my word processor is that it works simply, quickly and doesn't bother me.  The fact that a gang of engineers in Redmond is cranking out C code to make it easier to spell check doesn't interest me.

Folks like to show off applications to me because I get excited when I see innovation.  I stared at a beta of Pointcast for half a day when it arrived on my desktop.  The engineer who gave me the link was tickled with himself that he'd ruined my entire day.

The "big thing" these days are to point me to applications and add the comment "And it's written in Java."  So the same application can run under Windows and the Mac.  I don't care because I've got exactly one platform on my desktop and if an application I'm intending to use happens to run on the Mac, yippie-skip, does it run well on my souped-up Windows NT 4.0 box?  It'd better or you've been wasting my time.

Start-up 280.com's Meeting Center application recently made the rounds around my work pit.  The idea isn't new, a net based meeting area, where co-workers can login in from around the globe and "discuss" topics.   The "gee-whiz" in Meeting Center lies in its elegant simplicity.  The designers behind the application focus on two things: 1) Forget everything you know about user interface and 2) Keep it simple so new users are productive in a matter of minutes.

Meeting Center's user interface is astounding.  They've completely ignored the etched steel 3Dness Microsoft stole from Next and fell into a design where color drives action.  Smooth tabs litter the outside of the windows and, when clicked, slide out to reveal work areas.  It takes just a few moments of discovery to find the metaphor of interaction between the workspace and the user.

280.com is far ahead of the curve with their application, so far ahead they're making some assumptions that might spell doom for their masterpiece.  Most folks still work within 50-100 feet of their co-workers, so a virtual workspace doesn't replace standing on your chair and yelling across a sea of cubes.

Their work remains a strong testimony for the middle line that can be drawn between designer and software engineer.  One can hope that the foundation of their work can be applied to other more instantly relevant applications.

[p.s. and it's totally written in Java!]