“Still, I had to accept the impossible, final truth: GO was gone. Six years, hundreds of jobs, $75 million — all gone.”

Jerry Kaplan

‘It Was Pure Magic’

In 1989, GO Corporation created the first tablet computer: the PenPoint. Twenty-one years before the iPad, PenPoint took computing from clunky towers right into the palm of your hand.

“It was pure magic — no one had ever before seen this much computing power packed into a diminutive, four-pound frame. Someone snapped a Polaroid. I wrote on it ‘6/20/89 — First Working Unit’.”

In his book Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure, GO Founder & CEO Jerry Kaplan gives us the PenPoint story from the inside.

The Best and the Brightest

Kaplan built a team of some of the best and brightest engineers in Silicon Valley. Above all, he selected for enthusiasm:

“We soon developed a simple technique for selecting candidates: check their credentials, tell them about the project, and then observe their immediate reaction. We judged their suitability by gauging their level of enthusiasm.”

Great team assembled and flush with venture capital, GO looked hard to beat.

With Friends Like These…

But the reality inside the company was far less rosy. GO burned money rapidly to create its cutting edge hardware.

Needing support with vendors and customers, not to mention more capital, GO was forced into a partnership with IBM. From day one, IBM made Kaplan nervous.

Nonetheless, Kaplan did the deal. He would come to regret it.

“…what mattered was not how much we liked the partner, but how much weight they could throw behind our bid to establish our operating system as the standard.”

IBM soon hamstrung GO with bureaucracy. Security reviews and committee approvals proliferated.

Soon, IBM went from an incompetent partner to a malign one. Knowing GO was running out of cash, it dangled financing over Kaplan’s head with one hand while trying to steal his invention with the other.

Kaplan was eventually able to get financing from AT&T instead. But the red tape and bullying proved to be IBM-all-over-again.

GO was making solid progress on its product. But it was also bleeding money and making almost no sales.

The End of the Line

Seven years in and once again low on cash, the team began to lose faith.

“…as I looked around the room, I realized for the first time that money wasn’t the problem. It was a loss of faith…”

With an exhausted team and shrinking bank balance, GO was forced into a merger with AT&T-controlled EO in January 1994.

Shortly thereafter, AT&T shut down both EO and GO. This was the end of PenPoint.

What Went Wrong?

“In looking back over the entire GO-EO experience, it is tempting to blame the failure on management errors, aggressive actions by competitors, and indifference on the part of large corporate partners. While all these played important roles, the project might have withstood them if we had succeeded in building a useful product at a reasonable price that met a clear market need.”

Kaplan zeroes in on job #1 for a startup: solve a problem, and get paid to do it. Despite tremendous effort, GO was never able to do this.

The PenPoint was far ahead of its time. In technology, sometimes too early is just as bad as too late.

Developing a brand new hardware and software platform may be too much for a startup. New hardware platforms and operating systems in recent decades have come from big incumbents like Apple and Google, not startups.

Wrap-Up

GO proves an enduring truth of startupland: hardware is hard.

Jerry Kaplan and his team did everything to make their revolutionary computer a success. But it just wasn’t enough.

Startup made clear to me just how hard it is to build a great company. And it also made me a little wary of IBM. 🙂

Although PenPoint never made it, I admire Kaplan’s bold vision. PenPoint helped inspire a future generation of handheld computers, from the iPad to smartphones.

Maybe GO wasn’t a failure after all!

What do you think about PenPoint? Leave a comment and let us know!

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Photo: Jerry Kaplan