Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Larkspur, CO, USA
Posts: 32

Did someone say Pee Wee Herman?

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Metro Station, Hollywood and Highland
Posts: 1018

The URL for the offending review is:
http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/di...dy/990920db.htm

Briody falters on a number of points:

First, the New Coke analogy he opens with is an urban legend. He states that he resented Coca Cola for tinkering with the "old" Coke and felt vindicated when the company brought it back. In fact, Coca Cola has modified it's formula, albeit discretely, many times over the decades. The only difference between the New Coke and the "old" one, was that, in this instance the company chose to publicize the change and make a marketing campaign out of it. His aversion to the New Coke is purely the power of suggestion.

Briody fixates on the founders' decision to leave their parent company and form a new one. He then reiterates this throughout the article, suggesting that he's either less interested in the product he's reviewing than the corporate politics behind it, or that he own's stock in 3Com and is hedging on full disclosure.

Hawkins and Dubinsky have stated in many interviews that they felt that they could spend more time and energy developing the Palm platform independently without have the constraints of being intrapreneurs with a networking company. If Briody had done his homework and read some of these interviews, we might have be spared his rhetorical questioning.

His assertion that the Visor has fewer business apps that other Palm is manifestly absurd, since they all run the same OS. By extension, the addition of the Springboard and can only mean that the Visor will have more apps than Springboard-less Palms.

Then he stubs his toe on a non-sequitur: "Granted, with a Universal Serial Bus connecting port, it was never meant to be a business tool . . ." Should true "business" tools use the slower serial ports instead? One can only imagine what he would say if Handspring upgrades to Firewire.

He asks if there's any reason to switch from the Palm V to the Visor. Yes: the $175 savings, and the broader horizons offered by the Springboard he so arbitrarily dismisses as an ersatz Game Boy.

Finally, Briody has the temerity to accuse the Visor, created by the inventor of the PalmPilot, of being a "PalmPilot knockoff". I'll bet that when he first encounted the original PalmPilot, he thought it was a Newton knockoff.