A Conversation with Dataquest’s Gerry Purdy

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Gerry Purdy, vice president and chief analyst of mobile computing for Dataquest, a leading market research firm.

Purdy, an industry veteran of over 25 years who has held positions with Compaq, Fujitsu Personal Systems (formerly Poqet Computer), and Phoenix Technologies, has been enamored by mobile computing since he was directly involved with it at Compaq. He sees the new generation of personal assistants and communicators as the true bearers of the title personal computer. “I think we did a disservice by calling the IBM computer in 1981 a ‘personal computer.’ We should have called it the individual office computer, or something like that because a truly personal computer hasn’t really existed until the Zoomer and Newton were introduced this summer where you have a true computer system in a handheld.”

To Purdy, the pen has a powerful, perhaps even mystical draw. “We have this instrument of thousands of years of utilization, and technology has not been able to focus on that particular part of our communication. Now when we see it possibly happening, there’s this emotional hook that you desperately want it to be able to do all these extensions of writing, giving you the ability to do things far better than you could on a real piece of paper. There’s a feeling of disappointment when you have this high expectation level.”

If this is true, you wonder “What’s missing? Why haven’t pen systems been overwhelmingly accepted?” New computer technologies can be held back by some critical component. In some cases, this could be the operating system, in others it could be the lack of hardware. Finally, it could simply be a shortage of usable applications. However, in the mobile computing market, much of this seems to have fallen in place over the past year. While acknowledging this progress, Purdy believes that the critical missing component is maturity. He likens this to the emerging PC market in the early ’80s where “you’ve got this individual device that’s has the ability to operate independent of a network, which is sort of a joke today because you want to do the reverse.”

He rightly claims that the Zoomer, Newton, and other mobile and personal devices have not gone through the necessary maturation process. And like the preceding technologies, Purdy feels that this process can take anywhere from five to ten years. However, when these applications arrive, Purdy views them as having special properties that almost possess “a magnetic attraction.” He believes that one of these applications is certainly wireless electronic messaging, but instead of focusing on one key killer application, he feels that three general classes of applications will appear. Purdy admits to being influenced by Marc Porat’s “whole-person paradigm” which forms the core of General Magic’s design philosophy. In this model, a computer system should satisfy people’s basic desires to understand, to know, and to communicate.

Using this framework, Purdy views the first class of applications as personal information managers (PIM) which enable people to organize their thoughts and plans when not communicating. The second class of applications centers around communications, in particular, intelligent communications. He feels that Newton’s Intelligent Assistant seems to be a likely candidate for this class of application. In addition, he strongly feels that current communications must be made increasingly transparent to the user. Purdy also likes General Magic’s Telescript as an enabling system for sending intelligent messages. He predicts that “people are going to be buying agents like they buy Nintendo cartridges. Today, kids have 40 cartridges, and I’ll probably have 40 key agents out of thousands and thousands of Telescript-based agents out there that will do a lot of creative things for me through the wireless ether of communications.”

The third class of application enables users to connect to information resources external to their mobile personal devices. These resources can range from corporate databases to consumer services such as city maps and guides. Purdy notes that “sixteen gigabytes of stuff doesn’t need to be put into a handheld. An intelligent way of getting access to the information and making it useful to me is what I’ll have this infrastructure for.” In this way, we may even see the concept of what may be called “killer information.”

As we try to better integrate these mobile devices into the enterprise at one end, the emergence of a class of truly consumer-oriented devices at the other end may be potentially more interesting. Purdy thinks there are several factors that are essential to success in this market. While an attractive price point is important, he feels that ease of use as measured by the “out-of-box time” is the most important. To him, this means getting good use from a device without reading a user’s manual. “I don’t think anybody has ever read an instruction manual on how to use a Sony walkman.” When this occurs, he predicts that the real money will appear not in the margin of the hardware products itself, “but instead in the information, the software, and the accessories and networks that are going to be available to be attached to.”

He went on to stress the importance of good user-interface design in a successful product, especially when compared to the conventional hardware issues such as weight and battery life. He explained by describing the early market research conducted at Poqet when designing the Poqet PC. “When we asked people about the Poqet PC, they told us that the most important things were small size, light weight, and long battery life. So we designed a system with small size, light weight, and long battery life and it didn’t sell. It didn’t sell because the user interface wasn’t right, the keyboard was too small, and you couldn’t read the screen very well. And when you came back at them and said you told us size, weight, and battery life, they said ‘yeah, but I thought I’d be able to use the damn system first.'” Because of this, Purdy considers these issues to be “secondarily important” to the primary issue of the usability of the product.

“When we asked people about the Poqet PC, they told us that the most important things were small size, light weight, and long battery life. So we designed a system with small size, light weight, and long battery life and it didn’t sell. It didn’t sell because the user interface wasn’t right, the keyboard was too small and you couldn’t read the screen very well.”

When it comes to picking his favorites in the field, Purdy acknowledges that it’s a difficult task because of the shortage of actual hands-on, real-life experience that one can get with these new and sometimes undelivered products. However, he is very impressed with Apple’s Newton architecture. When asked to project the best-selling PDA, he felt that it would be a horserace between Newton-based devices such as the MessagePad and the Tandy/Casio Zoomer. Purdy thinks that part of the reason it’s difficult to pick a clear winner is because the Newton and Zoomer devices will appeal to slightly different audiences. For example, he sees the Zoomer appealing to users that are less computer literate, while the Newton will attract people who feel comfortable with computers since it acts more as an intelligent support system. Purdy also feels that the Zoomer has a more defined use than the Newton and as such may be easier to use out of the box. He observes: “Look at the user interface design in Newton versus Zoomer and you will find that the Zoomer’s icons that are fixed at the bottom of the screen are apps, very quick and very directed. Newton’s, very interestingly, creates no apps on the bottom of the screen, they created functional tools which can be useful. In fact you have to hit the main button to pull up the menu to actually run the app.”

While Purdy feels that the Newton architecture may be a little harder to understand, he thinks it is also potentially the more powerful of the two. His views about the current breed of handheld organizers, however, is unequivocal. “We think that the organizer class machine is a dying breed like the slide rule and will go the way of extinction after we develop further versions of PDAs.”

In addition to the Newton/Zoomer rivalry, Purdy is awaiting the entry of perhaps the most powerful competitor of all — Microsoft. He anticipates the upcoming Microsoft WINPAD initiative to spearhead a battle that will be as intense as the PC/Mac war of the ’80s. He believes Microsoft’s strength will lie with their massive ISV community, and will look for them to leverage the ISV’s as a powerful competitive weapon. While Purdy acknowledges that Microsoft must maintain a strong link to their flagship desktop environment, he also believes that the company has the people-talent to build a solid architecture for the handheld distributive environment.

Purdy forecasts the U.S. PDA market over the next five years as:

And what about the rest of this year? Purdy sees “two big crazes going on right now in the manufacturing community: subnotebooks and PDAs — there is more energy focused on those two than anything else. If you’re talking about Dataquest customers in the manufacturing community, that’s where their two primary focuses are. You’ll see more on that developed and presented at COMDEX this fall than anything else.”