Face value One Palm flapping

摘要

By rights, it should not have been this hard. Carl Yankowski, chief executive of Palm, the leading maker of handheld computers, is a former president of Sony's American operations. He is a big, dressed-in-black "gadget guy" with just the right combination of consumer-marketing experience and technology savvy to straddle the gap between computing and consumer electronics. From its start in 1996, Palm single-handedly generated the personal digital assistant (pda) craze, succeeding where many had failed before, and it is now leading a drive into the new wireless world. Computing meets telecoms meets consumer electronics—the palmtop becomes the new desktop. And here, or so it might seem, in the right place at the right time, is Mr Yankowski.