Sakoman Returns to Apple

Posted By: Ryan Thursday, March 6, 2003 11:46:22 AM

Steve Sakoman, the former Chief Products Officer for PalmSource, has returned to his former employer, Apple Computer, as a vice president. Sakoman recently left PalmSource amid the last round of job cuts.

"A lot of great people are coming to Apple for the opportunity to do innovative work like we are doing with Mac OS X and some of our other core technologies," Apple said in a statement at news.com.

Steve's was previously responsible for product marketing, engineering, and developer relations. He joined PalmSource with the acquisition of Be Incorporated in November 2001. Steve co-founded Be in 1990 and was the chief operating officer and served on the board of directors.

Prior to co-founding Be, he was a director of CPU development from 1984 to 1987 at Apple Computer, where he managed the hardware group responsible for the Apple II and Macintosh product lines. Steve also started and managed the Newton development team from 1987 to 1990. One can only wonder why Apple would want to rehire a handheld engineer...

Article Comments

 (6 comments)

The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. PalmInfocenter is not responsible for them in any way.
Please Login or register here to add your comments.

Comments Closed Comments Closed
This article is no longer accepting new comments.

Down

Might as well be now if ever

hkklife @ 3/6/2003 2:34:14 PM #
At no point since the late 1980's has Apple's (IMHO) standing in the public eye as a hip, trendy, innovative, and "have to have" company been higher. That can almost be entirely due to the phenomenal success of the iPod and the iMac (relatively speaking, of course). If anything, Joe 6-Pack's perception of APple is probably higher than it is with techies/industry insiders. With the iMac carrying the torch from, say, 1998-2001 and the iPod taking up the slack since then, now would be the best time for Apple to announce a handheld/buy a PDA manufacturer. The iPod has slowly (and quietly) morphed into a quasi-mp3 player/bare bones PDA and there's no reason to think that it could not serve as the basic underpinning of a PDA line.

With the storage space afforded by even a 5gig iPod hard drive, it would make all of the squabbles over MemoryStick Pros vs. SD cards a relatively moot point. Apple could stick in a small 2 or 1gig HD into a PdaPod (my name for it) and still be vastly ahead of the competition in terms of storage space. Of course, lack of firewire in most PCs would still be an issue, but Apple could always bundle a cheap 2-port PCI card in the box...

I have long wondered why Apple didn't attempt to at least stick a toe into the consumer digital camera market after having more or less launched it many moons ago but with the competition so cutthroat, it's easy to see why they'd rather focus on a feature-laden PDA instead. Hmm.....

RE: Might as well be now if ever
Fammy @ 3/6/2003 3:05:34 PM #
Being PalmInfoCenter.com, we'll hope for a PalmOS PdaPod.

That would be scary -- a PDA with a built in hard drive. I think the iPod proves that it can be done under $500 (a reasonable amount for a PDA - no offense Sony fans).

_____
Fammy

RE: Might as well be now if ever
gfunkmagic @ 3/6/2003 3:33:46 PM #
Although this is probably bogus, there were rumors over at cliesource a while ago about something called the NX70vx that supposedly had a 5 GB HD.

http://makeashorterlink.com/?W1B6246B3

I would be pretty skeptical about it though...

RE: Might as well be now if ever
jlc @ 3/7/2003 9:15:12 AM #
Yea, a iPalmPod (I'd really like them to call it the iNewton, but that'll happen about the time Jobs asks me to takeover Pixar), running OS5 with 5/10/20/30 gigs of memory would be real neet. Given Apple's penchant for design, it would have a great screen and form factor. Unfortunately, given Apple's penchant for "not invented here", I'd be real surprised if they went with PalmOS. It makes sense for tehm to use PalmOS - it already links with the Mac, is robust, small and modifiable (Apple could develop their own iPalmPod finder as a front end); which they could use to extend into tablets as well.

Of course, they could just want a smart enhineer to work on the mac.



RE: Might as well be now if ever
Javahead @ 3/7/2003 11:50:36 AM #
"Unfortunately, given Apple's penchant for "not invented here", I'd be real surprised if they went with PalmOS."

Actually, Apple didn't develop any of the internals of the iPod. Essentially, they came up with the design and outsourced all the work for the embedded OS (Pixo), firmware, DSP, etc.

In the case of the iPod, I think they realized that by outsourcing as much work as possible, they were able to bring a final product to market much quicker than if they had built it entirely on their own.

"Parking" at Apple for a while

RhinoSteve @ 3/6/2003 4:20:28 PM #
Guess the few weeks of testing the VC waters was that bad and he couldn't get the $10,000,000 he wanted to the latest and greatest trendy start-up. Sigh.

Welcome home Steve!

Top

Account

Register Register | Login Log in
user:
pass: