The Newton and the Hare

Negative reviews are bad enough, but when your company's new product is ridiculed for a whole week in Doonesbury, you know you've got a public-relations disaster.

Most products wouldn't survive such a withering blast. But Apple keeps plugging away with the Newton MessagePad, keeping a low profile while building for a hopefully brighter future.

``People ask me what it's like to work on the Newton,'' says Steve Capps, an Apple Fellow (senior scientist). ``I tell them I'm thick-skinned, but not thick-headed. We've got to stick with the Newton but be wise about it.''

Although the Newton MessagePad has not lived up to its early promises, it has quietly moved to the forefront of the embryonic market for PDAs (personal digital assistants). Rivals such as the Eo (owned by AT&T) have dropped out, and other competitors postponed t heir plans when they saw what happened to the Newton. That's giving Apple an opportunity to retrench and build a solid foundation of software developers, applications, licensees, vertical-market users, and experience.

The Newton's greatest strength is its operating system, perhaps the most advanced on any personal computing device. It's CPU-independent, and programs that are run on it don't have to be recompiled for different processor architectures. It's oriented around the task, not the application, so users can switch seamlessly among programs. Its persistent object database eliminates the hassles of file management and incompatible file formats. And its user interface is deceptively powerful, while shielding users from confusing hardware details. In fact, the Newton gives us a peek at the kind of operating systems we'll see on future desktops.

Without much fanfare, Apple is leveraging vertical markets to subsidize the development of true consumer PDAs. Newton MessagePads are being used by so ybean farmers to manage crops, by telephone technicians to communicate with central offices, by medical workers to record patient data, and by real estate salespeople to retrieve listings.

PDAs will inevitably succeed and become as widespread as calculators and Walkmans are now; the only question is whether Apple's commitment (or, indeed, Apple) will last that long. Capps thinks it will. ``[Apple CEO Michael] Spindler really gets it,'' says Capps. ``He understands that you have to think long-term about the Newton. You have to be very Japanese about this, thinking long-term while the product matures.''