• While the bulk of UI features on the PalmPilot are very well designed, the PalmPilot team has implemented some baffling user interface elements. The most obvious: to drop a menu that's at the top of the screen, you need to click a button on the bottom. Mac, similarly, has many UI elements that are excellent and intuitive, yet ejecting a disk requires a counter-intuitive drag to the trash.

• The PalmPilot UI was prototyped on a Mac, using HyperCard.

• Many employees of Palm are former Apple employees. That's not reason on it's own to be concerned however. Both firms are in Silicon Valley and if you thought you could link any actor to Kevin Bacon easily (i.e., Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon), you can definitely link employees of any one Bay Area technology company to another in many fewer hops.

• The device strikes a chord with its users. Like Macs, the PalmPilot often appeals to its users in a very personal way. For lack of a better set of words, it "fits" instantly to some users. This has been the same for the Mac.

• As a result, users aren't just users. Users are enthusiasts. Or maybe even fanatics.

How PalmPilot differs from Macintosh
Obviously, the PalmPilot is a handheld and the Macintosh is a desktop computer. Even with the similarities, the PalmPilot isn't truly a chip off the old block. For instance:

• The PalmPilot is affordable and was designed to be affordable. Apple always charged a premium for the Macintosh experience -- to their detriment.

• One of the things that always ticked off Mac users was the tendency of Apple to not provide an upgrade path. USR/3Com provided a fair upgrade path for Pilot 1000 and 5000 users to the new PalmPilot machines.

• Apple was always against licensing the MacOS. While 3Com clearly hasn't made licensing their most externally visible priority, many 3Com execs have told me that their licensing program is very important to them and they've done deals with IBM, QualComm, Symbol, and FranklinCovey.

• There's unquestionably hype about the PalmPilot. But the relentless and often self-destructive and self-denying "reality distortion field" of the Macintosh is not in much evidence.

What, me worry?
One of my earlier companies was a Macintosh development company. It suffered as Apple changed directions and went back on promises. I felt the joy of working with an exceptional device and the absolute panic when Apple, a company I'd learned to trust, proved to be psychotic and self-destructive.

And like many other Macintosh developers. I lived to tell the tale. I even wrote a book about it called "The Flexible Enterprise".

There are aspects of working with any company and platform that can cause company executives to lose sleep. Certainly, relying on Microsoft (or worse, partnering with them) is no picnic.