Jeff Hawkins, PalmPilot Inventor Click picture for a larger image.

When we last spoke to Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the PalmPilot and lead visionary, 3Com had shipped just over a million PalmPilots, and it was PalmPower's premier issue. Eight months later, PalmPower has grown to more than 300,000 regular readers and 3Com has shipped nearly two million Palm devices. And Jeff Hawkins and Palm Computing general manager Donna Dubinsky have left the company they founded. To learn more about these big changes, Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz spoke to Jeff on his first day of his new life, in this exclusive PalmPower Interview.

DG: Well the obvious question is, what caused you to make this decision? Was this something that was part of your original employment agreement with 3Com? What actually is the catalyst for this?

JH: Well, first of all, I'll preface my comments by saying that this is a very good thing for Palm and a good thing for 3Com. It may not seem this way on the surface, but it is. I'll explain why in a second. The reason I'm leaving and the reason Donna Dubinsky are leaving are similar but slightly different.

The fundamental reason is that we both view ourselves as entrepreneurs and enjoy the small company setting. And we'd like to get back into that. Our success at Palm has made Palm a big company and it's going extremely well. This is a good time to leave if you're going to leave someplace; when it's got a lot of momentum and being very successful. There's nothing acrimonious about us leaving at all. On a slightly different note, I think I have some products that I want to work on that I'm not sure fit real well with 3Com. I could have done them there if I wanted to, but I think they might be better done separately. We're planning on building those products in our new company. And those products will be built on the Palm Computing platform. We are going to be a licensee of the Palm Computing platform and have the Palm Operating System in the products. That's why it's good news for your audience is that we hope to produce some really great products that are part of the Palm story and will be compatible and offer some new and exciting things but still be from the Palm family.