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Donna Dubinsky (born July 4, 1955) has played an integral role in the development of personal digital assistants (PDAs) serving as CEO of Palm, Inc. and co-founding Handspring with Jeff Hawkins. Her management skills helped keep Palm Inc. financially viable after the failure of its pen computing device in the early 1990s. Fortune Magazine has nominated her together with Hawkins to the Innovators Hall of Fame while Time Magazine named the pair as part of its Digital 50 in 1999 for their contribution to the development of the PDA.
Early Years
From a Jewish background, Donna Dubinsky grew up in southwest Michigan where her father worked as a scrap dealer. She went to a high school were armed guards had to keep order but eventually ended up going to Yale University where she majored in history in 1977. Dubinsky then worked for the Philaedelphia National Bank for a while before obtaining a MBA from Harvard Business School in 1981.
After graduating from Harvard Business School, she went to Apple Computer where she started work as a customer-support officer but by 1985 was running its distribution network. However, she became unhappy at turf warfare to protect the network.
In 1987, Bill Campbell recruited her to a senior position in Claris, a software company that Apple spun off to improve its performance. Dubinsky was responsible for international sales and marketing and within four years, her group was responsible for 50% of Apple's sales. However, Dubinsky decided to leave when Apple brought the company back in 1991 and took control back.
Palm Inc.
After a brief sabbatical in Paris painting, Dubinsky contacted Bill Campbell in 1992 who introduced her to Jeff Hawkins. Hawkins was looking for a CEO to manage Palm Inc which would join with other companies such as Tandy Corporation and Casio. The consortium produced a PDA called the Zoomer PDA on October 1993 just after the Apple Newton. Zoomer was a market failure like similar products developed by Hewlett-Packard, Sharp and Toshiba.
By 1994, companies had spent a billion dollats to develop PDAs without any of them capturing the imagination. Most of the campanies either left the market or in Apple's case kept on issuing new versions of the same product. However, Palm took a different route commissioning market research showing that its customers were business users who were looking for a faster, simpler device that connected with their computers. The consortium fell apart but due to Dubinsky's frugal management had enough cash left to develop a new device that would meet the markets needs.
Palm Inc. decided to take full responsibility for the manufacture, programming and distribution of a new product which it labelled Touchdown. However, it struggled for a couple of years to find support to bring the product to market. In 1995, Dubinsky organised meetings with U.S. Robotics that would lead to that company taking over Palm Inc. for $44 million and bringing the Touchdown to market under the new name of the Palm Pilot.
The first Palm Pilot went on sale in April 1996 and by the middle of the year the product had become a smash selling 400,000 units during 1996. In its first 18 months, more than one million units of the Palm Pilot had been sold. The success of the Palm Pilot was one of the crucial factors that led 3Com to offer $7.8 billion for U.S. Robotics in 1997.
Handspring Inc. and beyond
Dubinsky, Hawkins and Palm marketing manager Ed Colligan quickly became disillusioned with 3Com's plans for Palm Inc. and left in June 1998 to found Handspring. Their track record and the tech boom that was then underway in the US meant that the trio were easily able to finance their new company.
Dubinsky was the CEO of the new company which managed the get its first product, the Handspring Visor, in September 1999. The company decided to target the lower end of the market. Within a year, the company had managed to capture 25% of the market. Handspring also became a leader in the market of smartphones with the Treo. However, the early years of the 21st century was not as kind to technological companies as was ther 1990s and Handspring merged with Palm Inc. in 2003 to form PalmOne, Inc.. The new company is the market leader in PDAs. Dubinsky became a director of the new company in 2003 and is also a director of Intuit.
Dubinsky adopted a child from Russia in the mid 1990's and married Len Shustek in 2001.
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