From PR Wire: "Geoworks Cancels Special Stockholders Meeting Due to Lack of a Quorum. Company Will Explore Alternatives Including Bankruptcy."
A pathetic ending for a once great little company. There are enough stories behind that little press release to fill a book. Geoworks was founded 20 years ago, and went through more lives (and management reshuffles) than a cat. It had a lot of great firsts, but it was also a company that had a real gift for giving up on a market after shipping its first product, just before that market took off, e.g. one of the first commercial GUI OS's, GEOS; one of the first PDA's, the Casio Zoomer; and the first dedicated smartphone OS, GEOS-SC.
I put five years of my life into the company, spending many late nights in the office and many weeks in Japan. And I was part of some great things -- building a great embedded GUI OS, GEOS-SC, code name "Liberty," from scratch, shipping some of the world's first real smartphones, the Toshiba Genio and Dialo. I got to work with some really smart and good people. But I also got learn how greed and stupidity at the top of the corporate organization will doom the efforts of those below them, no matter how smart or hard the people below them work. Geoworks built up a world class engineering organization, but could never decide what it wanted to do with it (Geoworks eventually sold one part of it in Seattle to Amazon for a pretty penny). The founder was replaced with a series of executives who were smoother and would be more likely to please the market. Some of them were quite good at talking up the stock, but none of them were any good at leading a company. I worked with a lot of other people building up an OS business then watched it get thrown away, because it wasn't sexy enough for "the market," and because it supposedly wouldn't be as profitable as the wireless services business, which itself proved in the end to be a mirage.
I quit when I became convinced of the utter lack of integrity of my then boss, David Thatcher, the latest CEO at the time. He has now pled guilty to conspiring to commit securities fraud at a subsequent company, Critical Path, and is facing 1 to 5 in the federal pen, so I at least have the satisfaction of having my judgement confirmed.
Bitter? I sound bitter, but I'm really not. I had a great time, I worked with some great people, made some lifelong friends, and I learned a lot. I just rue the waste of all that energy, talent and drive. A lot of it was just thrown away.
Posted by Geodog at January 8, 2003 10:46 PM | TrackBackMy apologies, but my web hoster has turned off commenting, due to a flood of obscene spam bringing the server to its knees. I hope to have this weblog transitioned over to Wordpress in the near future, so that I can have commenting up and working again. Until then, please feel free to send me your comments via my email contact form.. Please ignore everything below this comment.
Can't disagree with anything you've written. In hindsight ("in a nutshell" :-), I'm just happy I left before the Thather era. But I loved my time at Berkeley Softworks / Geoworks -- the best bunch of people I've ever worked with, a group capable of amazing things.
And although Geoworks is on its deathbed, GEOS lives on. Breadbox is continuing to develop GEOS, and I still support it over at Två Katter
Posted by: Gene on January 10, 2003 12:01 PMI spent some wacky times at Geoworks. I stayed a little longer than I should have (with the result that I got pushed when I should have jumped), but I did learn a lot there. (I still enjoy shocking interviewers by talking about my first job--working on an SDK for "object-oriented assembly language". A marktetoid at Sun flatly refused to concede that such a thing was possible...)
But, man, was that place fucked up. I left at the end of '94, and all the signs were there even then. I remember at a company party when the CEO (Brian, back then) asked me what I was up to. I talked about working on the assembly toolkit docs. He went berkserk because he was under the impression that the SDK had already moved to C, which would've been much more marketable, if we could've done it, which we couldn't... (That was when I learned Corporate Lesson #1: Never say anything to the CEO!) I remember Brian setting impossible goals, with the motto "If you don't strive for the impossible, you'll never achieve it." (Which, as I noted back then, was the special case of the general principle "You'll never achieve the impossible. That's why it's called 'impossible'.") I remember by manager finding out that the stock option package we all had--including him--which we'd been told was the "engineering package", was actually one fourth the size of the option grants engineers got. (Who remembers when that list of corporate salaries got leaked?)
Wacky times. Don't miss those times much.
Posted by: Andrew Solovay on January 10, 2003 12:41 PMI am glad for my GWRX time -- as if I'd suffered throuh some kind of Fraternity pledge week upon entry into the real working world (it was my first post-college job). While it is happening, you think it is worth it. You think if you endure the pain you'll have some kind of special status in the world. After its over you have a bit more perspective about what you got for what you gave up.
I have no regrets. What I did there was almost as fun as the people I did it with. Next time I'll tie up less of myself in the work and value the people more.
Posted by: Matt(a) on January 10, 2003 02:35 PMI can hardly say I saw it all at Geoworks, given I started in June of 1996, almost 15 years into it's illustrious history. I did, however, see some of the most tumultuous years I could have imagined. In my first year I worked in the developer support group for GEOS. For the next year I was a part of the Mekambo project, the embedded browser for low-end smartphones. Not more than a year later I was on the Java application server project, Jellyfish. Some people work on one project for a decade. At Geoworks, hardly any project lasted more than five years.
In a way it was fun working on so many projects. Unfortunately, it isn't how you make a successful business. I never knew what was going on at the management level, so I can't say with certainty what brought about the demise of Geoworks. I believe it was a combination of poor timing, poor decisions, and sometimes a lack of decision-making. Greedy CEO's didn't help much either.
In the six years that I worked at Geoworks, I saw more layoffs than I care to remember. Near the end of my term at Geoworks, I was one of two people working on the Jellyfish project, and I kept at it because it was the best project I ever worked on. Even now I miss Geoworks. Granted, it was sad in the end, having watched so many of my friends leave, but Geoworks was a very cool place to work.
And it had a lot of cool people to work with.
Posted by: Nathan on January 10, 2003 10:41 PMI remember a lot of good lunches with the Geoworks engineering team. They were fun, and I learned more about OSs during those lunches than I ever did in school.
Hoo boy, David Thatcher sure made me lose my appetite.
Posted by: Anonymous on January 11, 2003 07:22 PMThere was an ad, in the late March, 1998, NY Post, advertising a hot new product, namely a Color GeoBook, from Brother, & still use it, once inawhile. 3 Windows devices have bitten the dust, since then. Finding out that the real Palm OS, was developed by GeoWorks, causes me to realise that Gates isn't the only guy in town.. I expect my Palm m130 to last awhile, while my GeoBook & Danger Hiptop, last awhile? Who needs Windows?
Posted by: Mike on December 12, 2003 03:31 PM