This week marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Canadian song writer and folk singer extraordinaire Stan Rogers. I lived in Michigan in the early 80s, and experienced Stan's amazing baritone when he brought the word to us heathens south of the border. He was still growing as an writer and singer when he was taken. Most of his material has been reissued on CD by the family label, and a few are available at Amazon with samples. If you've never heard Stan Rogers a cappella on NorthWest Passage or Old Maui, you've missed something in life.

Stan died in the fire on board Air Canada flight 797 on June 2, 1983, at the age of 33.
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Anytime Dan Gillmor and Richard Bennett weigh in on the same side, it may be all over but the shouting. But what the hey, I can pile on too:

The market verdict is now in - the stand-alone PDA is a niche market, and not a large one at that. It was overestimated out of a combination of wishful thinking, and the common tendency of the Valley to stare at its own navel, in this case inferring that the work and social habits in the hothouse are typical. I got my own object lesson on this last year when I tried to give away my old Palm after an upgrade, putting it up for first dibs on the family e-mail list. It took two tries to find a taker - one of my nephews is trying it out at school. We're not talking hicks - the siblings have gigs like senior design engineer or run chunks of companies. But they aren't Valleyites, and apparently their life styles didn't generate a need for the PDA bundle of functionality. Evidently they are more typical of the market than I am.

The PDA is going to become a set of features accreted onto mobile communications products. What features are in the core product is still very much an open question, which is the origin of the current 'Cambrian explosion' of diverse mobile devices. Given the poverty of user interface affordances dictated by form factor and energy budgets, trying to do everything at once is just not an option (that was the lesson from Palm's initial success). There's no particular reason, though, that there is just one answer and stable market position. For instance, I'm a confirmed e-mail junky and don't particularly like being Always On (thank you very much), while my partner prefers voice and the synchronous style. Why should we be buying the same bundle of features? Why should the outcomes in Europe and Japan resemble those here? This makes it very hard to call winners, including the RF standards and carriers of choice.
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