"It's all about applications and functionality, not technology": Jeff Hawkins Interviewed

The Treo 300 is one of my favorite products around, this interview with Handspring's Jeff Hawkins shows why:

I'm not a technology guy. I understand technologies, but I don't really get excited about technologies. I get excited about applications. I've been cautious about Bluetooth for many years, because I ask myself what a user would do with it. It reminds me of infrared. Infrared was in a bunch of products, but no one ever used it. And we didn't put it into the Palm Pilot until we had a great application for it.

We were the first people to make infrared popular. You could beam card information from one device to another. It worked 100 percent of the time, and essentially it became the first real successful consumer application of infrared in a computing device. It's all about applications and functionality, not technology.

Repeat after me. "It's all about applications and functionality, not technology". There is a reason this guy makes such great products.