Free at last: A case study in learning to love the unchained corporation of tomorrow.
It was a scene to give any IT guy chills: 12 top executives of Palm Inc. were meeting in the boardroom last December. As usual, attendees had opened their laptops, unsheathed their PDAs, and were attempting to log on to the company's wireless local-area network before getting down to business.
But this time, the network wasn't working in half of the room. CEO Todd Bradley and his staff were getting nothing but sluggish connections and frustrating error messages. Mike Allison, director of the company's global tech infrastructure, quickly found himself on the receiving end of an angry phone call from his boss, CIO Marina Levinson. "I don't get yelled at that often," Allison recalls, "so there must have been some urgency."
Allison was ordered to diagnose and fix the problem immediately. But he could find nothing wrong with the company's network or the building's Wi-Fi nodes. Finally, he discovered that someone had set up a so-called rogue network - an unauthorized Wi-Fi hub - and it was crowding out the corporate LAN at the access point serving the executive conference room. The execs sitting around the table were inadvertently logging into the rogue node - a dead end.
With the help of a laptop and Kismet sniffer software, Allison identified the position of the rogue network. To his astonishment, its signal emanated from the office of Eric Benhamou, the chair of Palm and 3Com.
A pioneer of computer networking in Silicon Valley, Benhamou is also an Apple enthusiast and a lover of Wi-Fi. He had brought from home a Mac laptop and an Apple AirPort, which he had installed himself on the corporate intranet. Allison politely informed Benhamou that his home-brewed wireless network was, well, mucking up the works. Allison turned it off, and the Palm executive boardroom was once again bathed in glorious, empowering radio waves from a legitimate 802.11 access point. Connectivity was restored, and all was well.
In its Silicon Valley offices, Palm has one of the most sophisticated wireless networks anywhere. Eighteen Cisco Aironet nodes cover 140,000 square feet across all three Palm buildings in Milpitas. Of the 700 employees on the campus, more than half have Wi-Fi cards. Palm also put in 30 Bluetooth access points throughout the offices to connect (albeit slowly) PDAs to the Internet.
Palm doesn't just want to unshackle its employees. The company needs to fully embrace a wireless workplace so it can road-test devices and stay on top of Wi-Fi trends. Even more important, it wants to remake itself into a dynamic illustration of a flourishing unplugged workplace, to help convince penny-pinching execs at other companies that it's worth bringing the technology to their offices as well.
Palm's future depends on it. Gone are the days of its first Pilot, when a portable digital calendar and phone directory were enough to persuade thousands to fork over $300. Those features are now commonplace in myriad devices. Today and for the conceivable future, the development of PDAs revolves around getting businesses to embrace wireless networking. Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Research in Motion, and a crowd of mobile-phone vendors in Asia and Europe are all elbowing their way into the market. Palm is on a mission to convince the world that it knows the business better than anyone.
For now, Palm's transformation is underwhelming. Employees are, as expected, working away from their desks. Outside headquarters, several sit tapping away at laptops, enjoying the Valley's warm sun. And in an empty conference room near the lobby, another employee, taking refuge from his cubicle, answers email. But most still work in their cubes, tethered to their Ethernet-hungry desktops and their voice-over-IP telephones - both of which are anchored to cables that snake through the buildings' floors.
Unlike far-flung university campuses and factory floors, where mobile connectivity is often the only alternative, corporate America has yet to fully embrace wireless networks. CIOs are nervous about security vulnerabilities. Companies know they can never fully cut the tether so long as workers need docking and recharging stations. And many firms are simply too comfortable in their use of Ethernet, a technology that contractors routinely install in all new office buildings.
For now, the heart of Palm's wireless transformation is in that cherished universal experience: the meeting. One of the most popular software apps around the office is Colligo Meeting, which allows six PDA owners, sitting up to 30 feet apart, to instruct their devices to find the first mutually acceptable meeting time. Once connected, colleagues can volley instant messages - a real-time meta-conversation that underlies whatever's transpiring. Palm staffers also use a Bluetooth application called Blueboard to scrawl messages to each other on the screens of their PDAs.
The downside of all this connectivity is, of course, more intrusion into what was formerly known as free time. "It used to be that just the cell phone could get you. Now I'm available on every channel, every hour of the day, if I choose to be," says Eric Klein, a group manager.
It also means more goofing off. More than once, says Klein, he's been running a meeting and noticed a colleague's fingers feverishly pecking away at a laptop or PDA. "There's no way a human can reply to an email and appear to be paying attention," he says.
Larry Birenbaum, who oversees wireless strategy at Cisco, says fighting the distraction of always-on Net access during meetings is simply a matter of developing a new code of conduct governing its use. "Imagine the caveman days," he says. "They had some meeting, and all of a sudden, someone brings in a chisel and stone to take notes. That must have been equally distracting. Over time, you get used to it."
Neither Palm nor Cisco thinks this is enough of a problem to restrict when employees can use computers or handhelds. But other Valley companies, like Wi-Fi hardware maker Proxim, ban laptops and other connected devices from some high-level powwows. "Just like the mobile phone, you have to set limits," says Proxim exec Maureen Smith.
Palm's wireless culture started, as always, with the nerds. In late 2000, when the company still operated from the campus of its former parent, 3Com, the engineering group tired of trying to get the old-school IT department to adopt the new 802.11b technology. So they decided to set up a network themselves. To avoid getting caught, "we had to somehow camouflage [the antennas]," sysadmin Darryl Lee recalls. The solution: Lee punched holes in empty Palm V and VII boxes, placed the antennas inside, and scattered them around the building. He and his cohorts put up 12 hidden nodes around two buildings, typically in cubicles near conference rooms. "Only the telltale cable [running to the antennas] signaled anything unusual," he says.
Yet the network was insecure. In 2001, some computer scientists at UC Berkeley announced they had cracked WEP, the wireless encryption standard, which was the only thing protecting Wi-Fi-enabled networks. Palm employees recall being able to drive down Tasman Drive in San Jose and easily hop onto Cisco's nascent Wi-Fi network, called Tsunami. Although the Palm setup was similarly vulnerable, at least it was small enough to hide from most such war-driving detections. And if the nerds' endeavor had risked exposing Palm's corporate LAN to hackers (for a short time), it was worth it. The outlaw experiment gave Palm a compelling glimpse into the future.
At the time, the company was betting big on the Palm VII, which could download email and calendar appointments over the Mobitext pager network. But just as word of Palm's Wi-Fi network spread from one employee to another, Intel subsidiary Xircom announced its first 802.11 "sled." Attached to a Palm m500 or 505, the sled let users surf the Net over Wi-Fi and get email hundreds of times faster than they could with the Palm VII. Soon, employees were discarding their Palm VIIs and upgrading their older models with the new Xircom attachments. And inside the office, workers preferred to connect via 802.11 rather than over sluggish wide area networks. Palm got the message: In August 2002, when the company moved to its Milpitas offices, Palm put in its current network of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth nodes. For security, these networks were placed outside the corporate firewall and safeguarded with a virtual private network that uses sophisticated encryption to keep away intruders. The experiment to prove that going wireless is worth it had officially begun.
When the first corporation pulls the plug entirely, "workers will become totally unchained," says Kenneth Berger, founder of San Francisco-based consultancy LogX Technologies. "Corporate culture will be changed in ways we can't fully understand." Employees will be free to roam anywhere they're needed. Conferences will take place spontaneously, no matter where the participants are. Phones may look like Star Trek badges pinned to clothes.
When Palm goes totally wireless, it will be an ironic moment in Silicon Valley history. Palm was, after all, bought and later made independent by 3Com, which was founded by Bob Metcalfe in 1979 to capitalize on his invention of Ethernet. Twenty-four years later, 3Com's protégé may help to make the wired network obsolete.
