![]() And poor Sidekick got lost in the shuffle: The dumbed-down Sidekick 99 was the sad final version of a venerable PC mainstay. The aftermath: Six weeks before Sidekick 99 shipped, Kahn sold Starfish to Motorola, which said it would use the new acquisition’s mobile-synching technologies to “create a new generation of wireless devices that exchange information with each other as well as with a wide array of information sources, including PCs, the Internet and wireless service providers.” Instead, it didn’t do much of anything with Starfish. No wonder the predecessor, Sidekick 98, felt like the upgrade. Though the program was a trim 6MB in size, it had lost the earlier Sidekick’s phone dialer, many of its importing and exporting features, its ability to output HTML calendars, and even its spelling checker. Aside from some new PDA syncing features, almost all of its changes involved removing features. Kahn responded with the appealing-sounding concept of “slimware.” But Sidekick 99 wasn’t just slim it was positively emaciated. The bad things: By the late 1990s, many PC users were ticked off over bloatware–software that bulged with nonessential features and gobbled up excessive disk space. Debuting in 1983 as the first blockbuster product developed by1980s software wunderkind Borland International, it later traveled with Borland founder Philippe Kahn to his new company, Starfish Software. ![]() ![]() The product: No relation to the T-Mobile smartphones–which have problems of their own- Sidekick was an early PIM. ![]()
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