If, these days, you are a busy person, or a keenly-organised one, or a business executive who travels and likes gadgets, you may find yourself acquiring strange typing habits. Perhaps you only use your little fingers; or the edges of your fingertips; or a pen or a pencil, even, to peck more precisely at the keys. You probably type in public: on trains, at cafe tables, on streetcorners. You may feel nicely modern, bent over your personal organiser, great mineshafts of information and pulses of global communication beneath its slot of a screen. And just next to your tiny keyboard, the manufacturer's logo, most likely, will be an apparently unpronounceable word in yellow capitals: Psion.
It sounds Californian - another anonymous-but-crucial Silicon Valley conglomerate, like Sun Microsystems or 3Com. Or maybe East Asian. When Psion (pronounced "Sion") commissioned research about its country of origin two year ago, most of its customers thought it was Japanese. But Psion is British. Its name stands for "Potter Scientific Instruments Or Nothing", its founder was a physics professor, and its history has been as charmed and erratic as any aficionado of these islands' famed inventiveness could hope for. What is more, in the great profitless deserts of British computing and innovation, Psion has actually made money. It could be about to make a great deal more.
Since the early 80s, improbably at first but with steadily growing credibility, Psion has been selling an idea of the electronic future based on computers the size of pencil cases. While everyone else has been building faster, flasher machines, with features to please the nerds and prices to match, Psion has been producing far simpler, cheaper, more genuinely portable models. Until quite recently these were barely considered computers at all - a sort of electronic Filofax. On the business pages, Psion was praised, but modestly, as an "innovative" niche enterprise.
Now, rather suddenly, it is being compared to Microsoft. And not just by over-excited financial journalists: in October 1998, Bill Gates himself "leaked" a Microsoft memo to the US media identifying Psion as his vast corporation's "Number One Global Threat". Since then, other computing and communications conglomerates have been queueing up to collaborate with Psion, like sixth-formers begging for a glimpse of the upcoming exam questions. On Tuesday, Motorola announced a joint manufacturing deal. Nokia, Ericsson, Oracle, and Matsushita, among others, have already joined a project started by Psion, called Symbian, to create the operating system for the next great advance in computing: fusion with the mobile phone.
There are currently at least 380m mobile phones in the world. There are only 330m personal computers. Within two years, Nokia estimates, mobile phone numbers will have breached one billion. Day by day, it seems to be becoming clearer that people prefer their electronics small, cute, and pocketable - the way that Psion, more than anyone, has always built them - rather than desk-bound, boxy, and designed for offices. By next year, according to the publicist for Symbian, there will be "30 or so" mobile "communicators" or "smartphones" or "wireless information devices" for sale. They will combine telephone functions with email, internet access, and word processing.
The publicist looks up from his laptop computer, where his presentation program is unfurling in a giddy whirl of rhetoric and dollar symbols. "This is not a computing industry any more," he says, his smile suddenly gone. "Consumers will not tolerate what they've lived with up to now." On the table, his slim new laptop, which is not a Psion, suddenly looks like a lump of stone. He purses his lips. "I don't see this as an evolution."
The company was more modest at the start. In 1980, after two decades teaching at Cambridge and Imperial College and the University of California, an expatriate white Zimbabwean with restless eyes and a love of London called David Potter decided to take a punt on computers. He was already a successful semi-professional investor, and had £70,000 in spare profits. His curiosity had been stirred by the beginnings of Silicon Valley: "A couple of my colleagues [in California] went off and built a mini-computer in 1974," Potter remembers. "That impressed me hugely."
He founded Psion as a software company, writing computer games. Across Britain, other people were inventing hungry hardware; early on, Psion provided software for some of the personal computers sold by Sir Clive Sinclair. And as most of the new computer firms began to fail, cut down by recession and naive marketing, Psion managed to prosper. "We were very lucky," says Potter. "We made huge profits very early on." He hung on to these windfalls to sustain Psion when things got worse. "They made their own luck," says Sinclair.
In 1984, Potter unveiled his first Organiser. It cost £100, and was little more than a computerised filing system, plus a calculator. But unlike the rival products that soon followed - such as the Microwriter and the Agenda, which asked users to learn an entirely new way of typing - it was practical. By the mid-80s, Psions were being used, very publicly, by British Rail staff and Marks & Spencer. Potter the ex-academic, "analytical by nature", seemed to understand how to exploit novelty better than most entrepreneurs. "If you look at the computer industry over 40 years," he says now, a professorial boom entering his voice, leaning back in one of the many chairs in his office at Psion's London headquarters, "you get these disruptive transitions. Each time, the controllers of the technology, the high priests, lose power." A shark-like smile splits his long, tanned face. His eyes light with mischief. "This is all solid-state physics, ultimately."
In 1987, he confidently floated Psion on the Stock Exchange. Within a year, the share price had quadrupled; profits were surging up the graphs too. Two years later, both had collapsed. Psion, for all its cerebral self-awareness, had not yet learned a fairly obvious lesson about business: the more innovative a company is, the more it can suffer from its own "disruptive transitions". Each time Psion had a new product out, its customers would get excited and sales and profits would climb; but then, as the novelty eroded, and expectations about the next new gadget began to grow, people would stop buying and wait. In the meantime - which might be several years - Psion would be spending millions on research and development. The stock market, not known for its patience, would panic. At the memory, Potter's face abruptly tightens - from playful inventor to beleaguered pioneer. "The major transition periods have been very difficult," he says.
Currently, Psion is enduring another. As it makes promises about Symbian, and all its associated miracles of minaturisation and communication, so some of the items Psion sells now - its latest range of silvery slim Organizers, its standard software packages - already seem old-fashioned. On Tottenham Court Road, London's ceaselessly competitive electronics bazaar, Psion's recently-launched organiser for the younger, "switched-on" market, the Revo, has already been marked down from £300 to £260.
Psion's shares have been lurching sharply up and down for months. The company website warns that "On-going investment in Symbian will continue to constrain... short-term profitability." Senior Psion staff, some long-term, have been leaving in greater numbers of late than feels comfortable. Since 1996, Potter, who is 56, has suffered heart alarms and surgery. He has given up the day-to-day running of the company to become chairman.
"My role is more of a guiding one these days," he says. His office at Psion is on the top floor, facing away from the ferment of central London; a glass wall gives onto dozing Mayfair rooftops, a terrace, drifting clouds. "In 1988, when we were about 120 people, I absolutely knew everyone," Potter continues. "A larger organisation becomes more... process-driven." He has been acquiring projects outside Psion. He has recently been invited to Downing Street to give a lecture on entrepreneurship. He is a regular on education quangos.
Meanwhile, across the corridor from his office, the new chief executive of Psion is plotting reform. David Levin is 20 years younger, a former management consultant, and has a background, not in electronics or new inventions, but in "venture capital" and "abrasives". He likes to whizz around his office on his chair castors. The view from his windows is of building sites, business premises being transformed or torn down.
Levin wants to turn Psion from a deviser of gadgets into "a platform for content". He fixes his eager gaze: "The category of organisers... is going to come to an end." The company needs to become more "market-driven", and less "technology-driven"; it must be "nimble", accept the need to "reinvent" itself. What all this means, in practical terms, remains a little unclear, for all Levin's chair-rolling and tumbling syllables. But he does mention one concrete initiative: he has sold off some of the company's factories.
Such reinventions have not always suited Psion. In 1996, it tried to become a high-street favourite by buying Amstrad, the consumer electronics firm. The deal failed. The plans for Symbian are a similar gamble. The alliance could quickly raise Psion from a vigorous but commercially-vulnerable company of middling size to something much bigger and more stable. Potter and Levin anticipate receiving a large and constant income, via licence agreements, from the makers of the new devices that use Symbian software. Or the great collaboration could crumble. Some of Psion's current allies seem to be hedging their bets: last December, Motorola and Nokia became investors in the Palm Pilot, an American rival to the Psion Organiser; the same month, Ericsson announced a link-up with Microsoft to develop mobile email.
Victor Basta, the managing director of Broadview, a consultancy specialising in the merger of computer firms, thinks this phoney war could last "a year or two". After that, as in many sorts of e-commerce, one or two conglomerates may be left standing. "Psion's got a pretty good shot," he says. "People have been saying Microsoft will kill them for a while now, and they haven't yet."
High above Mayfair, behind his glass wall, Potter disagrees that such all-consuming competition will ever loom. "No one company can manage the whole wireless future. You've got to be interdependent." He cites Europe's greater sophistication than the US, when it comes to mobile phones: in America, the network remains patchy and uncooperative because, he says, the telephone companies refuse to pool their resources. At board meetings for Symbian, by way of a contrast, Potter says he acts as "the Kofi Annan".
It all sounds very civilised. That the electronic future might be partly constructed, not by some pale perpetual teenager from the cold school of capitalism, but by "an old-fashioned liberal" who "believes in things", and finds the time to advise the South African government, for example, on how to better educate poor people, is a reassuring notion. Perhaps we will all become more like Psion users: keen on our machines, more practical in our use of them, more resistant to pure marketing, a bit patriotic or political even in the brands we favour.
There may be a few problems to sort out first, though. When the man from Symbian runs his demonstration program, the portable computer he shows is twice the likely actual size. Yet its screen is barely bigger than two matchboxes. He talks, quickly and a bit vaguely, about folding screens and putting the screen down the back and offering "not internet, but internet-type content".
Sir Clive Sinclair knows about such difficulties. "Whenever I'm at a meeting and we're deciding about dates," he says, "the people with diaries are always 10 times faster. But the people with Psions get terribly cross if you say so."
