Newton & Palm Veteran Comes Back To Apple As Vice President

by , 8:30 AM EST, March 5th, 2003

Steve Sakoman has rejoined Apple as a vice president, according to an article at C|Net News. Mr. Sakoman was an Apple veteran in 1990 when he left the company to cofound Be, Inc. with Jean-Louis Gaseé. During his tenure at Apple he worked on the Newton product, and before that was in charge of CPU development at the company. When Palm bought the assets of Be, Inc. in 2001, Mr. Sakoman became the COO of that company, and was in charge of the team developing Palm OS 6. Handheld-oriented publication Brighthand reported on February 20th of this year that Mr. Sakoman had left PalmSource, while yesterday's C|Net article says that his new home is Apple. From C|Net:

Sakoman, who recently left his post as chief product officer at Palm software unit PalmSource, will report to Apple Senior Vice President Avie Tevanian, an Apple representative confirmed Tuesday. Sakoman, who most recently helped lead development of the Palm operating system, worked on the Newton handheld project, among other things during his previous stint at Apple.

"A lot of great people are coming to Apple for the opportunity to do innovative work like we are doing with Mac OS X and some of our other core technologies," Apple said in a statement.

You can read the article at C|Net News, including comments from Palm about Mr. Sakoman's departure.

The Mac Observer Spin:

Let the increased speculation on Apple working on a handheld/iPhone/iPad/iTablet commence! Seriously though, this is an intriguing move for Apple. The company has publicly forsworn PDAs, yet has hired one of the foremost PDA engineers in the industry to be a vice president. With Apple, that might very well be a coincidence, but it could signal something new coming from the company. We certainly hope so, and for our money, we also hope it has something to do with that iPhone trademark the company owns.

C|Net News