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I was saddened to see an update from Adam Engst of TidBITs that Now Software is gone – John Wallace of PowerOn Software bids farewell on the company website. Id like to share some stories about a Now that was, and might have been. Very shortly after I moved back the United States, I landed a job at Now Software, then based in Portland, Oregon.  It wasn’t long before I became International Sales Manager at Now Software, owing to my expertise in working with Japanese mega-trading company Marubeni Corporation – in fact one of the largest corporations in Japan. It was an exceedingly exciting and difficult time. Incredibly popular Now Utilities was a best seller, and so was Now Up-to-Date and Contact.  During my time at Now, we were courted by several companies – Adobe, Netscape, IBM. It was just after the first wave of Palm Pilots hit the market, and the first Palm phone was under development. And some wonderful things were happening in the labs.

We had a fantastic demo of using NUD&C to render event and contact information to something called compact HTML. The notion was to enable business people to be able to exchange contact information and plan meetings remotely on a mobile device  and all synchronized on a server. This was an incredible development considering this was also well before Microsoft shipped Outlook. It was also a vision that intrigued management at Qualcomm.

But it also happened during a particularly dark time for Mac OS software. Macintosh software was disappearing from store shelves, though thankfully, Now products were reasonably stocked both domestically and abroad. Apple had shipped an update to OS 8 that not only duplicated some of the best parts of Now Utilities, but also so profoundly broke Now Utilities that it almost spelled the end of the product. In fact, the Now Utilities development team had mostly fled at that point, many to other local companies like Extensis. Our Japanese partners insisted on one last set of improvements, so I persuaded one developer to come back and provide an update – one that shipped in Japan almost immediately, but Qualcomm didn’t release to the English speaking world long, long after.

Being acquired by Qualcomm looked like a shiny moment – Eudora was the best selling email software at the time.  Now had already negotiated a deal for NUD&C to become the Mac Desktop for the Palm Pilot.  I joined Qualcomm, and made several journeys a month down to San Diego as International Sales Manager. I plugged Eudora into some new countries, but it was already well represented in most major markets. I didn’t like what I was seeing at Qualcomm though, and the Now products did not seem to fare well – from day one. Qualcomm then was an incredibly vertical and secretive company. They were very invested in CDMA technology and a satellite business, so the secretiveness wasn’t without reason, however a culture of secretiveness permeated all levels that I had contact with. That is when I left to start my second company, Proactive International.

There was a huge amount of squandered potential. With the Palm Minstrel and the alpha/beta quality technology we had at Now, many of the features celebrated years later with the RIM Blackberry could have been realized. I also was in discussions with a large Japanese auto navigation company to work with location based data and their system.  Then add email, and event based news. This was all in the mid 90s.

When PowerOn finally got NUD&C (after having also picked up Now Utilities), I know they didn’t think much of the ancient source code and wanted to start afresh.  As far as I can tell, the products just sat at Qualcomm. The old code base for NUD for Windows was terrible and due for replacement anyway – something the PowerOn guys reminded me of when I ran into them at MacWorld. I knew the PowerOn team would give the product lots of love – but finding a place between Apple and Microsoft isn’t easy and it doesn’t surprise me that Nighthawk never landed.