Selling Women on PDAs from “Simply Palm” to “Audrey”: How Moore's Law Met Parkinson's Law in the Kitchen

Abstract

This essay investigates key moments in the history of personal digital assistant (PDA) marketing to women. Analyzing promotional texts for three PDAs that received considerable press coverage from 1999 to 2001, this essay explores the cultural significance of the convergence of anxieties about women's place in the gendered division of labor with the computer industry's changing marketing imperatives. Drawing on an array of promotional texts, including news articles, press releases, promotional Web sites, and ads appearing in newspapers and magazines, this paper tells the story of how the computer industry aimed to sell smaller, faster computing devices to women while promising to mediate and thus reproduce women's overwork as paid and familial laborers. After experimenting with the PDA as a sexy fashionable gadget for working women, marketers approached women as mothers with “Audrey,” an Internet appliance designed for the kitchen.

Keywords:

• PDA
• computer
• marketing
• advertising
• gender
• work
• domestication
• discourse
• Audrey
• Palm
• Moore's
• Law

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the National Communication Association conference in Boston, 2005.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the National Communication Association conference in Boston, 2005.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Carol Stabile, Linda Steiner, Jonathan Sterne, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

Notes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the National Communication Association conference in Boston, 2005.

1. Parkinson identified this “law” to satirize inefficiencies he observed during WWII.

2. An abbreviated discussion of Audrey appears in Rodino (2003).

3. In the early 1990s, PDA manufacturers targeted men by promising to enable male professionals’ anytime-anywhere work. Consequently, women accounted for 10% of Palm's PDA market in 1997 and 20% in 1998.

4. Norris (1990) argues that advertisers already courted women, in the decades following the Civil War (see p. 17 and chapter 4).

5. I calculated these figures by adding the average number of hours per day men and women spend caring for household children under six as primary and secondary activities (see U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2004, tables 9 and 10 available at: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.toc.htm). In the general population, women spend 1.6 hours more per day tending to household members and doing household chores and errands than do men (see table 1).

6. Such announcements contrast Census data from 1880–1910 that concealed women's work through categories that omitted many white female worker's (Geib-Gundersun, 1998).

7. The title of one Businessweek article from 1990 announced, “PC Makers, Palms Sweating, Try Talking to Women” (Reed, 2000).

8. Microsoft's newest handheld PC featured Windows CE program and color displays. Although Palm commanded 72% of the PDA market, forecasters predicted Microsoft would claim 55% by 2002 (Miles, 1999a). When 3Com bought U.S. Robotics in 1997, it acquired Palm Computing.

9. This ad appeared in Fortune, April 17, 1999, pp. 97–98. See http://www.palmpower.com/ issuesprint/issue199905/whiteboard.html. Accessed on June 5, 2006. Image courtesy of ZATZ publishing.

10. Around the time of Simply Palm's launch, women accounted for approximately 55% of Condé Nast Traveler's readership and 45% of Newsweek's. Regarding other outlets with ads for PDAs pitched at men, 40% of Forbes’ readers were women, 33% of Fortune's, 30% of PC Computing's, PC Magazine's, PC World's, and only 15% of Computer Shopper's (Mediamark, 1998).

11. Despite Palm's IPO, 3Com retained a 95% stake in the company (Miles & Kawamoto, 2000).

12. To view this image, click on the Palm PDA at http://www.palminfocenter.com/images/ img_ClaudiaPalm.jpg.

13. Founding members included Best Buy Co. Inc., Cisco Systems, CompU.S.A, General Motors, Honeywell, Invensys, Motorola, Panasonic, Sears, and Sun Microsystems.

14. To view Audrey, see Kanellos and Wong (2001), http://news.com.com/2100-1040-254497.html

15. The diffusion rate of television had also outpaced that of computers. Between 1950 and 1965, U.S. household ownership of television grew from 10% to 94% (TV Set Owners, 2005). During a comparable period in the home computer's development, household ownership of the computer grew from 8.5% of all households in 1985 to 51% in 2000 (NTIA, 2005).

16. Audrey lost date and time data each time I unplugged and moved the gadget around my home.

17. Although marketing executives have refused to release final sales figures, trade industry coverage suggests that sales were lackluster (Fried, 2001; Harrison, 2001; Kanellos & Wong, 2001; Shade, 2003). My efforts to obtain final sales figures from 3com executives were also unsuccessful. Audrey, however, lives on through hackers who use her as a web server and MP3 player (see http://www.audreyhacking.com/). T-shirts, mousepads, and mugs that promote the hacking Web site, each with a graphic of Audrey that reads “Hack me,” are available at: http://www.cafepress.com/audreyhack. Audrey sells on eBay for $25–50.

18. Hochschild (1989) argues that obscuring mother's second shift helps reproduce it.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michelle Rodino-Colocino

Michelle Rodino-Colocino, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Cincinnati