The Old Diocesan Issue 13 - Magazine - Page 96
OBITUARIES
David Potter, then chairman of the British tech company he founded, Psion, presents a palmtop computer to Princess
Anne during her royal visit to Psion’s headquarters in Greenford, Middlesex, in October 1996.
Psion launched “The Organiser”,
the world’s first mass-produced
handheld personal computer, two
years later – a diary, address book,
notebook and computer in one. Psion
grew into a worldwide conglomerate
with offices in the UK, Boston,
Amsterdam and Frankfurt. For the
next 17 years, it was in the vanguard
of personal digital assistant products
(PDAs), continually developing
lighter and more powerful iterations.
In 1988, the company floated on the
London Stock Exchange. Eventually,
its market leadership in PDAs came
under pressure from Palm in the US,
as well as Japanese calculator
manufacturers Sharp and Casio.
With Psion valued at some £300million, David pivoted to licensing
software. In 1998, he helped to put
together a consortium of mobile
phone producers, including Nokia,
92 | THE OLD DIOCESAN
Ericsson and Motorola, to co-develop
the Symbian operating system.
Samsung, Sony and Matsushita
joined later. Based on Psion’s EPOC
software and using British ARM
processors, it would become the
industry standard for the mobile
phone market, enabling multitasking,
internet browsing and early app
ecosystems, and greatly influencing
later smartphone software.
Applicable to more than 100 types
of phones and installed on 125-million
devices, it outflanked US competitors
such as Microsoft to provide software
for more than three-quarters of the
world’s mobile phones at the time.
In 2004, Psion sold its Symbian
shares to Nokia for £136-million.
Symbian remained the world’s most
popular smartphone operating
system until 2010, before the rise of
Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.
David stepped down from his
executive role at Psion in 1999 but
remained chairman. The following
year, Psion bought the Canadian
company Teklogix to become Psion
Teklogix, focusing on manufacturing
business-to-business data-collection
hardware. Motorola bought Psion plc
in 2012.
“David is intellectually enjoyable
but intellectually fierce,” said a former
colleague. “You can’t go to him with
a half-baked idea. Even if you’ve got
90%, he spends time demolishing
you for the 10% flakiness.”
David leaves behind his wife,
Elaine, a former Sunday Times
investigative journalist, who worked
on the paper’s famous investigation
into the thalidomide scandal, and
with whom he launched the Bureau
of Investigative Journalism in 2010.
They had three sons.
