Memsen offers a device scheduled for production in 2006 that will compliment your future of the PC scenario quite nicely. See the Click n’ Share Keychain at http://www.memsen.com for a look at true mobile file sharing capability and its impact on real life digital file sharing in mobile settings. We will now move from PC to PC file sharing only to true portable device to device sharing with Memsen’s Ultrawideband products.

Cheers!

Very good, well-researched and thought-provoking article. But I have to take issue with your view of the Tablet PC. It’s not that your view skews the article, not at all (it’s insignificant relative to your overall message). My objection is that you’re spreading misinformation about the Tablet PC.

From Microsoft’s point of view, the Tablet PC is NOT an “unmitigated disaster”. They were quite happy with the ~400K units shipped in 2003. What’s missing is an understanding of WHY Microsoft created the Tablet PC in the first place. It was NOT intended to be a “totally new mobile platform”, regardless of what their PR and ad agencies said. (Those message were just to get the product started. Already Microsoft’s messaging is starting to move away from the theme of extreme portability towards mainstream usage of the pen.)

Microsoft has a simple but hard-to-achieve goal: add a third input device to the PC. Today the two primary input devices are the keyboard and the mouse/touchpad/pointing stick. But these devices aren’t very good at some things, such as (a) sketching, (b) annotating documents, and (c) taking digital notes without making noise. These three things highlight the value of the pen. Without a pen, you can’t do these things very well, especially while mobile.

So, how should Microsoft go about add another input device to the PC? Just tell the OEMs to add it like Firewire? It’s not that simple. The pen needs software support in the OS and from ISVs. Firewire and many other hardware additions don’t. This means that Microsoft can’t just cram the pen down the OEMs’ throats like they normally do with new hardware.

As a solution to the problem, Microsoft created a mobile platform where the pen makes sense (the Tablet PC). The role of the Tablet PC is (a) get the world used to the idea of a pen on a PC, and (b) start ISVs modifying and developing software that takes advantage of the pen. An example of the latter (that hasn’t happened yet) is Adobe Acrobat, often used for annotation of documents. Acrobat doesn’t currently support Microsoft’s digital ink standard, but it will eventually.

Microsoft doesn’t sell PC hardware. They don’t have any allegiance to any particular hardware form-factor. They don’t care how many OEMs get burned creating new hardware platforms that never go anywhere. (Just think about the three generations of Windows CE hardware that were born and died before the iPAQ hit the sweet spot!) To Microsoft, the Tablet PC is just a means to an end. If the sales stay in the “few percent” range over the next few years, that’s perfectly OK with them. They are gradually accomplishing their objective. They take a MUCH longer view of this than anyone ever realizes, especially the media! Writers like you and many others believe that if a new product doesn’t take the market by storm and rack up more than 10% penetration in a year or two, it’s a failure. With a consumer product such as the iPod, that’s probably true. But the Tablet PC isn’t an iPod. It’s a different beast with a different purpose in life and a different lifespan.

The next piece of the puzzle is Longhorn. Today, to write a pen-enabled application you have to do special stuff — you have to use the Tablet PC SDK. The pen isn’t integrated into the OS, it’s really just an add-on to XP Pro. Longhorn changes that situation drastically. Take a look at an architecture diagram of Avalon (Longhorn’s presentation subsystem) and you’ll see that the pen (digital ink) is fully integrated everywhere. When Longhorn is released at the end of 2006, there will no longer be a separate Tablet PC OS because it won’t be needed. Microsoft believes that the four years of Tablet PC hardware development (2002-2006) and the steadily increasing number of pen-enabled applications from ISVs will pre-dispose the market towards accepting the pen in Longhorn. If the pen is totally integrated in Longhorn, and if OEMs know how to build a pen into a laptop (which they will have been doing for four years), why wouldn’t both ISVs and OEMs start to consider how & where their products could take advantage of digital ink?

By the end of 2009 (three years after the Longhorn launch), Microsoft expects that the percentage of standard laptops that incorporate a pen in some form will be somewhere between 25% and 50%. There won’t be any “convertible Tablet PCs” in 2009 because a laptop with a pen will be mainstream. That’s not to say that all laptops will become convertibles, not at all. Consider that if all you need to do is sketch and annotate, why not allow your laptop screen to open 180 degrees and lie flat on the table? If the laptop has a wide-angle screen (160 degrees all around), using the pen is perfectly OK with the laptop flat on the desk. That’s one of the reasons that Microsoft is pushing the LCD vendors and OEMs so hard towards wide-angle screens.

End of 2002 to end of 2009 — that’s seven years! Do you see why I say that Microsoft is taking a very long-term view of the Tablet PC? And why I say that the Tablet PC is NOT a new form-factor, but instead simply a vehicle to help drive the pen into all PCs?

Why does Microsoft care about adding the pen as a third input device in all PCs? Listen to some of Steve Ballmer’s speeches and you’ll hear him say, “We want you to use the PC 16 hours a day!” He doesn’t mean sit in front of a screen for 16 hours, he’s talking about integrating the PC (in many different form-factors) into every aspect of life. In the office, in the car, in the living room, in the recreation room, on the road, on your wrist, in your pocket, everywhere. What’s missing that’s needed to enable that integration? Actually, many things, including OS reliability, simplicity of operation, security, etc. — but that’s a different story. What’s also missing is “more input devices”. You simply can’t do everything with a keyboard and a mouse if you’re going to integrate the PC into your life. Pen and speech are two critical input devices that Microsoft has been working on for many years. Speech is coming along, but it will still be 5-10 years before it meets the average user’s expectations. Pen is much closer to being ready. There are some issues, like the cost of the required active digitizer, but Microsoft is working hard at getting that cost down (for example, by pushing other digitizer vendors into the market, to break up Wacom’s monopoly).

That brings up the subject of handwriting recognition. Three paragraphs after your “unmitigated disaster” comment, you talk about “doing away with the keyboard and using the stylus for input”. That is NOT Microsoft’s vision or goal. The pen IS NOT a replacement for the keyboard, and it will never be. Handwriting recognition is steadily improving, but it’s still nowhere near accurate enough, fast enough and easy enough to correct. Nobody will consistently use the pen instead of a keyboard, except in two special situations. The first is taking notes in a meeting when it’s rude to use a keyboard. The reason for using a computer rather than paper in this situation is simple: take the notes in digital form so they can be searched later. It’s not necessary to explicitly convert them to text — after all, how often do you transcribe notes from your spiral notebook into Word? Probably less than 10% of the time. As long as the notes are searchable (via the “magic” of background recognition, of which the user is never aware), that’s all that’s needed. Wouldn’t you love to be able to search the notes in your last ten years’ worth of spiral notebooks?

The second situation is when you’re using the computer on the couch, or reading in bed, or whatever, and you need to enter a file name to save some notes, enter a URL, or scribble a really short handwritten email, etc. This activity uses explicit handwriting recognition, and it must work very well for users to accept it. But it’s NOT replacing the keyboard. It’s just a convenience for when the keyboard isn’t readily available or convenient to use.

Look at Microsoft’s ads on the Tablet PC. You won’t see much mention of handwriting recognition. You’ll see lots of mention of digital ink, which is what the pen is really all about. Sketching, annotation and note-taking are the three key applications for the pen. I’m talking about horizontal users (knowledge workers and consumers) here, not today’s vertical users such as nurses and insurance salespeople.

One final point. So far, the Tablet PC has been the only form-factor in which Microsoft would support a pen. But they recently and quietly announced that OEMs could now sell the Tablet PC OS on a desktop, as long as the desktop package included a monitor with an active digitizer (a so-called “tablet monitor”). If you look at the big picture, this makes sense. It’s another step on Microsoft’s path towards integrating the pen into all PCs.

In summary, the Tablet PC looks like “an experiment with the PC form-factor”, but it’s really not. Its purpose is as a vehicle for introducing the pen to the PC ecosystem. It’s one step on a 7+ year journey towards adding the pen as a third input device on all PCs.

Geoff Walker
Walker Mobile, LLC
Email: geoff.walker@att.net
Web: http://www.walkermobile.com

Also, a Tablet PC running Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition / 2005 can run all Windows XP Home/ Professional applications plus applications that take advantage of digital ink and advanced speech recognition’. So, when you compare it with the Sony, a Tablet PC can actually do more and you can get one for less money. (Check out Acer C112, for instance, it’s less than $1500 US.)