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AnchorDesk

David Coursey
Here's what's wrong with Microsoft's Tablet PC

David Coursey
Executive Editor, AnchorDesk
Friday, November 8, 2002
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It may sound silly, but the success--or failure--of the tablet PC could hinge on the answer to one question: How rude is it to type during a meeting?

Tablet PCs have been all over the news this week, both prior to and after yesterday's introduction of the Tablet PC version of Windows by Bill Gates in New York. (Check out the video here.) My colleague David Berlind was at the launch event. My boss Pat Houston, along with several other ZDNet writers, has been playing with sample tablets for the past couple of weeks.

(You can find Josh Taylor's review here, a ZDNet round-up review here, and a video demonstration of the new Fujitsu Tablet PC here.)

BASED ON conversations with my colleagues, my own experiences with tablets, and my discussions with Microsoft, I think tablet PCs face some pretty stiff challenges in the marketplace.

David Berlind spoke to me and my radio audience from the back of a cab headed toward the airport after the Tablet PC launch. He said something that gave me pause: He admitted that he's a much more efficient note taker using a keyboard than a pad and pencil.

Later, unaware of Berlind's comment, Pat Houston made the same observation about his kids, saying that they're so adept with keyboards that he's not sure they'd ever use a pad for taking notes.


  Bill Gates introduces Microsoft's Tablet PC operating system.

Watch now

David tries out Fujitsu's new tablet PC.

Watch now

Pat Houston checks out FranklinCovey's TabletPlanner.

Watch now
The point being, if you don't want to use a tablet PC to take written notes (which it stores and indexes as graphical ink), how attractive will tablets be as a general purpose computing platform?

As has been firmly established elsewhere, the handwriting recognition technology in Microsoft's Tablet PC software isn't ready to reliably transform those notes into digital text. And as I've admitted previously, because the handwriting recognizer in Tablet PC can't read my upside-down-leftie scrawl (which, to be fair, I can't read much of the time myself), I'm a particularly bad candidate to test that part of Tablet PC's repertoire.

MICROSOFT SAYS the tablet PC will be a boon to what it's calling "corridor warriors"--knowledge workers and management types who spend much of their day going from meeting to meeting and who want a more efficient way to take and store notes from those meetings than the paper and pen they use today.

But why are they using paper and pen? I think it's because there's an unwritten social rule against typing in meetings. It's easier to look like you are actually "in" the meeting when using paper and pen than a keyboard. The paper and pen (or its tablet PC analogue) are pretty much silent, compared to the clatter of a keyboard. Someone taking keyboard notes can look more like a transcriber than a meeting participant.

So, change the social taboo against typing at the conference table during a meeting, and a good bit of the tablet PC's potential allure vanishes. Do I think people are going to suddenly warm up to a chorus of key clicks in meetings? Or to meeting participants whose typing makes them seem to be occupied elsewhere?

Probably not. But if and when tablet PCs start showing up in the meeting rooms of America, the sound of keyboards clicking could become more common as well, as tablet PC have-nots demand equality.

We've come a long way from the days when Lotus 1-2-3 arrived with all the inevitability of an avalanche. Now we've got an important new PC technology, the success of which could be entirely stymied by a small change in business etiquette.

ANOTHER BIG REASON to be skeptical about the tablet PC: A pen can only take you so far. Whether you're surfing the Web or browsing e-mail, eventually you have to enter text. And then you either need better handwriting recognition than MS's Tablet PC software can provide, or a keyboard.

Berlind told me that switching back and forth between pen input and a keyboard--even the onscreen keyboard--could be enough of a productivity sinkhole to offset any gains the new form factor affords.

Finally, there's the price. One of the key applications Pat tested was the Tablet PC version of the famous FranklinCovey planner. He told me it's a nice piece of work, if you don't mind spending about $2600 ($2400 for the tablet PC hardware plus $200 for the FranklinCovey software) for something a $100 paper-based system does as well. (See Pat's video demo here.)

Despite these challenges, Berlind, Houston, and I agree (for once) that Tablet PC is likely to be a boon for specialized applications that don't stretch handwriting recognition too far. Likewise, people who find Windows Journal (the Tablet PC note-taking app) to be adequate for their needs regardless of recognition will be well-served.

BILL GATES PREDICTED yesterday that by the end of the decade, digital ink will be as common a user interface element as the graphical user interface is today. I think he's probably right, although by that time a voice user interface should be very common as well.

Microsoft is already looking at making digital ink useful in a variety of ways that don't require recognition, while at the same time continuing to improve the recognition engine that powers Tablet PC. Using a pen to edit onscreen documents or to actually write instant messages and e-mail--all three already demonstrated--may prove a turn-on for potential users. And I know some users who are constantly sketching out ideas on whatever piece of paper is handy; the tablet PC could be great for such visually oriented thinkers.

But for now the jury is still out on Tablet PC and whether the technical progress Microsoft has made--and will make in the next year or so--will be enough to establish it in the marketplace. Of course, as notebook prices continue to fall, tablet technologies are likely to end up as standard options in the notebooks of 2004 or 2005. That, I think, is what Microsoft is counting on.

What do you think? Would you buy a Tablet PC? Why? Take my QuickPoll below, and TalkBack to me! 

Would you buy a tablet PC (assuming it cost about $250 more than a standard notebook)?
Yes
No

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