Pen computer business

In August 1999, when Microsoft announced ClearType, they also announced that they planned to create their own tablet "for computing, communicating and reading electronic books." To bolster the project, Microsoft brought in (among others) Chuck Thacker, a legendary computer innovator. While at Xerox PARC, Chuck was the chief designer on Alto, the first personal computer to use a bit-mapped display and mouse for user interface. Mr. Thacker is also the co-inventor of the Ethernet local area network. His current title at Microsoft is "Distinguished Engineer, Emerging Technologies Group." Clearly there's a heavy hitter at the core of this project!

In June 2000, Bill Gates demonstrated the very first prototype of the Tablet PC during the unveiling of Microsoft's .Net strategy. However, as it was such an insignificant part of the overall presentation, it received essentially zero press coverage.

Next, during his Comdex keynote in November 2000, Gates demonstrated an ID-enhanced prototype of the Tablet PC (beneath the dolled-up housing, the hardware was basically the same as it was in June). Gates positioned the product as "a full-function Microsoft Windows operating system-based PC incorporating the convenient and intuitive aspects of pencil and paper into the PC experience." What aggravated a lot of people in the pen computer business (including Pen Computing's editor Conrad Blickenstorfer--see his editorial in the March 2001 issue) was that Gates presented the Tablet PC as if it was a brand-new concept. It was as if the last 10 years of the pen computing business had never existed.

Press and analyst reaction to Gates' Comdex demo was not very positive. Largely it boiled down to "been there, tried that, need a keyboard." In a column written for ZDNet news (extracted and summarized below), John G. Spooner offered the opinion that for the Tablet PC to be successful, it would have to offer substantially more than today's notebooks:

"Hopefully the Tablet PC will offer a multi-modal user interface that combines input from voice recognition and handwriting recognition with the option for a keyboard and mouse. If the Tablet PC is the device that the "knowledge worker" will be carrying around in 2003, it must be significantly different from my IBM ThinkPad 570 notebook. There is no reason for me to give up my ThinkPad for anything at all unless it's something that's significantly cheaper or significantly easier to use. If Microsoft nails the user interface on the Tablet PC, this device will take off and nobody will look back and wish they still had their old ThinkPad. You and I will give up our notebook PCs for Tablet PCs, which will be much easier to live with and will easily take penned, spoken or keyed-in commands. Anything less is doomed to failure" WinHEC 2001 Microsoft revealed a lot about the Tablet PC hardware in March at WinHEC 2001. WinHEC, the annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, is where Microsoft updates OEM hardware engineers and driver developers (more than 2,200 of them this year) on the strategies, roadmaps and technologies for future PCs. In his keynote at WinHEC, Bill Gates again showed a prototype of the Tablet PC. Most of the Tablet PC demo was focused on how easy it is to use ink in a new note-taking application that Microsoft will offer. Actually, the application, temporarily called "Microsoft Notebook, isn't new at all. It's an enhanced version of "InkWriter", a program originally written by "Aha Software," a company that Microsoft bought outright in 1996. InkWriter was shrink-wrapped pen software that was enjoying modest sales success; when Microsoft bought the company, the product disappeared from the marketplace.