Evan Feldman, who works in the Mobile PC Client Business Unit at Microsoft, says the Tablet PC is not dead, nor (warning – gratuitous Monty Python reference ahead) is it pining in the fjords.
Buried in the post is a great observation that most people just don’t get, especially those that haven’t used a Tablet PC:
I think part of the confusion comes down to a fundamental issue that I had a very large hand in long ago…. “Who was the Tablet PC designed for?”
I have the inside track here as I’m one of the people who helped make the decisions relative to what the Tablet PC was going to be and what we needed to accomplish in order for the Tablet PC to be useful to users.
[…]
Tablet PC wasnt designed for the majority of people who will ever read this post. It was made for the majority of people who are in large enterprises who are busily running from meeting to meeting and have to take notes to keep up with whats going on and what they need to do.
Sure some of us fit into this category, but were also early adopters, we want more, expect more and want more cool gadgets, features, and bells and whistles. Were also not satisfied with simple functionality or simple tasks; we have to make it into something which it really isnt. Most reviewers (and IT professionals) are early adopters and they place the review in context of all the cool things they can expect the gadget to perform. There are some exceptions, like Walt Mossberg, but generally tech ideas and products today are evaluated in the popular press of the techno-elite.
Remember this the next time you read a review of a product in a computer magazine or a Web site. That reviewer may not work the way you do. Sometimes the “Editor’s Choice” is chosen for all the wrong reasons – at least as far as your needs are concerned. A reviewer who doesn’t give you enough details to decide for yourself has fallen down on the job.
One corollary from my own experience in both reading and writing reviews: Many times reviewers insist on evaluating a product by comparing it to what they think it should do or be, rather than trying first to understand what it is. I’ve seen lots of reviews that fall into this category, where a reviewer complains that a feature from the old version doesn’t work the way it used to, ignoring the fact that the problem he’s complaining about has a different and better solution, if only he would adapt to a new way of thinking.
In terms of the Tablet PC, I’ve read lots of reviews (and answered lots of similar questions) that focus on the strengths and weaknesses of handwriting recognition. After you’ve used a Tablet PC for a while, you realize that that is not so important after all. A lot of the stuff you do should stay in your handwriting and not be recognized. In OneNote 2003, for instance, the digital ink used to capture my notes is recognized and indexed in the background. If I search for a word, it will turn up in my handwritten notes without my having to explicitly recognize it.
Coincidentally, after I had this thought, I ran across Marc Orchant’s interview with Michael Linenberger, author of Seize the Work Day. He says almost exactly the same thing:
Many first time users of the tablet wrongly bring their PDA habits with them, where nearly everything written needs to be converted to text to be useful. If you try to do that you will be disappointed with the Tablet. First time users often have trouble realizing that using digital ink as the target format is usually better. Not to avoid incomplete conversion, but to preserve the subtleties that handwriting contains. I think many new users see digital ink as a giant step backwards; after all, we use computers to create cleanly formatted text on the screen, and clean laser printing, right?
But the best uses of the tablet are well beyond that. Note taking, brainstorming, pen-based manipulation of programs during meetings. Again, I feel the tablet is a killer meeting productivity tool, and one rarely needs to create long segments of converted text from work created in a meeting. I convert maybe 20 % of my inputs to text. Most of my inputs on the tablet (usually in meetings) consist either of note-taking or brainstorming in ink, and short converted segments of text (say adding to-dos to my list or writing e-mails). The rest of the time is spent using the pen as a point and click device in read mode: surfing through the XP file system, finding and scrolling through reference material, researching the web. Extensive handwriting recognition just isnt needed for these uses.
Working past our preconceptions is an essential first step to really learning about the cool technologies around us…
Ed Bott 