Incremental Blogger

In today’s blog post, Steven Sinofsky talks about the tradeoffs in creating a highly customizable Windows system. His post is in large parts a response to the many of commenters on the E7Blog asking for a more customizable experience–something that it appears to me that Linux, Admins, and gamers seem to want a lot and something I’m not too keen on. Decoupled components is good. A highly configurable install process is not. At least, that’s my take.

Anyway, what really got me in this post is when Steven talks about places that it makes sense to have Windows customization. He says:

Some examples are quite easy to see and you should expect us to do more along these lines, such as the TabletPC components. I have a PC that is a very small laptop and while it has full tablet functionality it isn’t the best size for doing good ink work for me (I prefer a 12.1” or greater and this PC is a 10” screen). The tablet code does have a footprint in memory and on the 1GB machine if I go and remove the tablet components the machine does perform better. This is something I can do today.

If you’re a Tablet PC advocate, I’m sure you’re re-reading this quote, then re-reading it again, and then once again.

Yes, he’s saying that even on a Tablet PC, the Tablet bits don’t have enough value for him.

OK, OK, everyone’s needs are different and I’m guessing what’s going on here is that he’s just unfamiliar with how to leverage the technology. (I’ll get back to this point in a minute and how I think that as Tablet enthusiasts we need to get back to thinking about how we can make Tablets more compelling for executives–even within Microsoft.)

Why do I think he doesn’t really know much about Tablet PCs? The way he spells it “TabletPC” [SIC]. It’s “Tablet PC.” Two words. Both capitalized. That’s our first clue that he probably hasn’t spent much time reading about Tablet PCs. Maybe he needs to spend a few minutes on Gottabemobile.

Another shocker for me is his view that ink isn’t compelling on a 10″ display. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I think most of us Tablet enthusiasts would say that two of the best Tablets ever were both 10″ models: The NEC LitePad and the Compaq/HP TC1100.

And what about all the UMPCs? Or the Classmate PC which is going to support a digitizer? These are all small screened devices and all of them make sense to have touch as well as ink technologies. I can’t imagine a great education PC that doesn’t at least have ink, for instance, and is there any doubt that these PCs will have small screens because of cost reasons?

Now, if you’re a heavy notebook user and rarely use Tablet features, then I bet I can see why screen real-estate trumps ink. But then again, I bet what this really means is that the software isn’t there.

In fact, I think Steven’s comment is really saying that the current ink-enabled software isn’t compelling enough. What does this mean? Ink in Word, Powerpoint, Messenger or any other Microsoft product isn’t compelling enough?

I guess I can see this in some cases, but might I suggest he look outside of Microsoft. Considering his position of managing developers, he’s got to try TEO, an ink extension for Outlook. And if this isn’t enough, I’m willing to give him a free copy of InkGestures, an add-in that gives pen and paper like editing gestures in Word. And if that isn’t good enough, I’ll show him how ink and other markup media can be integrated into Visual Studio. Anchor ink notes, screenshots, right in your code. I can think of half-a-dozen other ink-enabled apps that he might find worthwhile, but of course, I’d really need to better understand what types of things he does throughout the day.

Here’s another thing that erks me about his comment: That Tablet bits degrade performance–particularly on limited resource machines. I hope he’s not also talking about a dog fooded version of Windows 7, because I hope this is something that Windows 7 would address.

In fact, with the addition of multi-touch in Windows 7 I’ve been hoping that this was a signal that the Windows 7 team was taking a long overdue renewed interest in mouse/pen eventing. Plain and simple mouse events have long lagged in the innovation arena when it comes to Windows. Now I’m beginning to cringe and think this isn’t going to happen.

The performance fix for the Tablet bits is not to remove them. It’s to address the lower level implementation details. I wish he was signaling that that’s on the Windows 7 to do list.

Anyway, I’m really disappointed that Steven doesn’t find Tablet technologies worthwhile. I wish this was different. I wish that all of the Microsoft executives and senior management saw the value. But the truth is outside of Bill Gates, we’re just not there. After all this time, how can this be? I know we’ve discussed this in the past, but what we need badly is a Tablet usage scenario for execs–something preferably public.

So I’ll end this post the way I started it: Would you remove the Tablet bits from a Tablet PC? I know I wouldn’t. Would you?

Update: Steven Sinofsky has responded to this post in the comment section and says that I read to much into what he wrote. Be sure to check it out.

Rob Zelt, Neil Roodyn and others from the community had a roundtable luncheon with Bill Gates last week at TechEd. Think about this: How many executives from any tech company you can think of set aside time like this to meet with members of the community? Not many.

Rob Zelt has the best write up at this time.

According to Rob, the main topic of conversation was about education including a bit about Tablet PCs.

It’s great to hear on both accounts.

Bill Gates has been the leading public advocate of Tablet PCs. Just look at his last five speeches listed on Microsoft’s Presspass:

From TechEd: “We’ve also got the pen capability that we’re taking to a whole new level in terms of easy recognition, and how that is implemented in the hardware. I think of every student having a device that avoids the need for paper textbooks. The tablet device will let them take notes, record audio, connect to the Internet. It will be superior in every way, and yet it can’t be purely keyboard based. It has to have this touch and pen as well.”

From advance08 The Future of Media: “So that idea of seeing will have that in many places — your desktop in your office, you’ll be able to have things displayed and just point and expand the information, your whiteboard will be an intelligent whiteboard and you can navigate through information there. So it’s pretty spectacular when you get what we call natural interface. Likewise, being able to talk to the computer, talk to your mobile phone and say what you want or have a tablet-like device that you can just take notes on and those notes can be recognized or searched, sent off to other people. That is the combination of incredible processing power together with software breakthroughs.”

Microsoft CEO Summit: “The early uses of this, besides Surface, include things like the touch on some of the phones, including Apple’s, it includes the pen on tablet computers that are very popular in verticals like medicine, and we expect to catch on with students who want to take notes or people who sit in meetings.”

2008 Government Leaders Forum Asia: “I’ve got one last thing to show, and I previewed this earlier, and that’s related to the student Tablet. To me this is an important milestone, and Microsoft has been investing in this for a long time. We see lots of ways that we’re going to drive this into the mainstream. In fact, my own daughter goes to a school where she uses a Tablet PC, and it’s phenomenal to see how comfortable she is, how she learns better. She tries out her knowledge, she communicates with her teacher in a new way. It is completely digital. The Internet is there, the ability to create things is there.”

Japan Premium Forum: “This will be important in the office and it will be important at home, so it will touch computing everywhere. You’ll see on your phone, of course, we’ll have touch and the pen as well. You’ll see on the portable computer we’ll have a tablet-like device that will have touch and that’s where the pen with the ink and ink recognition comes in.”

Five speeches. Five mentions of Tablets. If I went further through the list of speech transcripts, I imagine the trend would continue. That’s the way Bill Gates has been.

I also like the fact that Bill Gates spent so much talking about education. Oh, how I wish I could have listened in. Early on while developing for the Tablet PC I began to see how ideal a device like it might be for education. I’ve been working on some eWorkbooks (or activity books) for awhile that I think will offer a natural way for students to interact with their learning material. Cancer was a bit of hiccup along the way and now I’m racing to pay off bills like you can’t imagine, so my work has gotten more splintered, however, my goals have not. I can’t help but get inspired each time I think about how education can be improved with the right technology. The time is right. The devices are getting inexpensive enough, mobile enough, connected enough, and interactive enough. Now we need the software and content packaged well to leverage these devices.

I hope you don’t mind a little self-archiving here as I re-post some of my eWorkbook “applications” that I’ve been working on.

These include a variety of components ranging from crossword puzzles, clock problems, coin counting problems, math problems, matching problems, reading problems, word search problems, coloring surfaces, connect the dots problems, and so on that fit together nicely in an eWorkbook format. In addition, each component supports both handwriting and keyboard input as well as most importantly interactive feedback:

And here are a mix of algebra problems:

And an eBook that reads aloud for beginner readers:

As well as a personal diary eBook:

And a music composition eWorkbook:

Technology wise, they’re all written with WPF and XAML with portions ported to Silverlight.

As I look back over these screenshots I get goosebumps.

If you could cut your boot times by a quarter and extend your UMPC’s battery life by 40% would you switch from Windows to another OS? Acer is betting so, according to this article on vnunet.com.

Here’s the problem as I see it: Will developers embrace these machines, let’s say like they have the iPhone? If not, Acer is going to have a tough time no matter what the OS.

This is the challenge for Acer, Intel, Microsoft and the others. Now possibly the developers will follow the users if large numbers of people adopt these systems, but I bet you’ll have to capture the imagination of the developers from the get go. So far that hasn’t happened in large enough numbers.

Now if Acer truly is going to keep the price low–and I mean really low–then maybe they will attract a slew of Linux developers and advocates. However, there are many developers like me that want more. I don’t mean in terms of cost, but rather in terms of compelling features. There’s got to be some unique communication capabilities or multi-touch or GPS or something.