COMMENTARY--Bill Gates is beating the drum for tablets, Smart Display, and Web services - purchased with his US$5bn research budget. The question is: do we want to follow, and can we afford to?
On the heels of a long, drawn-out antitrust battle, and in the midst of a technology spending lull that doesn't seem to be easing, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates' message to a less than packed room of Comdex attendees was that there's plenty of industry-wide work to be done in the areas of usability, manageability, security, and connectivity, and that Microsoft was prepared to do it.
Despite Gates' optimism for the industry's future, the subdued mood amongst attendees, exhibitors and press is palpable here in Las Vegas, especially under the cloud of Comdex producer Key3Media's questionable future.
Evidence of Gates' commitment was a chart showing Microsoft's climbing research and development budget. Gates expects the company to spend close to US$5bn before the end of 2002, with the largest slice of that budget dedicated to the company's Trustworthy Computing initiative. As Gates regularly does during his Comdex keynotes, he reminded show goers that Microsoft has made good on initiatives announced at earlier Comdex events while offering a glimpse of things to come.
Among the accomplishments that Gates noted was the company's delivery of the Tablet PC edition of Windows XP. Although the launch took place earlier this month, Gates and his cast of Microsoft staffers didn't waste the opportunity to show-off how shipping Tablet PC offerings from a handful of vendors could be used in a typical business scenario. As I've said in my previous coverage of Tablet PC, there's a lot of potential for the operating system in vertical markets that are well suited to the tablet form factor and that need a unifying platform to develop custom applications for. But for the masses, there is much work to be done before Tablet PC can deliver productivity returns on the slight premiums that tablet buyers will incur when buying these next generation notebooks. For some knowledge workers, it could be a step backwards in productivity if they find themselves wrestling with the operating system's handwriting recognition capabilities, which are good, but less than perfect.
If Tablet PC does have a shot with the masses, it may take a killer application like Microsoft's OneNote to make that happen. Gates' keynote address featured a demonstration of OneNote, an application that's still in the labs and that closely mirrors the way most people take notes and aggregate information in an unstructured format. Some of the advantages of OneNote include the ability to type text or draw ink (if you have a tablet PC) anywhere on the screen. This is unlike word processing applications such as Microsoft Word, where new text can only be entered at the cursor's current insertion point.
Using a tabbed interface at the top, OneNote can be like 10 composition notebooks in one, with each tab representing a category of notes. In addition to accepting text and ink, pages in OneNote can have virtually anything dragged onto them including content from a Web page or a slide from a PowerPoint presentation. When data is imported in this fashion from another source, OneNote remembers where it came from so that the user can easily go back to that source with a click of the button. Like the Journal application that comes with Tablet PC, OneNote can search through all notes that a user has taken, and reveal the results of that search in much the same way that Web- based search engines such as Google and Yahoo! reveal their results.
After playing with Journal on the tablet PC, and then seeing OneNote, I wondered why Microsoft didn't accelerate the development of OneNote and include it with Tablet PC. During a private showing of OneNote before Gates' keynote, Jeff Raikes, group vice president, productivity and business services, admitted that once he started using OneNote himself, he wouldn't consider going back to Journal. OneNote doesn't require Tablet PC and is likely to be available for the plain vanilla versions of Windows 2000 and Windows XP, but the company has not said whether the software will be bundled with Microsoft Office, or if it will be sold separately.
On the "we delivered" side of the equation, Gates talked about Microsoft's progress on the Web services front and proved his point by showing how Microsoft Windows can now print to any Kinko's location through an XML-enabled architecture -- a new service called "File, Print, Kinko's."
The demonstration, which Kinko's president and chief executive Gary Kusin called "the longest printer cable in the world," showed how a user can pull up a print dialogue that uses a mapping utility to find the closest Kinko's, and send the document to that Kinko's for mass printing. Then Kinko's will ship those copies to a specified destination. The demonstration was performed by Microsoft's director of .Net strategy Neil Charney, who explained that the entire application --- the connection to Kinko's, the mapping utility, and the subsequent feedback that tells the user the instructions were successfully received by Kinko's --- was strung together using XML. Charney went on to say that there was nothing that prevented other developers from leveraging the same XML interface that Kinko's exposed to Windows.
Another newcomer technology that was demonstrated at the keynote and that will be available on 8 January is Microsoft's Smart Display technology. A Smart Display is basically the display of your computer, but its means of connection to the computer is through a wireless Ethernet (WiFi) network instead of a VGA cable. The idea is that you can take the display anywhere you want (within a certain distance of the computer), and work remotely through the touch-sensitive display.
Most Smart Displays can have a keyboard and mouse connected to them if need be. During the Smart Display demonstration, Microsoft officials said that people could move up to 150 feet from the computer they are controlling, which, in my estimation, is a bit of a stretch. I've rarely seen a WiFi network work at those distances. But, as I discuss in my column about the technology, the real issue will be cost. Initial entries for the technology are going to start at about US$1,000 and go up from there (depending on size, additional functionality, and accessories). Microsoft is targeting consumers with Smart Displays, but I can't imagine a lot of consumers parting with that kind of cash for something that isn't a must have.
As evidenced by Gates keynote, and the many demonstrations contained within, technology is marching on. And, to some extent, Microsoft is dictating the direction. But when you look at cost and practicality, the bigger question may be whether we're willing to follow.
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