Former Microsoft VP explains why Office sucks on Tablet PC

Posted by | 02/04/2010 | 19 Comments

Former Microsoft VP Dick Brass offers an editorial on The New York Times explaining why Microsoft is declining as a leader in technology. In particular, he points to internal conflicts that wind up derailing innovation efforts, as happened back in 2001 with the Tablet PC.

Another example: When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow.

So once again, even though our tablet had the enthusiastic support of top management and had cost hundreds of millions to develop, it was essentially allowed to be sabotaged. To this day, you still can’t use Office directly on a Tablet PC. And despite the certainty that an Apple tablet was coming this year, the tablet group at Microsoft was eliminated.

The meaning of the term “directly” aside, it is absolutely true that Microsoft Office offers a poor pen experience. The exception to this rule is OneNote, but even it isn’t specifically designed for Tablet PC, and I recall it originally used its own ink format. The TIP is a fine kludge to interact with non-tablet applications, but it’s hardly ideal and certainly we were expecting better from Microsoft’s own products. Instead, we had to turn to plug-ins like Tablet Enhancements for Outlook, InkGestures, and TipX to make Microsoft Office workable, none of which are still under active development.

And why were we Tablet PC users left out in the cold like that? Because some desk-bound, keyboard-loving executive couldn’t wrap his mind around a mobile, pen-based computing experience? So the same mindset that we constantly fight in the keyboard-loving media, that drags the Tablet PC through the dirt, is responsible for making it that way in the first place. Well, that explains a lot.

What’s really baffling is this was nine years ago. I can understand if one guy gets in the way at one point, but how could top management not get any real Tablet PC-specific projects going in that time? A version of Outlook that works like a paper day planner? A version of Word designed for pen editing? Internet Explorer for Tablet PC that matches what I get in Firefox with add-ons? Could we not get anything other than PowerToys and accessory-level apps?

I would really love to blame that one guy for fouling things up forever, but at some point, leadership needs to overcome such obstacles. Clearly that hasn’t happened, and it is embarrassing to everyone involved, myself included, that it might take competition from Apple – NINE YEARS LATER – to get things moving forward, and I’m really not happy about that. Between that and being forced to admit ink on the iPhone (and presumably iPad) isn’t just possible but looks good, this has been a day of Tablet PC disillusionment for me.

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Category: Editorials, Software

About the Author (Author Profile)

My name is Mark Sumimoto; I am Sumocat. I dabble in all areas of mobile computing, but my focus is Windows-based Tablet PCs and pen input. They’ve been part of my arsenal since 2004, and I’m proud to have pioneered the field of ink blogging, earning a spot as a Microsoft MVP for Touch and Tablets in the process. My current tools include a Fujitsu Lifebook T900, TEGA v2, and iPhone 4. Email me: sumocat [at] notebooks.com
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  • sbtablet

    I just finished spending a day grading papers, marking them up with ink. I have a choice, I can leave the papers in MS Word, and use the limited and annoying ink mark-up tools in the application, then save them to PDF to embed the ink before returning them to students, or I can print them to OneNote, mark up with less irritation, and then save them to PDF in OneNote, which leaves a frame around the text and makes everything smaller and harder to read when I return them. Neither is optimal for a simple edit, but I much prefer it to the pain of using the keyboard for the same task with the silly notes and remarks features.

    The ink in Word is buried in the Review tab. It does not remember the color and size of the last pen you used, always reverting to fat red on every new document. When I add my grading form to the end of the document, if I have ink at the end of the student’s paper, the form doesn’t know it’s there, and ends up on top of it. There’s no way to grab your ink and move it. Thus, I have to always remember to add the form before I start inking. There are a myriad of other minor irritants that slow me down because nobody thought about what you might want to do with ink, even for review. It’s worse if you just want to write.

    OneNote feels much more ink friendly, but it slows me down to have to print every student paper to OneNote, and then takes up hard drive with both a Word and a OneNote copy in my files. And, as I mentioned, I would REALLY like to make a PDF without the extra frame around it.

    Any software designer who spent a week or two with these programs and a pen could make them work better for ink. Why don’t they? Outside applications have proved it can be done right.

    Even with all this whining, I have to say that overall, I find the use of my tablet pc and ink for grading is a much more intuitive and efficient task than using the keyboard tools in Word. I get to do exactly what I would do on paper, without killing quite so many trees, and with the ease of electronic submission and return. Added plus, I don’t worry about losing papers in a stack somewhere.

    I wish Microsoft actually believed in the tablet pc. I do.

  • Scott

    When I get papers electronically, I use PDF Annotator when I mark up student papers (print word docs to pdf then open and ink in Annotator).

    Of course, that solution costs precious teacher $$$

    From the sound of it, I am NOT going to upgrade to Office 2010.

  • griz8791

    Sharon:

    If you can print the students’ Word docs to pdf, why not mark them up with PDF Annotator? That would be one way to do away with extra margin. At this point I would have to say PDF Annotator is the brightest spot in my daily workflow.

  • http://www.tabletpc.com.au Brett Gilbertson

    Hear hear sumocat. This does explain a lot. Time for some real innovation with leadership from MS.

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