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Monday, June 30, 2008

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A Former Tablet PC Team Member Speaks Out On Microsoft and Tablet PC Marketing

- Rob Bushway

Hilton Locke, a former Microsoft Tablet PC team member, posted a very interesting response to Craig's Microsoft Tablet PC Marketing article. He offers some unique observations, especially from someone who used to work on the team.

Here is what Hilton has to say regarding Microsoft, Tablet PC, and marketing:

I don't have any inside info on Windows marketing, but here are some of my observations.

1) The SKU shift to Tablet would be net positive, because Tablet features are only available on the higher-priced SKUs, but the volumes of machines sold is small. So marketing here might not be a good return on investment. Classic chicken-or-egg.

2) Volume growth has been in consumer/entry level systems and that area is terribly price-sensitive. The extra $50-$100 bill of materials costs tends to remove opportunities here. Business and professional users love Tablet (insurance adjusters and healthcare for example) but it's hard to convince the ISVs to Tablet-enable their apps. Without custom app support, the $50-100 cost difference for Tablets is an unnecessary expense. So the most common usage in business is still notebook with pen as "super-mouse". Not terribly compelling.

3) Tablet is part of the larger Windows organization. As such, it's limited in what it can do for marketing, since every message must be vetted at (large number) different levels, and must add to the overall Windows strategy. For an innovation group like Tablet, this is the kiss of death.

4) Microsoft is not the leader in defining pen and touch input interface standards. Pen and touch digitizers have been around for a lot longer than Tablet, so the digitizer technology is relatively mature. A variety of niche solutions in this space has yet to be molded together into a larger standard. Standards again cost a little more in the beginning, as existing drivers and software are rewritten to the standard. Why isn't MS investing here?

As you know, I blogged about Tablet marketing in Dec07 http://blogs.msdn.com/hiltonl and took a lot of heat. It's also widely known thanks to the "Vista Capable" fiasco, that no marketing decision made inside of Windows is done in isolation.

IMHO, Tablet is likely to die a slow and ignominious death within Windows as it is absorbed into a larger "Natural input" movement. Note how touch, speech and visual recognition are the new darlings. Touch input is the only Windows-team-owned "darling". Microsoft's big challenge will be to figure out how to get Windows developers excited about NI as a whole.

Microsoft | Speech Recognition | Tablet PC | Touch

6/30/2008 12:39 PM MST

A Former Tablet PC Team Member Speaks Out On Microsoft and Tablet PC Marketing Comments [3] | Digg This | del.icio.us | Citations

Monday, June 30, 2008 3:10:16 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

The last paragraph puts it well in that it seems Microsoft has used the tablet as a testing for future development and it has shown this in the way Vista incorporates a lot of the key points of XP tablet by default. Windows 7 it seems will be the big leap forward to "Natural input" and will hopefully enhance the tablet experience that has already benefited from Vista. Only time will tell how Microsoft will market its new abilities of its operating systems.

I also feel that OEM tablet makers should have pushed marketing of the tablet as well especially in the university/college arena. Being a university student and talking to kids and even parents that ask me questions about my tablet seem to wish they new about it before they bought a computer, or have become interested in them from the conversations. Both Microsoft and tablet makers need to realize the potential market they are losing to companies like Apple that market to the university/college kids. Tablets will not get cheaper if companies still produce them for businesses instead of for everyone.

Rushan

Tuesday, July 01, 2008 8:18:16 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

The whole Tablet functionality is sorely overlooked and under promoted. Most people do not know about Tablet PC's. Once a laptop user is educated, sees what it can do, and actually uses one, they normally become staunch supporter, and never want to go back to a plain laptop anymore.

OneNote is a phenomenal application, but it is too bad not more applications can take pointers from OneNote. A person who takes notes and uses OneNote can be incredibly organized, and keep years and years worth of notes all readily available at the search of a pen stroke.

Vista was an improvement for Tablet functionality, but Vista is sooo slow. I've moved my Vista tablet to Ubuntu Linux and the core Tablet functionality works, but Linux is missing some Tablet PC niceties. I wish someone would make an equivalent to OneNote for Linux, and a TIP replacement that works for entering the password, and can recognize entire words. CellWriter is nice, but I can't get it to be usable to enter passwords, and it does not do whole words, just individual characters. Linux is SOOOO much faster on the same hardware though, compared to Vista. But now that I've tried Linux, I don't want to go back to Windows. Now my dilemma is finding Tablet functionality in Linux... Calling Tablet developers to Linux!?!

TabletUser

Tuesday, July 01, 2008 10:15:18 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

The problem that Microsoft introduced with "tablet" functionality is a lack of focus. Even the name "tablet" is a problem. It does not convey what the computer can do. Furthermore, when most people originally thought of tablets, they thought of drawing and that is a limited market, at best.

It would have been better if the handwriting recognition aspects of tablet functionality had been emphasized. If I were advising MS (using 20-20 hindsight), they should have called it XP OneNote and made OneNote one of the Accessories that came with the OS.

This would also mesh with the market that Microsoft should have pushed - college students. There are a whole lot of students (and parents) who would be more than happy to spend an extra hundred or two in order to get an edge in college.

Oh, well. My only hope is that handwriting survives as a form of natural input and that multi-touch develops to the point that it can accurately identify a stylus input distinct from random screen touches.

Dave P

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