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Bill Gates Still Pushing Tablet and Pen

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Bill Gates, in a Fox Business Network appearance along with Berkshire Hathaway execs Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger, says that Microsoft is still cooking up some Tablet and Pen goodness.

This comes after news that the Courier is dead and still unconfirmed reports that the HP Slate isn’t going to be using Windows 7 as the OS. (Side note: we’ve seen several comments and reports that say the HP Slate is still on.)  Here’s the money quote from the interview:

“Microsoft has a lot of different tablet projects that we’re pursuing. We think that work with the pen that Microsoft pioneered will become a mainstream for students. It can give you a device that you can not only read, but also create documents at the same time.”

Via Todd Bishop’s Microsoft Blog

12 Comments

12 Comments

  1. GoodThings2Life

    05/03/2010 at 2:07 pm

    Woah… read AND create… AT THE SAME TIME?!?! You’re crazy, Mr. Gates! Absolutely crazy! Let’s not get carried away. We’re living in a consumer world, not a creative one, Mr. Gates.

    OK OK, I’m totally kidding. I’m glad to hear from Bill about it, but I just hope it’s true and that it won’t take them 5 years to do play catch up to a market they created.

  2. Joe

    05/03/2010 at 2:07 pm

    It would be nice to know that these “other projects” aren’t just concepts. If the iPad goes more or less unchallenged for a year there won’t be much of a tablet market left for anyone else, no matter how much more productive we are with pen and touch.

  3. gEEk

    05/03/2010 at 2:36 pm

    This is starting to look a little too much like a replay of the iPhone/Window Mobile fiasco.

    • GoodThings2Life

      05/03/2010 at 2:41 pm

      Hey, if it plays out that way and we end up seeing the Windows Phone 7 interface on the HP Slate, I would totally be OK with that… no doubt it would save the battery life, and migration of the handwriting/tablet functionality probably wouldn’t be that difficult in a future release.

      • Jan

        05/03/2010 at 2:55 pm

        Exactly! I don’t care what os is underneath as long as I can carry my onenote with me :)

      • gEEk

        05/03/2010 at 3:20 pm

        The part of the “fiasco” I was referring to was Microsoft loosing its lead in a market it created then a vacuum as MS does little to acknowledge their failure and offer a credible roadmap to a competative product.

        Windows Phone 7 on a slate device may be a good outcome but it is complete speculation on your part. There is little evidence that anyone outside Microsoft Labs takes slates without a full Windows weight OS seriously for productization. In fact the last decision they made public that such a product, one that had much of us salivating, will not be produced.

  4. Joe

    05/03/2010 at 3:06 pm

    The problem is, even though Bill Gates loves tablets and the pen, he has little to no say in anything at Microsoft anymore. I mean, yes he’s the non-executive chairman, but really, it’s Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie who have much more input these days.

  5. Mickey Segal

    05/03/2010 at 4:14 pm

    Why can’t as OS operate in a power-efficient mode when mobile and a different mode when plugged in? Apple used a subset of MacOSX for the iPhone/iPad. Why can’t you keep the other subset available and switched on when needed?

    It seems this approach could work for Apple or Microsoft.

    For a lot of people, docking is much easier than syncing, particularly when the syncing involves iTunes, which runs terribly on Windows.

    • Mike

      05/03/2010 at 6:32 pm

      This is akin to asking why you can’t fold the back seats down in your car and load longer stuff in the trunk when you need to.
      You absolutely can – if your car was designed this way.

  6. Ben

    05/03/2010 at 9:35 pm

    I’ll believe it when I see it.

  7. lololololo

    05/04/2010 at 4:26 am

    Great news for me!
    im still waiting the courier tablet :D

    Bill Gates go go go :P

    • Riley

      05/04/2010 at 7:58 pm

      If you weren’t aware previously, the Courier project has been scrapped.

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