Features

Lonestar announced on one set of Tablets - which, being interpreted, is..?

Microsoft has announced that in six to nine months, it will shop a new version - "Lonestar" - of Tablet Edition of Windows XP. Does it fix the problems? "What problems?" is Microsoft's apparent attitude.

A week after Canalys issued a "disappointing, messy, must try harder" school report on Microsoft's Tablet Edition of Windows, Microsoft itself has stepped up to the headmaster's table. The Tablet, it says, is "moving in the right direction."

Specifically, says Bill Mitchell, VP of Tablet and SPOT, "We've been working very closely with our enterprise customers over the past year, getting their reactions and using their feedback to influence some of the features in the new release of the beta operating system. They've provided us very good feedback and are happy with the direction we are moving." Taken at face value, Mitchell appears to be saying that all is well, or better than well. So either, he's out of touch with what other people are saying, or we need a skilled adept, who can produce a correct exegesis of what has been handed down from the mountain. What he says, is not what it sounds like he says - or, to quote Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Mitchell's own pronouncement is full of things which you might imagine you understand. Be careful: for example, he says that "Microsoft shipped the new Microsoft Office System, including Microsoft OneNote, which enables users to annotate anywhere in Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents, and send handwritten e-mails. OneNote on the Tablet PC brings together ink, text and Web content in one application."

I visited a special "reviewers' workshop" for Office 2003, which shipped in the last month, and we were shown OneNote. It's a definite killer app, and (to quote the technical lecturer in San Francisco earlier this year) "it works great on any Windows PC, even better under XP, and is best on the Tablet.

So when I got my review copy of Office 2003 Professional, I looked for OneNote. And it isn't there. (Neither is Front Page, which certainly was on the set of beta-copy discs which I got after the workshop).

Explanation? "Well, it's part of Microsoft Office System; not part of Microsoft Office."

When Mitchell speaks, what he says is not necessarily what it sounds like he's saying. And when he says "We've had excellent feedback" what he means is "We've made lots of mistakes, and people haven't been shy about telling us about them." When he says that people are "happy with where we are moving" he means that "they aren't happy where we are today."

What he could have said, surely, was something like this:

In the market, after the first year, it's become apparent that there are lots of features of Tablet design which people really like, and want more of. That would include "ink" technologies and "ink to text" technologies. We've been quite surprised by the enthusiasm ... and so on.

In some parts of the planet, people would see a statement like that as an endorsement of the project, and a sign of real hope that Microsoft knows there were real errors of judgement with the Tablet. Microsoft seems to feel that if it admits any errors, people will decide not to buy it.

The biggest mistake, in my view, is not including OneNote with every Tablet shipped, free. Second biggest, is not promoting Tablet Edition as a cheaper version of XP Pro, with a special offer of a pen digitiser for any PCs without a writing-enabled screen.

So, what's really in the new version of Tablet 2004 Edition of XP?

Mitchell: "Our goal was, first of all, to improve the Tablet PC experience by making the pen a mainstream input device, on par with the keyboard and mouse. This is not only about the way in which the pen is used to insert text — although there are certainly a number of improvements there — but also about inking across the operating system and across Windows applications. So our goal was to make pen-based input be a standard part of the way you use your mobile PC."

Forgive me, Bill; but isn't the whole point of Tablet, that pen-based input is the standard part? On a slate, how else can you get input into the machine?

"In addition, Microsoft shipped the new Microsoft Office System, including Microsoft OneNote, which enables users to annotate anywhere in Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents, and send handwritten e-mails. OneNote on the Tablet PC brings together ink, text and Web content in one application."

Bill, nobody knows about OneNote. Trust me on this! I keep meeting people who actually have Tablets, who don't know about OneNote. It would sell Tablets for you. The reason Tablets aren't outselling ordinary notebooks is (first) price and (second) the fact that nobody knows about OneNote.

As for the statement that it "brings ink, text and Web content together" - what, exactly, does that mean? "It's a printer"? "Tippex typing error correcting fluid" ?

What else is new? "We've brought a new level of handwriting-recognition intelligence to the Tablet PC operating system." Why? Everybody I know who has tried the Tablet has been amazed at how good its handwriting recognition is already. I haven't met anybody who said: "Hm, if only the handwriting recognition were a bit better!"

"All users will see deeper support for pen input across the entire operating system and in all Windows-based applications." That's it? "So the improvements in ink and handwriting recognition are probably the two biggest benefits."

Go away, Bill. You're boring us. We've told you what we want: we want Tablet features on ordinary PCs, not just on machines without a keyboard, that you have to hold on your elbow, and which cost twice as much as a notebook. We want better battery life, less weight and screens that are more legible in daylight. And we need to know exactly what ink can actually do for us, by seeing it work on our everyday personal computers.

It sounds as if Tablet 2004 fails to address any of these issues, so why are we supposed to get excited about it?

Mitchell's full interview - with a Microsoft writer is online. There's a full summary of the "Lonestar" announcement, which was presented by Bill Gates to Comdex.

And, in the words of one Londoner: "The whole thing really does pen and ink, doesn't it?