Microsoft: Putting Coolaid in Tablet Form

I really enjoyed this riff on why Microsoft Tablet PCs are cool from Steve Gillmor.

It seems like the Tablet PC is one of the few things Microsoft can do (put in people’s hands) that just stops people dead and cuts through prejudice. Tablet PC is disarming. Its funny to watch begrudging envy; is there a word for the opposite of schadenfraude? Steve isn’t the only one though, Kathy Sierra is another “see the light” conversion.

So here is Steve, with a backhanded slap of a compliment if ever i saw one:

Whatever I think of Microsoft’s slipping grip on the rest of the network OS, there’s no doubt that the Tablet continues to go where noone has gone before.

Gillmor is looking at Tablet as a platform, with associated benefits, and its interesting to see him position for the “new productivity apps” – not Office, the cool ones. 😉

I’ve been determined to retain cross-platform compatibility and redundancy via Firefox, Skype, Rojo, and GMail. In doing so I’ve sacrificed a bit of Tablet engineering in Firefox, which does not support (Brendan?) in-place ink recognition as IE does. So I have to use the frozen UI at the bottom of the screen for text input into Firefox requesters. Skype, AIM, and Windows Messenger clients support in-place, and Messenger supports ink directly, which shifts my IM traffic to Scoble from the terse to the illegible.

Just in case its not clear he’s talking about productivity.

The most striking aspect of the Tablet 2005 is the speed with which I can move through information

Kathy Sierra meanwhile is interested in a particular use case, mind-mapping, and in the Tablet finds an ideal form factor. She wants one.

I met a guy from Microsoft Search, Brady Forrest, who I’ll never forgive for what happened next. He came up with his tablet PC and showed me the notes he took during my tutorial.  He’d created a mind map… complete with drawings! I fell in love right there in the hallway. Just to make sure I wouldn’t recover, he then handed me the tablet PC and the pen and said, “Here… draw something…” Then he even had me enter my contact info into a mind map.

 Anyway, that was the most expensive hallway meeting of my life, because now I simply must have one. And I don’t even like Windows.  [italics not mine, i just bolded]

Here are a couple of people, significant influencers, who are naturally oriented to Microsoft alternatives. Yet all they can say is hubba hubba gimme gimme. Maybe Microsoft should stop giving Tablets to friends of Microsoft, and give them to enemies instead. They could call the program Road to Damascus.

Here’s a top ten show off list of apps that show the benefits.

I often wonder why Microsoft doesn’t nail these transformative experiences more effectively. Like the Orange SPV C500 (Audiovox, Scoblephone), which blows a Nokia 6630 out of the water, and really opened my eyes to what integrated innovation could mean in practice. If you use Microsoft Outlook and or Office and you want an outstanding multimedia phone there is literally no alternative. In comparison Vodafone and Nokia don’t even suck; joint offerings are far lamer than that.

What else is transformative? I still believe OneNote is an underplayed app in terms of MS marketing, and i am not even talking about the Tablet version. OneNote rocks as a laptop app. Joyce Becknell is an analyst at another firm called Sageza, which does a lot of work in the IBM Systems and Technology (STG) space. Joyce attended a Microsoft InformationWorker event recently and now every time i see her she is evangelising OneNote–“but have you have seen the PowerToys…”

Who needs facts when you can drive religious conversions? Tablets seem to make the coolaid infinitely palatable.

One recurring theme on the net is Peelers waiting for Apple to come up a Tablet equivalent. Yeah we know Apple invented the Newton… Sure you can wait folks, but Tablets are available now with a wide range of applications and hardware suppliers.

A point of disclosure – I am not Tablet user. Did i remember to say Microsoft is lame and Scoble doesn’t get it? I will be watching for my review machine…