Will Tablet PC prove a bitter pill for Microsoft?

The Tablet PC, Microsoft’s latest brainchild, was unveiled with much

fanfare at the recently held Comdex in Las Vegas. It is being seen by many as a

move to replace the desktop PC, a perception vehemently denied by Microsoft. The

Tablet PC is an integral part of Microsoft’s Dot

Net vision. It’s a pen driven, fully functional computer, the size of an

examination pad and weighing approximately 2 to 3 lbs. It has a 500-600MHz

processor, 128MB RAM, 10GB hard disk, USB port for keyboard and mouse and runs

on Whistler, the 1.0 release of Dot Net based on Windows2000.

The ayes



It is targeted at people who spend a part of their day away from their desk
and would require access to their computers. Let’s say you have to attend a

meeting, while others would be scribbling furiously on pads of paper you would

be doing it in style on your Tablet PC. The handwriting technology that the

Tablet PC incorporates allows you to do just that. The electronic ink technology

or ‘rich ink’ as Microsoft calls it, allows you to write directly onto the

screen. Not only can you take down notes, you can also edit, insert spaces,

move, copy text, sort and search these handwritten notes. Microsoft’s

ClearType technology makes text on LCD screens easier to read. It also supports

wireless standards such as 802.11

and will eventually support Bluetooth. This means that while you are at the

meeting you can still be connected to the Internet, LAN, access e-mail, transfer

the presentation that you’ve created on your desktop to the Tablet PC and

transfer the notes that you’ve jotted down on the Tablet PC to your desktop

with ease. The Tablet PC will also include speech recognition technology.

The nays



Now that we’ve got the good part out of the way let’s see if we really
need a Tablet PC and even if we do why Microsoft’s? Well, let me justify this

question by putting forward some arguments to support my case. Firstly, the

Tablet PC falls in the segment between handhelds and laptops. It in fact tries

to integrate the two and is priced in the same range as laptops. On one hand,

handhelds are truly convenient to carry around and on the other laptops with

their keyboards allow you to do the kind of stuff you would normally do on a

desktop. With the kind of sleek and lightweight laptops doing the rounds, is

there a segment into which the Tablet PC can fit?

One viewpoint could be that the Tablet PC allows you to write on the screen

while laptops do not. But talking of writing on the screen, I’m sure typing on

a keyboard would be more preferable to scrawling on the monitor. It not only

saves you trouble but also a lot of time that would otherwise have been spent on

trying to make sense of what you’ve written later on (people who try to pass

off fowl scratch as handwriting would wholeheartedly agree with me on this). As

for speech recognition, imagine a whole bunch of people entering information

into a word document or Excel sheet via voice. This in addition to all those

people chattering away on their cell phones.

Lastly, but by no means the least, the question of why Microsoft? People

who’ve read about and taken a peek at the Qbe range of products from Aqcess

Technologies would have gotten my drift. For those who haven’t, you can check

it out at the Web site http://www.qbenet.com/

and see for yourself the astonishing similarity between these products and the

MS Tablet PC. This is just one among the many different kinds of Tablet PCs that

are already in the market. This just goes to prove that Microsoft’s Tablet PC

is really not the innovative or brilliant product as the company would like us to believe, nor is it entirely Microsoft’s vision. There are similar if not

better products already out in the market. But of course they don’t have the

all-important Microsoft seal on them. But does that really matter?

Continued...

In the .Net world, what happens to Microsoft’s COM and DCOM initiatives?

Is the distributed computing aspect of .Net en extension to COM? What happens to

those who are using competing distributive computing technologies such as CORBA?



COM/DCOM is the building block. They can be integrated in .Net. COM/DCOM will
not go away. We will continue to work on COM. On the Web server, we will

continue to work with components. DCOM, however, will be replaced with XML/SOAP.

There are still many business applications built around COM. SOAP and XML may

not be a good idea in a closed environment, here COM may be the answer.

Why should other companies accept XML and SOAP as standards?



Today, no two Web servers can communicate. This will become possible with XML
and SOAP. While XML has already been accepted as a standard, once people

understand the advantages of working with SOAP as it is platform independent,

this will also be adopted. It has already been accepted by IBM.

What is the status of Java in the .Net framework? C# looks a lot like

Java, have you incorporated anything from Java?



We have not taken anything from Java. One of the key points of .Net is that it
is language independent. Irrespective of the language you write your code in —

be it C, C#, Java Script, Visual Basic or for that matter even COBOL — you get

a pseudo machine code called intermediate language, which is executed on the

.Net framework. The same code can run on multiple devices–PCs, pocket PCs,

phones etc. There is no (specific) runtime (for the codes). You can also have

multiple executables running on a single process.

C# was created from C++ with some extra features, such as automatic garbage

collection.

When do you think the acceptance of .Net will be complete?



It is an evolution and would not be completed. Some of the .Net framework is
being accepted. It is not before 12-18 months that we will see major adoption of

the framework and products coming up.

From the Microsoft side, you will see Office.Net and the .Net version of

Windows 2000 being released during the end of 2001. Visual Studio is expected in

the second half of 2001. Parallel to this, you will see us supporting several

devices such as smartcards, in the .Net framework.