Sometimes I just can’t figure out which movie metaphor to use, in this case I will use them both.

I came across a post the other week in my old files, from sometime during my days when I was working on Microsoft’s Tablet PC . Having been intimately involved with the “Go Software” he mentions I understood the truth of his statements deeper than he could possibly know.  The link is still valid.

from Bright-Eyed Master Zen

This tablet PC epidemic is going to be painful to watch. It’s really too bad that all these hardware companies are going to pay the price for Microsoft’s foolishness.

I want a tablet, I’ve wanted a tablet for many years in fact and I’ve purchased numerous devices to try to find something that would work. Every single one of those devices had some major failing that completely destroyed the usefulness of the device.

Now if Microsoft was rolling out a completely new OS targeted at this tablet PC device then maybe I would be more optimistic. Or maybe not given how bad Pocket PC 2002 still is. Unfortunately, running the mess that is Windows XP on a device without a keyboard is simply foolish. It’s not designed for that usage model and the OS interaction is just wrong. This is yet another case of where Microsoft has truly set computing back ten years.

The other day I was in the library and came across the manuals for PenPoint. This was the pen computing environment developed by Go Computing. I of course had to sit down and read through the manuals to see what it was like since I’ve never seen one of these machines. The thing that pains me about this, nothing has advanced. Because the Go software was designed from the ground up to be Pen driven and did not have any need to appear like an existing desktop environment, its interaction model was vastly superior to any current OS that runs on a portable device. Apple’s Newton technology was another example of this. I know these platforms were limited at the time, but just imagine where these things could be today if they had survived?

So now today, instead of getting truly interesting devices with software custom tailored for the unique constraints of the platform. We get crap that runs a desktop operating system that has extremely poor usability even when it runs in the environment that it was intended for. No, I’m definitely not optimistic about the success of these devices. In fact I’m pretty pissed off about it. When they fail it will represent yet another barrier for someone to be able to come in with fresh ideas and actually make the tablet format a success. I can just hear the VCs now, “so what makes you think you can make this succeed when even Microsoft failed at doing it?”. Bah, I want a tablet PC, but I want one with software and hardware designed and tailored for the constraints of the platform. Not some keyboard less laptop running a desktop operating system.

Very painful to watch indeed. Now 7 years later the dust has settled, its time for Tablet Dreams again.

Will Apple make the same mistakes? Heck no.
It Ain’t Going To Be An iTablet
Finally, we’re back to the future, where we left off in 1992…
The Eo Personal Communicator

It’s strange, “history does repeat itself – though in different ways.” I remember Robert Carr (the architect of PenPoint) said something like that to a bunch of weary developers during a talk a long, long, time ago, after GO had died.

So now I am developing in Cocoa, using Objective-C, I literally do feel I am in 1992 again.   Not surprising, Cocoa (then known as NextStep) was developed in parallel periods, both PenPoint and Cocoa are purely C-language based, with Object-Oriented extensions modeled directly on Smalltalk. Both are heavily message based, using the Model-View-Controller paradigm throughout.

At least somehow, someway, and it wasn’t easy, NextStep survived and is being ported to the products this type of technology was destined for, ever since the Dynabook vision that spawned it all.  Awe yes, Episode VI The Return Of The Jedi.

I wonder if this Bright-Eyed Master Zen guy from the past looks like a muppet?