Programming Windows: Tablet PC (Premium)

Bill Gates fervently believed that Tablet PCs and their stylus-based handwriting capabilities together represented the future of portable computing.

He was wrong about that, as it turns out. But the Tablet PC capabilities that Microsoft developed in the early 2000s would be improved, and over time they were incorporated into the Windows versions used by mainstreamed portable PCs. And it’s fair to say that this initiative would ultimately impact Windows as a platform to a much higher degree than did contemporary XP technologies like Freestyle (Windows Media Center) and Mira (Windows Powered Smart Displays).

As Microsoft’s final Windows deliverable to customers in 2002---Microsoft had circled November 7 for the launch date several months earlier---Windows XP Tablet PC Edition represented years of research, competitive analysis, and development across a wide range of hardware, software, and services. It was a pet project of Bill Gates, who oversaw the entire process at a high level and spearheaded its final push to release.

It wasn’t the industry’s first attempt to digitize handwriting, of course. Earlier portable computing devices called personal digital assistants (PDAs) had employed simplistic and small styluses to let users enter data on their tiny displays. Apple’s Newton had infamously been lampooned by cartoonist Garry Trudeau in his “Doonesbury” strip for its comically bad handwriting recognition. And so latecomer Palm bypassed this issue by inventing a simplified notation system called Graffiti that users had to learn. It was inelegant, but it worked.

It wasn’t even Microsoft’s first attempt. After a failed WinPad initiative in the early 1990s, Microsoft created and then evolved Windows CE, which ran on non-PC portable devices like Handheld PCs, Palm-sized PCs, and then Pocket PCs, the latter of which saw some measure of success, thanks largely the popular and expandable Compaq iPAQ. Windows CE would never rise to the sophistication or power of Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, but it got better and better over time and perhaps should have remained the primary focus when you consider how the market changed years later when Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007 and then the iPad in 2010. But in Microsoft’s defense, even the most forward-looking prognosticator could never have predicted such a turn of events. And the Microsoft of 2000 was very much obsessed with its Windows cash cow.

In any event, Microsoft would solve the problems with PDAs via “the magic of software,” as Gates called it, and the steady advance of the PC platform. As with Media Center, the core strength of Tablet PC---it was a PC---was also its core weakness. But the central genius of Tablet PC was a combination of capabilities that together represented a major leap forward.

The first was a technology called ClearType, which Gates announced at COMDEX 1998 in Las Vegas. ClearType solved the problem of “jaggy” onscreen text by...