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Microsoft wants to lead technology march

David Berlind CNET News

Published: 19 Nov 2002 17:33 GMT

On the heels of a long, drawn-out antitrust battle, and in the midst of a technology spending lull that doesn't seem to be easing, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates' message to a less than packed room of Comdex attendees was that there's plenty of industry-wide work to be done in the areas of usability, manageability, security, and connectivity, and that Microsoft was prepared to do it.

For full Comdex coverage see ZDNet UK's Fall Comdex 2002 News Focus.

Despite Gates' optimism for the industry's future, the subdued mood amongst attendees, exhibitors and press is palpable here in Las Vegas, especially under the cloud of Comdex producer Key3Media's questionable future.

Evidence of Gates' commitment was a chart showing Microsoft's climbing research and development budget. Gates expects the company to spend close to $5bn before the end of 2002, with the largest slice of that budget dedicated to the company's Trustworthy Computing initiative. As Gates regularly does during his Comdex keynotes, he reminded show goers that Microsoft has made good on initiatives announced at earlier Comdex events while offering a glimpse of things to come.

Among the accomplishments that Gates noted was the company's delivery of the Tablet PC edition of Windows XP (click here for ZDNet's review of Windows XP Tablet PC Edition). Although the launch took place earlier this month, Gates and his cast of Microsoft staffers didn't waste the opportunity to show-off how shipping Tablet PC offerings from a handful of vendors could be used in a typical business scenario. As I've said in my previous coverage of Tablet PC, there's a lot of potential for the operating system in vertical markets that are well suited to the tablet form factor and that need a unifying platform to develop custom applications for. But for the masses, there is much work to be done before Tablet PC can deliver productivity returns on the slight premiums that tablet buyers will incur when buying these next generation notebooks. For some knowledge workers, it could be a step backwards in productivity if they find themselves wrestling with the operating system's handwriting recognition capabilities, which are good, but less than perfect.

If Tablet PC does have a shot with the masses, it may take a killer application like Microsoft's OneNote to make that happen. Gates' keynote address featured a demonstration of OneNote, an application that's still in the labs and that closely mirrors the way most people take notes and aggregate information in an unstructured format. Some of the advantages of OneNote include the ability to type text or draw ink (if you have a tablet PC) anywhere on the screen. This is unlike word processing applications such as Microsoft Word, where new text can only be entered at the cursor's current insertion point.