Tablet PCs Miss Their Market

According to a story in The Register, the hardware manufacturers who've been trying to sell "tablet" style PCs loaded with Microsoft's Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, aren't finding many takers. One of their complaints is that Microsoft's hefty licence fees for the WinXP Tablet software are adding too much to the price. (The hardware itself costs about the same as laptop with a keyboard.) Same old song, 37th verse. But the main problem is that people just aren't buying them. No kidding.

They've been trying to market these to executives, who (even today) tend to have minimal keyboard skills, viewing that as a "secretarial" skill. (That's silly elitist bullshit, but let's let that go for now.) It doesn't automatically follow that a computer without a keyboard is then well-suited for executives. They've got it backwards.

The tablet form factor is for "sub-secretarial" tasks, not "super-secretarial" tasks. It's best suited for taking inventory, collecting delivery signatures, and other tasks that involve walking around and recording data. That's semi-skilled clerical labor, not executive work. They could be useful in hospitals, but in the hands of nurses and interns, not doctors and administrators. In schools, they might be useful to students, not faculty. They're for peons (who can't afford Microsoft's surcharge), not the ruling class.

Furthermore, execs (and docs and profs) don't generally use pens any more than they use keyboards (except perhaps to sign documents generated by other people). Their job is to read stuff, listen to people, think about things, and talk to people (usually telling them what to do). A tablet PC assists with none of those. What they want is (yes, I'm afraid it's true) a voice-controlled system, the 21st-century version of a dictaphone. Give the tablets to the folks who could actually get some use out of them.