http://www.flickr.com/photos/paypaul/4312326836/

Secondly, the iPhone/iPod line is not at all like the tablet PC or Newton. Not just in functionality and design, but in use cases and in sales and popularity. Most people would not even consider them both to be the same kind of device. Calling them both “tablets” is just semantics.

Finally, if Bill Gates had never fallen in love with his clone of the Newton, how would that have prevented Apple from creating iPhone and iPhone OS and iPod touch and forthcoming larger devices? How would those devices be different? I don't see anything in iPhone that is tablet PC -inspired. There is more drawn from pro music software, which for a long time has featured virtual recreations of physical devices like reverbs and EQ's and synthesizers, including all the knobs and sliders and so on, and their distinctive looks and sounds. However we have had to interact with the virtual devices by dragging a cursor around. With iPhone, Apple solved that problem so you can actually turn knobs, slide sliders, click buttons, and the virtual devices are now as good as the real thing. That is more important than the fact you can hold both iPhone and tablet PC in your left hand and activate it with your right. Clipboards can do that.

The problem with this is that Apple didn't steal anything from Xerox PARC. Apple paid for it all. In exchange for the PARC research, Xerox got part ownership of Apple, which was still a private company. When Apple later went public in a huge IPO, Xerox made a ton of money. And the people from PARC who had done the research went over to Apple to continue their work. So the GUI project essentially moved from a research phase at Xerox PARC to a commercial product phase at Xerox/Apple.

To use the Bill Gates metaphor: two neighbors named Apple and Xerox went into business together to make a TV and Bill Gates broke in and stole it.

Gates’ response

“Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhrMRPpxl0c

I’ve heard Bill Gates is trying to get an autographed original of the Ten Commandments. That may have something to do with his tablet obsession. So far he’s only been able to get 5-10, but as that where the signature is the other half will be hard to verify.

Apple and Microsoft have this in common: They both tried tablet computing too soon.

It may STILL be too soon.

Some problems I can think of:

Readability in all light conditions. OLPC and a couple others have somewhat solved this. But a device your going to carry around constantly must be readable in sunlight and other not-ideal conditions.

Anyone using this as their primary computer is doing a lot of consuming and not so much creating. Will they ever be able to make these things act as a keyboard? I don’t care about handwriting recognition. I can type faster and HATE handwriting. Microsoft has shown in their hilarious demo the sad state of voice recognition… I think it went something kill “Kill my aunt NOW”.

Finally touch screens get scratched, and smudged, and broken and some people have a lot of trouble wt the digital gymnastics of cut-and-paste, even when the OS providers get around to providing such capabilities.

I think this is a game of chicken, with everyone afraid to go first, because those who already went first, got killed.

Meanwhile Sony and Amazon have pretty good readers that could easily be made to browse the web, play music, and download specialized content. Oh, wait they already do that. Now if Sony or Amazon or someone else would just make them do it a little bit better, we could increment our way to the perfect tablet PC. No need to search for the Holy Grail.

I think that your post only proves that every brilliant ‘invention’ is derivative of what came before it.

As Federico Faggin of Intel once said, “The hard part lies in actually making the idea work.”

Specific to Microsoft, they failed because their vision of the tablet was always a derivative bolt-on of Windows (hardware, connectivity limitations aside), a failure to define a software user experience, and grow an ecosystem around same.

This is the same thing that makes Courier cool but a “show me” question mark.

With Apple’s version, we can readily say that 85K apps will run on that form factor in a compelling fashion, that the ecosystem (dev tools, app store, content partners) is already in place, and whatever re-think logic needed to make this a successful platform is core to Apple’s operational DNA.

With Microsoft, every device hammer looks like a Windows nail to them, and culturally (except for XBox), that seems to preclude their ability to re-invent.

Mark
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Innovation, Inevitability and Why R&D is So Hard
http://bit.ly/Y8kcH