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A truly personal computer

Gates used his influential keynote speech at Comdex in Las Vegas yesterday to demonstrate a prototype of the Tablet PC, a machine, running the next version of Windows, that's about the size of an A4 pad, and that forsakes a keyboard in favour of doing everything through pen and voice recognition. This, finally, will be the truly personal computer; a machine that you can carry around with you everywhere and that becomes an integral part of your life. It'll use a Crusoe chip from Transmeta to give battery life in the tens of hours, meaning you can recharge it overnight and forget all about it. Knowing Gates, he'll probably want to fit in some aspect of semi-intelligence in it as well, so it can anticipate what you want to do before you even know yourself.

Sounds familiar?

If this sounds familiar to you, there's a good reason. It's very similar to a vision of computing put forward by Apple's then-CEO John Sculley in 1989, in a video about a product called Knowledge Navigator. This was a tablet-sized PC that communicated through pen and voice, and the overall ideas in the video went on to inform the vision and design of Apple's Newton PDA. Although Apple never quite got around to releasing a tablet sized Newton,

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the MessagePad 2100 got pretty close, and the company was working on building speech recognition into it before Steve Jobs, who hated everything connected with Sculley, canned the project. As Jobs is rumoured to have said to one Newton engineer at the time, "Apple makes computers. Computers have keyboards." So much for thinking different.

Gates is good at many things, but one of his key skills is knowing a good thing when he sees it. At the time of Newton's demise, he must have laughed heartily as he saw Apple effectively throw away a technology that it would take Microsoft years to develop. What Jobs did when he canned Newton was to hand a new and potentially huge computer market to Microsoft, and Apple will be suffering the consequences of this for years to come.

Of course, Apple could pull something out of the bag, and may even be working on a tablet Mac for launch next year. It is known that it has some pretty nifty handwriting technology, codenamed Inkwell, running on Mac OS X, and the low power requirements of PowerPC make it ideal for this kind of mobile device. Mac OS X itself is pretty scalable, and if Linux hackers can create versions of the Open Source OS that work on handhelds, there's no reason why Apple can't make Mac OS X run on tablet PCs. (Aqua would look pretty nice in portrait mode.)

Public perception matters

Yet if Apple does release such a device, it'll now be seen as following Microsoft, thanks to Steve Jobs' idiotic obsession with not commenting on future products. If Jobs had shown a mocked up tablet running Mac OS X at Apple Expo Paris, he'd have shown that Apple, not Microsoft, is a true innovator. And, in the computer business, public perception of who's the leader matters a lot.

It's a lesson Jobs ought to learn from his old sparring partner Gates.