Microsoft Touts New Era Of Personal ComputingMicrosoft Touts New Era Of Personal Computing

Bill Gates and his co-workers at Microsoft want to re-invent personal computing--again. A decade after introducing the first version of Windows good enough to popularize graphical computing, Microsoft is aiming for another user-interface revolution with the Tablet PC, a portable business machine that will recognize handwriting, take speech dictation, and run on batteries for nearly a full workday.

Gates will tout the system--due next year from vendors such as Acer, Compaq, and Fujitsu--in his keynote address at Comdex this week in Las Vegas, as Microsoft begins a yearlong marketing push for the product. The Tablet PC has made appearances in prototype form over the past year.

"Sending E-mail or working collaboratively on a document are instantly more productive and exciting experiences when you can take your PC just about anywhere," Gates says.

There's a PC industry graveyard filled with past attempts to build a high-powered electronic tablet. Microsoft hopes to usher in an era of information-sharing in which business users tote slate-shaped computers into meetings to jot down notes, edit documents and drawings by hand, then plug in a keyboard for desktop work. But its ambitions for pen computing extend beyond the Tablet. Gates says all Microsoft applications--including Office--will be able to read handwritten notes and annotations when Tablets ship during the second half of next year.

"I wouldn't be surprised if in another two years, most of our notebooks are gone and people have Tablet PCs instead," says John Thomas, CIO at Parsons Group, a Pasadena, Calif., engineering and construction company with 10,000 PC users. Thomas envisions field engineers carrying Tablet PCs to job sites to view drawings. "I can't imagine 10 years from now that people will use keyboards and mice to interface with their computers," he says.

Microsoft says it will make available a set of Windows APIs that open its handwriting-recognition software to independent developers. Companies including Autodesk, Corel, and Groove Networks are developing versions of their applications to run on the Tablet PC.

Pricing for the Tablet PC is likely to start at around $2,000.