Tablet PC is dead !?

[Colin Dunstan]

"This one caught me by absolute surprise. Here is the background. For some time now, I and several other analysts and IT managers have been telling Microsoft that the separate Tablet PC edition idea was a bad one. This is because the last thing IT wants is another operating system to manage. After lots of pounding, Microsoft agreed to look at this issue. In two presentations at WinHEC -- Microsoft's recent hardware conference for developers -- Matti Suokko, the Mobile Platforms Division manager, and Darin Fish, the Business Development manager for the Mobile Platforms Division at Microsoft, both indicated Microsoft is considering a new direction.

You would think the result would be a sigh of relief from analysts and media. Instead, the articles that resulted generally concluded that the Tablet PC is dead. Folks got to this opinion by taking the obvious shortcut of tying the platform to the unique OS and concluding that if the unique OS is gone, so is the platform -- despite the fact that pictures of tablet computers were liberally sprinkled through both presentations, including the future road map sections."

So the Tablet PC is dead - another dispelling misconception about Microsoft?