Doonesbury Sends a Wake-Up Call

During the week of August 23rd, shortly after the announcement of the Newton MessagePad, Garry Trudeau’s internationally popular Doonesbury comic strip featured one of the strip’s main characters, Mike Doonesbury and his new “digital assistant,” which Mike had purchased to keep track of all his contacts and appointments. To start with, his wife made fun of him because he was unemployed and didn’t have any contacts or appointments. Mike responded that he wanted to be on the leading edge of technology — a pioneer. He then proceeded to demonstrate to his wife the wonders of his new digital assistant. Over the next few days, Doonesbury treats us to a series of disasters with the digital assistant. The handwriting recognition returns gobbledy-gook. The battery goes dead in the middle of a session of entering names and addresses, losing all of the data that Mike had laboriously entered. The digital assistant comes back with things like “lunch with Dlop at Burger Kling.”

To make a long story short, Doonesbury ridicules the current crop of “digital assistants.” And this ridicule has not gone unnoticed. One of our editors had been in discussions with a major airline magazine to write an article on pen computing — until the Doonesbury series. The airline magazine was no longer interested, because clearly the technology “isn’t there yet.” And the sad fact of the matter is that Doonesbury and the airline magazine are right.

Of course, the counter-argument is that people put too much emphasis on the handwriting recognition. Pen computers are good for all kinds of other applications that don’t involve handwriting recognition. That may be true, but the handwriting recognition is there — it’s a major feature of pen computers. If it’s going to be a main feature of pen products, then it has to work perfectly, not 99% of the time. Consumers aren’t satisfied with a washing machine that only cleans 99% of their clothes. Why should they accept 99% accurate handwriting recognition?

The same goes for battery life. There is simply no excuse for batteries failing without the system providing adequate warning and automatically saving the user’s work. It’s ironic that a syndicated comic strip like Doonesbury sent the message that the pen computer industry needs to hear: it’s not going to succeed until it puts out products that people can use.