The Bright Future of Pen Computing

Recently, Chicago was host to the concurrently running Personal Communications and Computing Show (PCC) and the summer Consumer Electronics Show (CES). While not entirely representative of the industry, the message was clear: wireless communication is perceived as hot, while consumer pen computing is lukewarm at best.

Perhaps most indicative of this was a roundtable discussion chartered with the task of separating the winners in the pen computing market from “the rest.” During this one hour session, most participants lamented the less-than-stellar market for pen computing systems, with a couple going so far as to agree with the notion that pen computing is dead! While few can successfully argue that the pen industry has developed as hoped or expected, the more important question is whether these expectations made any sense to begin with.

Turning the table and looking at the basic assumptions may, in the end, prove to be more useful. And perhaps the most fundamental assumption was that since everyone uses a stylus in their regular course of daily life, this alone would prove to be compelling enough to persuade people to buy into this technology. Having collectively learned a very expensive lesson, it’s time for the industry to adopt a more sensible approach.

Focus on the Solution

What this means, plain and simply, is that companies should focus on providing a direct solution to customers problems. While this simple fact is common to all industries, something endemic to high technology seems to force these leading edge companies to relearn this lesson—over and over again at great cost. In some cases, the cost extends past a single company and affects the entire industry. Something like this has clearly happened to pen computing.

It’s easy to point fingers, however a few obvious mistakes were made. Many in the industry assign a portion of the blame on Apple Computer, with their overly optimistic prognostications of pen computing in everyday life. Of course, Apple is large and influential enough to have its voice and opinion widely registered, making it an easy target for analysts’ tomatoes. Certainly other companies, ranging from the now defunct Momenta to the struggling EO, have also contributed their share.

In fact, AT&T’s abrupt change of strategy from pen-based tablets to so-called “smart cellular phones”—which essentially included pulling PenPoint from the market—has been the single most disruptive and destructive act so far.

Vertical is Good

When looking at the question of what makes stylus-based devices compelling to use and deploy, one has to wonder whether Apple’s much maligned handwriting recognition, or EO’s clumsy integration of wireless communication are indeed the culprits at the center of the storm of criticism. Imagine for a moment that both had worked flawlessly: would pen devices have been the run-away success that many had rosily predicted? I’m not convinced.

What has happened is that while analysts, the press, and many early adopters focused like a laser beam on these technical shortcomings, most people missed the essence of the problem facing the industry. More important than the sometimes unforgiving handwriting recognition, or the lack of enterprise integration, is the fact that these products are rarely positioned to solve real customer problems.

For some reason, this is obvious to people outside of the core pen computing industry, people who perhaps aren’t entirely enraptured by the “promise of the pen.” Instead, they have long realized—and somewhat pooh-poohed the fact—that the pen computing industry today is vertically oriented. Paraphrasing Oliver Stone’s fictional Wall Street character Gordon Gekko: it’s time to face the fact that vertical, for lack of a better word, is good.

The companies that realized this early, including, Telxon, PI Systems, the former GRiD, and others, have found pen computing to be a very dynamic market. In short, they have found plenty of opportunity in solving customers’ well documented problems, instead of trying to convince them that a problem exists. In some cases, they have advanced to second and third generation products—products once again centered on technology used to solve the problem at hand.

Meanwhile, the companies that have aimed at the nebulous productivity-enhancement market have come up short. And why not?—their task is at least twice as difficult. Not only do they have to sell a solution, they have to educate and sell a very diverse audience on the problem as well. One approach is hype; the obvious consequence is disappointment. The press and public are not altogether forgiving of a high-flyer, and the revenge has since been extracted on the entire pen computing industry.

The Future’s So Bright…

The good news is that while a few major early battles have clearly been lost, the tide is starting to turn, and the future looks very bright for the companies that manage both their customers’ expectations, as well as their expenses.

It’s wise to remember that the so-called “Year of the LAN” was really five years in the making. Widely proclaimed in the late 80’s, it was well into the early 90’s before customers turned to this now popular solution in significant numbers. Likewise, the proclaimed “Year of Multimedia” went through the trauma of several births and rebirths before reaching its state today. The pen computing market and its year will also undoubtedly arrive. However, only after the industry has retrenched and approached it with more realistic expectations.

Imagineering the Future

The question then becomes how do we, as an industry, better manage these expectations. Pete Snell, Vice President of Newton software developer MobileSoft had obviously considered this issue carefully when he said: “The [hype] serves a useful purpose in that it gets people who can create the vision into the process. The bad news is that the same message, which is being received by the industry…is also being communicated out to the consumers. The consumers get sucked up into these incredible stories about what’s going to happen in the future, and so they can’t help but have their expectations set awfully high. Unfortunately the computer industry has a rich history of not fulfilling on it vision and its commitment.”

Therefore, what the industry needs are walls around its “imagineers.” Any visitor to Disneyland will certainly have noticed the brightly painted walls surrounding upcoming attractions with a notice stating that Disney Imagineers are hard at work creating the next great feature. Disney faithful don’t want to hear the hype from behind the walls—they want to be amazed when it’s completed.

Looking Down the Road

So what about the future of pen computing? As is often the case, the long-term scenario is easier to predict and is often as clear as an azure sky. This so-called generation view, playing out over a human generation, has pen computing assuming a very prominent role in both business and everyday life. The near term is a bit more tricky to forecast. However, one insight may help: the pen will definitely not slay the keyboard—reliable user independent speech recognition will!

The pen has been unfairly and unreasonably pitted against the keyboard, as the two titans of input clashing for mobile computing supremacy. As we’ve seen, this is an unfair competition at best in the short term, and mostly irrelevant in the long term. The keyboard killer will ultimately be advanced speech recognition technologies on platforms ranging from desktop super PCs, to mobile handheld personal computers and communicators.

Speech recognition technologies are moving from the research laboratory to the desktop with products coming from IBM, AT&T, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, and others. With Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors on a microprocessor—and by extension the computing power—doubles roughly every eighteen months, showing no signs of slowing, along with advanced digital signal processing (DSP) and other application specific integrated circuits (ASIC) solutions in silicon, we can expect even more advanced algorithms to be widely available on handheld mobile computing devices within a dozen years.

When this happens, the often heated debate between keyboards and pens will seem as pointless as the battle between vinyl and 8-track tapes. With true speaker independent voice recognition, the keyboard will finally be delegated to the museum where it belongs. Who will willfully choose to use enter information via a keyboard with accurate speech recognition available?

And the Pen?

What will become of the pen in the world of speech recognition by computer? Is it positioned to suffer the same fate as the keyboard? Not likely. Even though we have near 100 per cent accuracy using speech between humans, we still depend on handwritten and hand-drawn communication for a sizeable amount of communication. As the pathways and bandwidth of human-computer communication and interaction leaps forward to match our existing human-to-human communication, pen-based input will become more important than ever.

In fact, it’s easy to envision a model of interaction where today’s handwriting recognition plays a relatively small part in the rich communication that is likely to take place between human and machine, and between human and human through a machine intermediary. The keyboard has little place in such a world, no more than a relic—the computing equivalent of the manual wind-up starter on a Mercedes SL today.

Back to the Near Future

While the generation view is a useful strategic tool, people in the mobile computing industry are forced to make or lose their fortunes in the present. While recognizing the vertical nature of the early market, many are searching for that breakthrough application that will bring mobile devices to the masses. These people point to the short history of personal computing to illustrate that a single application, VisiCalc, and its later spreadsheet siblings, fueled much of the early microcomputer boom for both the Apple II and the IBM PC.

Likewise, the breakthrough technology of the early Macintosh provided a substantial following only after the introduction of Apple’s laser printer and the new application it enabled—true desktop publishing. In the mobile computing industry, manufacturers and developers are pinning their hopes on advanced communication features—particularly those employing wireless technologies—as the next killer application.

Wireless certainly promises exciting opportunities, not the least of which that it moves the computing market to an even larger arena; that of general purpose communication. However, early developers should heed the lessons learned by the pen computing market and concentrate on matching products with specific customer needs. The mass consumer market requires its own set of marketing skills that few computer companies have successfully demonstrated.

Meanwhile in Chicago

Back to the industry roundtable at Chicago’s PCC, an interesting moment occurred when a couple of the participants held up their Casio wristwatches to illustrate the type of function, reliability, and value that they felt was necessary for a product to succeed in the pen computing industry.

While Casio and Seiko have clearly demonstrated a good understanding of the consumer market, the wristwatch industry also provides interesting instruction in marketing to the tastes and life-styles of a very diverse population. The introduction of the quartz watch a few decades ago nearly decimated the mainstream Swiss wristwatch industry, long known for producing the most accurate watches in the world.

With the quartz technology, Japanese and other manufacturers could now easily and inexpensively produce watches matching the accuracy of the finest Swiss timepiece. The resurgence of Swiss prominence came with the introduction of the Swatch, a mass-produced watch of slightly better-than-average quality, matched with a marketing campaign that some people in the European luxury business have hailed as equivalent in importance as the invention of the engine.

The presence of Swatch in Europe is almost unequalled. With an entirely new line introduced each quarter, early Swatches can fetch thousands of dollars. European executives and fashionable individuals sport collections often in excess of 50 Swatches! The message: Casio and Seiko sells quality and price; Swatch sells life-style.

As mobile devices strive to enter the mainstream in not only computing, but also everyday life, developers must consider much more than technical excellence and product features. A whole new world, unknown to even present day computing giants, awaits the developer of a truly mass market, horizontal device.