The Big Bang
Microsoft may have blurred the messaging, but its brilliant idea processor strikes the right Note
WATCHING BILL GATES’ annual Comdex keynote is an eerie exercise. For starters, it takes place at the MGM Grand amphitheater, the site of heavyweight bouts and bites. But instead of seeing Joe Frasier climbing into the ring to wish the champ well, you see heads swivel as Carly Fiorina is escorted to her front-row seat.
The keynote’s content is no surprise, having been telegraphed by the Times and the Journal in the morning editions. It’s Tablet PC III: The This Time We Really Mean It Tour. But there is other news as well: Dell’s entry in the Pocket PC sweepstakes with a $200 model, a slick small Palm-killer iPaq from HP, and a smart alarm clock from Microsoft Research. Don’t ask; I don’t get it. But Bill does, and that’s what counts, or will.
Last year’s keynote took the usual path of keeping Gates onstage through a series of product demos and alpha glimpses of new code. This strategy produced the dubious resource allocation of the world’s richest hand model, with deadly scripted stage patter punctuated by moments of stark terror as product managers watched their careers blue-screening.
This year’s model is a hybrid of Disney’s autoanimatronic It’s A Small, Small World rotating stage and David Letterman’s Viewer Mail segments, where Dave rubs his chin as we flash back to a vignette. Bill sets up the demo, then strides offstage as scenarios roll into view. Only once in a sketch about Viewsonics’ Wi-Fi-enabled Smart Screen does Bill drop in to watch TV like Norton on the Honeymooners.
This scenario-based approach insulates Gates from the dropped cues and the “It worked perfectly in rehearsal” asides, but it also has the counterintuitive effect of filtering out Gates’ fierce vision of the loosely coupled digital architecture. And in a parade of smart wireless devices — kitchen magnets, wristwatches, key chains, Wi-Fi base stations, Tablets, Pocket PC Phone edition, even Kinko’s virtual printer Web Service bureau — you wonder whether the company should be renamed Microhard.
Lost in this shuffle is OneNote, a powerful idea processor from the Office group. Mark my words: OneNote is the new center of the Office universe, relegating Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to the edges of the architecture in a single leap. Billed as an Office add-on, in reality it’s a smart device programmed to transform Office from a suite of applications to a grid of interactive components.
OneNote — stupid name, so let’s call it Note for short — derives from Steve Ballmer’s directive to focus not on product groups but on scenarios. Scenario No. 1 for me has been capturing and manipulating ideas. Whether it’s writing this column, brainstorming, prototyping business plans, or retaining the myriad bits of information that keep my marriage intact, it all starts with a note.
These days we live in the e-mail client. I estimate my time splits up about 60 percent in e-mail, 20 percent in the browser, 10 percent in Word, and the rest staring out the window, trying to retrieve a semblance of a good idea. When (or if) an idea arrives, I typically capture it in the most inelegant way — as an email to myself.
It’s the same thing with Web pages. If you’re Jon Udell, tethered to your Titanium and a broadband connection, Web data is effectively persistent in the Cloud. If you’re me, on an airplane or playing thumb tennis with my BlackBerry, capturing Web pages is a constant issue.
As 802.11 gets built out, the tipping point for my BlackBerry is getting closer. When someone marries a Wi-Fi/GPRS combo CF card to the new iPaq, even without a thumb board, my BlackBerry begins the ride to craigslist. But what does this have to do with Note?
Note is agnostic about three forms of notes data: text notes, handwritten notes, and audio notes. With a Tablet PC, you can capture all three types, either typing with the keyboard, using ink with the stylus, or recording a meeting with the built-in microphone. As Note team leader Chris Pratley points out, although the sound quality of a laptop mike may be inadequate for speech recognition, it’s great for Note, which time-stamps the recording to synchronize it with the notes you jot down in a meeting.
Remember: These notes can be typed or inked, and intermingled at that. Note lets you drop notes at any location on the page; drag and drop Web page data; reorganize and auto-categorize thoughts, lists, and documents; and then search all this data chronologically, by category, by contextual flags, and across both typed and inked notes.
Everything is weighted in service of idea capture, with processing available when you get the time. Audio notes lets you capture the full transcript on linear audio, but then lets you click on your notes to jump to that portion of the audio for playback. Or you can play back the recording and watch the focus shift to the relevant note like a bouncing ball, then flesh out your notes inline while retaining the synchronization.
There’s not enough time to do this software justice here. But Note is the killer app that defines the utility of the Tablet, switching automatically from stylus drawing to typed text to idea cataloging without dropping a stitch. And looping back to the Pocket PC scenario, imagine what happens if (or when) Note ink objects can be created on the thin(ner) client and Web serviced to the base station for incorporation or further processing. Bye-bye, BlackBerry.
Then Office’s current tool set becomes rendering engines for Note data: Word formatting, Excel calculations, PowerPoint presentations, and Outlook communications. Version 1 has a pseudo XML data format, and no visible programmable object model. But Pratley says turning XML on will take “a matter of days once we define the schema.”
Bang. Zoom. To the Moon, Alice.
