The confirmation that the Microsoft Courier tablet project was scrapped broke my heart, as I’m sure it did for most people. It looked so promising, so refreshing, so… good. While I may be saddened that the product never came to fruition, I’m still optimistic.
We were so graciously privileged to actually get leaks of an R&D (Research and Development) project, from Microsoft of all people. Most of the R&D stuff never gets leaked, let alone from a big company. That’s exactly why we’re complaining: we actually got a leak. Had we not have gotten a leak, we would not have been any the wiser to the Courier’s birth and demise. Every company (and I mean every) has wild R&D projects that they conduct. That’s how Sony’s Playstation Move motion-controller came to be, and I could go on and on with the examples. Companies give their engineers some money and let them go nuts and that’s how they concoct the products you hold in your hands this very second and the future ones you’ll aspire to own. If the projects don’t ever see the light of day, and most of them never do, you’ll get bits and pieces of that idea / concept that’ll live on in a future product.
So why am I optimistic? Well, Microsoft seems to get it with the Courier. The ideas are brilliant, absolutely brilliant. A mix of pen computing and touch input, a tight ecosystem, and a user-interface / user experience innovative on so many levels is reason enough for anyone to get excited. When the Courier was first leaked by Gizmodo, we knew nothing more than it being an R&D project, so I (and everyone else) had their reservations. The second time it leaked through Engadget, and this time it was stated that it would be coming to the market and that it was very real. Minds were blown. Entertaining the thought of myself being able to buy one was more than enough to cause, what we nerds call, nerd-boners. Everyday I would think about it replacing my Moleskine notebooks for note-taking, managing my calendar, reading books, and just an awesome way to keep organized.
Those ideas aren’t going anywhere. Microsoft probably spent millions of dollars funding this project and there’s absolutely no way that this project is going to waste. Something you might see in future devices: improved writing recognition, devices / software that support both pen and finger input, and possibly a tighter calendar / email / document integration in software. I’m just riffin’ on ideas, here. Microsoft and Bill Gates have been active protagonists for pen-computing for as long as I could remember, and this was a way to explore the possibilities of what you can bring to the tablet market, which is still very young and very much consists of “consuming” devices (the iPad) as opposed to “content-creation” devices (the Courier).
Whether Microsoft will ever decide to bring this device to market is unlikely. It’s possible (and very much more likely) that we’ll see the ideas we see here recycled and reborn or spliced into something that Microsoft wants to make better. Consider yourself lucky that we don’t see many R&D project leaks, or we’ll be feeling like this much more often. The Courier will live on, mark my words, I just don’t know in what form. But if this is where Microsoft is taking tablet computing and this is how they’re looking at the market, there’s reason to celebrate in that.
This post originally appeared on Thedailygetup.com on Apr 30, 2010 02:02am
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