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  • In this file photo, then Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates shares a prototype of an "ultra-mobile" Tablet PC during a keynote speech for attendees at the Microsoft Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Seattle. The Associated Press

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June 20, 2012

Microsoft has long history with tablets

Associated Press

NEW YORK — For decades, the tablet computer was like a mirage in the technology industry: a great idea, seemingly reachable on the horizon, that disappointed as hopeful companies got closer. Microsoft has experienced this cycle of hope and disappointment many times.

The device unveiled by the Redmond Wash.-based software giant on Monday — the Surface — isn't the first tablet it envisioned. Indeed, the company's engineers have been trying to reshape personal computing for as long as there's been a PC.

Microsoft has had one notable success in the tablet space — if you apply a broad definition to the term. Its "Pocket PC" operating system, which is distinct from Windows, ran on phone-sized hand-held "personal digital assistants" starting around 2000. The devices were powerful compared to Palm's PDAs, the market leaders of their time. The Pocket PCs supported color screens, and could recognize casual handwriting. Compaq made good use of Microsoft's Pocket PC software in its popular iPAQ line. But PDAs were a small market, and when Pocket PC moved over to smartphones and was renamed Windows Mobile, it soon found tough competition in the shape of BlackBerrys and then iPhones.

The company that finally cracked the tablet code in 2010 was Apple, not Microsoft. Apple made the iPad a success by scaling up a phone rather than scaling down a PC, which is what Microsoft had been trying to do with the Tablet PC and Origami. Phone chips are cheap and last much longer on batteries, which meant that the iPad was both light, inexpensive and had good battery life. In addition, the iPhone software it used was designed from the ground up for touch input.

Microsoft's new strategy is similar. For Windows 8, it's borrowing design features from Windows Phone, its new smartphone system. Most importantly, one version of the software is designed to run on phone-style chips, rather than the PC-style chips that have been the mainstay of Windows since it was created in the 1980s. It remains to be seen whether Microsoft can make its tablet vision a reality, or if it will remain a mirage.

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