I spent the day at Microchip’s Master’s Conference today. In case you’re wondering, Microchip specializes in very low-cost ICs–particularly microcontrollers and PICs. Primarily this is a hardware conference, but when you dig in you’d think it’s a software conference. Over the last dozen years that Microchip has been around it’s grown from an almost invisible startup to the number one microcontroller manufacturer–at least according to them. And what’s led Microchip up the success ladder is its combination of inexpensive programmable devices and its development tools. In many respects, its success is similar to Microsoft’s in that it treats the “developer” well.
Anyway, some friends were going so I decided to tag along. Of course I took my Tablet PC.
Within the first 30 minutes or so, someone came over to check out the Tablet. She hadn’t seen a Tablet PC before and was quite impressed with the idea. As an architect who thinks through high-level designs, takes lots of notes, and edits a lot of documents shared with many individuals, she could see how valuable a Tablet could be. After 15 minutes or so of looking at the Tablet her cell phone rang, so she had to leave. But she wasn’t discarding the Tablet PC concept. She wound up talking about Tablets with whoever was on the other end of the phone.
Later I met up with a consultant from a large firm and he was less than impressed with the inking. Paper was fine for him. Well, kind of. He’s a heavy user of PDAs. His comment: If you could do the same or similar things on a PDA, he’d want it now. I guess that’s one vote for a compatible ink sdk on the Pocket PC.
After lunch I picked up a conversation with a gentleman checking his email on his ThinkPad. I learned that at his company, they had settled on only purchasing IBM notebooks. They figure it would save them money from a support standpoint if they only had one notebook to support. He also said they’d looked at Tablets when they first came out. They passed around 10 convertibles–loaners he’d thought–to various marketing and field support engineers. But the test program didn’t go very well. The computers were underpowered and too expensive. Of course, the other problem was that IBM doesn’t make a Tablet. He went on to explain in impressive detail how the pilot program worked and how they had settled on IBM. After a few minutes more of talking with him, I learned he was a VP of Engineering at a large company. His vantage point was becoming clearer. So I asked him: Had they given one of their 10 Tablets to any of their engineers? He didn’t think so. He didn’t think they’d be interested. So I asked him if I could give him a one minute demo. I promised him it would only be a minute. So I ran through a couple highlights of how I use a Tablet from an engineering perspective. He got it right away.
An hour or so later, while handwriting IM messages to Lora about a recent blast of Slashdot traffic WhatIsNew was experiencing, a guy sat down on the couch next to me and asked, “Is that a Tablet PC?” Yes, I replied. He said he wanted one, but they have been a bit too expensive and that he’d just been reading on Slashdot that a new low-cost Tablet PC with an AMD processor was hitting the market. (Wow, word spreads fast on Slashdot.) He was excited about the possibility of getting one. Oh, in case you’re wondering, the first thing he wants to do is install Linux on it. Ah, yes, if I had any doubts they were gone. I was in hardware land.
Turns out he was quite knowledgeable about Tablets. His boss had one. Well, more accurately his boss used to have one. As fate would have it, on the way to the conference the Tablet PC was stolen out of his luggage. The really bad part was that he’d purchased the Tablet on his own nickel because the company he works for wouldn’t purchase one for him. Ouch.
All in all, it was a very interesting day. I got my fill of hardware speak for the day and had several opportunities to talk Tablets.