Wednesday, February 09, 2005 - Posts

Synergy

After the Tablet PC launch on November 7, 2002, I was invited to the HP Tablet PC Party. I just walked across Broadway, grabbed a beer and found a seat in the second row. We all received a bag filled with HP/Compaq Tablet PC materials, party favors and the book Dick Clark's American Bandstand.

Just as the show was about to begin Carly Fiorina and Michael Capellas set down right in front of me with their respected entourages. This was just about a week after the controversial and combative merger of Compaq and HP.

It was a great party; Dick Clark himself was the MC of the show, Chubby Checker along with the Shirelles and Gary US Bonds. The Shirelles were fabulous and so was the beer. When Chubby started to do “The Twist” the house went wild, then he extended a hand to Carly and Michael and up they went on to the stage TWISTING the night away!

The HP “Marketing“ girls sitting around me started swooning as if Carly and Michael were involved romantically! Chubby looked at us and said come on up here, so there I was on stage twisting with my good friends Carly, Michael and Chubby!

Carly learned everything from Lucent, so her talk of “synergy” between HP and Compaq should have been seen as just that, talk. Michael Capellas left HP/Compaq for MCI hours after the party, CEO Carly lost market share to Dell and IBM! The HP shareholders paid for the party and much more, Carly is walking away, the HP way, with 21 million dollars.

posted Wednesday, February 09, 2005 1:59 PM by paul with 3 Comments

Tablet PC amazes

The Tablet PC launched on November 7, 2002 at the Ambassador Theatre in NYC, I still have the black bag with all the swag. We all got a commemorative 32meg USB drive, a Tablet PC cap and t-shirt. Bill was there with the actor Rob Lowe and all the demos worked flawlessly on the Broadway stage.

It’s over two years now and the Tablet PC still amazes us, to hear grown men and woman “owing and ahing” in this age of technical miracles has to mean something. Everything about the Tablet PC is impressive, from the new way to take notes to the sleek light weight design.

The Tablet PC SDK 1.7 can be downloaded today and will be included in Visual Studio 2005 so developers can create ink enabled applications. There are now a few hundred Tablet PC apps, but look for that number to increase as there definitely is great interest in the developer community.

At our N3UG meeting last night, Frank La Vine held us spellbound despite the fact that we knew this magicians trick, but like kids at a performance we just had to see it again! We had one Tablet PC in the audience and most of us knew the brands and the specks of each model, so it was a great interactive discussion. Miguel stood up at the end and told Frank “you know this meeting is going to cost me $2500”!

The consensus in the room was that the Toshiba models with the 1400x1050 screen resolution were the best of breed. Acer and HP also received good anecdotal reviews, but the big question is why has the adoption of the Tablet PC been sooo slow?

Of all the conferences I attended last year only at Speech TEK did I see as many as ten Tablet PC’s in the room. The Apple Powerbooks cost more and have been more prevalent at most of the industry gatherings I have attended lately.

So where is the buzz? Who are the influencers? I’d love to be blogging on a Tablet PC moving about un-tethered in this age of technical miracles making my mark!

posted Wednesday, February 09, 2005 7:19 AM by paul with 10 Comments