Funny thing happened this week in the tech press. On Thursday, the Inquirer printed a story with the headline “Touch Screen Is the Future of Computing, Says Microsoft.” The very next day, Vnunet.com published another story headlined “Touch Screens Are Not the Future of Computing, Says HP.”
Microsoft is right. HP is wrong. Again.
In the 1970s, a talented young HP engineer invented a low-cost, highly efficient personal computer. He desperately wanted the company to fund and build the PC, and he pitched it passionately. If HP had more vision back then than it does now, the company would have allocated five million dollars and 30 engineers to the project, and would have leveraged in-house talent to become the driving force of the entire personal computing revolution. HP, however, saw no future in it, and rejected the engineer’s proposal in totality.
So Steve Wozniak left HP and joined up with Steve Jobs to found Apple, and the rest is history.
HP is kinda sorta making the same mistake again. HP’s CTO Phil McKinney proclaimed this week that touch computing, although interesting, is “not the future of computing,” and his reasons why reveal why he doesn’t understand it.
In the article, McKinney is quoted as saying that touch interfaces have “only limited use for desktops and laptops… and will not replace the keyboard and mouse.” Why, because users have to “reach over to use the screen” and that typing on glass is unpleasant.
Well there you go. HP, or at least McKinney, cannot see the future (again), which is why the company and the CTO don’t believe in touch.
Touch desktop PCs won’t be the idiotic laptops Microsoft and Dell have been showing, where the touch display is vertical, and the user has to hold his arm up to use it (unless in presentation or meeting mode). Touch desktop PCs will be like drafting tables and touch laptops will snap open flat for use in touch mode.
And they won’t prevent you from using keyboard and mouse, although you’ll be able to go without the mouse and use an on-screen keyboard when you want to. You’ll be able to pull out a cheap, wireless physical keyboard for real writing and, in the case of desktop PCs, it’ll rest right on the slanted touch display if you want.
And some of the chores now done by keyboard and mouse will be handled by voice command.
Just as much of HP’s multi-billion dollar business is now built upon the foundation of what the company rejected as having no future, in ten years time, much of HP’s business will be built around systems with touch interfaces.
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