Originally posted by Jeff Lebowski
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I know this group recognizes how powerful the program is. MS knows this, too. Chris Pratley was the product manager before MS shifted him over to office labs about 3 years ago. I remember thinking that the ON team was going to take a hit and the product would hurt. I also thought the day Chris announced he was going to an unspecified project that MS was going to have another awesome product coming soon.
The ON team has talked with me about how they hope that the Word team will see the benefit in the autosave and sync feature of ON, which allows the shared notebooks. This was developed by the ON team and I remember them saying that a future release of office would allow the more common applications to live sync. They were going to use the ON code to do this. One of the big hiccups is the vast majority of legacy users that would be very confused at the lack of a "save" option.
So, yes, they know how good it is as does MS. In fact, I remember the day that Chris announced that ON was going to be added to all office student editions. They were pumped at the recognition from their management.
Six years ago I said the majority of computers sold to students would be tablet PCs. The windows team screwed MS royally on this one with Vista. MS was about five years ahead of the industry. What they really needed was a device that had shorter boot times. I still would take the tablet PC with the active digitizer every day over the iPad...if it had the battery life and "instant on" of the iPad. Motion Computing was so close, in fact, I think the iPad concept was stolen from Motion Computing and given an apple twist.
I still think that the tablet PC with active digitizer is going to make a comeback and will battle the iPad for business users, if what they say about windows 8 is true. Dual input is king. Not having a point on my iPad makes the device nearly unusable for documenting in the medical profession.

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