Courier
I didn’t want to post about this, because everyone who is anyone has posted about it. I really dislike posting rehashes of other people’s work when they have done an excellent job with their write-up. Plus, I was growing a bit tired of only doing tips and rumors on Twitter (much respect, Twitter, I have grown to respect you and my fellow tweeters). I like to do analysis and informed speculation more than news and rumors. So, I really mulled over whether I had anything decent to say with Courier. After some back-and-forth, here’s what I’ve decided to say:
Much of what others have thought about Courier is true. It was real close to being made into an actual product. It was developed under the leadership of J Allard himself. And its incubation phase was a total black-box within the company, much like the Singularity/Midori/WDN project still is. That’s why it is so difficult to get any reliable information on its true status today as well. It has, however, truly reached a dead-end for now, where the road to commercialization is concerned. I thought about why that is, and what’s next for Microsoft, and I’ll tell you what I think; but first, a history lesson…
Courier started off, as Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet has suggested as an offshoot of the InkSeine project. People really passionate about ink and the stylus as inputs wanted to see where these technologies could go if they could break free of the Windows and Office paradigms and be created solely for a small subset of use cases or input method. Now OneNote looks nothing like InkSeine, and while it is a great program, it isn’t 100% efficient for use with a stylus only.
OneNote is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. It got money thrown at it and has a decent number of installs only because it was bundled with Office. It has become polished enough to replace Outlook in the core-suite and become bigger than Word, Excel and Powerpoint combined on Windows Phone only because it was bundled with Office. However, Office has also restricted its UI and affected its usability on the slate form factor negatively (remember that slates were around as a TabletPC sub-class long before 2010). And while we may never know for sure, it is possible that an InkSeine-like OneNote might have driven slate sales so well that it could have become a bigger product for Microsoft than Windows or Office. There was too much risk involved in taking that path for Microsoft back then, however.
The InkSeine people went on to build Codex, the true predecessor of Courier. They basically said, “the custom software is usable, so let’s prototype custom hardware” (basically two OQOs put together). Then it apparently caught Allard’s eye in mid-2008. Allard hadn’t done anything exciting since his work on the original Xbox and the 360. For reasons unknown, he had apparently been asked not to mess with the Windows Mobile group (maybe because Microsoft thought that it was a corporate-only market and feared too much change might cause a backlash).
