Last week I was at DevConnections conference in Las Vegas. The Microsoft Tablet PC and Mobile PC teams had a hands-on lab, and I had the opportunity to join them so I could listen to ISVs and enterprise organizations describe opportunities they see in our new mobile world and how it is impacting what they do in their daily tasks.
I had been at DevConnections, Las Vegas '04 and had a certain level of expectation that attending a non-Microsoft developer conference might have fewer people attending who are familiar with how to pen and ink-enable applications, work with APIs for power management or network awareness, let alone be familiar with advanced ink-recognition.
I was wrong. Boy, was I wrong. People looked for the pens and were ready to go through labs on Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 or the play with the CTP build of Windows Vista. Sure, there were those people who hadn't paid any attention to Tablet PCs in the last year, and they were pleasantly surprised about the widescreen display on the Gateway M280 or the light weight Lenovo ThinkPad.
Better yet, people understood that all these mobility features in a PC directly impact the work they are doing today. You see, not only was DevConnections one of the Visual Studio 2005 launch event locations, it was also an ASP.NET, C++, and SQL conference. So developers learned that they can have ink in a web-based Winform and store it in a SQL database. This general concept can be applied from applications ranging from enterprise ASP forms to blogs. So, now, ink strokes / reco, power management, network awareness, data synch, all sit in the libraries of developers just like web and database tools.
When I think about the warm reception moments from these developers, then it's even more exciting to see how ink on this blog is just the start of more to come. With this beta version of Telligent's Community Server, I can draw using a whiteboard. Now, it's time for some "learn to draw" lessons. :) Luckily, the advantage is not just a matter of expressing myself. Instead, ink is allowing people to communicate on a whole other dimension across the Internet.