Windows Phone Thoughts: Why Pen Computing Could Put You Out of Business

"Warning: Pen computing, handwriting recognition, and machine translation threaten your standing in the global marketplace. I'm not saying you're going to lose your job, necessarily. Just that there will be hundreds of millions more people, armed with tablet computers, ready and able to compete for it. I've been thinking about this for the past couple of days, ever since I talked to an executive from a handwriting recognition and tablet input company called Pen & Internet. It was founded in Silicon Valley by a group of very smart Russian scientists, the same folks who did the Apple Newton handwriting recognizer (which did not work very well) and sold Microsoft the technology used as part of Tablet PC (which worked much better). They sell their technology to hardware companies, software companies and, increasingly, wireless service providers in places like mainland China."

The article goes on to talk about an automatic translation system that could drastically change the way we communicate - but the cynic in me has seen how well auto-translation systems work now, and I can imagine some comical results.