VisiCalc’s Dan Bricklin weighs in on the tablet revolution

In 1979, Dan Bricklin wrote the most innovative piece of software in history. Before VisiCalc, there was nothing that remotely resembled an “electronic spreadsheet.” After it, the world of business was different in deep and fundamental ways.

His attention has shifted to the tablet marketplace, where he runs Software Garden, purveyor of Note Taker HD — a top-of-the-line iPad app for taking and organizing notes via either keyboard or electronic ink. He was kind enough to share his thoughts on tablets, inking, character recognition, and other, more important topics.

Advice Line: The PC revolution, which you were instrumental in starting, was all about empowering individual employees. That seems to have gone by the wayside, in favor of an IT-centric approach. Do you agree?

Dan Bricklin: It’s more complex than that. Microsoft used to empower technically knowledgeable users. That has pretty much been taken over by the open source world, and Apple has gone yet a different route.

No question, Microsoft’s focus is on corporate IT. That isn’t an indictment. Microsoft supports legacy stuff incredibly well, where Apple lets legacy stuff go pretty quickly — which also isn’t an indictment. It’s a choice.

Microsoft’s schtick has been to empower developers to do whatever they want. Apple’s has been to develop the “perfect thing.” It’s always gorgeous, but you always have to add something. Apple has taken a very strong consumer view of the world. With iOS, they overdid it at first — made it way too closed. Apple’s way of opening it up was with apps, which has served it incredibly well.

From a corporate viewpoint, this had issues because you can’t do anything you want, because Apple imposed all these restrictions. There may be good reasons for them … but they do pose a problem for corporations.

A long time ago, someone explained to me that in computing there are three steps: Solving it for one, solving it for two, and then solving it for n. Apple, for many things and especially for iOS, has gone with solving it for one. Limiting itself like this solves a lot of problems for it. I’m keeping a close eye on how Microsoft is approaching the tablet marketplace, because it has already solved a lot of these problems for n.

Advice Line: You’re the inventor of the original “killer app,” and so far as I can tell, the office suite/email combo, which built on your original killer app, is the only killer app there’s ever been. Do you think the “killer app” concept has any merit anymore? If so, what do you think it will be for tablets?

Dan Bricklin: There have been others, for example, desktop publishing. With tablets, the notion of the killer app might not be the best way to look at the situation. It’s more that once you’ve used one, you say, “I get it.”

In some sense, for tablets the browser is a killer app. Maps is a killer app to some extent. Being able to share the screen with other people — that it’s a social device — also might fit the bill. I think that for tablets, there isn’t and won’t be one killer app for everyone. It’s more that there are apps that are killers for individual people. It’s the sum of all those that is the killer app. This has been true since the original Palm Pilot.

Advice Line: In your note-taking app, you don’t offer handwriting recognition. Is this because it’s just too hard for a small software company to develop the technology, or do you think it isn’t all that useful a feature now that just about everyone grows up using a keyboard?

Dan Bricklin: First of all, it’s a complex thing to do. You work at it for years to get it right. Architecturally, either the company that provides the OS builds handwriting recognition into it, or we’d have to license someone’s engine. If we license it, we have to charge for it. And then there are patent issues.

Another thing: I’ve been in the ink world since the ’90s, and I’ve found that calling the problem “handwriting recognition” oversimplifies the challenge. Here’s why: Not all of the information is in the text of the writing itself. Some of the information is two-dimensional — how it’s placed on the page — so just transcribing the text doesn’t do the job. Where it is, and what you circle, underline, and so on have a lot of meaning. Searching is probably more important, and that takes a different kind of recognition. Then there’s the challenge of correction, which is more complicated than you might think, because with handwriting, corrected text is in the right position, but entered way out of sequence.

Anyway, I’m not sure it’s all that important. Until someone is able to figure out how to recognize handwriting without losing the spatial context, it will probably be more of a niche need than something broad enough to justify the investment it will take to develop. I haven’t gotten around to it yet. The way I look at it is, when a user needs the text to be perfect, they can use a keyboard. If they’re standing or a keyboard isn’t practical for some reason, they can dictate and use a speech recognition engine.

Advice Line: More about note-taking: From the small sample I’ve looked at it appears that except for OneNote, everything in this space builds on a page metaphor rather than an infinite scroll. Why did you make this design choice?

Dan Bricklin: One reason is memory. A scroll requires a lot more of it, or more sophisticated memory management. The other is the need for PDF output. That puts you in a page metaphor anyway. And you have to have pages when sketching is part of the feature set.

Advice Line: Let’s broaden our horizon. Looking at the industry, what are your biggest hopes and concerns?

Dan Bricklin: It’s exciting that computing is the way it is. It’s embedded — it’s everywhere. We’ve gone from innovation meaning placing your URL in your ads to having hash tags everywhere. The evening news shows something on YouTube that a random person put up there, and we take it for granted. That’s how far we’ve come, and for those of us who were here way back when, that’s kind of cool.

Let me take a minute to talk about special needs. Very few people are talking about this. The iPad has opened new worlds for children with special needs. For example, kids who can read but can’t manipulate a book can often swipe pages. Then there’s zoom. It lets kids with full cognitive ability, but more limited physical coordination, do homework. This is one reason we built PDF markup into Note Taker HD, in fact. I’ve found that if you think about special needs, it also illuminates the non-special-needs world.

Something else: In “Star Wars,” we had the Force as this interconnected environment. With the Internet, everyone is a Jedi knight — connected in ways they weren’t before. We’re taking advantage of this in ways that are revolutionary and in ways the designers never considered. Just one example: In Egypt, the revolutionaries were using dating sites to coordinate.

Concerns? I’m concerned that too few people are focusing enough on what we haven’t been able to do that’s now possible. I want to make sure we can do what we want on these machines. We need the ability to experiment. We used to be able to experiment a lot more. But in the world of day-to-day trade-offs between security and innovation, we’re out of balance. We talk a lot about what we need to do to keep things secure, but nowhere near enough about what we need to do to keep things fertile.

So long as we give people general-purpose tools that let them build things, we’re OK. It’s when we start to take them away that we get into trouble. I hope we always have popular machines people can use that aren’t restricted, so that those who have the desire and ideas to do something can, and can share it with others.

This story, “VisiCalc’s Dan Bricklin weighs in on the iPad revolution,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’ Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.