Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback | Hacker News Reader

Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback

wired.com

58 pointsdpflan81 comments

"He’s built a computer with almost zero latency—when you do something, the computer reacts instantly. Here, Bathiche has solved that infuriating problem where you write or draw on a screen, and the ink is always a half-second behind your finger."

So few people get that. Alan Kay once wrote in the 1970s that it was as unacceptable for there to be a delay between user action and response on a computer as it was unacceptable on a piano. Now we have several gigaflops on every desktop and still can't get that right.

We really need this in web browsers. Especially on phones. When you click or touch something, something should happen right now, even if more will happen later. Touch a link in Firefox for Android and see what happens, or rather what doesn't happen.

People often don't understand that for an action on the web (clicking a link) the user feedback and end result don't need to be the same thing. You can update the UI in a meaningful way while you wait for the end-result to come back from the server. A user should never have to sit there after doing an action and ask themselves "Did I really click that? Or did I miss it?"

> Especially on phones. When you click or touch something, something should happen right now, even if more will happen later.

Interestingly, Apple are really pushing this now. They've just demonstrated new predictive tech to get response time down to ~ 30 ms from ~ 60 ms on iOS devices (if I remember correctly, this is based on a publicly available WWDC talk).

That said, 30 ms is still far too much. Microsoft made a good demo showing just how noticeable 30 ms of lag is compared to none at all (linked on this page by sosuke). But it really just goes to show how poor this current generation of capacitive touch-based devices is. And Apple's software-based approach, though it helps, is not sufficient without new hardware too...

As an Android dev, this is what I envy of iOS.

I really wish that Android would also strongly push in that direction (and I hope that Google has some internal branches where the View system is rethought).

The design direction of the platform is astoundingly great, but the implementation lags far behind the vision.

Sit in a $100k Tesla and drag the fullscreen map view around on the giant touchscreen, watch it stutter and lag. It drives me up a fucking wall.

Yeah man, I don't own a Tesla but I hate waiting for shit too. Like when you dial 911 and they don't show up till an hour later:

https://play.google.com/music/preview/Tgvzffz3io7iw6zwczbul5...

The Apple Macintosh did this in 1984 (with the mouse cursor). Jobs understood the importance of this... If you get a chance, find an old Mac and just move its mouse around. There is absolutely zero lag. For a while it was the #1 reason why I couldn't tolerate Windows, whose cursor by comparison was flickery and laggy. (And today it's a reason why I don't like Android.)

Apple hardware and software still prioritizes this.

Glad to see Microsoft finally caught up ;)

http://lowendmac.com/2006/vintage-macs-with-system-6-run-cir...

Vintage Macs also had 0% (seemingly) cursor lag and 0% cursor flicker. Took Windows 20 years to finally have a usable (coming from a Mac at least) mouse cursor.

Unfortunately, this is true. My vintage 90's Mac that runs System 7 feels faster and more responsive when word processing than my 2012 iMac.

Context shifts.

Back in the days, people wanted tools to do serious things, expensive tools. And computers were nothing yet. Easy to dismiss. Now, computers are used for entertainment mostly, cost 400$, so who cares. Most of this industry is driven by the shiny, so it's easy to overlook lowly basic details.

Even when people care (Android Project Butter etc etc) it seems a bit too late, the culture shifted a bit and there are too many layers.

We've made a habit of punting on latency, and not just in HID.

It appears to be a hard habit to break.

Bring in some game developers. They understand latency.

Not all -- in the era of the PS2, 60FPS was common. Once the Xbox 360/PS3 generation started, 30FPS was acceptable.

Then again, that'll have to change with the advent of VR. Variable framerates can induce nausea.

This is one thing Apple really 'got right' in iOS. You can especially see it in any app that allows you to zoom or pan the view. If you change the perspective, it will always redraw the screen according to your input. Sometimes it has to fill in the new area with a temporary texture while it runs off to load the right one, but the response is instantaneous.

As an Android user, this is one of my biggest gripes. Android just hasn't figured this out, yet, or doesn't care.

I think that Android started off the wrong way with something aimed at the existing competition at that time (so the first Blackberry, WP and Nokia smartphones). Now it is very hard to revamp Android in order to accomplish this.

I just hope that the experiments made by the Dart team (they are aiming at a 120 fps lag free framework on Android) are also conducted internally in the Android team (not necessarily with Dart, but preferably not with Java).

Unfortunately, apple seems to have regressed with the apple watch. It really feels laggy and unresponsive at times.

Mistaken premise here in my opinion:

Think about typing the character ‘a’ on a keyboard. Fast, right? Just the one keystroke. “It is fast,” Bathiche says, “if you make some certain assumptions. That the position of the letter ‘a’ is where you intended it to be, the font is the way you intended it to be, the size of the ‘a’ is what you intended it to be.” All those decisions are made before you hit the key, and you often don’t have a choice. “But with ink, you can dictate all those things, almost simultaneously as you’re writing. I can put my ‘a’ here, or here, and I can make it as big as I want, as hard as I want.”

I can type wayyy faster than I can write with a pen.

So... yeah

His thought here resonates with me though, particularly when I'm taking the kind of notes that involve diagrams, I find that using the space I'm given exactly how I want it, whether to draw boxes with big symbols, simple graphs or sketches, is a lot quicker on paper with a pen or pencil than on a computer using a keyboard. I'm a pretty fast typer and a writer so I'll admit that there is probably some person whose speed difference is so large that this really isn't helpful, but mostly what takes up time if I want to type like a write is using the mouse to select my font size and type, click the button that tells the word processor I want to draw boxes or arrows and then drawing those boxes and arrows.

Also importantly, he admits there are many cases where you really just need a keyboard (writing a long paper, composing a tweet or comment) but I think he's right that there's also many where you really need a pen.

To preface this, I'm a mid-20s guy who grew up with a keyboard in his hands. I type absurdly faster than I write, with handwriting harder to read than a doctor's, and the idea of carrying an honest to goodness piece of paper and pen around with me seemed archaic.

Then I started my most recent job, and was provided with a Surface Pro.

I'm already well embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem, and I used OneNote before, but the workflow was a minor assistance to me, and I didn't get what the big deal was. You stuck some notes in a notepad, and then you could look at them later. So what? How does this help me?

Now, though, I've got a pen. I take my surface with me to each and every meeting I go to, and it's made a world of difference to how meetings work for me. I can take notes that have more contextually appropriate information than just text, because I can scribble out a diagram of a process as it's being explained to me. If I'm leading a meeting, I'll project from my Surface and use it to whiteboard out ideas onto the projector (like a ghetto version of the Surface Hub). I'll note other people's contributions into the same document and then share out a fully editable version of that document into a team notebook.

All of these interactions feel more "natural" than the action I'm most accustomed to, which is typing, and the end result is somehow more human-friendly (despite how horrifying my handwriting is) than my previous "list of things discussed and some dot points" method of taking notes.

If the future of interaction is pen, it'll come less of a surprise to me now than it would have five years ago.

If you don't care about font and style, yes. But if the "markup" is high relative to the character count, pens win.

This is also a pronounced issue in information graphics -- the off-the-shelf stuff in Excel etc is quite limited; you can do a custom visual a lot better, easier, with a custom drawing, what is impossible or ungainly in a "smart" diagramming program.

Can you type LaTeX faster than you can write equations on a chalkboard? I can't.

I can. I used to do my math homework in LaTeX. I'm not saying I did it on paper and the final stuff was written up, I mean I was thinking in LaTeX. The PDF viewer was "check what I just did mode" and the text editor was "get thoughts down" mode.

It was proof heavy so there was a lot of English anyway. Add copy/paste for derivations with a lot of shared structure and it really pulls ahead. If you define your own macros and are good enough at programming them on the fly it's a neat though dumb Lispy symbolic math tool.

Same here, I picked up LaTeX to take notes in my computer graphics class because I didn't feel like writing it (my written equations were always pretty cramped, and my handwriting is garbage) and because it was a pain to represent equations in LibreOffice (what I'd been taking notes in before).

Exactly, it's why I still reach for a pen and pad if I know I'll have to take notes on something remotely more complex than just text. The worst feeling is to be busily typing notes only to realize you could clarify something by drawing a couple arrows or circling something.

Also, no digital task list has ever been able to replicate the satisfaction for me of writing out a to-do list with checkboxes and checking them off as I complete each task.

I can, if I want to make sure I (or anyone) can read it back.

Reminds me of the 1ms touch delay technology also from Microsoft's applied sciences group.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4

I cannot think of another tech company that's as obsessed with pens as Microsoft is. They've been working on and promoting this stuff for what feels like decades now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_for_Pen_Computing

I remember reading that MS basically killed the nascent pen computing industry by announcing their entry into it.

Indeed, I used the Pen extensions for MS DOS ;-)

Better pen input would be great, especially for drawing.

How about some form of chorded keyboard or glove? A chorded keyboard was demonstrated in 1968 by Engelbart:

http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/library/extra4/sloan/mouses...

Google's Soli project might lead to better input:

http://youtu.be/0QNiZfSsPc0

Soli looks very interesting. There is Smarter Objects from MIT Fluid Interfaces that is similar in nature, but has a more dynamic approach. It's certainly not as simple as Soli seems because of the augmented-reality component it uses. But if Google brings back Glass and ships Soli in IoT/smart household objects, then you'd have the same result.

--EDIT-- Link to MIT Fluid Interfaces Smart Objects: http://fluid.media.mit.edu/projects/smarter-objects

I have been using Windows Tablet PC since 2003 (HP, Toshiba , and now Fujitsu).

The (typically) Wacom stylus works very well and with OneNote, allowed me to take extensive class notes across two masters programs.

OneNote also interprets the handwriting so it was quite the pleasant surprise to find that my scribblings were somewhat searchable.

I'd love an A4 sized one of these and a screen, monochrome would be fine, I spent so much of my life drawing out code/approaches on squared pads only to leave the pad at the office.

All I would want is some way of indexing them and one press to send as an email.

I'd drop 200 quid on that right now.

Have you looked at Boogie Board Sync?

http://www.myboogieboard.com/na/products/boogie-board-sync-9...

I tried it. I really wanted to like it, but the writing screen was just not bright enough for me. May be it will work for you.

I absolutely hadn't but that looks damn interesting, thanks!

What was the delay like in actual usage?

EDIT: This is literally what I was describing and have wanted for ages, US only but some ebay.co.uk vendors have them! I'm having one of these soon!

Sony's Digital Paper does that and only that. It allows you to read and mark up pdfs with a pen and nothing more. Unfortunately, it's $800 USD.

http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/show-digitalpaper/resource.solu...

That's more or less what a Surface Pro with OneNote (and OneDrive) does. But it isn't even ballpark $200. More like $700+.

Indeed and I've considered it a bunch of times but I have a fast android tablet and a nice laptop/desktop setup running Xubuntu.

$200 would be ideal, I don't need a tablet just a high quality portable digitizer rather than another tablet.

Next tablet upgrade might well be a surface pro though even running Windows (which I haven't done for a decade) as I'd really like instant access to all of my sketches going back months or years.

EDIT: It would be incredibly useful to pull up a sketch of an architecture against a git timestamp so I could figure out WTF I was thinking at the time ;).

I've got a workflow that gets close to that - I use a "smart pen" for architecture diagrams, you have to write on special paper but in exchange you get a digital version of everything you write/draw, indexed by time (and, if you want, you can record audio as you're writing/drawing and later replay the audio it recorded by pointing at some part of the text)

It's quite useful for architecture diagrams, and for capturing requirements in a meeting (because you've got full audio of what the client said).

The main drawback of the pen I use is it's quite bulky (I use a pen from livescribe), although I suspect there will be better-proportioned pens nowadays...

input to response time is very important for VR

'I can send an IP packet to Europe faster than I can send a pixel to the screen. How f’d up is that?' -John Carmack [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/193480622533120001

I have been using pen input since 2009 when I started university, and am glad that they're finally gaining traction as mainstream input devices.

The only problem is most of these new pens are actively powered by the annoyingly rare AAAA battery. I haven't been able to find a rechargeable AAAA from a reputable manufacturer yet. And the very fact that they require manual battery swaps is unacceptable in this day and age IMHO.

This is why my newest laptop was a HP Elite X2 1011 that I paid through the nose for, but at least has an older generation passive Wacom pen that does not require a battery.

If any laptop/tablet makers are reading this, please replace the AAAA battery slot in these active pens with Li-ion batteries and allow them to automatically charge from the laptop when placed into their holders.

Reminded me of Dr. Ivan Sutherland's "SketchPad" demo; here's a video of it with Alan Kay commenting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=495nCzxM9PI

Can I get the Hacker News recommendation on the best affordable pens and notebooks?

I will leave specific recommendations to others, but I favor http://www.jetpens.com/ for being able to easily buy singles of many different pens and notebooks and try them out for yourself.

Depends on what you want, as there's a lot of options. However, I will share the pens and paper of various kinds I like:

    pens:
        [0] Pilot Razer Point (Black, very fine point)
        [1] Uni-Ball Stick Micro Point (Blue, ball-point but with fluid ink)
        [2] BIC Cristal Ballpoint (Black, extremely cheap)

    Paper:
        [3] TOPS The Legal Pad (white, standard us size, wide ruled)
        [4] Staedtler Engineers Notepaper (lightly gridded)
        [5] Moleskine Notebooks (Large size, hardcover, gridlines)

[0] - http://www.amazon.com/Pilot-Razor-Point-Marker-Stick/dp/B000...

[1] - http://www.amazon.com/uni-ball-Stick-Micro-Roller-60151/dp/B...

[2] - http://www.amazon.com/BIC-Cristal-Ballpoint-Pen-Medium/dp/B0...

[3] - http://www.amazon.com/Legal-Inches-Perforated-White-Sheets/d...

[4] - http://www.amazon.com/Staedtler-Translucent-Bond-Pads-100/dp...

[5] - http://www.amazon.com/Moleskine-Classic-Notebook-Squared-Not...

Pens are very subjective, notebook paper is not. Thicker/heavier paper is almost always better. Moleskine paper is good, Rhodia paper (80gsm) is better, Clairefontaine paper (90gsm) is great. You can buy even heavier paper (67lb, 110lb, etc), but it usually doesn't come in notebooks.

Pens are all different: there are good gel pens (Sakura Gelly Roll, Pilot G2), good fountain pens (Lamy Safari, many many more), good art pens (Sakura Pigma Micron), good fine-point pens (Pentel Slicci, Uniball Signo Bit), and even good ballpoint pens (I like Skilcraft retractables, plus that 4-color Zebra pen). Some will bleed through on thin paper (especially fountain pens), so you lose 1/2 your notebook capacity. Not all pens/inks are waterproof (!).

UK specific comment possibly but: try a local art materials shop. Most will have A5 hard-backed sketchbooks with around 90 to 100 g/m^2 paper in with either white or ivory finish/colour for less than a fiver. Pretty ink proof and a lot cheaper than the branded ones.

I like pencil and Muji pens, the ones that are about £5 for a 6 pack.

It's also a good idea to try out paper first if you can. I bought a Rhodia notebook which has really nice paper compared to what I normally use, but discovered I don't really enjoy writing on the paper because it's so smooth (your mileage may vary, though - I enjoy having a slightly scratchy sound+resistance when writing)

Pilot G-Tec-C4 Rollerball Pen is affordable and well regarded with a practical narrow stroke. Have used these for many years. Silvine pocket notebooks are affordable and well made.

Pen: Jinhao X750 ($10) is a no-brainer. Or the Platinum Carbon desk pen ($12) if you like really thin lines.

Notebooks: Rhodia, Clairefontaine, Leuchtturm1917, or equivalent quality. Should be around $15 depending on size. Moleskines are no-go (ink bleeds through page)

Ink: Private Reserve is a nice starting point. I am particularly fond of their foam green. $11 for a 66ml bottle.

Shop: I really like Goulet Pens. Good service, amazingly careful packaging.

Source: personal experience and preference.

I'd generally recommend the Pilot Metropolitan over the X750, I feel as if the Metro is a "surer bet" when it comes to QA, and it's only around five bucks more. Plus the Metro comes in fine and medium nibs so you have a bit more choice there.

Source: I have $100+ pens but I'm using a Metropolitan literally right now.

Interesting. My X750 sees quite randomly varying usage, and I really like how it's easy to "hard start" it after a couple weeks of non-usage. Is the Metropolitan similar?

Edit: after reading some reviews the Metropolitan is now on my buy list. Thanks for the tip.

I've gone from a Pelikan fountain pen and Leuchtturm1917 to... Faber-Castell pencil (grade B) and cheap Muji notebooks.

Yes, pencil does smear a bit, and those non-mechanical pencils get annoyingly short. But pencil is surprisingly durable (against light, and even against water accidents).

And cheap is a big psychological factor in "I want a set of those everywhere".

I use Zig Writer with Moleskines without any bleed through. Heck, I even use a Papermate Flair with them without issue sometimes. Edit: I see you use fountain pens, that explains it. I prefer the fine tipped markers since you get a smooth writing experience with an adjustable line width without the mess or bleed through.

I appreciate the reply, I have had a few Moleskines but the pages seemed relatively thin, is that your reason for them being a no go?

Updated to say the ink bleeds through. I use a Moleskine, but only with a 3B pencil.

I've tried them all, Rapidograph technical pens, Pelican and Montblanc fountain pens, roller ball, gel pens, and ball points, and even space pens. Fountain pens feel nicest, but they are the most trouble. Very expensive ones can be beautiful and collectable, but once one reaches the price point where the nib is a quality nib the writing experience doesn't improve much. The best way to pick a fountain pen is to go to a store that specializes in fountain pens and actually test some out. Some feel too big, some too small, some the cap doesn't work the way I want, but the most important thing is the way the ink flows on the paper. My very best was a high end Scheaffer from almost 40 years ago, still much less expensive than a Montblanc. However, fountain pens don't suit me well because I often wear t-shirts these days and work in a variety of settings, and the need to refill and care for fountain pens make them less practical for me.

Gel pens tend to smear a bit too much for my taste and run out of ink more quickly than I'd like. The rollerball pens often feel a bit too scratchy on the paper.

Most traditional ball points of any quality retract their point by clicking. I find that this is great for carrying a pen around in one's pocket, but the ball point tip invariably has a slight amount of play since it is not attached to the pen but simply passes though an opening in the outer cylinder of the pen.

I notice this troublesome movement at the tip the most when doing complex mathematics. Once I'm working with small subscripts I want the pen's tip to start writing at precisely the location that I've placed it on the paper. For this reason I recommend a ball point with a cap where the tip is actually affixed in position and doesn't retract. The Pentel R.S.V.P line has pens like this and they work very well for me. The pen is comfortable to hold, having a wider barrel than many cheap pens and incorporates a elastomeric sleeve where one's fingers grip it. The barrel is a good length to it works well with or without the cap. The "fine" size make nice thin lines, the tip is of higher quality than many other ballpoints I've tried and doesn't skip for me at all, nor does it collect a little ball of gooey ink that will be deposited on the paper at the most inappropriate place.

In addition to being reasonably priced the Pentel R.S.V.P line can be found everywhere, Office Depot, college bookstores, and even the supermarket. The pens are also available in a range of colors, two line weights, and even variations like short ones (intended to be carried in a small pocket) or ones that click to retract the tip (but see my comments above).

My favorite ink color is purple. I generally got very good grades in grad school and I was thinking one day while fishing out my paper from a stack of graded papers that it would be easier to find if I turned in my homework on a off-white or pale yellow paper. I started doing this and then adopted the convention of doing my work and tests in purple ink as well. My thinking was that the overworked graders would learn that my work on homework and tests in purple ink was almost always correct, and I believed that sometimes I got the benefit of the doubt when they had to interpret a weaker answer of mine because of the purple ink. For business use I revert back to blue-black ink.

As for paper, I really like Japanese notebooks. The paper is of high quality, and I like the narrower aspect ratio of ISO notebooks because it fits easier into a backpack.

Pilot Precise V5 is the best pen for the money.

I'm glad they are making a high-tech comeback, but anyone else here also love (or prefer) using fountain pens?

Indeed. I have a nice Schaeffer pen and I do most of my notes and plans for code with it. I would rather forget to take my tablet than to forget notebook.

I have a handful of ancient Esterbrooks that I love to write with but I hate maintaining. It's messy work.

Suffering from RSI right now makes me think how nice it would be to code with a pen...

"I can put my ‘d’ here, or here, and I can make it as big as I want, as hard as I want.” "

> he’s built a computer with almost zero latency—when you do something, the computer reacts instantly.

Oh, the irony.

It's Microsoft's own fault in the first place that we have an operating system that is so horribly unresponsive.

And, now, umpteen years later, it's a BIG ADVANCE that we actually make computers do what we want, when we want. Just like before Microsoft.

That's almost laughably incorrect, although unfortunately popular amongst a certain segment of the tech set. The nearly-impossible-to-use computers that did very little very slowly back in the 80s (and earlier) were not nearly as amazing as your memory is fooling you into believing. Sure, nearly-bare-metal OSes don't soak up much in the way of resources, but that only works in very narrow market segments, and computers are totally mass market now.

And in any case, you mean "before Windows" if anything, because DOS was fast as blazes (and did pretty much nothing as a consequence).

Essentially, when people think back to how responsive computers were "before windows", they are recalling computers which had no networking, and disks which were so slow that you would never write software which depended in real-time on getting that data from disk. You'd pre-load all the data you needed into your meager RAM and then, yes, for doing the one thing that was loaded into memory, with the data that was already in memory, the computer would be very very responsive. But when it came to saving or loading, you could go and get a coffee.

I have to say that in this case you're wrong. The Apple Mac Plus in my parents' closet, which I still fire up from time to time to play Dark Castle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCkbp4wurW0), had a zero latency mouse (or at least imperceptible) with zero flicker. Took Microsoft at least 20 years to get something comparable. This is not a nostalgic mis-memory, or an exaggeration. Please find an old Mac from the 80's and simply move the mouse around.

> they are recalling computers which had no networking

The very first network games I ever played were over AppleTalk on a Mac, like NetTrek (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z40VMsXtl0Y ... yes, that is digitized sound out of a 1984 machine), Maze Wars (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoEpgfTtUYg) and the venerable Bolo! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz_gYZ5kMvc), the latter still one of the best multiplayer gaming experiences I've ever had

> Sure, nearly-bare-metal OSes don't soak up much in the way of resources, but that only works in very narrow market segments, and computers are totally mass market now.

And we had Amiga. And BeOS. And Plan9.

All of which had very good latency. All of which Microsoft displaced with monopolist behavior and marketing money.

Microsoft is only interested in fixing the problems they caused now that they aren't the 800lb gorilla anymore.

If you had read further into the article (past the first two lines) you would have realised these latency issues are caused by hardware limitations rather than software. You can definitely bring latency down a decent amount in software, but as you approach 0ms the problems becomes exponentially more difficult. That's why this article is about Microsoft's pile of hardware prototypes, and how they're working on getting closer to 1ms in a table-like form factor.

The iPhone 5 just for context had a 55ms touch delay. The iPhone 6 actually increased that to 65ms (i.e. it got worse). Very few smartphones break the 50ms barrier (like one total from what I can tell).

That's what Microsoft are working on.

How many tens of millions of dollars has Microsoft sunk in Surface, tablets and other touch technologies, only to have Apple eat their lunch? How many billions sunk in MSR every year yielding no commercial products? Microsoft has always needed to get their product vision from somewhere else, and for all of the hoopla about Nadella and open sourcing everything, that core fact about Microsoft hasn't changed. It's really sad because Microsoft has everything stacked in its favour to succeed. I mean it's not like like don't succeed on those products that they copy from others, starting from Windows all the way down to the Xbox and Bing, but when it comes to commercial innovation, that's not who they are.

Microsoft Research is very strong, it's just that their work is broader than just new gadgets, though if you're interested in that then Kinect is an example of a product refined at MSR, plus you have the upcoming HoloLens.

For a broader understanding of what MSR does, check out their work on quantum computing ( http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/research-areas/quantum-c... ) and functional programming (Microsoft Research Cambridge and MSR-Inria are good places to look into for this). That's just the tip of the iceberg, Microsoft plows plenty of resources into R&D. The fact they invest in fundamental research isn't something to attack, it's something to celebrate, not all research needs to result in a tangible product.

I'm a bit of an Apple fan, but let's be honest, Apple isn't eating Microsoft's lunch. Apple has 18% mobile market share, and it seems that they've broken into the double-digits in desktop share:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/07/mac-achieves-highest-u-s-pc...

I'm talking about how Apple obliterated Microsoft in the tablet and smartphone markets, which Microsoft had several years of headway in.

Yes, they obliterated them by about 15%!!! Boom!!!

http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp

Did Android obliterate Apple? That margin is about 60%.

Yes, Microsoft screwed up, but they can always turn it around and grab a quick 10% share. They've got tons of money and talent. I'd never count them out. In fact, they're still pretty dangerous.

Apple makes more profit than the 82% of the market that they don't control. That's a kind of obliteration.

"could", you mean "can't." They've been trying to grab 10% market share since the iPhone pushed them below that, and have never recovered, in spite of having the best resources of anyone out there.

Well, problem is there is no room for a third place IMHO. This happens in general when a dominant design wins and I think we are witnessing one. Of course they can fake it with their new windows sales, but that opportunity is lost.

Microsoft seems to be perfectly successful to me, no?

R&D, by virtue of being R&D, rarely makes it to the market in a recognizable form. My guess is that the lessons learned there certainly have been applied to their real profit centers.

> it's not like like don't succeed on those products

I acknowledged that they are successful. But they aren't successful in creating new markets; they succeed in invading existing ones.

Plus their massive patent portfolio has definitely paid off in various ways.

PS - I don't personally like software patents, but you cannot deny they make money for research-based organisations.

The patent portfolio is a good point, I'll concede that.

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