In today’s blog post, Steven Sinofsky talks about the tradeoffs in creating a highly customizable Windows system. His post is in large parts a response to the many of commenters on the E7Blog asking for a more customizable experience–something that it appears to me that Linux, Admins, and gamers seem to want a lot and something I’m not too keen on. Decoupled components is good. A highly configurable install process is not. At least, that’s my take.

Anyway, what really got me in this post is when Steven talks about places that it makes sense to have Windows customization. He says:

Some examples are quite easy to see and you should expect us to do more along these lines, such as the TabletPC components. I have a PC that is a very small laptop and while it has full tablet functionality it isn’t the best size for doing good ink work for me (I prefer a 12.1” or greater and this PC is a 10” screen). The tablet code does have a footprint in memory and on the 1GB machine if I go and remove the tablet components the machine does perform better. This is something I can do today.

If you’re a Tablet PC advocate, I’m sure you’re re-reading this quote, then re-reading it again, and then once again.

Yes, he’s saying that even on a Tablet PC, the Tablet bits don’t have enough value for him.

OK, OK, everyone’s needs are different and I’m guessing what’s going on here is that he’s just unfamiliar with how to leverage the technology. (I’ll get back to this point in a minute and how I think that as Tablet enthusiasts we need to get back to thinking about how we can make Tablets more compelling for executives–even within Microsoft.)

Why do I think he doesn’t really know much about Tablet PCs? The way he spells it “TabletPC” [SIC]. It’s “Tablet PC.” Two words. Both capitalized. That’s our first clue that he probably hasn’t spent much time reading about Tablet PCs. Maybe he needs to spend a few minutes on Gottabemobile.

Another shocker for me is his view that ink isn’t compelling on a 10″ display. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I think most of us Tablet enthusiasts would say that two of the best Tablets ever were both 10″ models: The NEC LitePad and the Compaq/HP TC1100.

And what about all the UMPCs? Or the Classmate PC which is going to support a digitizer? These are all small screened devices and all of them make sense to have touch as well as ink technologies. I can’t imagine a great education PC that doesn’t at least have ink, for instance, and is there any doubt that these PCs will have small screens because of cost reasons?

Now, if you’re a heavy notebook user and rarely use Tablet features, then I bet I can see why screen real-estate trumps ink. But then again, I bet what this really means is that the software isn’t there.

In fact, I think Steven’s comment is really saying that the current ink-enabled software isn’t compelling enough. What does this mean? Ink in Word, Powerpoint, Messenger or any other Microsoft product isn’t compelling enough?

I guess I can see this in some cases, but might I suggest he look outside of Microsoft. Considering his position of managing developers, he’s got to try TEO, an ink extension for Outlook. And if this isn’t enough, I’m willing to give him a free copy of InkGestures, an add-in that gives pen and paper like editing gestures in Word. And if that isn’t good enough, I’ll show him how ink and other markup media can be integrated into Visual Studio. Anchor ink notes, screenshots, right in your code. I can think of half-a-dozen other ink-enabled apps that he might find worthwhile, but of course, I’d really need to better understand what types of things he does throughout the day.

Here’s another thing that erks me about his comment: That Tablet bits degrade performance–particularly on limited resource machines. I hope he’s not also talking about a dog fooded version of Windows 7, because I hope this is something that Windows 7 would address.

In fact, with the addition of multi-touch in Windows 7 I’ve been hoping that this was a signal that the Windows 7 team was taking a long overdue renewed interest in mouse/pen eventing. Plain and simple mouse events have long lagged in the innovation arena when it comes to Windows. Now I’m beginning to cringe and think this isn’t going to happen.

The performance fix for the Tablet bits is not to remove them. It’s to address the lower level implementation details. I wish he was signaling that that’s on the Windows 7 to do list.

Anyway, I’m really disappointed that Steven doesn’t find Tablet technologies worthwhile. I wish this was different. I wish that all of the Microsoft executives and senior management saw the value. But the truth is outside of Bill Gates, we’re just not there. After all this time, how can this be? I know we’ve discussed this in the past, but what we need badly is a Tablet usage scenario for execs–something preferably public.

So I’ll end this post the way I started it: Would you remove the Tablet bits from a Tablet PC? I know I wouldn’t. Would you?

Update: Steven Sinofsky has responded to this post in the comment section and says that I read to much into what he wrote. Be sure to check it out.