CrossPad

» see cross-pcg.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

A. T. Cross made fountain pens. The kind of pen a company hands you when you have worked there twenty five years, engraved, in a box. In 1997 that company announced a partnership with IBM Research and put a computer under the paper.

The CrossPad is a clipboard with a letter-size legal pad clamped to it. You write on the paper with an ordinary Cross ballpoint that happens to contain a small radio transmitter in the barrel. The pad tracks where the nib is, several times a second, and records the strokes. The ink goes on the page exactly as it always did, so you walk away with a normal pad of paper, and the pad walks away with a copy. Fifty pages to an ink cartridge, a dollar a refill. Six buttons along the bottom edge, pressed with the pen, told the device when you turned the page.

It reached shops in march 1998 at around $399. That was a serious number. In Turkey in 1998 my family had just got a phone line and a modem, and four hundred dollars was inside the range of a whole computer, not an accessory to one. This was an object for American executives who took notes in meetings and had someone else's budget for it, which is a demographic I have never once belonged to.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

The first year went well enough to look like a new business. Cross set up a Pen Computing Group as a real division, and in 1998 it turned over $25 million, roughly sixteen percent of everything the company sold. For a pen manufacturer with a two-hundred-year-old product line, that is a startling proportion to get from something invented eighteen months earlier. In september 1998 they shipped a smaller model, the CrossPad XP, sized for a jacket pocket rather than a briefcase.

The reviews were split down a clean line, with the hardware on the good side of it. The digitizer worked, the pen felt like a pen, and you got paper and a file out of the same motion. The software is where every review turned. IBM Ink Manager was supposed to convert the captured strokes into editable text, and it claimed something over ninety percent accuracy in the marketing.

~ the slide ~

Ninety percent accuracy means one word in ten is wrong. A reviewer writing in december 1998 put it plainly: correcting the mistakes was so awkward that retyping the page from scratch was faster. He had a Newton and said the Newton was better at it. Worse, Ink Manager reconstructed text by replaying the log of how you wrote, so if you went back and inserted a word into an earlier line, the recognized output came out in the order your hand had moved rather than the order the sentence read.

So you had a $399 device whose one job over a paper notepad was giving you searchable text, and the text it gave you needed retyping. Sales fell off a cliff in 1999. The Pen Computing Group lost $24.3 million that year, almost exactly what it had earned the year before, and dragged A. T. Cross to a company-wide net loss of $20.1 million. Production was cut hard in late 1999. The division limped for another year and closed in april 2001.

~ the long tail ~

IBM did not let go immediately. The ThinkPad TransNote arrived in 2001, a laptop hinged to a paper notepad with the same radio pen idea built in, and it lasted about a year. Then the whole approach went quiet until Anoto's printed dot pattern turned up in the Livescribe pens and the Moleskine smart notebooks, which solved the same problem by putting the tracking in the paper instead of the board.

There is a class action suit in the CrossPad's record, filed over the collapse of the product in the market, and it is the part of the story that best explains why nobody at Cross wanted to try again. A pen company had bet a sixth of its revenue on software written by somebody else. When the recognition disappointed, the company that took the loss was the one that had only ever made the pen.

The device still turns up on collector shelves and it still works, in the sense that it still captures strokes. What it cannot do is the thing it was sold for. You can pick one up now for less than the price of the ink refills it shipped with.

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