Since I am a “sales guy” and not a developer, I believe that without Microsoft, most of us would still be using an abacus to do the work we are so used to doing with Office applications. From a developer’s viewpoint, Office code may not be the best in the world, but the world is a far more productive place because of it.

I now open the floor up to Gates haters.

Thanks for bringing up voice/speech recognition as another solution to texting while driving. I like these alternatives much better than blocking solutions. It will take a bit of time for the technology to roll-over. Cars have a long lifetime, so it could take 5+ years to have a critical mass of cars within built-in speech recognition, while it could happen quicker with phones since the turnover time is generally 2 years or less. It will be up to the handset manufacturers to to make the technology easier to use. My BlackBerry has it, but it is awkward and cumbersome, and not very intuitive to use.

Two points of follow-up.

1 – It is most interesting to me that while BBerry clearly dominates the smartfone user market, much if not all of the “buzz” is about Apple’s iPhone. I suspect that the agency execs that manage the ad campaign for iPhone spend many a sleepless night obsessing over how they can maintain and further grow what appears to be a very lucrative ad account, based on the extensive promotion that iPhone currently enjoys in mainstream media. On the other hand, BBerry which is firmly entrenched in the country’s offices and cubicles, does little, if any consumer promotion, relying instead on carriers such as my Verizon to promote the BBerry brand. In addition, I think that market data would be more useful if it was broken down across age categories, to use one demographic as an example.

2 – Regarding the current growing concern involving the texting / driving issue. It is troubling that it took several tragic accidents involving texting / driving to bring the issue more “front of mind” in the country’s collective pysche. Of course, we know that this issue has been growing in importance for many years, prompting states such as New York to enact legislation prohibiting the texting / driving activity.

That said, I have followed the voice enabling, speech recognition market for many years and firmly believe that this technology would make significant progress toward helping make our roads safer. In fact, I purchased my current car, an 06 Acura TSX because it was the first model year that provided bluetooth hands free phone capability. Since I am a road warrior, this capability in my vehicle has been literally a “lifer saver.” I am, at once, both more productive and far more safer on the road as my car becomes my office and conference room.

But if readers would prefer to not spend tens of thousands on a vehicle with bluetooth voice enabling capibilty, companies such as Vlingo provide applications that completely voice enable your mobile device. As was recently mentioned in the trades, “Voice has become the new Touch. ” Using a voice enabled handset, a user can simply say a person’s name in the addressbook and the application opens the device’s addressbook and locates that person’s name. Then the user dictates the messages, says send, and voila, the message is sent without a single keystroke. Lastly I am please to learn that speech recognition vendors have tweaked their algorithms so the applications are vastly more accurate in deciphering people’s voices than was previously the case. ( Very little if any voice training is needed between the user and application. )

Again thanks for the great Wrap-up.