The iPad app that will remind you of Microsoft's old Courier project
(Credit: Tapose; screenshot by Jay Greene/CNET) — Tapose, the iPad app that aims to mimic much of the content creation capability of Microsoft's ill-fated Courier tablet, just won approval from Apple to be sold in iTunes.
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft's Courier died as hardware — the dual-screen journal tablet Gizmodo exposed as a secret internal project in 2009 never shipped — but its design DNA keeps resurfacing. Since then Microsoft itself has been meeting the iPad halfway from the software side, shipping OneNote and Lync apps for Apple's tablet in late 2011 rather than waiting for its own device.
Tapose now closes the loop from outside: an independent iPad app that recreates much of Courier's content-creation model won Apple's approval to sell in iTunes today. The pickup across The Verge, 9to5Mac, MacNN and other outlets shows how much residual appetite there is for a product Microsoft chose not to build.
First-order effects
- iPad users gain a journal-style content creation app that delivers what Courier promised, without any Microsoft involvement or hardware.
- Microsoft's decision to kill Courier means its own concept now competes against it on Apple's platform — Tapose monetizes an idea Microsoft abandoned.
Second-order effects
- Courier alumni and imitators have a proven template: the App Store lets killed hardware visions reach market as $4.99-class software, which invites more Courier-inspired creation tools from the original team's orbit.
- Every polished third-party creation app on iPad raises the bar for whatever productivity story Microsoft tells when its own tablet ecosystem arrives.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, big-company shelved prototypes increasingly escape as indie apps on rival platforms — hardware concepts becoming software products decoupled from the company that invented them.
- Tablets drift toward freeform, canvas-based creation tools rather than ported desktop document models, with Apple's storefront as the distribution layer for that shift.
The trend: Cancelled hardware concepts are finding second lives as third-party apps on competitors' platforms, with the App Store turning dead prototypes into shipping products.