Microsoft and the Mariners

P-I sports columnist Art Thiel's new book about the Seattle Mariners includes an interesting anecdote that, although not told for this purpose, provides a glimpse of the way Microsoft executives were thinking in the early 1990s about the technology that would become the Tablet PC.

Microsoft execs including Jeff Raikes, now the company's group vice president for productivity and business services, are part of the group that bought the baseball team in the early 1990s. As Art tells the story, Raikes and some of the other Microsoft executives in the ownership group befuddled Lou Piniella, who would become the team's manager, during their initial meeting in 1992 by asking if he could use a computer to take out the lineup to the umpires before games. You can read Art's account of the meeting in this excerpt, published yesterday in the P-I.

Maybe the Microsoft execs would get a warmer reception to their idea from Bob Melvin, the current Mariners manager, whose willingness to embrace technology was detailed by John Hickey, the P-I's Mariners beat writer, in this story earlier his year.