Who will create the 'smartpen'?

"The pen is mightier than the sword".

We see swords, either in movies or TV shows or in a few democracies where names like Super Kings, Kings Eleven, Raja, 'Sena' etc, and feudal systems still prevail.

The pen, ah, where is it gone? When did you last time see a pen?

Today, someone walked up to me to borrow a pen to write something. I politely told him that I am not carrying a pen with me. He understood without frowning or looking down on me and 'moved on'.

I wanted to tell him that these days, I don't write but type or click. Rarely, if I write on a whiteboard in a conference room, I don't miss clicking whatever is written on the board.

There was a time I used to take pride in my calligraphic handwriting. Nowadays, I sheepishly tell the viewers of my handwritten material that they should not mistake me to be a physician, given the prescription like scribbling I do on the paper or board.

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In the journey of mankind until the last century, somewhere, sometimes, creativity and pen became a synonym for each other.

The Austrian American economist Joseph Schumpeter must have brought up the economic philosophy of creative destruction (Schumpeter's Gale) in the 1950s using a pen.

In the 21st century, when time is rolling by at a leisurely pace compared to the speed of innovation, we may soon come across a new idiom, 'the smartphone is mightier than the drone (or other devices of destruction)' (In India, it may still be something like 'the smartphone is mightier than the sword' as Indians like preservation for posterity with modernity).

Disruptive innovation - one of the latest victims might be the poor pen, replaced by a smartphone.

And sooner than anyone may expect, we the people may come up with something smarter than the smartphone, maybe a smartpen!

Satya Nadella | Tim Cook | Jeff Weiner