Ballmer: An iPad Killer is Job One | Hacker News Reader

Ballmer: An iPad Killer is Job One

pcpro.co.uk

15 pointsall42 comments

If I have to install ant-virus software on a tablet, then they have failed. They really need to figure out a way to take some of the current lessons from iOS and Android to heart and build something that is dead simple, integrates well with Exchange, easily managed by IT Admins, and doesn't require maintenance.

Either MS makes a tablet that's actually cool, or they make a tablet I can install Ubuntu on, or I have another chance to laugh at MS. Any way you slice it, I win!

EDIT: Microsoft has XBox. They should be able to murder Apple with their resources and an installed base like that. They could make sure that putting Apple and "Digital Hub" in the same sentence implies a joke. The fact that this isn't imminent is a sign of massive internal disfunction.

I would submit to you that the installed base of iTunes is a lot higher than XBox. I believe the days of thinking of Apple as the little guy are just about over.

My point is that XBox has for a freakin long time been occupying the perfect real estate for the "digital hub!" If Microsoft could execute on decent "me too" offerings, they should have been able to murder Apple from that position. They had the fortified high ground with the heavy artillery and troops sitting on it, and they still let Apple surround and bypass them. C'mon! Zune + Plays for Sure. Vista. Kin.

Microsoft Home Server is a potential gold mine! Inkskein/Courier could have revolutionized personal computing in deeper ways than iPad. Singularity could have leapfrogged OS X, leaving it hopelessly in the dust.

Clearly, Microsoft has been dysfunctional and could not execute.

Sony had a better chance than Microsoft being in that space longer and also being a content producer. If Sony had come up with an iTunes service at the same time as Apple and incorporated it into the Walkman, Sony TVs, Sony / Erickson cellphones, and the PS/2 then Apple would have had some real competition. But, it didn't happen much like Barnes & Noble didn't build a competitor to Amazon until it was too late.

Microsoft's biggest problem is that the Windows franchise was not directly translatable into MP3 players or phones. This made their normal "me-too" strategy very hard. Also, all of the lock-in that Microsoft got from their Windows line was actually in Apple's favor with the iTunes ecosystem. "Me too" doesn't work if the switching cost is too high.

Microsoft Home Server is great for geeks and knowledgable users, but it is too expensive (PC cost / maintenance cost) for normal people. I believe Courier would have been a great product, but it, by design, would not have had the depth of ecosystem that the iPad has. It would have been an amazing device for business though.

In a nutshell: Apple has been walking all over competitors with tremendous positional and legacy advantages because only they truly understood end-to-end user experience.

If you have to use a stylus with it to click on UI elements that were designed to be targeted with a mouse, they have failed.

I see UI elements in this screen shot (specifically the tray icons on the taskbar) that are too small to be tapped on with a finger:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/202234/microsoft_vows_tablet_...

The only way I can see Microsoft making a Windows tablet that doesn't fail is with a brand new Explorer.exe built for fingers and multitouch rather than mouse/stylus. Of course they'd need to do the same thing with Office as well.

Apple took a much better approach by designing a new OS - it forces devs to not use small UI elements that are too small to be pressed with a finger.

As someone who has done UI for iPhone and iPad apps, I have to mention that you can get pretty small before it becomes difficult to tap what you want. And rarely is the touch sensitive area represented solely by the bounding box of the icon you're trying to hit.

It's difficult to tell from that image how big they actually are. And there's no way to know that the actual release will look anything like that. However, a coworker of mine last summer was working with Win 7 touch, which was basically Windows 7 running on a touch sensitive monitor, and he seemed to think it was relatively easy to use.

I was going to supply quotes here from the article, quotes that Ballmer made demonstrating his complete lack of competency in understanding the playing field, but then I realized that was all of them.

He should avoid using words like "urgently". Causes me to expect they're going to rush it out prematurely and embarass themselves.

> they're going to rush it out prematurely and embarass themselves.

like they did with Vista?

Seriously: they have ample capacity to embarrass themselves even without rushing things.

Hopefully they will let a small team of specialists handle this challenge instead of throwing a lot of people and money at the problem.

They had that (multiple times). Their obsession with putting "Windows" everywhere is killing good things. I (not a Microsoft fan) thought the Courier would have been a great product in the $300 - $500 price range. I could easily see people buying it and ditching their daytimes.

Like the iPod killer? Or the iPhone killer?

If you start by marketing your product as an "X-Killer", you've just shot yourself in the foot.

Exactly, because if you just injure instead of kill, you've failed.

Well... According to this

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/07/30/steve-ballmer-on-the-...

theirs will even print. I can't imagine how Apple will be able to compete with something so revolutionary.

Isn't there an app for printing?

Dunno. It wouldn't violate the store TOS...

There are actually dozens of apps for that. Here's a few:

ActivePrint http://prmac.com/release-id-13473.htm

iPrintApp http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2351954,00.asp

Air Sharing Pro http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2351933,00.asp

HP iPrint Photo http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2351934,00.asp

Canon Easy Photo-Print http://www.dpreview.com/news/0910/09101602canonprintapp.asp

I sure hope they waterproof it. Sorry Steve.

I'm laughing my ass off at his answers though.

"I relish the competition. I relish holding up those couple of machines today that I wanted to hand you. It's not today. I'll relish doing it tomorrow. Bring on ‑‑ particularly if with the application base, with the tools that we have, with the user understanding and momentum and everything going on, we can't compete with ‑‑ particularly whatever the weird collection of Android machines is going to look like, shame on us."

I hate to even hint at politics here, but does he not sound like Sarah Palin in that response. Unfocused and just blabbering on for the sake of it.

Microsoft's real problem is that they just have too much management, and they deeply miss the commercial and technical instinct of Bill Gates. As a result, they just can't iterate quickly on any meaningful scale.

Microsoft's best hope for a decent tablet is to bang hard on the Windows Phone 7 stuff, but they are way behind, and may end up being 'niched', though unlike Palm with WebOS, they have the deep pockets to pour money into Win Phone 7 forever.

Just one screenshot of a Norton, Symantec or Macaffee dialog demanding an anti-virus subscription, and the Windows 7 tablet is toast.

When was the last time something described as a "X killer" actually killed, or took significant market share away from, X?

When Adobe InDesign was released (1999), it was soon called the Quark XPress killer. http://www.macworld.com/article/21336/2001/02/indesign.html

A couple of years later, most print shops had switched to InDesign.

(EDIT: The print shops I was working with had all switched to InDesign by 2002. I'm sure that it took longer in other parts of the country. Be that as it may, it has definitely become the layout package of choice.)

It took a hell of a lot more than a couple of years.

Well, Microsoft did kill Netscape Navigator. Only conflict within Microsoft between those who wanted to protect the revenue streams from Windows and Office against web apps and those who wanted keep on improving Internet Explorer even if the improvements erode those revenue streams allowed competing browsers to get the beachhead they have now.

I'd imagine a windows tablet would come mostly at the expense of an android tablet market share.

I think you accidentally a word.

"This sentence no verb!" --Douglas Hofstadter

I really think tablets aren't all they're cracked up to be. They're just touchscreen netbooks with a sub-par input method. (Touch keyboards cannot match hardware.)

I'm quite content with my Dell Mini running Ubuntu. It does everything I need it to.

Netbooks (and laptops, for that matter) and slates have two different use cases.

For their intended use cases (primarily consumption), slates are excellent. I spend most of my "productive" time with a laptop formfactor, but the rest of the time, my iPad gets heavy use, for those uses, I consider the iPad superior to my much more powerful laptop.

It is unclear whether Microsoft's future tablet will be successful or not, but most of Ballmer's comments seem fairly reasonable and he never uses the phrase "iPad killer"

The fact that Ballmer is talking Windows 7 makes the whole idea doomed to fail.

Why not Windows Mobile 7 (or whatever they're calling it these days)?

I have never been a fan of Windows Mobile-- each WM phone I had prior to the iPhone, I wanted to smash into the ground.

Windows Mobile 7, however, actually looks pretty nice, and it seems like a fresh UI (even though it is Zune-like). It's not my taste in design, but it seems much more well suited to a slate interface than Windows 7.

"Ballmer: Catching Up Is Real Hard"

FTFY. :)

Quote from the same guy who presided over the nixing the Courier. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Courier

sigh Has anything come out under this guy that wasn't always going to anyways by sheer force of market inertia?

Oh man. There's nothing wrong with a fast-follower strategy, but the basic requirements are to (1) be fast, and (2) understand the thing you're trying to follow. SteveB is missing the boat on both here.

Hey Steve, what's Job Two?

"Job one" is singular, "Steve Jobs" is plural :)

Why not innovate instead? Or go after Apple where Apple is weak? AppleTV is a great target. Microsoft could own the home theater PC market a lot easier than they could catch iPad.

I haven't used it, but I've heard that Windows Home Server is actually pretty good. Not particularly well publicized, though.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowsh...

Anyone else ironically hoping MS creates a better iPad just for the opportunity to install Linux on it?

Microsoft "innovation": Three rotten product generations followed by an Apple clone.

hahahahahahahahahahahahaha

(Sorry but I couldn't resist)

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