Commentary on Microsoft's stand that Tablets are a passing fad
mondaynote.com
mondaynote.com
The other explanation is that not enough senior people have spent any time figuring out for themselves what potential the iPad has. Maybe they genuinely don't get it.
I actually think the second explanation is more likely. It's also much worse for them. It's easy to take a first glance at the iPad and see it as a media player and games console with a browser built in - i.e. A big iPod touch.
Paradoxically this makes it easier for them to brush off. "We all know that iPods are successful. Hats off to Apple, the iPod company - the iPad is the new iPod." Which neatly rationalizes away the success of the iPad in a way that's not threatening to the PC business.
Analysts, always eager to sell people what they want, are colluding with this by calling the iPad a media tablet.
The one thing none of these people are doing (unlike iPad customers) is trying to use them for real work, and discovering where they are strong and where they are weak.
I now use my iPad 2 as my only computer at home. This means I often try to push it into doing real work. I've been surprised to find that for some tasks which are very important to me, it's a lot better than a laptop.
Specifically, I now use the OmniGraffle on the iPad to do all my brainstorming, and technical diagramming.
I'm a long time user of the desktop version and bought the iPad version when it first came out. The combination of the relatively slow iPad 1, and the immature OmniGraffle, made it little more than an expensive curiosity.
Over the course of the year, Omni have worked diligently at improving the UI, understanding how to make good use of multi-touch, and improving performance. It was getting pretty good even on the old iPad, but on the iPad 2 it flies.
For the first time in my life, I feel as though I have a computer that can really replace a paper notebook for capturing ideas. I can be in the middle of making breakfast, and suddenly a design solution will pop into my head, and I can instantly open OmniGraffle and make a diagram capturing the details - better than I could with paper.
It's so good that I'll pick up the iPad to do this even when I'm sitting in front of my top of the range iMac.
Anyway - raving about OmniGraffle is really just by way of example. The real point is that step by step, application authors will figure out how to make their iPad versions better than their desktop versions.
This process won't take long, and it will establish tablets as the primary computer.
I tried similar experiments with Tablet PC's over the years, including using Motion Computing tablet with separate keyboard (i.e. Like a big iPad). It just didn't work, because of the software and the stylus - simple as that.
That is an enormous first step for an organization whose most prominent trait is arrogance. I'd like to see them come around, though, and provide some competition.
Their current approach to extracting intellectual property rents via patent licensing isn't the Road Ahead, it's the Road to Obscurity!
Good riddance.
I don't think you can start a culture of innovation with a "we were never really good at it" attitude.
They can innovate and build stuff nobody has done before. They just haven't, so far with the exception of Kinect, been able to build stuff nobody built before that people also wanted to buy.
Bill Gates himself made a lofty prediction: “The tablet takes cutting-edge PC technology and makes it available whenever you want it…It’s a PC that is virtually without limits — and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America.”
As much as people like to stretch the word "tablet", applying statements made about the "iPhone" to "tablets" is simply going too far. Yes: the article's title says "Microsoft: Tablets are a passing fad", but the article doesn't claim this is Microsoft's "stance" (you don't mean "stand"), so frankly this HN post comes off as link-bait.
Yet, the most (perhaps only) successful tablet up to now is little more than an overgrown iPhone that can't make voice calls.
If you read the essay, the author begins by describing IBM's strategies for responding to new competition, and how Microsoft learned from them. The prediction by Gates about the iPhone is a mere illustration of this. It could have been any example of similar posturing and have been relevant. That it is about the iPhone is incidental. This particular illustration was probably picked only for how it juxtaposes nicely against Mundie's similar posture about the iPad last week.
Perhaps you thought the word 'fad' in the headline was drawn from the 2007 Bill Gates quotation? I didn't read it that way at all.
Rather, to me it came off as a shorter Mundie, and an entirely uncontroversial paraphrase of what he said. He was savvy enough to avoid the word 'fad' in his statement, but he casted enough doubt on the longevity of tablets to invoke the spectre of the 2007 quotation by Gates.
Edit: I like the distillation of your point below, and find it vote-worthy. +1
The former's usage of the word "stance" is much more direct: it implies that Microsoft has officially made firm statements on this matter. Instead, you get to the article and read commentary (no matter how well informed or interesting; I do not wish to comment on that) about "mixed messages" from the guy who runs Microsoft Research.
Chef Jobs, in one stroke of his whisk, got the tablet mayonnaise to take, after three decades of clotted failures by the best and the brightest in the computer industry, Apple included.
The Nokia partnership is clearly a desperate attempt to resuscitate their mobile strategy. Given the ground that Nokia has ceded at the high end of the mobile market to Apple and Google it is far from certain, that this move will succeed.
What might be interesting is to leverage Nokia's production & distribution power to push WP7 into mid-range devices & featurephones. MicroNokia need to move fast though, the likes of ZTE are already targeting the mid-range with cheaper Android devices and are growing fast as a result.
I can be outnumbered 10 to 1 against a stupid enemy and still have a fighting chance. I can't say the same with I am outnumbered 100 to 1.
Maybe they realized how important the internet would be, but they were very late to the web, and that's what made the internet important after all. Microsoft's vision was of its private Compuserve-like Microsoft Network to be installed on every Windows desktop computer and accessible from anywhere. I am sure they were into TCP/IP and packet-switched networking, but... that's not what made the internet the transformative force it is now.
I think I have a Blackbird developer kit somewhere in one of my move-leftover boxes somewhere.
It's sad to say, but once, a long, long time ago, I was on the Other Side of the Force...
OTOH, life is just a passing fad. Give the Universe a couple hundred billion years and it may be completely free of it.