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Comment by daeken | Hacker News Reader

Shocker, Gruber thinks that if you're not approaching something the way Apple does, you're not going to succeed. That's really all there is to this article. Let's wait and see what they produce, considering that there's over a year before this will hit the shelves, shall we?

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Actually the sheer earliness and specificity of the preview seems like an unusually aggressive display of confidence from MS.

The earliness and specificity of the preview seems to me like a pre-emptive strike against whatever Apple announce at WWDC in a few days time.

They're not mutually exclusive. Time will tell whether they can effectively realize their vision, of course, but at least they've made clear that they have one.

To be fair, Microsoft has tried portable, non-PC devices for more than a decade and failed miserably, largely because they cling to the windows metaphor on small screens.

But to be more fair, in the past MS didn't really change the UI at all -- they just said, here's a stylus. In this case they actually provide a radically different UI.

It's the UI from Windows Phone 7, which didn't exactly light the industry on fire.

No, but I think that had as much to do with marketing and overall execution than it did the UI itself. I have to admit that what I've seen of the WP7 UI looks quite nice, even if it pains me to complement MS.

If they execute properly on this I could see it being a big hit.

But has been fairly universally praised.

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