Compromise

It's a thoughtful post. It seems to me that iOS was successful in no small part because the available hardware was sufficiently powerful to drive a compelling experience (with some of the compromises). It couldn't have happened (much) earlier.

I would be happy to find that hardware is now sufficiently powerful to drive a product as ambitious as Windows 8, that compromises none of the power of a traditional computing experience.

In a broader sense, I hope that hardware is or will soon become sufficiently powerful to enable products that leverage higher levels of abstraction in order to experiment more, and fill more niches in the computing spectrum, to allow more radical departures from dominant computing paradigms.

Stuff like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2921398

I'm afraid that the future role and mode of computing are becoming more and more narrowly defined, and that definition revolves primarily around consumption, instead of creation and connection.

Yes, there are compromises involved in iOS and the iPad, but I don't think they're the kind of compromises Sinovsky is talking about.

Find me one place where the touch UI of the iPad was compromised in any way to provide affordances for people who want to hook their iPad up to a keyboard. If there is one, I'll be floored.

An iPad means a sealed box where you don't have to mess with file systems or insecure code. Can't we have a compromise for those of us who want the ability to use a Finder to move files around and load them up in different apps? No, we can't, because that would compromise the experience. Can't we have a cool little local scripting development environment for doing nifty interaction design work. No, we can't, because that would compromise our sealed, secure box.

Sinovsky is saying that Microsoft is flatly refusing to provide a "tweener" interface, where the utility of the tablet is compromised to provide more of a desktop-like experience. I don't know whether Microsoft can deliver really excellent tablets or not, but (as with most of the things they've done with Metro) this part of their approach makes sense to me.

Microsoft seem to have a vision for their device which is quite different from the IPAD. Perhaps I'm reading between the lines too much.

Imagine a tablet that connected wirelessly to a nearby monitor and keyboard. Imagine arriving at your desk, placing your device in a charging station, picking up the mouse, and working on your device as a desktop.

Imagine picking up the device to go to a meeting, using it as a tablet to browse your colleagues slides while she talked. Imagine it's your turn. You touch the screen, and the projector takes its feed from your device screen instead, wirelessly. You can change slides by gesture, draw with your finger to illustrate your talk, and run the programs you have developed and make changes. After all, this is your development machine.

Laptops already do a lot of this but they are cumbersome. Mostly, people want to read on the move, and that's what a tablet is for, consuming data.

Anyway, that's where I think Microsoft is going, but it's been a long day and I'm talking out my ass. Would you actually find a device like this an improvement on a laptop?

As Inigo Montoya once said: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

This is nothing but a compromise. Sinofsky is not a dumb guy, so I wonder why he's lying...

ITT: People have read an article where Gruber interprets "compromise" to be scoped to whatever level of the subject suits his agenda best and nobody notices.

He uses his iPad for reading and video and not content creation, huh? Must have been too busy sending The Memo to read it.