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Comment by saturdaysaint | Hacker News Reader

It looks very streamlined and powerful - quite arguably more functional than today's iPad - but it's problematic that I don't see anything that makes anyones' life appreciably better. A Flipboard clone, mobile Internet, Twitter, Photos - nothing revolutionary. Really, really good, but nothing to give an iPad or Xoom owner buyer's remorse unless these are ridiculously cheap (I don't see how they'll have any price advantage over Apple or Googlerolla). Tablets will own this holiday season, which MS is missing out on, and remember that Windows 8 tablets will ship in the shadow of the iPad 3. Which, in turn, means that Android and iPad will remain the lead platform for large form touchscreen apps for the medium term future.

So: nice, but this doesn't stop their disruption.

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When the build conference keynote's over, watch the recording. I think the killer feature will be having every device you pick up be tailored to you. When you hand it to your wife, it's tailored to her... just by signing in with a Windows Live ID instead of a local user/password. Your contacts, e-mail, calendar, photos, files, apps, desktop, bookmarks, individual app settings -- it will all be there on whatever device you pick up, whether it's a tablet, a phone, a desktop PC, your work PC. Windows 8 uses Microsoft's cloud to bust through firewalls on every end to connect every device you touch.

That's my biggest complaint about the iPad: I can't fully share my ipad with my girlfriend since it is tied to my email accounts, contacts, calendar etc. It makes sense that a phone is tied to one person, but this iOS limitation is annoying -- especially when traveling.

Yup. The iPhone and iPad are intimately personal devices. For the iPhone this works 100%. For the iPad it's both a blessing and a curse.

If this really proved to be a differentiating feature, would it really take Apple more than a month or two to provide user switching? They already have it in OSX.

Kind of like iCloud?

Exactly, except this time, it'll be on the devices that have 85% market share.

http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/08/20/forrester.sees... Estimated 14% of the US wants to buy an iPad

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/09/13/survey-shows-unpreced... see exhibit 4 - 85% of the tablet buyers intend to buy an iPad.

http://mashable.com/2011/09/12/apple-set-to-break-record-for...

the status quo may not stay the status quo for long... especially with people slowly admitting that, at least for moms and grandmas, tablets may be much more in line with their needs.

Paul Graham was even just on stage talking about how Microsoft likely doesn't see how bad its going to get for them...

PG stays in his wonderland where Microsoft is no longer relevant. He said that a few years ago already. Microsoft still made billions of dollars selling windows in those years.

Same is the case with the surveys above. Everybody wanted to buy an iphone until android came along...

The interesting thing is that consumer surveys still show more people want to buy iPhones. But they walk out of stores with considerably more Android phones than iPhones.

Can you really imagine an average consumer being impressed that a tablet, identical in almost every way to the Android next to it, is running Windows? If not, it's really time to rethink Windows' dominant consumer marketshare.

No, but I can imagine an average consumer being happy that the device can run the copy of Home Landscape Architect 3D Pro Plus 2007 that they bought a few years back, work with their old Quicken data, and play that copy of Hoyle Card Games they have lying around.

People have accumulated stuff that runs on their PCs. Most people who buy iPads keep around their computer to do at least a few things, even if they don't use it very much. The sales pitch on a Win 8 tablet is that it docks to your desk, replaces your PC for everything, and you can still pick it up and carry it everywhere like an iPad.

That seems like a pretty fair sales pitch to me.

can run the copy of Home Landscape Architect 3D Pro Plus 2007

I'll be impressed if they can pull that off and still make it so I can carry it around like an iPad.

What I fear, however, is that they'll make this a hybrid that fails in both scenarios: not powerful enough to handle "3D PRo Plus 2007", yet too power hungry to let my wife watch 5 episodes of Desperate Housewives back to back.

Until I see production hardware, I'm on the fence.

I'd be impressed if their copy of Home Landscape Architect 3D Pro Plus 2007 was even remotely usable with a touch interface it wasn't designed to support.

If they pull this off, it will be dream come true. All will then boil down to 2 device that you carry, your windows phone and a protable awesome tablet cum pc.

They just showed a machine running core i5 with 4 GB ram. You think it won't run on a PC with that spec?

I think it will. Now show me a PC with that spec with the form factor and battery life - i.e. usage pattern - of an iPad. Your ARM tablet wont be able to run legacy software. Your x86 tablet wont have 12 hours of battery life and be thin and cool (in both senses of the word).

As a user it's a tradeoff. May be the x86 tablet won't have 12 hours battery life while still being as thin as the iPad but maybe I can trade a few hours of battery life or a few mm of thickness to get my legacy quicken app running on my tablet. What is cool is that as an end user I will have a choice to go either way.

Processors are getting better with each passing day. I don't think we are too far off from seeing x86 on a thin PC still getting a good battery life.

When you try to everything you end up doing nothing well. Zero percent of legacy Windows software was designed with touch in mind. The fact that Windows 8 will try and probably fail at letting people run this kind of software on a tablet shows me that the writing is on the wall.

When you try to everything you end up doing nothing well.

That's weird... PCs (Mac, Linux, Windows, etc...) have done this for the past 20+ years and a pretty good job of it.

Everyone loves to talk about the demise of the PC, but virtually everyone who has seen the ultrabooks has told me they want one. The only ones who don't are those that say, "Well I already have a MacBook Air". So, sure the Apple 5% may not continue down the PC path, but I think we're looking at a PC rennaisance. And in large part due to Apple.

>That seems like a pretty fair sales pitch to me.

Except we've already tried that. With pretty much every tablet that was ever made before the iPad. How many times are people going to go "but wait, mine is... a whole computer!" before they realize consumers don't want this? The reason the iPad won was because it wasn't a computer. It was a device, an appliance.

That's 85% market share of the legacy platform.

The google ecosystem is headed the same way. Chrome + Android + Amazon MP3 gives me all that stuff anywhere I log in (including windows / mac / linux workstations). I assume Google Music will do the same, which would put all those services under one roof and one login.

They already have some of this in Win7, the ability to link an ID, etc.

I think it is more than iCloud. it is making your profile, your personalization and your content roaming. In case of iCloud, it is only the content if i am not wrong.

MobileMe has been doing settings and contact and such for a while now. It's buggy, mind you, but all of that functionality is going to iCloud.

You buy a new iPhone, login to iCloud, and it pulls all your settings over, configures your mail client, calendar, installs your apps, and downloads your music. You add a contact on your phone, it goes to your MacBook and iPad, etc.

If you have multiple Macs, MobileMe will even sync your keychain, dock, dashboard widgets and preference settings.

FYI: Metro and its tile interface predates Flipboard.

Referring to the RSS reader.

Isn't it too early for that? Given the number of developers working with Microsoft's ecosystem, I don't think it will be long until they have a market as big as Apple's or Google's when it's released.

I think that WP7 wasn't a hit because MS made terrible partnerships and became a second-class OS vendor to everyone but Nokia, but I belive that the tablets will give MS more independence, will bring other makers to the table, and it will change. They're just late to the party.

I'm going out on a limb and making an educated prediction - it might well be too early. Then again, there's so much time between now and W8's release that we almost need to assume major launches and platform breakthroughs from Apple and Google (hey, Google announced Intel compatibility during the Build keynote). So to predict how things will shake out, we have to be a harsh on Windows 8 - it won't look any better next spring next to the iPad 3 and Android 4.0.

It's really weird for anyone that's followed technology for more than a decade, but Microsoft computers will have almost no special appeal to the average consumer. I don't think that Best Buy will have a special "Windows 8 Tablet" section like they do now for desktops and laptops - they'll be mixed in a sea of Android and Blackberry tablets (much like WP7 Phones at any phone store). Why not?

Windows 8 is in real danger of being second class in the consumer space. The lead development device is a Samsung, for example, but how much more profit would Sammy get if they made the same hardware with Android? Are the hurdles really great for Acer, Asus, Samsung, Sony or Lenovo (all Android vendors!) to put Android in any hardware that's running Windows 8?

It can run Visual Studio (more useful with a USB or bluetooth keyboard), not just a Flipboard clone, mobile Internet, Twitter or Photos.

You can even hook up a second monitor to it.

A $700 development tool is not the killer app I was looking for.

Any tablet can already create documents and spreadsheets, surf the internet, check e-mail and calendars, access social networks, edit movies, Skype... Everything that %95 of the population needs. People that need higher caliber tools (developers, creative professionals) can afford another system.

So Windows needs a stronger reason to exist it's going to dissuade the average consumer from buying either the market leader (Apple) or the cheap alternative (Android). Android is the real threat. A $200 PC replacement is quite feasible within a year and really deals a blow to Microsoft's business model.

The killer app for the enterprise is Excel. Having native PowerPivot access to your Sharepoint hosted data is worth the price of admission. And if they do a Metro Excel -- game over in the enterprise.

For consumers its less clear. Maybe XBox Live.

I think his point was more that it can run an application as complex as Visual Studio, not necessarily that it can run VS itself.

Any tablet can create spreadsheets, but not as well as Excel. Any tablet can create a document, but not one that's going to be 100% compatible with the version of Word they have on their desktop PC. Those are all very strong reasons to buy a Windows Tablet.

What desktop PC? Running what? I do have a desktop PC and I do do business with Word documents. But on my latest machine I have yet to install Office (though I have two legal copies) because Google Docs works just fine.

Ah, I forgot that every person out there is like you.

Sarcasm aside, a lot of people still use Office. Far more than use Google Docs. Even businesses that are using Google Apps for e-mail still use Office for their documents. Being able to edit documents with 100% reliability on a tablet could be a big deal when it comes to corporate tablet purchases, for a start.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2011/09/06/com...

"Microsoft’s average revenue from its Office suite licenses sold to enterprise and retail customers has been declining due to competition from cloud-based app providers like Google, Amazon and Salesforce.com, and also due to increasing lower priced products sales in emerging markets."

Sales have been declining- they haven't stopped.

There are still a ton of companies out there that use office. Creating a Windows Tablet could well cause sales of Office to increase.

The moment a decent windows 8 tablet comes out, the iPads in our company will be gone.

Care to elaborate on the reasons why? Locked out of the network by paranoid sys admins? People will flock to the compatibility with existing apps? You work at MS?

The development tools are free. Visual Studio Express is free. They are all you need for most any development scenario.

If for some reason, you need another edition of the development, you can get them free if you're a student (DreamSpark), a startup (BizSpark), or cheaper than $700 (MSDN sub).

I'd be interested to know why Express doesn't work for you?

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