Microsoft Expected to Introduce Tablet
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
You’d think they could just leave and found their own companies, but no, they’d have to make something people wanted relatively immediately, instead of being able to mouth platitudes about being “strategic” and “building moats” to “protect” Windows and so on and so forth.
Or if you prefer, there is a Windows Tax, and these divisions are like government projects, each trying to justify their existence and draw upon the tax revenues. Like government projects, they are not accountable to the people who pay the taxes, just faceless mandarins at the top.They only lose if they are silly enough to cause a scandal with their foolishness and embarrass the company into firing them and defunding their projects.
Building Kin, then killing it, then getting into bed with Nokia, then building their own tablet... Reminds me of the way the city contractors tear up my street, then pave it, then tear it up again, then pave it again, and so forth. As long as the bureaucracy is in control, and as long as the tax dollars keep flowing, it’s a game of who has the best PowerPoint.
Microsoft has always approached relationships with a B2B strategy - the mea culpa following the red ring of death shows the way in which that culture extends into the consumer side of the equation. Management's job is to make sure that there are dividends going to all those pension funds which own their stock, not to entertain bloggers.
If Microsoft is actually releasing their own tablet hardware as a long term strategy for extending an existing franchise (such as Xbox), it's probably because their is little interest in Windows Tablets from existing hardware manufacturers. Releasing their own hardware also brings the Windows RT restrictions regarding BIOS into a sensible light - not that dearth of consumer interest in Linux tablets made all the whining sensible.
I suspect that Microsoft has looked at the existing tablet landscape and sized it up pretty accurately as people want eReaders and iPads, and believe that the best way to expand the market is to get telemetry on how tablets are actually used.
Unlike your local paving company, Microsoft is gambling their own money, not driving up profits by looking for change orders.
Current Windows tablet makers may infer that investing money on Windows 8 tablets is as likely to pay off as the last round. The story there is similar to the iPod natural monopoly -- no one made any money on any of those cheaper-but-not-cheap-enough hard-drive-based portable music players. What is needed is an optimal hardware+software combo, plus a different business model. Following Amazon's lead, it might make sense to sell a Win8 tablet at cost and make the profit on cloud-based subscription services.
The second thing I see is that the idea of a media consumption device is somewhat antithetical to Microsoft's culture of treating computing devices as computing devices. Going to the roots of the Courier concept, it was about productivity not entertainment and Microsoft traditionally pushed productivity applications down onto mobile devices as a matter of course - I wouldn't be surprised to see Office on any tablet they provide.
Finally, one of the Metro red threads is that devices are occasionally connected, not permanently connected to the cloud like Chromium.
Such disinterest, if it is the case, isn't particularly surprising given the consumer market's acceptance of Android driven tablets, and it may be reasonable to see Microsoft choosing to take on the hardware side for the sake of conducting research (ala' KIN).
Alternatively, a Windows 8 tablet under the XBox brand makes a lot of sense given the success of that franchise and the level of acceptance that console competitors have achieved with portable gaming devices...e.g. Gameboy and PSP. A gaming focused marketing strategy has a lot going for it - "Mom, I can even do my homework on it because it comes with Word" and integration with XBox Live is already part of the Windows Phone 7 Gaming Hub.
I suspect that a gaming focused device would match up pretty well against the iPad (and Android) because XNA offers a way of facilitating cross platform development. On a larger front, integration of a tablet with Kinnect would offer the potential for some really interesting applications out in the workplace.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-confirms-dave-...
http://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Micr...
I also own an iPhone, and there I think iOS is great, since I want my phone to be an application console, and nothing more. But in tablet, I'd like it to be more like a computer, so iOS is not adequate for me here.
I'm wishing against hope that they'll bring to life some of the features in the Courier concept: Infinite journal, clip and paste, touch+stylus (stylus for writing ideographs --which are cumbersome by finger).
Dual screen? Maybe as an alternate model. One of the main ideas is that it would not just be a presentation medium but also a production medium.
With clunky PCs, I've never experienced that feeling. Hopefully Microsoft can get it right this time, and make it feel like a quality product. While I enjoy using my Apple devices a lot, they do need some competition to fuel innovation.
If Microsoft manages to pull this off the right way, with a feeling of great quality to it, I could even see myself buying one to try out Windows 8 properly.
Microsoft thinks they're the king of the hill with Windows but it wouldn't take long for vendors to team up together and make Chrome OS, Android, or some other Linux variant into a viable alternative.
All this alternate OS would have to do is everything that Windows XP does. The number of Windows 7 specific applications is shockingly low.
Also, the argument is predicated on the assumption that this is a zero sum game. Microsoft's value proposition isn't suddenly going to be so amazing that no consumer will purchase a non-Microsoft PC. In the same way, I find it highly likely that if Apple's OS were available for licensing, a lot of PC manufacturers would license it without regard for the fact that Apple's hardware is probably superior.
It's not even clear what Microsoft's value proposition is in this new space.
If you look at applications on the iPad and Android, only a small portion of them are what you might term conventional by desktop standards.
As a counterpoint, I'm always wondering which part on my self-built machine is going to fail or is failing, and whether I can do anything about it aside from junk the part in question. (I imagine the weird care guarantees for individual parts are weirder still than such as a 1 yr mfg warranty.)
Meanwhile, as a concrete example, neither of the Win7 machines I've built will sleep properly, and troubleshooting PC hardware issues is near the bottom on the list of ways I want to spend my free time.
I sort of miss having the time do to do that stuff. I have respect for those people that enjoy it. But it's so not for me anymore.
I would call it a success if they carved out a new, larger (in dollars) market elsewhere, ideally, but not necessarily, without standing on the toes of their hardware partners.
I know at least a few tech folks who have seen the Microsoft tablet demo'd, and been plied with free drinks to forget the experience.
I can't believe that me, a tech guy in Los Angeles, heard about this (and saw a MSoftie in our shared office showing it to some folks) before people in NYC, SV, or Seattle. Wow.
Microsoft is about to concede that Apple may be onto something.
play Xbox games remotely over the internet? It's just unfeasible. Control schemes on a tablet do not translate to console games.
great handwriting recognition? Then it's going to require a stylus, and many won't care. Not a good enough feature... The world has largely moved on from this desire.
program on it using any language you want? Lol! We're talking about Microsoft here! It's going to be a WinRT walled garden!
If it doesn't have a great screen, costs a fortune, has no features and no apps, then it's DOA. Pointing to a single feature and saying "this is the only thing the market cares about" is silly and rarely a useful metric to look at.
Android, likewise, has not been able to compete in the tablet market... even less so after the Retina iPad. Apple has, unfortunately, set a very high mark for competition.
I had just purchased an Asus eeePad Transformer Prime, the top of the line Android tablet, right before the Retina iPad... I immediately sold it, for a loss, and switched.
I disagree with all my heart, soul, brain and everything in the universe. The dominating feature of a tablet is the software.
> Android, likewise, has not been able to compete in the tablet market..
[citation needed]. Android has been slow to pick up but is slowly commanding more and more of the market. Android started from behind on tablets but is working to catch up; i.e., they're competing.
> Apple has, unfortunately, set a very high mark for competition.
I would consider that fortunate, not unfortunate. When is a high bar for competition a bad thing?!
> I had just purchased an Asus eeePad Transformer Prime, the top of the line Android tablet, right before the Retina iPad... I immediately sold it, for a loss, and switched.
That's fine. I find the screen to be the least important part of a tablet. I'd take 800x600 running Android any day over a high res iPad. You and I are different people with different preferences. The market is made up of many people like us, and the tablets that fit the most of us the best will do the best in the market. You cannot take your personal preference and impose it on the market. You will be wrong.
But I'm only basing that on about 27 years of using MS's products. (whether I want to or not)
The sad thing is, it will be cheaper than an iPad, and it will have a long list of features, and it will be pitched to VIPs in various organizations, as well as poorer customers, who aren't sure what they want to do, but see the list of things and the price.
It will suck, and it will eat up many times its cost difference in lost productivity, but it will probably get the biggest market share. Sob.