Surface: Between a Rock and a Hardware Place
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
Microsoft this week showed itself willing to do what was once unthinkable: design and sell its own computer hardware
They are giving too much choice (1). To me, the real issue is availability. They shouldn't have had the press conference until the device was available on the same day. They _always_ do this, and it rarely works out. They would have sold more devices in the first week, had it been available immediately, then they now will in a quarter.
(1) http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch...
That said, if it can do what they claimed and the price isn't stupid, I'll have one (then replace my MacBook Air with a MBPro). I'm not holding my breath, though. I've lost all faith in "product announcements" that don't actually have the product.
MS has all of the engineering talent to make this happen. I'm far from convinced that they have the leadership talent to make Surface a true success[1].
1. In this case, true success means taking an appreciative percentage of the market and inspiring changes in competitors' products (meaning they are thought leaders). MS is so large in the enterprise space that they may be able to turn this into many sales, but that doesn't mean they will be the ones pulling us into the future.
And you can see how they have done what they can in order to not screw over the hardware manufacturers, by promising to only sell the device through their retails stores.
..and now HP and Mark Hurds initial strategy with WebOS doesn't seem so stupid after all.
They abandoned two of those.
The future of computing is going to be fragmented. Not unified by a single tablet model.
Every time something new comes up we always get the same BS: "netbooks are going to replace computers". "iPhones are going to replace computers", "ipads are going to replace computers".
Give me a break.
In my work for a digital agency we have a lot of projects going with tablets (well let's be honest it's all iPads) to work as replacement for laptops for certain processes and situations. There are so many real-life processes happening today where toting a laptop around is really not ideal and tablets have some awesome characteristics which make them a great second or third device for some job descriptions, but also a first device for others.
For pump installers for instance a laptop is a pain in the ass. They all have one, but they never bring it out of the car with them because it's heavy, has poor battery life and is really impractical when you're working in a dusty, dark environment. A tablet on the other hand serves them well. They can bring it with them. Hang it on a pipe somewhere and watch that installation video or look up that manual that they are needing. Battery life is so that they don't have to charge it all week. Everybody wins.
Don't mean to get carried away, but the world is really full of people doing "real work" where laptops and desktops are just not the best solution.
I'm sure there is. But by far, most businesses still need laptops and proper desktops to work. Sometime you need a big screen. Most of the time you want to have a keyboard, a good one, to type fast. You want to have the precision of the mouse of do things on screen. ANd you need power. A portable device, no matter how good it is, is constrained by ventilation, temperature limits, processor speed, space, and so on. For the price of an iPad you get a much more powerful desktop computer.
Tablets have advantages as consumer devices, as presentation devices, as "reader / browsing" devices. They are convenient. I do not deny that. But they simply won't replace everything else.
And the reason why the iPad sells so well is because it's a disposable device at heart. Whenever a new iPad comes out, most of the previous iPad owners drop their older version to get the new one. (same for the iPhone, by the way). Usually computer users keep their PCs active for way longer than that.
Absolutely, I need those things... for about 15% of my working time.
I suspect lot of people in roles where access to information is needed with minimal modification or addition to the data could work with other devices.
By curiosity, what do you do the rest of your working time?
I've also heard the same story from other friends in different places, so I can only assume that a large amount of pre-iPad owners seem to buy a new one systematically. I don't have market research data to prove anything, however.
The devices aren't disposable, either. They hold value, and it's easy enough to sell the old one. Nobody is throwing away an iPad.
It costs about as much as a fancy new video card, and is much easier for users to replace than a video card. Plus, they can sell the old one, or hand it down to spous/kids/etc.
For a lot of job functions power is just not necessary.
There is a lot happening right now with especially the iPad as a tool for mobile professionals, service sector jobs and for blue-collar work functions where access to data and light data entry is needed but a quad core is total overkill.
An easy to use OS and a decent touchscreen is a great way of streamlining a lot of processes which currently involve filling out forms and carrying around manuals and forms and what not.
Us office types still see it as that third device that does nothing that our laptop or smartphone can't do, but for those who have neither of those provided by the workplace it's a real boon.
I do see people working with iPads quite often. Some examples; building and plant surveyor specifying changes in our building; teaching inspectors making notes during a lesson observation; local middle managers pulling down reports from Intranet during meeting; managerial types on train every morning reading documents and annotating them on way into work.
I don't think these people only use iPads, but I do think they use their tablets as data gathering tools and annotation tools. I suspect desktops will morph into workstations with huge monitors and highish prices, and that laptops will become a high end option for those of us who prefer a keyboard/screen combo.
Some evidence for that could be the success of applications that make it easy to syncronise data.
Having a Windows tablet device might make things easier for people to move data along.
PS: Am I the only one worried by that strange pantographic construction that supports the tablet in 'laptop' mode?
Maybe I should clarify what I mean by "working". For me, reading information on a screen is not working. Work is when you add value, so when you actually produce something with the information you have. An iPad may be a great tool to READ informatio, at the most take notes, but to produce something it is pretty poor and limited in many aspects. Yes, you can always manage to do something with it, but it's just a big compromise versus using the right device for the right job.
> I suspect desktops will morph into workstations with huge monitors and highish prices, and that laptops will become a high end option for those of us who prefer a keyboard/screen combo.
There is no reason for desktops to become more expensive, though. As long as they are built with mass-market technology, of course.
The total market for portable computing devices is growing, and the replacement of e.g. paper manuals by tablets might be one of the reasons. This is work by my definition.
"There is no reason for desktops to become more expensive, though. As long as they are built with mass-market technology, of course."
Many desktops in companies can probably be replaced by tablets/mobile devices. I'm in an open plan staffroom with 60 desks and 60 PCs. Many of my fellow teachers would be very comfortable with a tablet that could talk to a projector somehow and some good writing sketching software. We could halve the number of desktops easily, perhaps just have 10 on desks in the side of the room.
Multiply that all over and you have a reduced market in numbers for desktops.
PS: not sure why your comment is being downvoted, just depends on definition of 'work'. Mine is different.
That's probably good for short and "casual" writing. But for long distance writing, most people can type much faster than they can write, and most people can type much more legibly than they can write.
Which is hugely ironic, given the bandwagon of reducing emphasis on handwriting skills in favor of keyboarding skills in schools. For devices without keyboards, we'll either be using glass keyboards with their tactile inaccuracy, or styluses with OCR software behind them that will have to contend with increasingly terrible handwriting.
In the beginning they were small low-res tablets. But people wanted a bigger screen -> bigger tablets with high-res screens. But people hated to type on the screen -> keyboards added. But people hated to hold it all the time -> stands are added. And suddenly it is looking like a laptop.
I think there is a reason why Laptops and Desktops didn't change that much in all those years.
Agree. Apple software has very little Enterprise presence.
I see a few people bring iPads to meetings (they could be Androids, but I assume iPad). They quietly look at them once in awhile. Whatever it is they do with them has no effect on the rest of the meeting.
Contrast that with people bringing their laptops to meetings, connecting to the corporate network, and then editing the corporate collection of bits (databases and documents) live and collaboratively. That's done with Microsoft software.
Unless Apple or another player decides to go full Enterprise, that part of MS will be around for a long time, running on whatever supports that.
This is why I don't read Daring Fireball regularly. It's a blog solely focused on being skeptical about everything. The whole premise seems to be to find flaws in products/services and tell the world about them. I don't mind skepticism, but there's a difference between "it has these cool concepts, but it ain't perfect and probably will fail" and "it's going to fail because of A, B, C, D, … Z"
Gruber might be accurate, but in my daily reading I prefer people with a bit more positive thoughts.
was unable to find reference to said shenanigans though, which was disappointing
I'm not saying I'm a big fan of Gruber's (I never listened to his Talk Show, and removed him from my "daily" reading list because I consider what he did to 5by5 unethical, but I read him every few days because he's a fan of Kubrick, and finds great links). I just don't want to be represented with spec sheets and charts over and over and over again. Tech blogs and columns mostly repeat the same thing (what you almost always know), and when they tell you about their feelings, they're usually really narrow-minded and most of the time fail to understand their use cases (them being some sort of "journalist") differs dramatically with most people's ("iPad's gonna fail because it doesn't have hardware keyboards, which means I have to bring a keyboard with me when I'm going to conferences 6-7 times a month").
Apple, for all that's said about their software being excellent (and maybe it is) is a hardware maker. As such, they try to commoditize software: make complements to their own products as cheap as possible, so that the overall cost of buying Apple is as low as possible (while keeping their part of the profits as high as possible).
They have been immensely successful at this, obviously; but that doesn't mean "the future is nearly free software"! It means, Apple is trying to commoditize software and is doing a fantastic job at it. (Much better than what Sun tried to do for example).
But the answer to this, is that software makers should try to commoditize hardware. Of course, this is much harder, since the marginal price of a piece of hardware is non-zero. It may even be impossible, but that's still what Microsoft is trying to do -- it's not trying to jump into hardware making because "that's where profits are", it's trying to attack the hardware value proposition.
> the radical shift in Microsoft’s strategy is about the fight over the profits that remain after Apple’s
No, it really isn't. (Profits are the whole point, yes -- but the question is, what kind of profits are we talking about). Microsoft wants to bring the whole value of hardware down -- it doesn't want to take hardware profits for itself, it wants to make hardware profits disappear for everybody.
(It should give the Surface away for free.)
Consumers do not see profit, they see price tag. Hardware comes with a price tag, so the options are sell at cost or find a way to subside the hardware.
With Apple pushing for ever so cheap App Store software so much so it is willing to drastically cut its own premium software's price. The potential for a software subsided hardware business is diminishing fast. While Apple may forever lost the ability to sell hardware at 100% markup, Microsoft in the mean time is losing the ability to sell software for $100 and more . It is already reality in consumer space, and the price structure is collapsing too in the business world.
Microsoft has the money to give millions of Surfaces away for free, then what? It kills all its OEM in the process and can not make the money back on 30% software sales cut. And next year Apple brings out fucking iPad 4... Genius plan then?
Plus, Windows RT/Metro has no ecosystem yet, whatsoever. Even if Android has only a few thousand or whatever tablet apps, it still has all the other 500,000 phone apps, and most of them should work on tablets.
Other companies might consider buying Nokia only to prevent Microsoft doing that what would be quite fun to watch actually.
I think that's obvious. It IS a very important time for MS and Windows 8 needs to do well. I think the post misses an important angle to Surface though: in large part it is meant to make OEMs step their game up. It shows what Microsoft envisions can be done with a good formfactor and Win8. OEMs need to step up to the plate and make similar hardware. Not necesarily identical but very much in the same spirit.
A well execution should dent iPad sales because on paper, Windows 8 with a good form factor destroys the iPad every time.
Side note: I thought the keynote was actually fine. I completely agree that something seemed rather off about Sinofsky. He did seem nervous and he usually delivers quite solid keynotes. It was strange. I think everyone else performed fine. I actually liked the way the keynote was set up. At first it's just a tablet which is cool in of itself. Then it has a kickstand. And then it has a keyboard. Surprise after surprise.
Re: "Design is about making decisions, and Microsoft could not decide. ARM or Intel? Who should be on stage? Soft or hard keys on the keyboard cover? They went with 'all of the above'."
Windows has always been about having a lot of options. I think it's wonderful that there will be both an ARM version and an x86 version.
It is not record setting thin, or impossibly light, it has worse screen than the retina iPad, battery life is not mentioned at all, neither is th price,the look is quite minimalist and good, but not new or stunningly interesting ... pray tell, what's so awesome about the hardware? The glorious kickstand?
It means that rather than buying sales types an Air/Ultrabook along with supporting their iPad/Android we can buy them the surface pro and hand them a Windows Phone and have easy integration.
Microsoft understands the enterprise market.
Hold the 11" MBA in your hand, pretend it is a tablet, see how that works out ergonomically.
If they need to walk around holding a tablet in clipboard mode all day, then the ARM version would be the platform. Yes, the apps they run would have to be Metro apps, but Metro apps are worlds easier to write (and get deployed) than an iOS app. And I can still re-use that same code on the Pro version if need be.
To my eye, the Surface is what Apple would have made if they ever paid any real attention to enterprise users.
I'm pretty sure Apple does some of the things just to spit you guys, personally. Like requiring iTunes until just recently.
They'd revealed Windows 8 and had mixed reactions about teh touch interface, and both users and developers were skeptical about it. They needed to show off this hardware for everything to make sense. When I saw the presentation, I had this 'Ohhhhh....' moment where it all made sense - the interface, the hardware, their strategy.
They pushed this launch forward to show they actually had a plan.
All that said: take my money. I want one of each.
Someone with power allowed their ego to make that decision. It must be now, because of something that some other company is or isn't doing. Damn the engineering, full speed ahead.
Oh? Now Gruber says people want Android on phones?
Sorry, we're doing Apple vs. Microsoft here. I'll try to not get distracted.
I want Linux over Mac OSX and Windows 7. Imagine how fast Linux would grow if they got the OEMs's support.
I would love to buy laptops et al. with good Linux support. In fact, I once bought a glorious Dell XPS M1330 ... with a horribly outdated Ubuntu install.
Now I'm even wasting your time by commenting on it. Please vote me down to -10 or I'll have to fagellate myself for an entire week!
What he usually does when he writes about Apple technologies is to look for the good even in the obviously bad. In this piece about a Microsoft technology, he goes out of his way to ignore everything that might potentially be good or interesting.
Really, when will the likes of Gruber learn that consumers will decide if they like those products, and they'll do so with their wallets. Surely he doesn't believe that Apple's success with i{whatever} is due to slick, coherent stories told onstage at some event they couldn't get into.
The truth is that the masses who buy these devices could care less about product announcements, Apple included. Apple customers will line up for the next item, no matter what it is. Microsoft customers -- well, not quite sure what floats their boat, but they'll do their thing.
These announcements are for lighting up the third-parties who like to consider themselves quasi-insiders. Like Gruber, for instance.
The disconnects imply that MS doesn't understand how to communicate with the non-technical, "buy stuff because it feels right" crowd. Instead, they try to market to everyone, and when you try to market to everyone, you succeed in marketing to nobody.
Also, keynotes are hit-and-miss for everyone (including apple) and as such nobody has the time to sit and watch 45 mins of random people talking.
I thought Gruber's point was very clear: Consumer expectations have shifted such that companies which survive (read: profit) are those which make money from reasonably priced hardware while the software is sold at low, low prices. The phenomenal, decades-long profitability of Microsoft has been based on consumers behaving in an opposite way: paying bare-minimum prices for hardware but a premium for software.
The computer hardware industry is lined up to favor the hardware makers. They can also make the software (like Apple does with iOS) or they can acquire it at low cost (like Samsung using Android), but the profits come from hardware. The Surface, no matter how good it may or may not be since no can reasonably evaluate it yet, is a testament to Microsoft recognizing this shift.
Really, the details of the market shift are irrelevant. The point is that the market is moving away from what has made Microsoft profitable, and the company has publicly (if in some ways indirectly) shown it understands this. The Surface (and Windows 8), despite how important it may be to the future of Microsoft, is most notable for the change it represents Microsoft making in its approach to profitability.
I think the shift to their own hardware, for this Surface product, is more about trying to achieve a user experience on par with Apple. It's obvious they haven't learned from Apple in that the user's experience includes first hearing/seeing the product on stage, immediate availability, etc. so the rollout isn't polished (far from it.)
I'm just not sure Microsoft is all-in on recognizing the full profitability shift where their software is essentially a loss leader. If Microsoft releases their own high-end desktop PC and phone with Windows 8 sometime in the next 12 months, then I'll believe they've made that mental leap.
The big thing here is developer mind-share. Microsoft is trying to leverage their large pc software library, but that seems like a mistake here. Tablet users want touch specific apps. A large library of nearly unusable programs isn't a winning move. They need to get developers engaged with the platform and give them a reason to support a third OS.
It's a chicken/egg problem. They need to convince both consumers as well as developers WHY they should care. That's a tough sell, made all the more difficult by poor presentation skills and no good answer for the question. If Microsoft wants to disrupt the tablet market (and they'll have to if they want to gain any significant market share), they have to do better than just living off their name. They need a game changer and I'm just not seeing it (and that might just come down to their poor ability to communicate).
Also odd to see him still claiming that no-one but Apple could have made Samsung's A4 chip.
That remains to be seen, and depends on Microsoft being willing and able to stick with the Surface. They could easily screw this up, like the Kin, or lose interest and energy like the Zune.