Hacker News Reader

Comment by jtoeman | Hacker News Reader

I think this is the nail on the already-likely-dead coffin of MS Surface. What's the market they are going after???

"tablet market"? nope - already dominated by iPad

"enterprise"? nope - 1) not a market, 2) already dominated by iPad

"budget"? nope - priced on par with iPad

seriously, how are they going to push this thing? they don't have a channel like Apple nor Amazon, so they need to rely on all their other paths.

they should've called this "XPad", made it a mobile Xbox, and sold through that channel - just like they did with Kinect.

fail fail fail.

View on HN

They have a couple of markets they can go after pretty easily.

  * Gaming.  It's fairly easy to port games between Xbox and Windows, and this
    device has been shown to integrate nicely with Xbox.  Whether that's enough
    is anyone's guess, but it hardly seems like a hail-mary pass at this point
    to me.
  * Enterprise.  I do not actually see what you're seeing, at least here in New
    York, that enterprise tablets either don't exist, or are dominated by iPad.
    I've seen mostly laptops still, plus some iPads, some Xooms and other Android
    tablets, and even some Blackberry PlayBooks.  This market is not exactly a
    done deal for anyone at this point, and the level to which Office is
    entrenched in the corporate space gives Windows RT a real chance.

I'm not saying that the Surface will nail these markets, but you're being odd to discount them so quickly.

The gaming market would seem to be out, since Windows RT devices can only run apps distributed through the Windows App Store, and the Windows App Store refuses to carry any games rated as containing mature content (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/10/11/windows-8-marketp...).

In other words, no matter how easy they would be to port, you couldn't make versions of Skyrim, Borderlands 2, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, or Resident Evil 6 to run on Windows RT, simply because Microsoft will not allow you to sell them to Windows RT users. All those titles have content ratings higher than MS will allow for distribution through the App Store.

Ruling out AAA titles feels like a pretty severe blow to any ambitions WinRT might have to be a gamer's OS. Which isn't to say they won't sell games for it; just that it won't be games driving the sales of WinRT devices.

You have a good point, but I've been assuming that Microsoft would drop their refusal to allow mature content, at least for big-title games, if any of the game studios expressed serious interest in porting to Windows RT to begin with. We'll have to see. If I'm wrong, then I'm with you: Windows RT will never be the gamer's mobile platform. But I assume that they'll yield as soon as there's a real reason to do so.

Where it gets screwy in my mind is whether Windows RT still has a shot at being a major casual gaming platform, in the style of iOS. Android, iOS, webOS, and I believe PlayBook all use OpenGL ES. Windows RT (and Windows 8 Phone) only offer DirectX. It's not that it's even that difficult to target both; it's simply that no one has yet done so, because the only meaningful mobile platforms run OpenGL ES. This puts Windows RT and Windows 8 Phone into a very chicken-and-egg position for casual gaming, and I'm not clear that it can win that one.

I'm sure this project is going to get a lot of use; As a supported of free software, I would have been much happier if this was GPLd or at least LGPLd. Alas, it's BSD license, which means that it's going to help the Win8RT echosystem tremendously :(

https://code.google.com/p/angleproject/

ANGLE: Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine. The goal of ANGLE is to allow Windows users to seamlessly run WebGL and other OpenGL ES 2.0 content by translating OpenGL ES 2.0 API calls to DirectX 9 API calls.

That's not entireially true. The App store 18+ isn't the same as ESRB mature but ESRB AO+.

>> Apps with a rating over PEGI 16, ESRB MATURE, or a corresponding rating under other ratings systems as described in the table below, are not allowed.

src http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh69408...

i expect that's not region sensitive either. in the UK the BBFC classified Skyrim as a 15.

http://www.bbfc.co.uk/website/Classified.nsf/ClassifiedWorks...

eta: although that now seems to be merely a historical curiosity, since the BBFC no longer rates games - we use PEGI instead.

I was going off the PEGI ratings -- all the titles I cited are PEGI 18.

Imagine if all other car makers said "Oh, the car market is already taken by Ford. We should do something else".

Ha, said much more eloquently than I would. I think it is odd that people are automatically dismissing it simply because it is not an iPad. I guess that is how the hive mind works now-a-days. I like the Surface because it is a genuinely unique OS. And, in many ways it is better than Apple's offering. The gestures are better, it surfaces information better, and it works much better as a productivity device. When has better become not good enough?

better is rarely enough. the biggest killer of "great" products? ones that are "good enough".

Terrible analogy - there's a proven market for cars.

At this point, it's pretty hard to prove there is a market for non-iPad tablets that aren't e-readers...

It's not a terrible analogy. Think if they said that right after the Model T came out.

That would be true IF after the model T came out there was no evidence that the rest of the population was interested in buying cars. But instead it turned out that everyone wanted a car.

For MS, or Google, or anyone to really play in the space, they need to get ahead of Apple, not catch up.

Personally, I'm going to be buying one of these tablets, they look pretty powerful and cool, plus I prefer Microsoft offerings over Apple.

They don't need to own a particular market, sure it helps, but personally, I couldn't care less how much it costs or how powerful it is, I would buy one of these just so I didn't have to buy an iPad.

So to be honest, I think at least one market which this tablet will dominate is the "fuck you Apple" market.

> So to be honest, I think at least one market which this tablet will dominate is the "fuck you Apple" market.

Sorry, this is already a crowded market - Android rules here, whether it's Google or Amazon shipping the product. Why would I buy this when I can get a Kindle Fire 4G with $50/yr mobile data? Why would I pay $300 more than a Nexus7?

Microsoft has lost the forest for the trees - so bound up in hating and trying to produce an "iPad Killer" that they don't realize the competition is way ahead of them.

> they should've called this "XPad"

Can't. Apple owns all Pads.

http://www.tuaw.com/2010/04/13/steve-jobs-apple-owns-pad-tra...

Microsoft could buy Always and re-purpose the Maxi-pad brand.

No because that trademark does not extend to computing devices.

"the world"? nope - already dominated by iPad

Seriously, the tablet market is still wide open. having an iPad3, iOS is only good for a small portion of things I would like a Tablet can do

Reply on news.ycombinator.com