Comment by bhauer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhauer | Hacker News Reader

Although I own three tablets, my love affair with the tablet as it exists today never really took off the same way it did for so many consumers. The primary reason is that I do not believe that tablets should be first-class computing devices. Tablets, and in my opinion, the entirety of what we today call "mobile," should be subservient to a general computing model of personal omnipresent applications [1]. Put more concretely, I should only have one e-mail application, one web browser, one IM client, one media player, and all of my devices—wired, wireless, wifi, cellular, and everything in between—should be views upon those singular applications and nothing more.

So although I have three tablets because I am a technology addict, I simultaneously do not want them because I do not want additional first-class computing devices in my life.

If each additional tablet I purchased were just another input and output device—an additional view—added to my arsenal, I would buy as many as I see worthwhile to have scattered throughout my house and office. But as it is, each additional tablet (or phone or computer) is a first-class device with first-class expectations for my attention. Every device wants to be babied with application installations, updates, configuration, local data, and the works. Today's plain cloud is a meager, sticky, and altogether phony solution to this problem.

It's interesting to see this and an article about decentralizing the Internet (mischaracterized as "the web") as the top two articles at HN presently. I recently ranted [2] that Mr. Nadella should seize the opportunity to take Microsoft into a fundamentally different direction than what everyone is telling him, including himself ("mobile first, cloud first"), rather focusing on users and applications first. Particular views of applications, such as mobile or desktop or living room, are secondary matters.

I'd like to see Microsoft step up and become the only tech titan to stop following today's mobile-first, cloud-first model and swing the pendulum back to self-control with technology serving users, not companies.

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao

[2] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft-carve-your-path

I agree with you (especially about Microsoft.) I've been saying for years that there is a killer opportunity for Microsoft in the enterprise: develop a single platform for serving applications that serves a tablet view to tablet users, a desktop view to desktop users and a mobile view to mobile users. Basically, enable the hell out of BYOD because the PC is disappearing. They can make the money they lose in Windows licenses back on the server side: if the PC industry is pushing all the workload and complexity to the server, the costs should go there as well.

Basically, it should be RDP/VDI but the entire interface adjusts to the device you're using it on. They have a great touch interface in the Metro (or whatever they're calling it) -- their mistake was forcing users with a mouse and keyboard to use it as well. I suspect that a lot of Microsoft's tablet shenanigans have been because they were trying to make the Surface happen. IMO the better tactic for them to take would have been "We don't care what platform you access your business applications from, as long as your app servers are running Windows."

Which is basically exactly what you're saying. So I agree with you.

I've personally been thinking along the same lines. We may be thinking about the personal cloud. Bringing the application server to the user allows us to provide thin clients, reestablish personal security, and drive consumers to buy more advanced hardware for their core infrastructure. It would require a big change in how things are done today, but I think it would ultimately end up helping the industry.

I've been saying for years that there is a killer opportunity for Microsoft in the enterprise: develop a single platform for serving applications that serves a tablet view to tablet users, a desktop view to desktop users and a mobile view to mobile users.

My startup is doing things that way (although not for Microsoft products, obviously). Being able to create an 'app' that is write once, run well on Desktop/Tablet/Mobile, with efficient UIs on all of them, is pretty dang useful, at least in the business market.

Yeah; but the biggest problem you'll encounter in launching this is that you're not Microsoft. Microsoft has an extensive partner sales network and a lot of companies already using many of its infrastructure products. They write the SDKs and IDEs that developers use to develop Windows apps. They write the software that the system admins run on the servers. They write the security policy management systems that most companies use to manage their users, applications and hardware. And they also write the most popular desktop applications so they can show people how to really implement something like this.

I don't think anyone other than Microsoft can realistically do this. Which is exactly why Microsoft should; it's a product that nobody could copy and they would have a 90% market share on corporate BYOD management in under 5 years. Nadella is the right guy to actually push something like that forward; I just hope that the shiny consumer stuff doesn't remain a distraction. There's nothing fundamentally cannibalistic about someone running MS Outlook on their iPad: in order to do this, they still need a Windows user license, an Exchange license and an Outlook license, so MS is still getting paid three times for that user.

I've never been able to get my thoughts to fall in line before reading this. I have absolutely no use for a tablet with a powerful PC and android phone, I just never really knew why I didn't have a use for one.

It's one more commitment in my life. I need to make sure it's up to date, I have to install and tweak my settings, I have to make sure that it works the way I want it to first. THEN I get to actually enjoy it. I have to make sure that what someone else has determined I want actually becomes what I want.

Rob Pike seems to share your dream, at least in part:

What hardware do you use?

A bunch of Macs at home, Macs and Linux at work, plus of course the Google compute clusters. When I was on Plan 9, everything was connected and uniform. Now everything isn't connected, just connected to the cloud, which isn't the same thing. And uniform? Far from it, except in mediocrity. This is 2012 and we're still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary. I sorely miss the unified system view of the world we had at Bell Labs, and the way things are going that seems unlikely to come back any time soon. (...)

What would be your dream setup?

I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine. At Bell Labs we worked in the Unix Room, which had a bunch of machines we called "terminals". Latterly these were mostly PCs, but the key point is that we didn't use their disks for anything except caching. The terminal was a computer but we didn't compute on it; computing was done in the computer center. The terminal, even though it had a nice color screen and mouse and network and all that, was just a portal to the real computers in the back. When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that.

http://rob.pike.usesthis.com/

I've always thought this is what I wanted too, and until now, never thought that maybe this makes the Chromebook the right platform going forward. Though still 'first class citizen' machines, they're probably the thinest client available, which kinda gets to where we're going.

Or maybe Microsoft (with that shiny new CEO) can deliver on the streaming OS vision and truly provide I/O focused devices http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/streaming-os-micr...

This is where I am now. I have been lucky enough to get started on a Chromebook for free and have expanded from there. For me, the Chromebooks and tablets are ways for me to access webapps, particularly Google Apps. Additionally, Chromebooks have a fully-featured SSH terminal built on NaCl and a remote desktop app in form of Chrome Remote Desktop. For me, they are just windows into my cloud applications and back to my full-featured workstations (both home and work). I don't feel restricted by them except in the rare cases where I don't have access to the internet, which is increasingly rare, and even then the Google Apps are working better and better offline.

My tablets I mostly use as a web browser, an email client, an eReader and a remote control for my television. They really aren't the way I want to work, just sometimes a good form-factor for relaxing.

Sounds like a police state's dream.

That's a good point, and that's why the plain Kindle is more appealing to me. The fact that it syncs automaticall, and it's dumb (only good for one thing) makes it more useful.

A few weeks back I saw here on HN a very enterprise-y looking service (from Amazon, if I recall correctly) that allowed employees to access company applications (think pre-configured versions of Word etc.) from whatever device they had available. It was like the next-generation VPN, which sounds like what you're getting at.

Sadly, I can't seem to find the link now.

Probably Workspaces: http://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/

Indeed. Thanks!

Being able to assist you in any small way is really a treat considering all I've learned from your site over the years.

Thank you.

I'd like to see much better integration between devices, but I also don't want them arbitrarily limited to dependence on a server.

A couple of sibling comments have mentioned Google's stuff, but really, while something like Chromecast is a big step forward, it is still a feature missing from large screens, not a real product. The problem is that manufacturers are more interested in crap like 'content partners' than they are in making integration easy.

Incidentally, I too was intrigued by Chromecast [1] and the similar Miracast because these are technologies that dance awfully close to where user interface push and pull should go. But they are constrained by narrow thinking, leaving them frustratingly limited and merely bite-size demonstrations of what multi-device life should look like. Both only push views, and are only read-only without a whole lot of context adaptation.

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/chromecast-a-miss

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