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Hardware Makers Unhappy With Tablet Sales
rocketjam writes "According to The Register, hardware manufacturers, tired of continued low sales of the much-hyped tablet PC, are beginning to speak out, complaining that Microsoft has not marketed the platform enough and has over-priced licenses for its Windows XP Tablet Edition. The predicted demand for the devices has not materialized; faced with the tablet's premium pricing, consumers have continued to opt for lower-priced notebooks."
M$ did a lot of marketing for the tablets. I keep seeing ads for them, and they have a big section on their web site.
the real reason that it hasn't caught on might also be that the digitizers and or the windows GUI handling aren't good enough to make using the touchscreen and the stylus an acceptable user experience.
we have these things at my lab (for multimodal HCI studies), and while the handwriting recognition of Win Tablet isn't too bad, clicking on things in the GUI is way too unreliable. the windows GUI doesn't allow ambiguous inputs (selecting an area rather than a point), as they would occur with a finger and as they do occur when the digitizer isn't good enough. here, either the GUI should become more robust (= fault-tolerant) or the digitizers should become better. probably both. (tried with a top-notch acer centrino tablet!)
other issues with the tablet is the sheer size and weight of these things. still waiting for apple to come up with a really thin tablet that you actually WANT to take anywhere. at the moment, the tablet's i have seen suffer from over-weight, clunky-ness, short battery-life...
my prediction is that in a couple of years these problems will be solved and people will enjoy clicking on items directly (and maybe handwriting) rather than using a stupid trackpad...!
my dad just bought a store display model from ebay (an Acer) and he loves it and is able to do serious work on it.
Er, pardon me for being thick, but what's this got to do with MS? You decided a Windows OS was best for your hardware, not Microsoft. If it's too expensive Use Something Else; it's a free market out there. Why should Microsoft pay to advertise your product for you?
If you had decided on Linux, would you have expected Linus Torvalds to launch an expensive advertising campaign for your benefit? Who advertised your car? Was it the car manufacturer, or a manufacturer of one of its components?
I have a Compaq TC1000, and it's dead slow with Microsoft XP Tablet edition - can't even play my sweet DivX movies.
Tried putting linux on it, and guess what? It DOES fly! Smooth playing DivX and all.
Sadly I haven't got the pen and wifi to work in linux (yet).
From Pen Computing Magazine #22, June 1998
Why Did Apple Kill Newton?
(C)Copyright 1998 David MacNeill
Early Friday morning, February 27, 1998, Apple Computer made official what the Newton cognoscenti had strongly suspected for six months: the Newton handheld computing platform was dead.
The rather terse press release gave the basic facts: Apple will cease all Newton OS hardware and software development, no more products will be made after the existing stock is depleted, and Apple will continue to provide support to users. Brief mention was made of development of a new low-cost Mac OS-based mobile device in the future, but no details were offered. But the most galling omission was the lack of an answer to the question on the minds of hundreds of thousands of shocked, angry Newton owners: Why?
Before I attempt to answer this question, let's take a quick tour of the mercurial five-year career of Newton. This will serve to prepare you for the several explanations we will be considering.
A brief history of Newton
During its turbulent five-year life, Newton technology was close to death several times, yet always managed to survive. Department heads came and went, but the essential concept of the personal digital assistant (PDA) was too compelling to die easily: A small, inexpensive, pen-based computing device that would accompany you everywhere, and that would learn enough about you to make informed assumptions about how to help you keep track of the myriad little bits of information we all must carry. It would be simple enough for anyone to use, a true computer for the rest of us.
I was fortunate to participate in the Newton beta test program and to co-author and deliver the training materials used to launch the product. The moment I saw that beta unit my life changed, and I wasn't the only one. I still remember the excitement of holding a pre-release Newton NotePad (as it was labeled then) in my hands for the first time, said Clinton Logan, ace developer for LandWare. Truly unique products like that don't come along very often.
For those of us who bought into this vision, it seemed like the future was arriving ahead of schedule. Like the buyers of the original 128K Macintosh, we gladly paid the high price of admission just to participate in this achingly cool dream that had taken physical form. We loved it and made it work for us in ways unanticipated by its creators, which is the true measure of great computer design.
What is Newton ?
Newton had an identity crisis from the very beginning. Former Apple CEO and Newton champion John Sculley first showed the prototype to the press in Chicago on May 1992, where he described not only the device but also their platform strategy. A central theme in Apple's advertising and promotional materials at the time repeatedly used the phrase What is Newton? Some have suggested that Apple never actually answered this question to anyone's satisfaction.
Consider the name change. The product was originally called the Newton NotePad to suggest its personal assistive features, but that was later changed to MessagePad to emphasize the product's communications capabilities.
We had always intended for Newton to be a platform, not just a product, said former Newton Systems Group chief Gaston Bastiens, now CEO of Lernout & Hauspie, an eminent speech recognition company. Unfortunately, all the press took away with them was the handwriting recognition aspect, which was over-emphasized. The whole thrust of Newton was to be a personal communicator as well as a personal assistant. From a conceptual point of view, John was absolutely right. The infrastructure for two-way wireless at the time was not there; we all knew it was a couple of years away, but it was always part of our platform strategy.
John Sculley generally gets both the credit and the blame for the origi
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
Last time I mentioned this I got modded as flamebait, so I'll just AC. But the PocketPC is amlost the exact same thing as the Tablet. MS came to Taiwan with a hardware spec --note, this is a software company-- and said we're only going to allow an elite group of "winners" to be in on our next big thing.
They had promises of 300% growth and investment banking reports backed them up. Most of those companies that got suckered in --some of them even dropped Symbian and other Linux based PDA development to do so-- got fucked. PocketPC sales are almost as bad as Tablets.
Woah.
Apple's Steve jobs had previously mentioned that the tablet market was non-existant.
Specifically, here's what the westion was, and his answer to that:
M: A lot of people think given the success you've had with portable devices, you should be making a tablet or a PDA.
J: There are no plans to make a tablet. It turns out people want keyboards. When Apple first started out, "People couldn't type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this." "We look at the tablet and we think it's going to fail." Tablets appeal to rich guys with plenty of other PCs and devices already. "And people accuse us of niche markets." I get a lot of pressure to do a PDA. What people really seem to want to do with these is get the data out. We believe cell phones are going to carry this information. We didn't think we'd do well in the cell phone business. What we've done instead is we've written what we think is some of the best software in the world to start syncing information between devices. We believe that mode is what cell phones need to get to. We chose to do the iPod instead of a PDA.
The full interview is avilable here.
"...WAYYYY overpriced as a notebook."
Yep, and underpowered. If someone came out with one of these babys using a Centrino processor or better, then I would have considered buying or recomending one to my clients. But when a client asks me to recommend a notebook, well, I just can't recommend something with a PIII processor at this point.
For example, someone noted above that the Tablet PC's main use within his company seemed to be during meetings. That's fine, and some of my clients could use that funtionality. Hell, I'd even be interested in it as something I could take to a bar and write on or browse the web wirelessly. (Wireless notebooks, by the way, are *great* for resolving bar arguments.)
However, it would have to be priced as something that maybe cost a few hundred dollars more but gave you equivalent performance to a high-end notebook. It's been marketed as a notebook with extra-funtionality, but with the current processors on most of them, they'll be obsolete in a year.
The Tablet PC needs to not only be marketed as a notebook with extra funtionality, but built like one. I guarantee you they would be *far* more successful if they matched the specs of the rest of today's laptops.
I've got two tablets: a ProGear which I bought for $600 when the SonicBlew decided to clear inventory, and a Toshiba Poretege 3500. I can tell you that, primarily, the biggest problem with these tablets is a cruddy software interface. I assume you remember the first incarnation of Windows CE, and how much of the interface was a lift of the Windows 95 GUI. Tablet XP is the same way. While the underlying components are all there, they are implemented to allow quick transition from XP to XP Tablet. The interface on these devices should be more along the lines of CE's CURRENT design, which presents much more information on a single screen, with a much more streamlined (read specialized) human-computer interface.
I'm developing software for the Toshiba, but have had a chance to use it for classwork (I'm a Senior in Electrical and Computer Engineering at OU), and I can seriously say that for people like me that take a lot of notes (read digital packrats), tablets have lots of potential. I can search my handwriting for specific keywords, or "print" a document to the Journal and mark it up, which is a great feature for professors that provide notes to follow along with in class. While everyone else is scribbling madly to keep up, I just pick the "highlighter" and highlight the notes, and maybe make some of my own in the side margin.
As far as the form factor goes, they're getting smaller, and lighter. Look at Acer's TravelMate, for example.
Also, what some people fail to realize is that there are two distinct types of tablets. All of the ones I've highlighted, with the exception of the ProGear are "convertible" machines. A second (cheaper) form factor is also out there, the "slate" machines. Check out a great overview at TheTabletPC.Net.
As they say with many other things, don't knock it 'til you try it.
Mike Hollinger
Michael C. Hollinger
It looks like the tablet is in her leather case. Do you have any other source for this or are you extrapolating from the two pictures?
I guess you didn't know that Microsofts Pen for Windows was created as a response to the product by Go Inc. Read about in in the book "Startup". It tells how Go hired Microsoft to write apps for the Go product and all the Microsoft guys did was try to get Go to use Windows instead of their own pen optimized OS. Go finally told Microsoft to get out and Bill Gates publicly claims he invented pen computing and has Pen for Windows in the R&D lab. Then at Comdex, Microsoft holds up big signs listing all of Go Incs developers and a bunch of Windows developers are companies writing apps for Pen for Windows and that kills Go's market. DOS/Windows wasn't even capable of doing much more than handling pen taps but it was enough to kill off the company that created the market. The Newton was a spinoff from the original Go Inc project.
Kinda reminds us of how Microsoft did Java doesn't it?
I don't think there is any new company Microsoft is trying to kill this time but I do think that this is an attempt to see if there's a market between PDA's and the Desktop. WinCE is still a business flop for Microsoft and they surely can't go smaller/lighter than the PocketPC platforms. They can only go larger and that's where the Tablet comes in.
It's another MS-Bob IMHO. Though there is SOME use for it since there's always been a use for the tablet computer. Just not worth spending 10's of millions of dollars marketing it. And not large enough for so many hardware companies who fell for this latest Microsoft dance number.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
The first tablets were around in the early 90's so I don't think it's still in "the first couple years".