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Why Microsoft Surface Took So Long To Deploy
An anonymous reader writes "Nearly a year after all the fanfare unveiling a new touchscreen tabletop interface, Microsoft's Surface computer will finally appear in select AT&T stores later this month. Popular Mechanics tech editor Glenn Derene, who first introduced us to Surface in May, seems to have done a complete 180 in this rant, blasting Microsoft for being more obsessed with Surface's novelty as a magnet for image-conscious partners while messing up a rare hardware device — and, surprisingly, the simple software he was told came with it. From Microsoft's official excuse in the article: 'It's actually been a good thing for us,' Pete Thompson, Microsoft's general manager for Surface, told me. 'We were anticipating that the initial deployments were going to be showcase pilots using our own software applications on units to drive traffic. What our partners have decided is that they want to skip that stage and go to an integrated experience where they build their own applications. That's pulled the timeline until this spring.'"
Hate to use management terminology, but they're not "agile" enough to pull off that sort of application. Putting aside their ability to do it, even if they did make it work the resulting product would be too expensive for anything other than a gimmick market.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
This is why Apple's tight control of their whole ecosystem is a good thing: you don't generally see them putting their "partner's" need to shove content at customers above the user experience.
You can tell Apple's _customers_ are it's actual customers.** Microsoft's partners and developers are it's customers, and it shows.
Look at Windows Mobile: you get a reasonable platform that's perverted by hardware "partners" and their singular inability to write crash-resistant software, and then further mangled by the carriers, who seem addicted to penny-pinching revenue-ware.
Yes, it's "open" to developers, but as a manager of a fleet, the first thing I'd like to do is strip the device down to Microsoft's core platform, without the craplets the vendors see fit to add to it.
With Apple, you get a locked-down device. AT&T can't rebrand it (if they had their way, it'd be the "AT&T A7530", and it'd have six different ways for AT&T to sell me overpriced ringtones or web forms), nor can the Taiwanese hardware manufacturer load it with battery management software that misspells the word "Battery".
** you see this with free software as well, but the customer base isn't quite the same demographic as Apple's.
--srj/mmv
If anything good has come of Surface it is showing the "digital sign" market that this type of device will lead to more interaction.
Walking through a mall you see a digital sign, walk up to it touch it and it gives you more information. This is all available now, but things like surface get it exposed to levels that make decisions.
I work for a marketing company and as soon as surface was released our customers were asking for them. So I'd guess the interest is there. It's not specifically surface they want, we can use any choice. They just like the idea in general. But if I can get a development package that helps me push them out the door faster then so be it.
Really expensive machines without practical function are almost always proof of concept. The MS guys know this isn't ready for prime time, and they want more time to test it so they don't end up giving away free units to replace fried ones, like with the Xbox 360.
It's like an Apple Lisa (pre-Macintosh, even more expensive, unreliable and pompous than a Mac) or the NeXT cube: great ideas, the first to bring them to market, but still not fit into a market niche. Market niche is what Microsoft does really well.
They will trot this out to try to gain the cool points, then find out a way to apply the technology to a tablet computer that also can prop itself up like a mini-table.
technical writing / development
The iPhone uses real touch sensitivity, while Surface uses cameras and a projection screen.
What kind of fanboy nonsense is this? Is there some kind of platonic ideal of touch sensing technology? In what conceivable way is touch sensing by capacitance more "real" than touch sensing by infrared image processing? If it senses touch, it's "real" touch sensitivity, no?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
They way they have these set up, it looks to me as annoying as table-top arcade consoles from the 80's. Yuck!
I do think it could be nice as a drafting table, however.
They push more DRM out the door than any other company
They are also the sole reason Amazon sells any big-label commercial MP3's at all.
Only by grabbing control of the DRM reigns away from the studios was Apple able to force labels into realizing DRM free music was good for them (it was the only way to illustrate to the studios that lock-in was a problem for studios as much as consumers).
Pray that Apple succeeds in the video market if you ever want to see DRM free video as a commercial product. This is less likely though as the video companies saw the path music took, and they are even less willing to forgo DRM even though the benefits they would reap would be even higher.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
By which you mean just the iPod, right? Because with everything else, you're just paying more for less, and the simplicity doesn't make up for it.
He might also mean the:
Macbook Air, which forgoes a DVD drive to give you a much lighter and thinner notebook, better for traveling.
Or the Apple TV, which foregoes a tuner but makes it easier to get media directly to your TV over the internet with easy iTunes integration.
Or the iPhone, which makes smart phones that are much easier to use for most people.
Or OS X itself, which is basically UNIX with a simplified window manager which is easier to use than most traditional X windows managers (and that for most people does make up for the loss of flexibility).
In fact all Apple really does is look at how consumers are using something, and simply that thing in ways that most people can actually use it, and advanced users can tolerate it because in spite of simplicity it's doing programatically sophisticated things under the hood. You may disagree with Apple's choices of where to simplify but historically Apple has shown they make very intelligent choices, based on what people actually buy over time.
The same arguments apply for much of the software they write as well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A high-resolution display of that size is pretty expensive on its own. Add a waterproof touch sensor on top, plus the GPU required to run the graphics on that kind of system, and we're talking some substantial hardware investment. And don't forget that the touchscreen has to be near-instantaneous and support many objects touching it at once.
I'm sure MSoft will also try to make a killing on the software, but there is still a pretty significant hardware cost here.