Slashdot Mirror
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
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.