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Microsoft's Touted iPad Rival Courier Becomes Less Than Vapor
Kostya writes "The much discussed Courier two-panel tablet device from Microsoft is now even less than vaporware — now it's just plain dead. 'Microsoft execs informed the internal team that had been working on the tablet device that the project would no longer be supported.' While the Courier had never been officially announced as a supported product by Microsoft, it had generated a lot of discussion as what the iPad should have been."
Msft got HP to buy Palm so that HTC, or Google, could not buy Palm. Now, to repay HP for buying Palm, msft drops msft's own "iPad killer" thus eliminating a huge competitor for HP.
Msft and Apple, hate and fear Android - they want to patent troll Android out of existance. HP has no special love for Android, because Android would not differentiate HP enough from the other Android tablet, or phone, sellers.
HP is a very close partner with msft, with both PCs and phones. If either HTC, or google, bought Palm, they would be able to use Palm's arsenal of patents to counter-sue msft and/or apple.
Pure speculation on my part, but it is quite a coincidence that the following all happened at the same time:
Apple sues HTC
Msft and HTC form a special patent deal
HP buys Palm
Msft discontinues Courier
So, first time in years that Microsoft's concept of "innovation", which is really "just copy whatever Google or Apple or Sony do", actually WASN'T a stupid idea... and they kill the project? You've got to admit, this was much better conceived than the Zune!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
How about, HP was the only hardware maker willing to build Courier, but Microsoft's schedule was slipping and slipping so HP in disgust decided to buy Palm to use WebOS for the tablets it has lined up instead?
Thus without a hardware backer, Microsoft had to close Courier for good.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The problem for Microsoft and tablet support is that, while in strict engineering terms, tablet support is "something you add"(ie. wacom drivers, handwriting/ink support, some touch gestures, a demo app or two), in terms of design, UI, and pleasantness of user experience, tablet support is all about what you remove. It's like the old notion of "burning the boats" to inspire your army.
As long as MS approaches tablet support as just a few optional features, that can be added as a superset of their primary OS, they may well be technically competent(I've heard that their handwriting recognition is actually pretty good, for instance); but they will, outside of tech-demo-ware and highly specific custom applications, never escape the massive gravitational pull of the gigantic install base of the touchless OS. At worst, their superset offering will be completely ignored. At best, it will find a few niches, and a reasonably broad adoption in the form of "pen=mouse" ports of existing applications. Since these applications won't be all that comfortable, manufacturers will back off from bold all-tablet designs, and just start churning out "convertibles", which are just laptops with a wobbly single hinge and a screen that looks like crap because of the digitizer layer.
This is one of MS's major strength/weakness combinations. They have the resources(and some genuinely good people) to relentlessly add interlocking feature-set after interlocking feature-set to their products. However, because of their enterprise orientation, they are not good at the exotic, or the starkly cut down. Any innovation has to be capable of being tacked on to the gigantic interlocking feature mass. Any cut-down subset has to alienate as few 3rd parties and legacy customers as possible, and integrate with the feature mass as much as possible. On the plus side, this means that their stuff makes it relatively easy(if not wise) to build a towering enterprise stack, and then have it supported for years and years. On the minus side, it pretty much stomps on innovation, even where technologically possible.
I remember when Microsoft was able to kill a platform like Go Penpoint with just a vaporware announcement.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."