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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."
I bet you can BING some awesome reviews and success stories about this tablet anyhow.
*snicker*
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
its all part of market testing.
And if the "testing" happens to kill a competitors product launch while people wait for the Microsoft product, well that was just an accident!
Happily there are very few product announcements from Microsoft people are willing to wait for these days it was apparent to pretty much anyone Courier wasn't going anywhere at slow pace of even delivering concept videos...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You have exactly one VP saying that the product was real, but was shitcanned. Besides that, there's some leaked computer generated videos and pictures of an alleged product.
You're mourning the fact that a puff of vapor got carried off by the breeze. That's not awesome, that's standard operating procedure for Redmond; unless by awesome you mean "marketing bullshit that never has to withstand real world use and criticism," in which case, spot on.
The problem I have with all these technophiles decrying the iPad's lack of flash is this: are you not the same group that beats down any flash site? FFS, slashdot is the place that puts [PDF WARNING] next to links. If anyone was going to complain about the lack of flash, this is the absolute last group of people I would have expected.
As I said in reply to the OP, the problem is that full PCs are simply too much machine for what many people want to do (watch a show, check facebook, etc). A $99 iPad would be a true game-changer, and I think something along those lines is the next step. At this price point, people (like you) get confused because of the price and say (as you did), 'but... look at the sweet box I could buy for $500, I don't get it!' The point is that my mom and my wife and many like them don't care in the least if they have a sweet box. They care if they can "like" timmy's facebook status.
Your geek factor (Look at me! HTPC! Check me out! Modded Wii!) is what's keeping you from seeing this market. Not everyone uses computers the way you do, and not everyone derives the same satisfaction from setting up their own rad HTPC setup. My wife is perfectly content to watch DVDs, out of a box, on her laptop. I thought that was madness when I first saw it. Fact is, people compute in different ways.
Sony ha
The awesome thing about how Slashdot moderation works is your insane theory should make it to +5 in no time.
Excuse me while I grab some popcorn, this is like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
and your surprised?
It's just fine, thanks for asking. :)
Yeah. Tablets are dead. Long live suppositories!
And beyond that, Apple is building a computing platform that is completely appropriate for 95% of users out there.
I've been observing with great amusement the geek outrage over Apple's closed, locked-down ecosystem, starting with the iPod and iPhone, and culminating with the iPad, and I say: more power to Apple .
To paraphrase Spider-man: "With great computing power comes great computing responsibility." Manufacturers have placed general-purpose computers into the hands of the masses, and what have we gotten in return? Mountains of spam, malware galore, and tens of millions of zombie boxes. A general-purpose programmable device has proven, overall, a disaster for the Internet. In the hands of typical non-technical users, they are just begging to be exploited, and that's exactly what happens to them.
Steve Jobs has it exactly right. The overwhelming majority of people don't need a computer with a general purpose operating system. They need an iPad or something like it - an appliance that meets the needs of 95% of users, and is locked down so tightly that it is very hard to exploit via user stupidity.
Personally, I don't want an iPad. I don't need an iPad, because I'm capable of managing a general-purpose computer. But the appeal of the iPad to the average consumer is blatantly obvious. Apple is going to sell a lot of iPads.
A $99 iPad would be a true game-changer, and I think something along those lines is the next step.
I'm not an Apple historian, and this is an actual question, but has Apple ever sold a product at anything but a premium price? Any Apple product I can think over the last decade has cost far more than the median price of equivalent hardware by Apple's competitors.
iPod Touches aren't $99, and they've been on the market for a number of years. Plus, if the iPad was $99, what would an iPod Touch sell for? $69? Never, ever, ever going to happen. I could see the iPad maybe selling for $399 eventually, but I would be very surprised if it ever sold for less.
Better known as 318230.
The era of the geek driving computer development is dead: people want easy to use features, and Apple is giving it to them. The era of clock speed, bus speed and VRAM capacity being important for selling computers is over as well.
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fect for users. There
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be any
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