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Ballmer Says Microsoft Is 'Hardcore' About Tablets
gbll writes with news that Microsoft is gearing up to aggressively pursue the tablet PC market, according to CEO Steve Ballmer. Microsoft is working with a variety of hardware companies including Asus, Dell, Samsung, Toshiba and Sony, to release Windows 7 slates later this year.
"These slates will be available at a variety of price points and in a variety of form factors — with keyboards, touch only, dockable, able to handle digital ink, etc. Since Ballmer showed off a prototype of a Windows 7 slate from Hewlett-Packard at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, the company has said next-to-nothing about how it planned to address the slate form-factor space. ... Ballmer never mentioned the iPad or the coming Chrome OS-based slates by name during his remarks. Microsoft’s pitch will be that these slates will be sanctioned by corporate IT departments, enabling customers to use them at work and at home."
Tablets, Tablets, Tablets, Tablets!!!!!
Last I heard, Microsoft was also hardcore about the smartphone market. So, how is the Kin doing? Oh. Right.
It really is a shame that Microsoft has such lethal corporate politics impacting their every decision... Not that I thought the Kin was cool (it certainly didn't appear to be...) but to kill a product line mere months after launch is pathetic...
But, hey, Ballmer says they're hardcore about the tablet market so that clearly means they'll be serious about it...
Ballmer using words like 'hardcore' makes me feel the same as when my Grampa would talk about 'the Googles' or any other time a male-menapausal coot tries to use 'cool' words to 'relate' to 'todays youth'
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Is tweak Windows 7 a little bit and replace the mouse with a stylus or the user's finger, this will fail. A tablet needs a UI and OS designed specifically for touch, and applications need to be designed for that OS. I have yet to see anything from Microsoft that indicates to me that they really understand that. No amount of corporate IT agreements will get companies to purchase devices they don't really need.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
It means "We have dedicated 5 different development and marketing teams to 5 different products that all compete with each other. Each of them has different strengths and weaknesses, each of them is mostly, but not *completely* compatible with the other, and NONE of them will actually be available for sale before Apple or Google makes them completely obsolete. Also, there will be skins available."
Books are too complicated.
My ideal world is one that is 1/3 Apple, 1/3 Microsoft, and 1/3 Linux. May not happen, but if any one company gets too powerful it gives us problems.
Qxe4
Microsoft will defiantly put out a good tablet they know what people want and they will defiantly do a good job.
1. They've been flogging "tablet computing" unsuccessfully for damn near 10 years now, because they do a shitty job at tablet computing. That's not just me saying that, the market has spoken. Clearly, nobody wants a bloated desktop OS with a few UI changes, shoehorned into a tablet form factor that then must have heavy-duty hardware and a big, heavy battery to make it usable. As long as they keep trying to stuff Windows and Windows applications into a tablet, they will fail. The iPad is doing well because it uses a purpose-built OS with a UI made for fingers that runs fast on relatively lightweight hardware.
2. It's spelled "definitely"
~Philly
I disagree. MS software has a huge association factor with it. Most people, my mom included, can navigate the UI blindfolded. That counts for something.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
preface: this post gets real ugly...some might even say...trollish...but i need to form an opinion here.
being in IT ive already "sanctioned" the ipad, the iphone, and droid for our networks. My blessing doesnt automatically cause a product to fly off the fucking shelves, steve; it never had a bearing on the ipad at all.
in fact considering as we're still hopelessly mired in a recession that just wont end and my state has 10% unemployment as our company looms to cut costs of everything from daytime office lights to toilet paper, i could make a compelling argument that if i dont even have the budget for new CRAC filters, i damned sure dont have the budget for another lifeless battery sucking piece of half-hack competitionalist horse shit from redmond that will either die off completely in 2 years or cease to have any bearing on "productivity" in 3 weeks. I also dont have the manpower to support such a Utopian wireless dog turd, and i dont have the maintenance budget to replace it when someone leaves it in their car in the 110 deg. blistering desert summer heat.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Tablets have been hyped and died for the last decade, form factor kills their usability
It wasn't the form factor that killed it, it was that manufacturers had designed tablets as scaled-down desktop machines. That didn't work. Once someone came along and introduced a tablet with an interface that made sense for that type of device, tablets suddenly took off.
This ain't rocket surgery.
This is not true, iOS is very different under the hood than OS X. There may be similarities, but at the core they have nothing to do with each other
Absolutely untrue. Aside from achitecture-specific bits, they run the same XNU kernel. On top of this, they have the same libc, the same CoreFoundation framework and the same Foundation framework, providing interfaces to the system. They run the same display server, with the same CoreGraphics / CoreAnimation frameworks providing interfaces to it. Text rendering on both is done via the same CoreText framework. They have the same Objective-C runtime, although the ARM version does not support Autozone GC. Both provide most of the same high-level frameworks, such as the address book and calendar store. There are some differences:
UIKit is about the only major addition in iOS, and I wouldn't be surprised if it shares a lot of code with AppKit (a lot of the classes are almost identical, or just cut-down versions UIKit). Pretty much everything else in iOS is also present in OS X.
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