Ballmer Promises Microsoft Tablet By Christmas

judgecorp writes "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told an audience at the London School of Economics, that there will be tablets running Microsoft's Windows operating system available by Christmas. 'We as a company will need to cover all form factors,' he told an audience of students and press. 'You'll see slates with Windows on them – you'll see them this Christmas.' Mind you, if he's talking about the rumoured HP Windows 7 slate, he may not be so pleased when it appears. A recent YouTube video showed a supposed prototype which has been described as a 'trainwreck in the making.'"

Comments

It would have to be in the retail chain already

[Animats]

To be in the stores for the holiday shopping season, it would already have had to be shown to retailers, the retail space booked and paid for by Microsoft, and the first containers of product on ships in transit from China. It's too late in the retail cycle for this season.

It's a reaction to Wall Street

[jbengt]

The investment bank cut its rating of Microsoft shares from "buy" to "neutral".
It said Microsoft was being threatened by the rise of tablet computers such as Apple's iPad, which do not run Windows software.

Re:OMG

[larry bagina]

I saw the leaked HP slate video a couple weeks back (I assume this was it). Highlights:

• mouse pointer is visible when windows starts up then hides
• you have to press a physical button to toggle the on screen keyboard
• there's a physical button for alt-control-delete
• touching performs a mouse click at that location, with a touch indicator/animation.
• slow/jerky scrolling in internet explorer.

It's windows 7 with some half-assed touch support bolted on. it will run your existing windows software but your windows software was designed for mouse and keyboard. I think you would need to be really desperate to go anywhere near it (this characterization applies to Microsoft, manufacturers, and consumers)

Re:And in typical Ballmer fashion

[shutdown -p now]

Since when was Windows an open development platform?

Since it was first made available.

Try writing a decent Windows app using gcc and not making use of frameworks like .Net, MFC, etc.

For starters, all those frameworks that you've listed (and others which you did not) are layers on top of the core Win32 APIs, which can greatly simplify things, but don't really provide new capabilities. A testament to that is that most apps that ship out of the box in Windows don't use MFC, .NET, or any other framework - they're coded against raw Win32 API. .NET is not even a C/C++ framework, so why it's listed alongside gcc is beyond my comprehension. It's like complaining that you can't write Rails apps with gcc. That said, you can write .NET Windows apps using a fully OSS stack - Mono runs on Windows too.

MFC is a proprietary Microsoft C++ framework. It's very archaic, too, and you'd have to be a masochist to write a new app using it. Meanwhile, Qt for Windows is available, works great, and comes with a great free IDE.

This, by the way, is precisely what it means to be an "open development platform" - APIs, ABIs and file formats are all documented, and there are no legal restrictions on their use, so any company can provide development tools and frameworks targeting Windows. Qt SDK is a prominent one, but you can just as well use Java with either of the major IDEs, or any of the dozens of C++ frameworks, or D, or Python/PyGTK, or write your own.

Note that even if you stick to Microsoft offerings, Windows SDK is free, and includes both command-line C++ compiler and C# / VB compilers. As well as debuggers and other tools. VS Express is free, though somewhat limited. It's all still proprietary, of course, so your point still stands - just wanted to point out that you don't need to pay any $$$ beyond that Windows license to develop for it.

The vast majority of Windows development is done using Visual Studio because many people consider it the best development environment (at least on Windows). You're not in any way locked into it.