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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.'"
I'm betting that the tablet will be running the exact same bloated Windows OS that is meant for PC's. Ballmer still wants to see the same Windows start menu, etc. on every single device no matter how big or small. He should learn a lesson from Apple with the iPhone & iPad. What makes them so popular is that Apple did NOT take the Mac OS-X GUI and try to shoehorn it on a smaller device. The smaller screens necessitated a much simpler and more user friendly interface. Until Ballmer accepts this and lets Microsoft develop a new UI paradigm for portable devices they're doomed to failure over and over again.
It tickles me how Microsoft turned into a "me too" company. "Where do you want to go today?" is more like "Where were you a few six months ago?"
Microsoft a few months (years) late and a billion dollars short... and the market analysts noticing at long last
Shares in Microsoft have already fallen 23% since April this year, with analysts concerned that the computer giant is failing to assert itself in the growing smart phone and tablet computer markets.
Ballmer's just trying to prop the value of his share options up before they force him out.
Microsoft is anything but late to this party. They have been trying to launch a tablet for over a decade now. They've tried again, and again, and again, and they have failed every single time.
I've lost count of how many times they have tried, but it goes all the way back to Windows 95 for Pen Computing, or whatever it was called.
I seems like Microsoft has always been a "me too" company.
Where do you think "embrace, extend (and extinguish)" came from? Microsoft has always been late to the market with technology, and that technology usually takes a couple of iterations to become really usable. In some cases, the technology is becomes pretty good, in other cases it gets deprecated and thrown out because even they can't make it work.
Now, some of their stuff has gotten mature and fairly usable, but some rots on the vine and is mostly an expensive transitional technology that people buy and get burned with.
But, except for Clippy, I am hard pressed to think of many situations where Microsoft felt like it was innovating. Granted, some of that might have been behind the scenes in APIs the the like (eg .NET), but as an end-user, Microsoft has been rolling out features that Mac, UNIX (and now Linux) have all incorporated for a long time.
I don't hate Microsoft in quite the knee-jerk way I used to, and I honestly find most of their modern products to be pretty damned god and stable ... but it's hard to really think they've ever led the way in consumer technology that makes me say "ooooh, I gotta get me some of that".
For the last bunch of years, they mostly seem to be watching what others do, come late to the game and then throw resources at it until they get it right (Sharepoint) or throw it away (Zune).
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
For the last bunch of years, they mostly seem to be watching what others do, come late to the game and then throw resources at it until they get it right (Sharepoint) or throw it away (Zune).
I don't anyone who administers Sharepoint will ever claim that MS "got it right." ;)
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Ding, we have a winner. Microsoft has had ample entry points into this market, and frankly the sales and adoption have been pathetic.
Don't get me wrong, people who have adopted them are satisfied with their pen computers, but the sales have been in the low 200K units per year out of the 40M laptops or so sold per year. A tiny fraction.
Repackaging WinMo or Win7 into an iPad like form factor will not result in success
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
You cut the rating for a billion dollar profit company to neutral? lol
There are two reasons to buy shares in a company:
1. Growth, which pushes up the value of those shares.
2. Dividends, which give you a better return than a savings account.
Windows may still bring in lots of profits, but the opportunities for growth are far less than a company entering new markets... and most people would rather own shares in growing companies than fat old companies that pay out dividends with a stable or declining share price.
Microsoft has always been slow to adopt new technologies until they've been proven. They like to see other peoples mistakes and learn from them (though they don't always do so). As the saying goes, you can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs.
However, addressing the "trainwreck" article.. it's rather stupid comments...
"Why include a “CTRL-ALT-DEL” button on the device’s chassis unless you expect the software to crash on a regular basis?"
What century is he living in where c-a-d still reboots a computer? It's used for several tasks these days, like.. oh, i don't know.. LOGGING IN?
"What’s with having a mechanical button to activate a virtual onscreen keyboard?"
Maybe because onscreen buttons may be obscured by apps running?
"but an unmodified version of Windows 7 on a small touch screen translates into icons roughly the size of theoretical particles"
Obviously he's never used Windows 7 on a multi-touch screen. You can use multi-touch to pinch-zoom the icons to whatever size you want.
That's what causes a "trainwreck in the making?" Stuff that he simply doesn't understand.
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What people failed to see was that a tablet should not be a old tech feature like a laptop with a rotating screen. A tablet is an entirely different device, a totally new market. Not a bolt-on feature set for an OS.
Foreseeing something and actually doing it are two very different things.
Apple released the first version of the Newton almost two decades ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MessagePad
Microsoft's PC operating systems divisions, with its internecine management wars, has managed to produce uninspired designs, solutions that have more security holes than a sieve, and has generally stagnated in the arena of innovation.
Microsoft doesn't have a technology problem: they've got a cultural problem. Like Xerox PARC of the days of yore, Microsoft's Research division cranks out all manner of bankable ideas--yet their corporate patrons fail to see the need to actually implement these things to any serious degree.
Exactly, the appeal of the iPad (or any tablet) is a smaller, simplified interface that is well suited to the form factor, with a user interface that is suited to the device.
All of the complaining that people won't be able to use it as a "real" computer is tech geeks thinking the rest of the world wants the same kind of machine they do.
Taking a desktop OS and putting it on a tablet and not actually changing much isn't really much in the way of progress -- it's repackaging 20 year old tech in a new box and not really taking advantage of it. If Microsoft just wraps up their existing OS, then it doesn't stand a chance of competing with the iPad.
As has been pointed out, Microsoft has been on tablets for a long time, and haven't really captivated people with it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
"Clearly Apple won but it's not as if one direction is obviously superior to the other from an objective viewpoint."
I'm not sure about that. I would think a small screen is simply not going to lend itself to head-shrunken Windows. The size changes the paradigm, that's what Apple got but they didn't get it in a flash. It came because the way music is bought for iPods. Music, to Apple, is mere software. People seem to like a lot of choices as long as they are well organized. That's the problem with the Windows world, it isn't well organized. It's a polyglot that makes most owners scared to death they might have to upgrade their OS. Apple figured out it was the closed garden that makes owners feel safe from the horrors only an OS screwup can inflict.
That said, Apple's machines are not for geeks who revel in a freewheeling environment because they know how to navigate it. Instead of a horror they see an interesting challenge. MS has corrupted that experience, Linux is attempting to give it back. But then Linux runs up against the mass market which doesn't care about computer challenges. So the trick for the Android devices will be to neuter the free-wheeling environment that scared the hell out of most people yet still allow for a geek-appeal to get under hood. The later will help encourage apps to be produced for it...as long as those apps don't reopen the box of horrors users do not want.
I disagree.
First off, calling iOS a "phone os" when its core is the same as that of Mac OS is showing that your not really thinking about the difference. The difference between the approaches has nothing to do with the core of the OS and everything to do with the displace and interface levels of the OS. That is where the difference is between iOS and Mac OS X and, in so much as OS X and Windows are similar, it is also the difference between iOS and Windows.
So given that the basic difference is in the UI layer I think its pretty obvious why iOS is better suited to tablets than windows. Windows was designed for mouse interaction and iOS was designed ground up for touch interaction. From a design standpoint, there really is no doubt which tactic is better for designing an OS for a touch based device.
Now that said, design isnt everything. Microsoft wanted full windows on their tablet so that they could leverage a large library of applications for the platform, even though those apps would not be easy to use with a touch interface. Apple managed to get the best of both worlds by releasing the iPhone first (the first phone that provided an easy way for people to build and, more importantly, market phone applications) and then was able to leverage those applications on the launch of the iPad. I suspect if the iPad had come first Apple would have faced an up hill battle trying to get developers and users on board at the same time.
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