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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.'"
Or the bigger question - which of the big Linux distros have drivers for touchscreens? I can see Ubuntu being all over this one.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Windows has been on tablets for a decade, and they aren't at all bad.
Video has been removed, that could be a story in itself...
The trouble is Microsoft has to base it on Windows OS, because the ability to run legacy Windows software is the only advantage they have over iOS, Blackberry, Android, WebOS or any other tablet.
I submit that a touch device that allowed you to "circle" an object, capture that object into an object clipboard, then drop it into any application which would be able to query the object or act on it in a special app-specific way *could* be developed.
Indeed, this is what OLE intended before it faded away. If a CLR or JVM underlies the API, it should be possible still. Android seems to hint at this, but no one has the wherewithal to bring it all together. MS could do that, but they won't.
So what he's saying is, we don't have a great idea for Windows on a tablet, but we know tablets are hot and we would look dumb if we don't make a windows tablet, so we're creating one just to try to look good. Of course, it will be a POS, but hey, we made it!
Well, that's the thing: Windows' best selling feature is it works on anything. Windows' (arguable) worst feature is that it wasn't designed to work with anything. The bad part of not being in the hardware business (in this context) is that MS doesn't really have the ability to drive the market in that regard. So they seem to be in the position of cajoling some hardware manufacturer into releasing a tablet. Now they can partner with that company to develop features that will work well on a tablet, but it's not the same as Apple deciding "we will make a tablet" and doing everything necessary to make it a success.
I don't know what the answer is for MS. Could be they need to acquire some sort of high-end, low-volume boutique PC manufacturer to serve as a marketing arm for new toys they want to develop. But for now they still depend on the manufacturers to decide what markets they want to get into.
However besides swapping out a stylus for a mouse, MS has put in very little thought or development about optimizing the UI for tablets. There is no sliding. Clicking and dragging on the stylus is the same as with a mouse; however, with a stylus, it's not very as comfortable or elegant.
One of the very interesting things that was pointed out to me is that scrolling with a mouse wheel and scrolling with a finger both work the way you expect them to, but they work in opposite directions. With a mouse wheel, moving your finger up moves the document up; on touchscreen devices, moving your finger up moves the document down. That's the kind of thing that makes just putting a desktop OS onto a touchscreen device a losing proposition: you need to change fundamental input interactions in order to make it work the way people think it should work.
I mean, if they were concerned about getting a serious toehold in that market they'd release something solid when its ready, not when its sales might artificially peak due to Christmas shoppers right?
MS has done this for years with consumer gadgets. For example, the Xbox and the Zune were pushed into the Christmas shopping seasons. Both allowed MS to claim that they moved millions of each when in reality, they simply pushed the quantities on retailers who would spend several months selling down their inventories. In the case of Zune, sometimes at bargain basement prices.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
But my hope was that it ran a modified version of OSX.
There was a survey that came out a week or so prior to the official announcement of the iPad - I heard about it on the now-defunct podcast "Network World's Twisted Pair". The survey-takers asked people whether they would prefer (on the iPad) a more-or-less standard OS X interface, or an iPhone-style (what Apple now calls iOS) interface. Something like 70% of the people stated they'd prefer the iOS style.
I'm not saying this in an attempt to invalidate your opinion; I'm just pointing out that, among the wider population, the majority of people don't seem to want a computer-like interface to their tablets. We probably could have deduced that even without that survey, though, given the tepid sales previous Windows tablets have seen.
I'd guess the take-away Mr. Ballmer needs to grasp is that the majority of people don't want a "Start" button on their slate...
#DeleteChrome
The problem is that they're getting to the point where software lock-in, strong-arming OEMs, making vague unspecific threats about patents and generally acting like a street thug isn't going to work.
If everyone is using an iPhone or an Android device, what's Microsoft going to do, hire people to break their phones? Wait, they might just...
They've been coasting on Windows and Office for 20 years, but that ride is almost done. They'll have to compete for real now, and it will be pretty amusing to watch, since they have clearly forgotten how to do it.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.