Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Coal is so old fashioned.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Motion has 3 models available:
http://www.motioncomputing.com/
There's the Archos 9:
http://www.archos.com/products/tw/archos_9/index.html?country=us&lang=en
and the Samsung Q1EX:
http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/laptops/NP-Q1EX-FA01US
and the Panasonic Toughbook is available as a slate.
Sadly, Fujitsy quit making slates though (perhaps they'll go back to making them?) --- interestingly the selection of Windows slates has gotten so low that some people who want a larger format slate are purchasing the Axiotron Modbook (a converted Mac laptop) and installing Windows on it.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
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'
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.
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?"
Hasn't Windows been on tablets since tablets were first sold, several years ago? Back when having no keyboard meant half your computer had fallen off, rather than being a selling point.
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...
Late? To the tablet market? Does the tech world have severe amnesia or something? It was called Windows XP Tablet Edition and there were plenty of devices sold. Microsoft just didn't anticipate that people would prefer having horrifically hobbled environments that can only execute approved farting applications downloaded through official sources.
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 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.
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.
From T other FA (eWeek needs better people if they think they can stop me cutting and pasting... sheesh...)
The rest of the article is not worth looking at, let alone reading.
Free Martian Whores!
Video has been removed, that could be a story in itself...
Even a video of a Windows product can't stay up for more than a month!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
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.
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
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)
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
His sled will be propelled by eight flying chairs.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
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.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
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
These devices look sooooo sweet, I am going to get one on lunch day.
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.
Why include a "CTRL-ALT-DEL" button on the device's chassis unless you expect the software to crash on a regular basis? What's with having a mechanical button to activate a virtual onscreen keyboard?
I hate coming to the defense of Microsoft, but "CTRL-ALT-DEL" hasn't been a hard-reboot sequence since WinME. It's been used in WinNT/2K/XP/V/7 as a way to access the login prompt because IIRC it's a special sequence that only the kernel is allowed to listen for, so you can ostensibly be assured that no program other than the login prompt is accepting your username/password. A soft-keyboard version of "CTRL-ALT-DEL" would defeat that "security" purpose.
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.
Repackaging WinMo or Win7 into an iPad like form factor will not result in success
This is a very good point. I've actually used Windows 7 on a tablet PC, yes, complete with touch screen. It's horrible!
Imagine having to do window management on a device like that, stuff you don't even have to bother about on iOS or Android OS. Imagine an OS where lots of apps aren't designed for e.g. changed dpi settings (to at least be able to put your thumb on a maximize widget and not hit the restore widget!) and have their UI's crap out completely at that. Imagine how no text box in the OS will automatically pop up a virtual keyboard, and that the built-in Windows 7 virtual keyboard that's there consumes a third of the entire display on a 1024x600 touch screen. It's like how polished Windows XP 64-bit is for 64-bit apps. That's where Windows 7 is today, at best. They haven't even thought about how you're supposed to *use* Windows 7 as a touch OS yet, it's just a cobbled together mess of mouse interfaces, touch-oriented keyboards, small widgets, and API's for multi-touch features, for the 0.32% that use such devices on Windows 7. And they're already talking of a HP Slate this christmas. This will risk ending up a huge disappointment for HP.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
"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.
Well, to be fair... Microsoft demo'd a lot of features in Longhorn back in 2002 that apple copied and was able to get to market with faster (due to Micorosoft's major screwups in developing Longhorn). Microsoft showed stuff like 3D Window managers with wobbly windows, instant search, etc.. long before they were in other products like Compiz/XGL or OSX.
I think you have your history a little screwed up. Apple released hardware accelerated version of their compositing rendering engine Quartz back in August 23, 2002 (10.2 Jaguar). Previous to that, they had software based Quartz in 10.0 and 10.1 and Quartz evolved out of Display Postscript on NextStep. Apple and Next had been working on search for a long time before that as well.
The taskbar in Windows 95 and quick launch was stolen from the NextStep dock.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
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.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
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.