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!
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Sadly, in this industry, sometimes just being practical is being revolutionary. Its amazing the degree to which people will throw themselves against the same obstacle over and over again without re-thinking their assumptions.
This thread is filled with examples of tablets with windows on them and none of them have been serious commercial successes. MS has tried time and time again to enter this market and they have failed every time. One would think by now that they would do the practical thing and consider the platform from the ground up, bu they didn't do that over the last 10 years.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
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.
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.
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
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.
What the fuck. Revisionist much?
Windows 1.03, 2, 286, 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, Windows for Workgroups, NT, Windows 95 (and possibly even Windows 98) all did not have a free SDK. And the SDK was needed to program for those platforms.
Hey, I went and bought a copy of Windows 1.03 -- and even though I also had a licensed copy of Microsoft C 5.1, 6.0, and MASM 4 and 5 I was not able to build an application for Windows. That would require the SDK, which was a considerable expense. I didn't buy the SDK until Windows 3.0.
And, from 3.0 until Windows 98 (when I finally stopped writing Windows apps), I spent a lot of money on those "free" SDKs. In the Windows 9x/NT timeframe, $3000/year for MSDN, several thousand before MSDN, so make it around 20,000 (or more). Not counting third party tools and libraries.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Windows 1.03, 2, 286, 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, Windows for Workgroups, NT, Windows 95 (and possibly even Windows 98) all did not have a free SDK. And the SDK was needed to program for those platforms.
They did not have a free Microsoft SDK. They did not preclude you from rolling your own. Calling conventions were known. API calls were documented (in fact, API of Windows circa 3.1 was even "standardized" by Ecma - you can still download a PDF today). Knowing those, you can write your own prototypes for all system APIs that you need (as e.g. MinGW did - their windows.h and related headers are not derived from MS ones, but made from scratch).
I don't recall where first alternative SDKs appeared, but I do rather vividly recall Borland Pascal and C++ allowing to write very nice GUI apps for Win3.1 without any downloads from MS. In mid-to-late 90s, Delphi was the king of IDEs on Windows 9x, soundly beating anything MS had to offer.
They're not free? Well, yes, the third parties that developed them figured that they'd like to get paid for the work they've done. It's not cheap, so it took a while before free (in all meanings) MinGW got to the point of being usable. Nonetheless everyone could make their own - and many did.
And, from 3.0 until Windows 98 (when I finally stopped writing Windows apps), I spent a lot of money on those "free" SDKs. In the Windows 9x/NT timeframe, $3000/year for MSDN, several thousand before MSDN, so make it around 20,000 (or more). Not counting third party tools and libraries.
It was your choice to use the (rather expensive, indeed) Microsoft development tools. There were other options.
More generally speaking, the availability of a free "official" (or any other) SDK, and openness of platform for development, are largely orthogonal. iOS is not open in that sense not because Apple charges you for a developer certificate, but because they place legal restrictions on development tools, and do not allow free unrestricted distribution of apps. Windows does not have, and never had, that kind of thing. That's why MinGW was possible, even if it took a while to get there.
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
Which is why they are going to die a slow death. And it started two years or three years ago (if not before). I saw the warning signs in 2003. Windows is a flat stable market, it has nothing "new" to offer, nor can it.
Putting Windows anything on a tablet, because it can run "legacy" apps is just stupid. It is NOT a legacy product, and if shouldn't be treated as such.
However, Microsoft COULD have come up with a OS that could be tied to AD (their best product, as bloated as it is) and controlled by Policy that ran on Tablets that wasn't "Windows". But they didn't, and they can't. THEY are WINDOWS. Everything they do is for WINDOWS. And as long as they think in terms of WINDOWS they are doomed to eventual failure, because WINDOWS doesn't do what people need on 4x5 inch screens or 9" tablets.
In short, they've stopped being a "technology company", or "software company" and have become a "Windows Software Company". This is the same problem "railroad companies" faced, thinking they were in the Railroad business, when in fact, they were in the Transportation business.
And this is why Apple is the #2 company in the world (Market Cap) and fast approaching #1 (Exxon), they aren't in the "Macintosh" business. If I was on the board of directors with Microsoft, I'd fire Balmer and find someone that had a vision of what kind of company Microsoft could be. I'd volunteer, but I doubt they'd pick a dumb idiot from the sticks like me.
I am willing to listen to offers ;)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.