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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
"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.