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MS Hypes Win7 Tablets For CES — Again
jfruhlinger writes "About a year ago at this time, we were all hearing exciting news about Windows-based tablets that Microsoft would be unveiling at CES. They would transform the industry and strangle the iPad in its cradle! Well, now the hype machine is starting again, for the same products that never materialized last year. This time around, though, the market has changed so much so quickly that Microsoft's tablet bid isn't cutting edge; as Ryan Faas points out, it's desperate."
It's like George Bush said. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice. . .you can't fool me again.
There are tablets out there right now that run W7. W7 is a horrible UI for a tablet as can be seen with the current stuff that is out. If they change their UI to make it more tablet friendly, then we will talk. Until then, hop on Google and check yourself, W7 is a fail on tablets with the current UI
The world is how you make it
There's nothing inherently wrong about running Win7 on a tablet. As long as the gui shell is optimized for the form factor and method of input, then it has a fighting chance. However, people will invariably want to run standard Windows applications on the device, and that is where the user experience will be miserable.
Apple really pulled a strategic coup with the iPad. First they built up an impressive array of modern applications totally designed around a multi-touch interface (via the iPhone), then they built a tablet that was fully compatible with that massive suite of applications.
MS has a massive application base, but there is no acceptable manner of utilizing those applications with a touch-only interface (and oh, has that been tried and tried). Couple that with Microsoft's heavy-handed treatment of developers of late (C# only for Windows Phone 7), and the tablet version of Win7 will never build up that critical mass base of applications it must have to survive.
Better known as 318230.
Big difference.
Scaling a PC OS to a tablet always seems to result in failure.
Scaling a good touch-oriented phone OS up to a tablet, however, seems to work well.
See, as an example, the success of the iPad (basically a giant iPhone) and the various Android tablets (pre-Honeycomb, basically giant Android phones, such as the Huawei S7 and the Galaxy Tab series mentioned in TFA).
Oh yeah - I love my Huawei S7 (Android-based tablet, pre-Honeycomb, running 2.1 and with a 2.2 Froyo upgrade in the pipeline). Android took the entry barriers to the tablet market and hit them with a nuke.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Why haven't MS developed a touch-based shell for Windows 7? They could sell it as Windows 7 Tablet Edition. Yay, they'd get a new product to sell, too!
I've used Windows 7 as a touch OS, and I can tell you it's no pleasant experience. You know the virtual keyboard that iOS and Android pops up as you give a text box focus? Yeah. Windows 7 doesn't support that. It has a virtual keyboard, but you can only click to open it manually. Click to open it. Every time you want to type. Oh, and the dpi setting support to make things easier to point and click at? Well, Windows applications don't use to have good dpi setting support. Their GUI's will break, or simply ignore the setting, and keep using small fonts. And what about window management? Clicking at window borders to resize them, to give room for... Wait a minute -- why do you have to window manage at all? That was taken out of iOS and Android, for a reason.
There are a dozen more reasons it'll make your skin crawl. It's an as poor OS for tablets, as Windows Mobile 6.5 is for mobile devices. It's as if Microsoft didn't learn! Why hasn't Ballmer learnt? Why is he so stubborn. It's his job to understand these things, and lead his company in the right direction! Windows 7 Tablet Edition should have been developed *along with Windows 7* itself! Because even back then, after Windows Vista, did visionaries in the tech industry see this as becoming huge in the future. But no -- MS seem to be willing to repeat their Windows Mobile mistake again. Trying to shoe-horn an OS design in a form factor and a human/computer interface it was never intended for.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
The Courier was never viable, nor even a real product - it was an attempt to use the classic FUD cloud to head off the iPad. But if the vapor is too thin, anyone can see through it and that was true in this case.
Imagine the batter life and weight of a Windows 7 tablet with two screens. Imagine the hassel of a mechanism that would fold easily while also letting you hold it open cradled in a hand or two.
Courier was never more than a concept video, and not even a well-thought out example of that. It looks amazing in the same way riding a dragon through the sky seems awesome and amazing, because it's not going to happen in reality.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The real problem will be expectations RE: 3rd party applications. "Android" succeeds, in part, on very non-PC-like hardware because it promises nothing about support for historical linux applications(plus, the only historical applications tend to either be server stuff, that you wouldn't run on a tablet except as a stunt, or geek stuff that geeks are welcome to try to get working if they want to).
Windows, on the other hand, has a huge amount of well known legacy applications, and when a product is sold as "Windows" people expect that it, and the disk they just got at best buy, will work on it. Trouble is, the vast majority of those 3rd party applications will suck without a proper mouse and keyboard. Not much MS can do about that.
There isn't anything much wrong with the NT kernel(I'm sure hardcore geeks and purists could pick some nits; but the same could be said of linux.), nor does MS have no ability to design a new touchable shell; but making 3rd party stuff not just tear you out of that shell and poke you in the eye with how much they suck would be somewhere between heroic and impossible.
This, I suspect, is why Apple, with their iPhone, Google(de facto, they don't actually stop you) with Android, and MS with Windows Phone 7, enacted a "no legacy" policy.
Microsoft has had a tablet strategy for almost a decade. Unfortunately it's an absolute crap strategy that isn't going to catch on in the marketplace. Before you might have been able to argue that their vision was ahead of its time, but now that Apple has had a lot of success with the iPad and Samsung has been able to duplicate much of that success with an Android tablet, Microsoft has no excuse.
You can tell how much they missed the boat on this by looking at their new phone OS, or at least what they named it. I wouldn't be surprised to see them use it for future tablets and stop trying to put Windows 7 and its successors on tablet devices. The funny part is that they called it Windows Phone 7, which (at least to me) indicates that they had no thought at all of using it for tablet devices, even after watching Apple port their iOS to tablets.
It's pretty clear that they intent to pound their heads into the wall and continue pushing their failed strategy. It's starting to look sad.
While I don't like Google any more than you do, I'm less worried about Android. Only a subset of Android devices are tied to Google in any useful way. Since Android is available as a largely apache licenced middleware stack for the GPLed kernel(plus whatever proprietary apps and drivers the vendor feels like shipping), assorted "Android" devices have sprung up like mushrooms that are about as connected to Google as a Gentoo box is to Linus Torvalds. By contrast, every box of Windows sold is money right into Redomond's coffers and, as of now, isn't shy about phoning home.
They've done better than that. They've got laptops that convert into tablets with a twist of the screen. I've got one. I like it as a laptop, but I *never* use it as a tablet.
The problem is that it's all very good to say "UI-switching problem", as if that were a single, discrete problem that could be solved by something like enabling touch input. It's not.
The problem is with the "value proposition", which runs roughly like this: "Use the apps you've already invested in exactly the same as you always have, but on a *tablet*." On paper that sounds like genius, but unfortunately it's not a self-consistent idea. Tablet interaction is radically different than mouse and keyboard driven interaction, so if the apps don't behave radically differently, they're going to suck in tablet mode.
You can't fix this problem by imposing a shallow tablet interface on top of the old app (which Win 7 does with approximately as much success as is possible). The app's UI has to be redesigned from the ground up to give users a tablet experience, not a mouse/keyboard experience simulated on a tablet.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Microsoft live and die on Windows and Office, nothing else really makes them any significant amounts of money.
Probably why they're willing to throw a lot of money to expand into something else. Their stranglehold of the PC and Office market may last for several more decades, but they realize that they've already saturated both markets and there isn't much room for growth in either. They're trying to find the next thing that will make them significant amounts of money so they can live and die on X, Y, and Z instead of just X and Y. It's a little like how Apple lived on died by the Mac. Then the Mac and the iPod. Then the Mac, the iPod, and the iPhone. Now the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPod. More legs to stand on.
But, if I remember correctly, isn't it just some product they bought in and re-labelled?
You're thinking about DOS. Ba-zing!
Microsoft still has the chance to beat Apple
I think this is the type of thinking that is why MS is behind Apple. Apple doesn't seem to give a damn about beating MS or Google or HP or Dell. Steve Jobs for years has said he doesn't care that Apple doesn't have a huge marketshare in computers. The fact that they make money and that they have loyal customers is their primary focus. Apple cares only about putting out products that they think are good products and will make them a lot of money. It just happens that their last series of consumer products starting with the iPod to the iPhone to the iPad have taken the market.
MS has always defined itself and its strategy on the market and competitors and not the goal of being the best. They have only wanted to beat everyone else. When they beat Netscape they let IE languish for years until Mozilla and Chrome started to eat their marketshare. They let Window Mobile stagnate until Apple and Google made them almost irrelevant.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.