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Microsoft's Approach To Battling the iPad In the Workplace
An anonymous reader writes "Even though Microsoft's public stance, when asked about the impact of Apple's slate is 'iPad? What iPad?', the Redmondians are preparing the company's partners for battle in 2011. Microsoft is making available to its reseller partners marketing collateral to help them defend against the iPad's encroachment into the enterprise market. I had a chance to check out a PowerPoint dated December 2010 on 'Microsoft Commercial Slate PCs' that the company is offering to its partners to help them explain Microsoft's slate strategy to business users." Besides the iPad, there are also the raft of tablets (available and upcoming) running Android, and Blackberry's QNX tablet that Microsoft will have to sell past.
MS stock has been flatlining the past decade. Ballmer is a dog, chasing another car/successful_product instead of innovating on their own.
Nothing to see here, move along.
I know you employ some brilliant, passionate, rock star developers. You could probably crush your competitors, if only you didn't move so conservatively at a slug's pace. Trim some of that management, get rid of the red tape, and use your devs!
It may not be the best OS of the bunch, but the fact of the matter is that it will run on a whole host of hardware. Apple and RIM have lost in this respect, because there will be very little choice. Microsoft seems to be in bed with HP. WebOS and Android will take the market because soon enough someone will be running it on a toaster.
And we've seen how this capability has directly led to Linux' dominance of the desktop computing market.
#DeleteChrome
All they can do is flail, obviously, because they have no presence in this space.
Microsoft's approach to battling the iPad is the same as it was for battling the iPod and the iPhone - show up a day late and a dollar short, with an inferior product, and then attempt to leverage what assets they have in terms of vendor lock-in to pry their way in.
Oh well - some more of those lame "to the cloud" ad buys should help. (not)
All of the upper management in my company carry an iPad, not for technical reasons but because they like it and they think our customers like it. Site updates are now being checked against iPads and site traffic from iPads has exceeded 1%.
I walked by a managers office the other day, a sign was posted that "The future of CRM is mobile" and a picture of an iPhone, Android and iPad.
Rather than carry my laptop around these days I carry my iPad for email, and other intranet access.
"I have great faith in fools: Self confidence my friends call it." ~Edgar Allan Poe
It may not be the best OS of the bunch, but the fact of the matter is that it will run on a whole host of hardware.
Which means very little by itself. Linux runs on lots of hardware but isn't remotely dominating the operating system market. There is more to it than that. It needs to run on the hardware people want and run the software people want and have a critical mass of users of those devices. Pulling all that off is no mean feat. Possible you will be right but you shouldn't be so certain.
Apple and RIM have lost in this respect, because there will be very little choice.
You are presuming two things. One, that people will care about choice in hardware. The iPod is a great example of a device that has dominated its market despite a multitude of alternative hardware choices available. Choice in hardware might not matter much at all. Two, that Apple & RIM need a monopoly to be successful. The iPhone is wildly profitable and popular and Apple is making a fortune even though there are plenty of other choices out there. The iPhone does not dominate the market the way the iPod does but you'd have a hard time arguing it isn't a successful product. Apple's strategy is a bit of a high wire act and they could easily screw it up but they've shown every reason to think they might succeed.
WebOS and Android will take the market because soon enough someone will be running it on a toaster.
My wife was just telling me the other day, "Why isn't our toaster web enabled? Isn't it about time someone did that?" [/sarcasm]
We use Ipads a lot in the ETC center of the College of Education at Pen State. With remote desktop, exchange integration, the size and portability, web functionality, it's a great tool for sys admins who need to go help others while still retaining the ability to remote into servers and other such devices to change configs, manage support tickets, update databases etc. Less bulky than a laptop, while providing the tools we need.
It's not to say Android devices wouldn't do the job as well, but the iPads were out first and fit the bill nicely (and being on the Mac Admin side it fit well with the existing infrastructure).
They're also used during interviews to record audio so we can easily go back and check on things that were said
Depends how it's handled, although most the things I will bring up can also be achieved with an Android tablet (with proper Tablet version, until Honeycomb comes out, the iPad is the only real option.)
Here are a few examples: A corporation can get a corporate apple development license, this means they can write and load any proprietary software they may need into the device. This can range from simple data entry applications with business focus to server management and security administration clients. A big conception between Apple critics is that the iOS is extremely closed and Apple wont let anyone do anything with it. This is not a concern for enterprise since the Enterprise Developer license is only $500/year (nothing for a small company) and allows internal application deployment across all the company devices. No Apple approval involved. Your boss can give you all the porn you want (under the risk of being taken to court under a sexual harassment case but that's a different story.) Apple's device lock-down also means companies can make sure the device they provide their employees does not get misused as users only can install from the company repository and not download games from the App Store, after all, Apple does not allow downloads of even free games without signing into the App Store with a password, and an enterprise is very likely to lock the device to their own account through Parental Controls. Android Openess may be a weakness in that department.
The iPad also has support for blue-tooth keyboards and Apple's Office contender is available for the device, plus a few others like Documents To Go and Quick Office. It is much more viable than a laptop in a fast-moving office. Example: Mike is working on a presentation on his desk, with a blue-tooth keyboard to do fast typing and a copy of Apple's PowerPoint alternative. He can then just stand up from his desk, leaving the keyboard behind and run to the presentation room. In this presentation room, he meets with another 10 (or whatever) managers with similar situations. Here, he uses his iPad to stream via Air Play his presentation into a projector hooked to an Apple TV receiver. As soon as he is done the next employee moves in with his iPad and takes over the projector without bothering with cabling switching.
Another situation, a project manager sits with his boss in a one-to-one meeting and he takes his iPad, again, leaving the keyboard behind without bothering to unhook or un-dock a heavy laptop. At the meeting he is asked for some information and he quickly access it without having to go back to his desktop or be forced to carry a laptop. In a fast moving office environment, dragging laptops left and right is not viable. An iPad (or any well done tablet) can stay on without draining any battery and back in action with the click of a button. A laptop requires, in the best case, to be sleeping and closed, then opened up, accommodate in your lap, and type a password to log in. Worst case may require to wake from hibernation or even a full boot.
I seen people pass iPads around a table, specially to show everyone some important email. Requires much less foresight than printing emails you think may be important.
In a warehouse, the iPad is just a bliss. No warehouse depends on laptops for anything. [Almost] every advanced warehouse has bulky devices designed for "quick inventory management" (you may had seen them in the hands of UPS delivery guys) or hand held PDA/BarCode Scanner hybrid devices. Both tend to be heavily specialized and still force the employees to deal with desktops set up throughout the warehouse. Off course, others just use paper and a clipboard. Tablets can drastically streamline this and open the door for much much more due to their flexibility.
IT staff can also use tablets for very effective remote server management. From simplistic VNC/RDP clients to dedicated management tools, amazing things can be achieved while stuck far from work or home if equipped with a 3G ready tablet.
As I stated at
It has a presence, yes... but doing "just fine"? The iPhone and Androids each have more units in the channel than WP7 has in-channel and activated *combined*. This is in spite of the fact that WinMo (in various incarnations) have been for sale for (almost) a decade.
I don't know about you, but if I had a product that was universally panned for nearly a decade, and my latest, greatest attempt at rectifying that issue was met with a universal "meh"? I wouldn't exactly call it "doing just fine".
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I've actually found a business segment where the iPad has made a near perfect replacement for the traditional laptop. I don't see MS catching up anytime soon. I just finished up a 4 month project to get one my clients moved to iPad's for courtroom usage. I was approached by the Sr Partner in the firm to come up with a way for him to use his new toy back in August. I was then given an iPad and list of "requirements". It needed to be able to send and receive email, edit word and pdf's, sync with the firms docket calendar, record dictation in a standard format that would be emailable and would be foot pedal compatible and access documents back in the office. After evaluating a ton of products I chose Pages, Evernote, Drop Box and Dictate on Demand with Team Viewer as an option for the more advanced. It worked so well that the Sr Partner decided everyone needed one.
Now everything they did on a notebook and a digital recorder requiring over $800 in software (MS Office, Gear Player, Adobe Acrobat, etc) has been replaced with a $800 worth of hardware and apps. So far its worked great the most expensive part aside from the iPad itself was the Dictation program which apparently they are quite proud of (it was $99). I had to wait a while for things to get out of beta, but when they say there is an app for that, they aren't kidding. Paired with a bluetooth keyboard (we picked up leather cases from Think Geek that have a keyboard built into the lid) they have all the capability they had with 4x the battery life, better connectivity and all the functionality the needed for a fraction of the price. For me its been great..no mid day treks to the courthouse or off hour support calls because the laptop crashed, got infected or randomly glitched. So far none have had any real issues at all that weren't simply lack of familiarity with the applications. It's going to take an awful lot for MS to be able to compete, windows 7 and its core applications simply aren't designed for finger input, instant on isnt going to happen unless its imbedded and then there is the issue of getting developers on board...based on their tack record with Windows Mobile I don't see it happening any time soon. I really think the biggest rival is going to Google assuming Honeycomb is as good as I hope it will be.
Their big selling point has always been Outlook/Exchange compatibility. Actually, that might well be the only real selling point they've ever had. The latest incarnation is an attempt to make their products "cool" so they would appeal to people who don't care about Outlook (read: people who purchase phones for themselves rather than receive them from their employer), and to catch up a bit on some of the corner business uses they didn't think of but could implement easily (including some which don't need implementing, as they can be done from anything with an Internet connection)
Anyway, I suspect that the enterprise slate market is Microsoft's for the taking once they deliver a working product. They're the only ones who can really do Outlook/Exchange integration, not to mention the rest of Office. I don't pretend to understand why so many people have such tremendous hard-ons for MS Office (I think that there are perfectly functional free and Free alternatives which are just as good at anything that isn't best done on far more intensive software anyway...), but the fact remains that few corporations are willing or able to just ditch it altogether, and unless your product is compatible it's unlikely to make much headway.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
That is ridiculous. Lots of hardware doesn't matter. We're talking about a screen and a bezel you hold, with a generic ARM and flash storage and Wi-Fi/3G. Why would you need to switch from IPad for hardware reasons? They are the acknowledged design leader and also the price leader, just as in iPods, and they have the most hardware accessories and custom cases.
Everything happens in the software on a tablet. Having native C apps, desktop class PC apps, is a billion times more important than a variety of hardware that all runs the same small set of Java applets that only do Web-class functionality. Nobody but Apple has native C apps on ARM, and nobody has full-size apps except Apple.
We are talking about corporate here. iOS has deployment and security features that Android lacks. It has Xcode rapid development tools that Android lacks. Corporations can deploy their own apps wirelessly. Their users already know the iOS interface. Even if the users know Android 2, the tablet version 3 is different.
What you have to do is resist saying "Android" and tell me why I'm supposed to pay $799 for a Motorola iPad clone with 32GB and mini Java applets and no installed base and not even available yet when iPad 3G 32GB is $729 and has a full-range of native C apps and 17 million installed base and an upgraded version likely to ship before Motorola?
If you look at music players, it is 75% Apple, 10% Samsung, 15% everybody else. How does that relate to your theory that more hardware choices leads to dominating market share? The non-Apple 25% has hundreds of devices. Apple sells more iPod nano than that whole 25%. iPad is the "iPod PC" the components are very similar and you buy native C apps instead of music. So what has changed from the music player market that users are going to prefer Motorola this time?
Rather than the "open" platform resulting in widespread standardization, we only see more fragmentation as each vendor implements their own locked-down flavor of it.
You're kidding, right?
Because Angry Birds works just as well on my Droid2 as it does on my wifes LG Optimus. So does Tune-In Radio, (must have!) and EzTether. (another must-have)
In other words, I have yet to notice any significant "fragmentation" between my phone and my wife's, despite being on different networks and being different phones at different pricepoints.
Yes there are differences, pretty much akin to the differences when running Windows 7 on a Dell vs running Windows 7 on a Gateway... pretty comparable. The default icons are different, and the "desktop" is arranged slightly differently. (OMG!)
I read, today, yet another article about "Linux fragmentation"... .something I've been reading about for over TEN YEARS. Somehow, it hasn't really happened, despite Linux running on everything from a low-end ARM CPU all the way up to 128-core SMP/NUMA servers.
Are there differences in Linux compiles? Sure! That's sorta the point! A 200 Mhz ARM core with 4 MB of RAM has quite different needs than a 32-core database server with 192 GB of RAM. One size does NOT fit all!
Are there GPL violations? Well, yeah, but they do tend to not be all that major, because major violations tend to cause problems for companies that perform them.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Your comment, it's just not true. (not my chart, btw). The integrated Facebook app is a good indicator of a mobile platform's market performance. Facebook users are common enough that they make a significant and representative statistical sample.
WP7 peaked below 1.5% market share on release, and is declining. It's now seeing about 4,300 new adopters each day worldwide, which is pathetic even for Windows Mobile. There is no way this can be described as "doing just fine." Its user base will never hit the 1.5 million units Microsoft claims are already delivered on its current trend, so somebody's about to get stuck with some dead inventory.
Its replacement Windows 8 has already been shown running at CES and the roadmap has a 1/7/2013 in-store availability scheduled. W8 being a full Windows rather than a mobile OS will of course not be compatible. Intel has committed that they will field phone platforms with it that run regular Windows applications on x86 phones. They're "all in".
So there's no reason to buy a WP7 phone. It failed to thrive, its execution date is set. There's no reason to develop apps for a phone with few users and no long-term prospects either.
Funny story: the KIN had about 8,000 sales and 300,000 Facebook likes. The integrated WP7 phone Facebook app has a little over 300,000 users now and less than 4,000 Facebook likes. It looks like buying Facebook likes has gone out of vogue with Microsoft's marketing department. But apparently hiring astroturfers to post on slashdot has not.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
This is an easy one to explain. Did you study the story of Beowulf in school? Bill Gates started out with the goal to be wealthy and famous. So he created this monster. It was feeble at first, but he got a lucky hit and fed it profits and it grew strong enough to procure for him and his people the desired kingdom of wealth and fame.
By about 1982 he realized that he was already wealthier and more famous than he needed to be. He had more wealth than anybody could ever reasonably spend. Such profligate wealth does not incent your progeny to high levels of achievement. But he had many useful years left, and this big powerful monster. So he turned to hubris: The philanthropist's dream of immortal praise - to using his monster to build vast wealth with which to spend his late years dispensing with problems that have plagued mankind.
Being the Alpha geek he is and founded in the moral certainty that his deeds were ultimately for the greater good, he then set his monster upon his opponents with greater zeal than ever before. For fifteen years his monster feasted on all comers growing stronger and stronger. It laid waste to the tech landscape, utterly destroying all who opposed it and most of its allies as well. This voracious beast has no moral compass, knows not friend from foe. It knows only hunger and power. His wealth grew to unimaginable proportions. Even though he bled the monster regularly, it grew in power and hunger logarithmically.
Sometime around 1997 he realized the problem. The monster had vanquished so many enemies, had become so immortal, was so greedy and hungry, that it was in danger of becoming his legacy. In every place it achieved dominance it halted all learning, all innovation, all progress. Though he built a thousand bridges, salved a hundred diseases, found a way to feed the masses, that would not be his legacy - his monster would would wipe out all of those good deeds. It became his Grendel. The monster itself was likely to be the thing he was remembered for long after he was gone. And his name would be spat upon by the serfs who labored under its brutal tyranny. Something had to be done.
And so he pulled its teeth. Instead of bleeding it a little at a time he bled it all at once with "special dividends". And then he cut at its guts, giving it incompetent marketing execs. Knowing guile to be its greatest weapon he laid bare its lying ways before the world. And of course, he bled it still to fund his charitable endeavors, but more prodigiously than ever before. And he gave it an incompetent rider, a captain sure to find no shore - a bumbling fool that could plausibly keep it from doing too much harm.
For a decade now it's been blinded, as he was its vision. It's been bled. It's been led in circles and still it doesn't die. He's as shocked by that as you are. Still as it stumbles blindly about it subsists on bits of flesh it finds. Still it finds hopeful fools to lay down with it, expecting to arise in the morning the better for it. Still it hungers to be unleashed from this bumbling fool.
But he can't have it. If Bill Gates is to be well remembered, to achieve his immortal hero goal, the monster he unleashed upon us all must die. He'll find a way. I believe in him.
But for those hoping he's going to return and give his vision back to the monster, to revive it and restore it to its greater glory? No. That is not the plan.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Except MSFT won't modify Outlook, or Office to work on a touch screen. They have had 8 years and not done it once why would they bother now?
WP7's exchange support is also lacking behind android and the iPhone. try reading some of the business reviews on it. WP7 focuses on twitter and facebook more than Exchange.
People won't change what they know. it is why Office 2007 and 2010 have less users than Office 2003(which is what I have at work) Businesses don't want to spend $2000 for 10 people to get a new office suite every 3 years. not when that suite will work just fine in 10 years.
why is IE 6 still around? Because people coded for it and it alone and now they can't/won't change the applications they have.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.