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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.
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]
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.
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?
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.