Slashdot Mirror
MS Global Strategy Chief: Tablets Are a Fad
jfruhlinger writes "Wondering why Microsoft isn't jumping into the red-hot tablet market? Well, maybe it's because Craig Mundie, the man in charge of the company's global strategy, isn't sure if the 'big screen tablet pad category' has staying power. Of course, it's possible that tablets will go the way of the netbook, but blogger Chris Nerney calls Microsoft's seeming total inaction in the face of a hot market 'mind-boggling.'"
I'm waiting for an improved tablet. What I would like to see is a tablet with an attached keyboard. Let's say, a device where the tablet and keyboard are joined by a hinge, so that it can be closed while not in use.
I think I'll patent that idea right now.
Wholeheartedly Agree with Microsoft.
I now fear comment retribution..
He is possibly correct.
Meanwhile, some others (notably Apple) are riding that bubble like the silver surfer and making money by the crate load.
So Microsoft's goal is NOT to make money from new tech?
Even if it is a bubble Microsoft shows its corporate vision (or lack thereof) in this.
Kind of sad because this is the same company that made the Kinect not so long ago, showing that not everybody at Microsoft lacks vision.
It should be obvious by now that Microsoft is incapable of competing with Android and iOS whether on the phone or the tablet. Much less get into the game with something great enough it makes up for their tardiness.
The only strategy left is to hope it all goes away soon, and denegrating that part of the market is the only commentary they can make to help that along.
Look on the bright side MS, at least the standalone digital music player market is shrinking.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Now that somebody at Microsoft has said tablets are a fad, they're going to be around forever.
Here is a Microsoft prediction to real-life consequence translation table:
X is a fad = X is going to be a fixture in the future of computer technology
X ought to be enough for everyone = X is going to look very insignificant very fast
X infinges on our patents = X is a major threat to us
X (said 36 times in a row) = X is going to start migrating away from us
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I think there is a world market for maybe five tablets.
I'm inclined to agree. I have some coworkers with iPads, and they're starting to not carry them to meetings in favor of a PaperPad and a pen. They're either awkward to view (too horizontal), or too awkward to type on (too vertical with a case-stand). They're nice for playing angry birds during meetings though.
Microsoft effectively killed the netbook when they quit releasing versions of XP and forced everyone to move to Windows 7, which had higher memory and drive requirements. By the time you were done with a system that could run Windows 7 well, it wasn't that much cheaper than a regular laptop.
Tablets don't need to run a Microsoft OS. Apple and Google (and now Amazon) are showing you don't need to have a local PC to do most of the work you do with smartphones and tablets.
Netbooks crashed primarily because of MS and the manufacturers got featuritis. Netbooks aren't really sold anymore, I'm not really sure that there is a lack of demand, but as long as nobody is selling a cheap, ultramobile device, it's really hard for demand to develop and be sustained.
I've got an Asus netbook, and apart from the battery life, I love the thing, it's big enough to type on, but small enough to be readily portable. But, then again, it doesn't run Windows, and MS expects to get a share of any netbook sales.
Netbooks are laptops with a smaller form factor.
Tablets are smart phones in a bigger form factor.
It appears that size does matter, but in what context is anyone's guess.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
No they didn't. Netbooks are all around us. I see people using the little laptops all the time, and the sales of devices like the Macbook Air seem strong. Netbooks and Tablets are absolutely running a trend roller-coaster, but when the ride finishes I still expect to see them as strong contenders in the marketplace.
The reason why Tablets failed before was that they simply didn't make sense. The OS was terrible (Windows lolwat?), the hardware was big and bulky, the battery life was scary, and the touch screens weren't responsive. Contrast everything I just said with a iPad 2011.
I think dedicated eBook Readers will die. Laptops and Netbooks will continue to merge closer and closer. Tablets and Phones might also merge even more. Ultimately however I think touch screen devices of some form-factor will survive.
I'm guessing it's because Microsoft doesn't have a touch-based UI for Windows that they're saying tablets are a fad. They thought the same about the internet and portable mp3 players too. Yes, they had tablet PC's long before others but it was a barely-modified version of XP that simply replaced a mouse with a stylus - it wasn't the same.
They'll get into the market as soon as they can cobble together a "good enough" touch-based UI for Windows and then leave it about 5 years later when they realize they aren't making any headway against already well-entrenched Android and iOS markets.
The Microsoft-dominated era is over unless they can figure out a way to execute at least as well as their rivals.
Only because no one sells them anymore. They kept getting bigger and added spinning disks. I love my dell mini 9, but have no idea what to replace it with other than maybe a macbook air. I am going to be wiping the OS no matter what route I go. I want light, small, and do not want any moving parts. I will use it attached to a real monitor and real keyboard when at work and do any and all heavy lifting on servers.
This seems odd, since Microsoft has been trying to get people into tablets for about 10 years. UMPC/Slates/Etc. I remember this was a keynote item for Bill Gates.
Now someone else actually makes a success out of it, and it's a fad?
That seems like the very definition of sour grapes.
IMO netbooks weren't killed by the IPad directly, they died because they went the same route as the IPad. I'm no expert on the subject beyond that I happened to be working at staples durring the rise and fall of netbooks, and I can tell you why they stopped selling at the store I worked in. Durring the peak, the store carried 3 netbooks, acer 1 which depending on the sale of the week was between $150 and $200 weak processor 1gb ram if I recall, then a HP and a dell netbook that were $350-$400. The acer ones sold like hotcakes because for the most part people wanted a weak cheap PC for taking notes, ultra portability was a side effect. The $300+ netbooks, I never saw one sell, primarally because any application that extra speed and power would be wanted, is an application that you should spend those 300+ on a laptop and see it on a screen larger then 10". Eventually the acer 1 stopped being carried and all netbooks that were in the store were the same price as the laptops. I never saw another one get sold, then a month later the IPad came out and everyone attributed that to the death of netbooks. Honestly I think netbooks killed themselves by failing to see their own selling point, then trying to compeat on the wrong selling point.
Netbooks are fad?
I still use mine all the time.
Or maybe just MS netbooks were fads? Mine runs Linux.
[enjoy warm, smug glow]
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
My idea of an "improved tablet" is one on which web sites cannot distinguish the fact that I'm accessing it on a tablet so that I won't get any more "We're sorry, but we don't have the content rights to display this on mobile devices" messages. Until that happens, I will always consider a tablet as a deliberately gimped PC. (That is typically actually more expensive than a PC.)
If you look back at MS's history, they generally try to downplay any new innovation they aren't actively in the market with. Smartphones, music players, tablet PCs, etc.
They don't have a tablet (at least not for sale or for show) so they're going to call it a "fad" and hope that keeps buyers from getting one and getting branded on it.
In the meanwhile their R&D department will be mad busy with their photocopiers, trying to make an "improved variation" on whatever they're labeling as a fad. No one believes them, but they're convinced that by simply making the statement, that somehow everyone will believe them and not create a market for the product, giving them time to scramble and rush something out the door in time to catch the wave.
18 months later they will suddenly stop calling it a fad and announce their new product, with surprisingly familiar looking features, plus a ton of additional bloat. Many months later, after delays, price increases, even more bloat, and cutting of key features that were pushed hard in the initial announcement, product will hit the stores. MS will announces this new product will "revolutionize" the market.
Despite outrageous amounts of funding and marketing, it will still bomb because the market has already been captured several years ago by what they were unsuccessful at downplaying as a "fad", it doesn't work like consumers are now expecting it to (even if some features may even work better than their ancestor in the market), is clumsy to use, and few will buy it.
After losing their shirts in a spectacular show of bad retail, someone will then get a clue and less than 6 months after product launch, an announcement will be made that the product has been discontinued. No official numbers will be given as to how much the fiasco cost the company, but inside sources will whisper tales of massive financial loss.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
How can anyone take what Microsoft says seriously?
They keep trying to barge into everyone's market and often fail, largely because they just don't get it - they don't understand the market, the product or the customers, but march in with their own Microsoft Brand and PR bandwagon going full-tilt, withdrawing quietly after a few years of marginal success or outright failure.
XBox is about the only thing they have going, but that didn't come cheaply and the one thing I know from decades as a video gamer - gamers are NOT loyal - as soon as a newer, better game shows up they're off to that platform and the old one is pushed to the back of the closet or flogged on eBay for what they can get.
Take away the revenues generated by The Windows Tax, Office software and Servers and they'd have gone bust a decade ago, with all the other phonus balonus dot coms and all their hubris about reshaping the world.
The one innovation which eludes Microsoft is getting their operating system off the home-brew legacy throttled model it has always been on. It may look glossy, but it's a cow, with security holes galore and all the important things users need to know safely buried in obscurity. At least Apple realized Mac OS was becoming a painfully large snowball to support and switched to a better model. The next version of Windows will again be completely unnecessary and try to copy everything Google has been doing, which will make it a real pain for desktop apps.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Asian manufacturers like Acer and ASUS starting releasing netbooks with versions of Linux on them because it wasn't possible to run Vista effectively on machines with first-generation Atom processors. They couldn't install WinXP on those machines because it had already reached its end-of-life, and MS wanted everyone to move to Vista. MS's partners like Dell and HP wanted nothing to do with netbooks because they feared, rightly I suspect, that these devices would erode the market for their more powerful laptops.
All that changed the day MS decided to extend WinXP licensing solely for netbooks. To protect its partners, MS imposed strict limitations on this license. "Netbooks" were defined by the screen size and limited to 1 GB of memory. Bigger screens or more memory meant no WinXP. Since Microsoft knew it was competing against a product that was free-of-charge, it dropped its OEM price for WinXP on qualifying netbooks to a mere $15 per copy, compared to four or five times that figure for OEM copies of Windows on laptop and desktop machines. Later they developed the crippled "Starter Edition" of Windows 7 to serve the same market and again charged hardly anything for it. It doesn't require a conspiracy theorist to see that these strategies were designed entirely to keep Linux off machines that might end up in the hands of ordinary people.
Well you can imagine what happened after that. The Dells and HPs of the world saw there was a demand for netbooks and began competing with the Acers of the world. People who wandered into Staples or BestBuy suddenly saw small form-factor devices with friendly old XP on them competing with systems offering some flavor of Linux with an unfamiliar UI. Guess which ones sold? Guess which OS comes with netbooks from Acer and ASUS these days?
Nowadays netbooks have 10" and 12" screens and often 2GB of memory. Which operating system are they running? Usually Win7 Home Premium. How much does it cost the OEMs to license that OS? A lot more than $15/copy I'm sure. The higher license fee pushed up the price of netbooks so they're no longer so price-competitive compared to low-end laptops. Dell and HP breathed a sigh of relief.
All this happened years before anyone ever touched an iPad.
this is why Microsoft must state that the tablets are a fad. They still have no OS to compete on the hardware and they have Apple to thank for a hardware base and software base to be compared to. They must say it's a fad because they have no excuse but the obvious to explain to investors why they are not in the market. IMO
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus