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Will Microsoft Release Its Own Windows 8 Tablet?
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft isn't exactly known for its hardware prowess. Sure, it's churned out plenty of nice mice, keyboards, and game controllers over the years, but success with actual devices has been mixed. The Xbox 360 has exceeded all expectations, while the Zune and Kin hardware have been monumental failures. According to industry sources in Taiwan, however, Microsoft is working on a Windows 8 tablet that will be powered by Texas Instrument's next-generation 1.8GHz dual core processor."
The 360 has exceeded all expectations?
Except the whole paying for the debt the Xbox left them with.
Seems you are uninformed. They hire in plenty of international employees. I'm not American btw, I don't care about such patriotic/racist sentiments.
which is totally what she said
Other Taiwan-based OEMs are also rumored to be assisting in the manufacturing process.
All American? Those days are long gone (and not just for Microsoft). Buying based on a US corporate logo isn't going to guarantee any American jobs (besides Ballmer's, and that's up for grabs as well).
The only difference between Apple and Microsoft is that the latter's O/S is going to have more end users committing suicide instead of Foxconn employees.
Have gnu, will travel.
If they expected to be 3 billion in the red.
Christ, and the iPod nano comes in piss yellow. Grow up. The Zune was released in red blue green pink black white and brown. Brown is the color of our earth, our eyes, our hair, and our skin. That you immediately associate it with fecal matter tells more about you than the Zune.
What they need to do is what the current overwhelming market leader did, namely, make a touch centric operating system from the ground up
The current market leader (I assume you mean Apple) didn't make a "touch centric OS" from the ground up. They took OS X - heck, they even took the same UI framework! - and they polished it into something very touch-friendly. In other words, precisely what you decry as "not working".
The trick is in doing it right.
Video would likely be decoded by a separate chip anyway, as it already is on all current tablets.
Microsoft has a long history of letting its hardware partners take all of the risks. That's a fine strategy if you want to sell a bog standard PC. It is a much less workable strategy if you want to make some sort of unique device. In the past, however, Microsoft has been the only game in town when it came to workable off-the-shelf OS software, especially if you wanted to play well with Windows.
So the OEMs took Microsoft's software and did all of the actual engineering to make it actually work. If the device was a flop they were left holding the bag with the unusable hardware and the bill for the engineering effort. If the device was a success, then it was a given that Microsoft was going to shop your ideas around to your competitors. After all, most of the software that made your device work belonged to Microsoft. Microsoft got paid per device sold, and so they were happy to encourage cut throat competition on the hardware side. This guaranteed that there was a disincentive to actually innovate as companies like Dell, that made their money by cloning other people's ideas and squeezing the supply chain until it bled, dominated. Why innovate if Dell and Microsoft are going to make all of the money borrowing your ideas? Every once in a while someone would come up with a new device based entirely on their own software (Palm, Rim, etc.), but they invariably faced lots of pressure and competition from Microsoft and its OEMs.
The combination of Apple's design prowess and the emergence of Google's android have broken this cycle. Apple has the design genius to create entirely new devices that people want, and the existence of Android means that Apple's competitors have a ready-made OS that doesn't require that they work with Microsoft. Now Microsoft realizes that it needs to get into these new markets, but none of its traditional allies are willing to risk working with Microsoft's software. Heck, HP even has its own software for these devices. Nokia is allied with Microsoft now, and in fact, it has bet the business on Microsoft's software, but they are too busy trying to make a Windows phone to be relied on for a tablet.
So Microsoft gets to take its own risks now. It should be interesting. Microsoft learned a lot from the XBox. It is even possible that they won't lose billions of dollars this time.
Well cooling off a 3.6 GHz processor might be harder especially in a mobile device. Also the shift towards parallel processing is not so much what you do but what background processes run like constant notifications.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I'm not entirely sure if those numbers are *JUST* the xbox. Microsoft has typically mixed the xbox in with other losing products like the webtv, and other crap so the division that xbox has been in has been unprofitable. Those numbers are also a year old, and xbox has been doing QUITE well in the last year.
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Nothing personal, but you need to take a basic accounting class before you talk about this stuff. Really.
The division that includes the XBox has been profitable since the original XBox was retired because Microsoft went through a whole pile of accounting tricks to make sure that all of the large expenses happened before that arbitrary date. For example, Microsoft essentially pre-paid nearly $1 billion for promotion instead of paying for campaigns as they came up. Microsoft also wrote off another $1 billion for hardware returns.
The hardware return writeoff is especially interesting. Normal people, like you and I, know that Microsoft doesn't actually incur any costs until they have to fix your broken XBox 360. However, because of accounting tricks Microsoft could say (on the books) that it had already lost the money that it took replacing hardware. So the XBox division got credit for new sales, but it did not get dinged for returns. Instead of years of red ink, on paper Microsoft had a few *horrible* quarters and then moderate returns. This might make you feel better if you aren't very good at math, or if you are a fan of Microsoft's gaming system, but the end result is the same. Microsoft is still in the red overall on the XBox 360, and the best it could manage was a distant second place. Heck, Sony might even pass then for that honor.
Personally, I think that Microsoft had to do what it did, and it still could easily end up with a win, but talking about quarterly profits from the XBox division is just ignorance. Microsoft's investors have took a beating on both XBoxes, and I am sure that a lot of them are very wary about Microsoft making more hardware.
Take a real look at them. They didn't suck in comparison to their competition.
I beg to differ. They were ugly, heavier than ipods of similar specs, and the interface was less intuitive. Together, that counts as suck. And the Zune HD had piss poor third party support, and the apps that were on it took too long to load with some even requiring full page video ads to be viewed before they would even start up. Yes, that sucks when the iPod touch is so much better.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
. I mean, to turn desktop Windows into a true tablet OS is going to require a complete redesign of the entire shell to make it touch centric. Everything from the File Explorer, the file picker, control panel, mmc, so on and so forth.
That's true. But, did you see the Win8 demo video? That's precisely what it shows. The old stuff is still there, but tucked far away, for the benefit of legacy apps you might want to run who expect to work in that environment. The new shell really is new, and unabashedly touch-centric (that whole tile thing).
Then, in order for it to compete with iOS and Android, you'll have to significantly reduce its system requirements or the other guys will just walk all over you with cheaper hardware and a similarly fluid and fast system for a lower price.
True. Hence ARM support (this is the crucial part of "cheaper hardware", and also a big deal for battery life).
And when you're done with all of that, do you really have "desktop" windows anymore? No. Not anymore than Android is desktop Linux or iOS is desktop OSX.
Well, you still have the same OS, and largely the same userland except for highest-level UI... so yes?
I guess it depends on perspective. If you're looking at it as a user, you really don't care about kernels and versions and such stuff - only about what you see on the screen. In that sense e.g. iOS and OS X have pretty much nothing in common. If you look at it as a developer, you know that, in fact, there are a lot of shared things there, including all the core parts.
Not right away ... it'll take about a week before it runs Linux.
Has it already become so obvious to the OEMs that WinTab 8 will be such an mind-boggling disaster that the only way MS can get it out to the marketplace is to make the hardware themselves? At which point aren't the traditional hardware OEMs going to start having second thoughts about supporting Microsoft on their other product lines?
Nokia's already feeling the burn from having joined themselves to the hip with Redmond, seeing their market freeze while consumers wait for whatever hybrid spawn the two produce, or just running to the other mobile platforms (Android/RIM/IOS). I'd have to think tablet makers debating whether to work with Windows are having their minds made up for them.
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How about at the Macworld keynote? Not consumer facing enough? Try the original iPhone website.
You left out the most important word of his statement....yet.
Now that they are coming out with their own tablet and a tablet-centric UI for the next version of Windows, you can damn well bet the Office devs are cranking away at touch-friendly UI's for the Office suite, as well as many other MS developers getting touch-friendly UI's in place for all the big-name MS apps.
I predict now that we'll see Office, Works, IE, Outlook Express, Media Player, and hell probably even MS Paint and Notepad (cuz, seriously, I don't think they'll ever abandon those....) with new UI's designed specifically for tablets.
Not to mention all the popular third-party apps out there that will be redesigned as well, same as what happened to many popular third-party apps for Mac when Apple released iOS.
Windows 8.0 BingPad Professional Edition with Windows Live for Tablets
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Now that they are coming out with their own tablet and a tablet-centric UI for the next version of Windows, you can damn well bet
No you can't "damn well bet" anything. MS' Windows people have been beating the tablet drum for a decade and the Office team have basically gave them the collective finger.
Not to mention all the popular third-party apps out there that will be redesigned as well, same as what happened to many popular third-party apps for Mac when Apple released iOS.
Believe whatever you want to believe, I guess.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
I'll wait for service pack 2..
MS: Hey, we are comming with Win8, it will run on tablets.
OEMs: Ok, call us when you have something.
MS: Hey, you'd better pay attention, or Windows may become more expensive for you.
OEMs: Ok, we are paying attention. Do you have something to show?
MS: Yes, your hardware must meet that spec...
OEMs: That's insane, it will be too expensive! Nobody will buy it!!! Is that all you propose?
MS: No, you also must get processors only from manufacturer X.
OEMs: <Strong laughs>
MS: Hey, we are serious!!!!
OEMs: <Hangs the phone, laughing>
MW: Ok, it seems we'll have to roll our own hardware.
Rethinking email
The Kin was killed because it failed to sell. The fact that the Windows Phone guys had political issues with the phone does not change that all-important fact. If customers would have wanted Kins, Microsoft would still be selling them.
I do agree that, at least to a certain extent, Microsoft stopped selling Kins because it was afraid that the stigma from the Kin's failure would rub off on Windows Phones in general. However, at this point, Windows Phone 7 is out, and it is still getting trounced. Heck, the only reason that we even mention Windows Phones and Windows Tablets in the same sentence as Android and iOS is that Microsoft can afford to pour billions into R&D while still losing.
Microsoft's hardware partners, on the other hand, do not have that luxury. Nokia has already bet its future on Windows Mobile, but I don't see it making a tablet any time soon. The rest of the hardware manufacturers are not likely to get into bed with Microsoft. Android is a safer bet, and besides the OEMs know that even if they came up with a Windows design that sold well Microsoft would just turn around and help Nokia (or Dell) duplicate the device. At least with Android they have *some* design leeway. Heck, most of Microsoft's traditional hardware allies either already have an Android device, or (in the case of HP) they have their own mobile operating system.
If Microsoft really wants to get an Arm-based tablet made, they are likely going to have to pull an XBox and make it themselves.