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The Story Behind the Demise of the Microsoft Courier Tablet
UnknowingFool writes "When the Courier project was leaked out, it was a bold look at how MS would design new tablets. Microsoft was currently selling tablets but they didn't make a dent in the market. The problem was it was too bold. According to the story Ballmer had two competing executive visions for tablets: J. Allard and Steven Sinofsky. Allard's vision was very different from MS thinking while Sinofsky's was more in line with existing Windows but was years away. Ballmer called on Gates to help and Gates met with Allard. Gates was apparently troubled on how Courier would not mesh with Windows or Office. The project was cancelled shortly thereafter. An interesting detail was that Courier was more complete than most outsiders knew. While there was no one prototype that unified all the concepts of Courier, there were parallel efforts in the different aspects of it."
I imagine that one of their complaints about the Xbox was that it couldn't be tied into Windows or Office either, but it ended up being a big money-maker. And even that has stagnated since Allard left the project. He was one of the very few "outside the box" guys that MS ever had. He was the one who warned Gates in the mid-90's that the internet was coming on big and that they needed to adapt Windows to the online world. He was the one who encouraged them to think more like Apple back when MS was still thinking "Apple?!? Ha, those guys will never amount to anything." The Zune was about his only misstep, and in fairness he was being tasked with an almost impossible thing there (catch up with the iPod after the iPod had already become the killer app).
Ballmer has been a shit leader at MS. And Gates isn't helping by still backing him. Losing Allard is just another symptom of the disease over there.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Yes it was a bold effort, but the first major player in the market often gets to set the standards other vendors must meet. Had MS pushed the Courier to fruition we would be looking at a very different tablet landscape. Obviously they didn't want to push a sub-standard product to market, but in the end I believe the Courier would have been a quality (and interesting) offering.
s/Microsoft Corporations/Windows and Office Corporation/g
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
for a content-creation-oriented user interface. The iPad is abysmal at content creation. Maybe MS could take its Courier ideas and use it to make a really spectacular, touch-based version of OneNote that could run on existing tablets -- any OS, not limited to Windows. Keep the split-screen functionality, just do it in software, not hardware. I'd buy it.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Yeah, that's a real game-changer there.
But we like the game as it is.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I've stopped believing anything Microsoft announce until I can actually buy it in a shop.
I could see the Courier coming back with Win8, maybe a dual release? A New touch friendly OS with a tablet to go with it? would make sense to me.
I've said multiple times that whenever Microsoft has a new product in the works, the only question that seems to matter to the upper execs is: "Does Office run on it"? It's the thing that killed WP7 (which is still in the basement in terms of marketshare, and has no chance of ever going anywhere). MS sees their entire business proposition in terms of MS Office. And that's what's going to kill them, because in reality, MS Office is a product few actually use, even though almost every company buys it. Most companies use Outlook, but few business users actually use the other parts of the suite. Word is dying fast; Excel is more and more relegated to the accounting department (from which it should never have escaped). MS Office is a product few people really need, but which most upper executives have convinced themselves is critical to their business.
But the spell is dissipating. More and more companies are moving away from MS Office, albeit at a glacial pace. And no one thinks that you need MS Office on a phone or on a tablet. Word/Excel viewers? maybe. But a full Office suite? certainly not. And as PCs will likely disappear from the desktops of all but those knowledge workers who really need them, so will MS Office.
And as long as Ballmer is in power, and Microsoft can't see past MS Office, MS Office will be the death of Microsoft.
One of the consistent items from the Steve Jobs Biog, was that he kept showing Bil Gates things like the iPad and the iPod and Gates just not getting it. So it does not surprise me
Microsoft over many years have built themselves a straitjacket called windows. They cannot do anything without seeing how it affects their cash cow, without realizing until recently it was strangling them.
I wonder how many other ideas generated from there in-house geniuses they hire every year has been strangled by there short-sightedness
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
My Courier met a disgraceful and ignominious end in 2008 when I was moving and realized that it was just inconceivable that I would ever use it again or that it would even have resale value. I was probably slightly wrong about that second thing (somebody, somewhere, maybe could have used it) but it didn't seem worth the trouble. It ended up in a box of stuff that went to a electronics recycler, and probably ended up poisoning someone in China.
FWIW, I'm glad Microsoft didn't end up tarnishing the once-very-reputable name "Courier." That name should be retired and always thought of with an implicit "US Robotics" prepended to it. What's next, Microsoft RX7? Microsoft P-38 Lightning? Microsoft Amiga?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Everything must standardize to Windows if Microsoft wants to remain the biggest player. Producing a product, no matter how successful, that is not locked to Windows would a marketing disaster. Microsoft's message lives and dies on the belief that Windows is mandatory for a product to be usable. Balmer made the correct decision.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
The iPad is abysmal at content creation.
Says who?
Millions are using the iPad for content creation every day - from drawing to music to writing to editing video. What honestly could the Courier have done you cannot do with an iPad and the right application?
I mean it theoretically had a stylus, but please. For art you can simply zoom in a bit more if you want to sketch finer details with an iPad stylus.
The reality is that given enough motivation to make quality applications, a device can become really good at content creation - the iPad has easily reached that point. Applications matter.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
One thing I forgot in the submission was Courier was missing email. I don't know if they could have added a client later in development though. In this aspect I would agree with Gates however I suspect that MS would have wanted not just email generally but Outlook specifically. From the article, Courier was using a heavily modified version of Windows that stripped out much of the existing UI. Adding Outlook would have been a huge effort.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The courier's form factor would have been a nearly perfect psychological fit to many things people use tablets for. It looks like an electronic book that can do all sorts of crazy "computer stuff." With the right software, it would have been perfectly intuitive as an eBook reader, notepad, sketchpad and several other things which would have endeared it to students, readers and business types.
I don't get how it would not "mesh with office." A company with Microsoft's resources shouldn't have any problem creating an Office Lite that has a touch UI. If they'd actually taken it to its logical conclusion with a solid phone, this very well might have done in RIM in the business market.
I know this is /., but a quick read of the article showed that Allard was targeting "content creators" like architects. One of the areas Bill pressed him on was the devices ability to get e-mail and the response was people had smart phones or computers for email, if they wanted to use the courier they could use webmail. It was meant to be a pc complement, except it was so "complementary" that it stood outside as a niche market item.
While the dual screen concept was very interesting, I think it was Allard that was short-sighted - at least in regard to how the device would be used. I think if you look at how the iPad and various other tablets are getting used, you'll see communication is one of the big features. If MS had released Allard's vision as (the article claims) it was presented Bill, MS would have taken a beating for not including native email and who knows what else.
I think Bill and, I can't believe I'm going to say this, Steve Ballmer did the right thing in this case, especially if Allard was so tied to his vision of how the device would work/be used and what it would offer that he wouldn't accept suggestions about where he could add functionality to bring it more in line with other company goals.
I mean, in my reading of the article I got the impression that the cancelation was less about aligning with Windows and Office and more about being a niche market instead of mass market device. I know very well that Windows and Office revenue streams get protected, sometimes to the point of strangling worthy new products, but if this device was really "all that" then it should have been possible to add those capabilities. I am left to guess that either adding that was actively resisted or there were other limitations that prevented them from being added, and if that were the case it would be an even bigger black eye. After all, if it wasn't possible to add those features, what else would developers not be able to add, and developers are another area that tie in to the Windows and Office revenue streams.
"Gates was apparently troubled on how Courier would not mesh with Windows or Office. The project was cancelled shortly thereafter."
Seriously? Yes, Windows and Office are huge cash cows for Microsoft and it wouldn't make sense to jeopardize that revenue stream. But guess what? If Microsoft doesn't do it somebody else will, and then you're going to be stuck in the same spot with no control over how it might upset the status quo. Sitting back and avoiding good ideas makes no sense either from the perspective of how it might affect your traditional business, or even more so in terms of the possibility of growth in a new area.
Windows and Office are an anchor ensuring Microsoft doesn't go anywhere but where it is now.
Take a look at http://youtu.be/GlpftPSuXe4 The big difference is that everything in the Courier is oriented towards keeping a journal of your content, whereas everything in the iPad is oriented towards presenting you with someone else's content.
Any by "orientation", I mean the whole panoply of user interaction, presentation, persistence, cataloging, etc.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
To say that Evernote "kicks butt" is a bit of an overstatement, don't you think? OneNote has the edge in organization (sections, tags); Evernote has the edge in cross-platform (web, mobile). Personally, I don't use either product, I use Zim because I need extreme cross-platform support. I only mentioned OneNote because that's an MS product, as is Courier.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I was very excited when the courier was announced, but also a bit skeptical about it actually making it into production. There are 2 things the current tablets are totally lacking:
- input via an optional stylus
If I want to scribble down a quick note, or sketch a drawing, doing so with my fingers is just not accurate enough- I won't be able to read it later on. An optional stylus would make this much easier. This is not even possible with most run-of the line laptops.
- killer application pre-installed. Even the iPad has not figured this out yet. Yes, there are apps, but I am supposed to dig through this "jungle" of apps to find what I want and need, and then pay extra for them. Productivity apps should be included with the device ! Focus on what a tablet computer can do that won't be possible with a smartphone. Take advantage of the larger screen ! A tabled computer is too big to use as a camera or mp3 player and uses too much battery as an e-reader. There has to be something else besides games !
Whichever manufacturer figures this out first will be setting the pace in the future.
One of the few projects there I thought was imaginative. Good thing Bill quashed or it might change Microsoft's image.
True, and they've already done this on a few occasions. They used to have Office mobile (it was pretty sad), but they had it nonetheless.
A new mobile version, even if it were new software that spoke OWA and basic office doc formats, would have been fine.
I don't get how it would not "mesh with office." A company with Microsoft's resources shouldn't have any problem creating an Office Lite that has a touch UI. If they'd actually taken it to its logical conclusion with a solid phone, this very well might have done in RIM in the business market.
Ah, but you don't get how MS works as a corporation.
They don't invent new products and then change the company around them. They go through their departments every now and then and look for "unrealised profits". Or they look at where other people make a fortune and ask themselves if they can get a piece of the cake, preferably the largest piece, without changing themselves.
That's MS greatest strength and greatest burden: It has never really changed itself. There is this strong core consisting of windows and office and everything that doesn't enjoy their company gets shot.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
OneNote is also superior in free-form note taking and information arranging. Click anywhere on the page and write/draw/annotate. Move your text to any place on the page. Evernote has a line oriented, top-to-bottom documents last time I checked.
Dick's claim [is] that Tablet PC was doomed because the Office team refused to make a version of Office designed around stylus input
And this is the original article from NYT: Microsoft’s Creative Destruction :
When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow.
The big difference is that everything in the Courier is oriented towards keeping a journal of your content, whereas everything in the iPad is oriented towards presenting you with someone else's content.
That is not even true with the default apps. I am presented with MY photos, MY videos, MY contacts I have stored. I see emails I have written, notes I have made...
Expanding out into other applications I use a number of note taking applications, and use a number of drawing applications too.
Yes I have a few videos on there of TV shows. But the large majority of my iPad is devoted to storing and displaying things *I* have made.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Come on, Microsoft. Is it sooo difficult to make a simple usable tablet? You should not run Windows on it, but a new O/S, partially based on Windows code, that has a different UI and your brandname apps recoded for this new UI.
Every average Joe with two bits of common sense can understand that, why can't you understand that Microsoft?
Also, it was entirely too serif.
This quote though really makes me think it could have been cool:
The key to Courier, Allard's team argued, was its focus on content creation. Courier was for the creative set, a gadget on which architects might begin to sketch building plans, or writers might begin to draft documents.
That is 180 degress from the iPad's model of being solely for consumption. I would love to see a device come to market based on that vision. Even the android tablets seem to be aping apple's hub of consumption model.
Zim is definitely NOT what I would call extremely cross platform. It works on Linux and Windows.
Evernote works on Linux, Mac, Windows, my Xoom tablet, and all my iOS devices as well as the web client if I happen to need Evernote from my Solaris machine. Evernote is a killer app (but it has plenty of room for improvement). Nevermind the web-clipper!
OneNote is a better tool overall (just in features), but it's lack of non-Windows support is a non-starter for me.
Microsoft's Origami from way back in 2006 was an even better concept that failed to take off.
Back in 2005 were two camps in Apple. One of them wanted to make basically a bigger iPod using a Linux-based OS, and it was led by the iPod chief Tony Fadell. The other wanted to repurpose OS X to mobile devices, and was led by the top OS X architect, Scott Forstall. Jobs had them do a bake-off, the OS X camp won. Forstall is now head of the iOS division.
However, there is the theory that Jobs was always going to go with OS X, but wanted Forstall to prove himself against other VPs before he was promoted to VP himself.
No email?! Allard should maybe be over at RIM. What kind of demographic is architects and comic book writers? what they don't communicate with a.... whats that word that allard forgot when designing this.... ah yes, paying client. the paying client wants an email of his spec house. It looks cool, don't get me wrong. But, this thing wouldn't last a second it doesn't do anything for the regular consumers. No email, go to the web to get it yourself, it's about content creation?
Wow. Must be nice to be so far removed from your customers reality to be cocooned in a little artists space, away from real products with real uses.
Consumers want fluff, they want stupid games where they can get an ego boost from tracing their fat American finders around a maze meant for a 2 year old. they want to listen to the newest formula pop star, they want to be in reality shows, basically completely brain dead idiots, that's who you design for.
If I was gates I would have took him out in a boat and done this guy fredo style. 2 in the head for wasting money and more importantly, time.
Just because you're willing to tolerate the deficiencies of the iPad in terms of productive content creation doesn't mean everyone is.
Just because you are too ignorant to know what the limitations even are, does not mean everyone else is...
Not to mention my MAIN POINT was simply asking what Courier was doing that would have made the situation any different whatsoever.
Try writing an application on the iPad
Ok.
As I said, ignorant.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm with John Gruber in respect to this history. Is really hard to believe that they have been ever close to release a product when even the internal teams were not aware of any of the design and software constraints by the others. If they were talking about a Microsoft branded PC or any other device with of the self components sure, it can be true, but with a device that requires such a level of miniaturization and custom parts is unbelievable. Aside from that, they would have used much of the Courier OS's technology in the last release of Windows Phone. How similar is Windows Phone OS to the capabilities of Courier?
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Regardless of if you or someone else is the author, nearly everything you mention is still content CONSUMPTION.
No. I edited the movies on the iPad. I edited some of the photos on the iPad. All of the artwork I created on the iPad. All of the notes I TOOK on the iPad.
That is CREATION. It's as much a tool of creation as my laptop - by your rules since you mostly browse a PC is content consumption only also.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Says me, I'm an iPad owner and content creator. I love my iPad, but it sucks for painting, writing, and video editing. It is, however, great for browsing and playing.
I am a content creator too. The iPad sucks at none of those things:
1) Painting.
Yes you are going to get a nicer device in a Wacom tablet. I am not a professional artist but do some light drawing and illustration, to the point where I bought a Wacom Cintiq.
And then I returned it, because I found I really preferred drawing on the iPad. The Cintiq was a pain in the ass, so many cables. Technically it was nicer but WAY overkill for drawing, instead I downloaded a range of iPad drawing apps and found a few I enjoyed using.
2) Writing.
It's called an external keyboard (although frankly I can type rather rapidly at this point using the on-screen keyboard).
3) Video editing. Again for simple editing it's not that bad.
For professional use, sure it's not going to replace a computer. But you are like the guy looking for one beetles in the tree in front of you instead of seeing the vast forest progressing far beyond the tree that stands in front of you. For most people the iPad is perfectly fine for those tasks, better in fact that a computer at some of them (like drawing) because how many casual artists even have tablets?
You do realize that an iPad stylus is just a pencil with a fake finger on the end of it, right? A Wacom it is not.
You do realize you can zoom in to a drawing to handle fine detail with a larger stylus right? I mean DUH. Have you ever even turned on your iPad?
Did I match your misplaced sarcasm properly there?
The iPad doesn't even have a proper file system.
Where's the goddam harness on this horseless carriage? Nor is there a place for my buggy-whi to be stored! Useless I say!
File interchange is being figured out. It seems primitive compared to what we are used to on computers but for real people it is FAR superior. The computer industry must evolve; it is time. Apple is the only one so far to produce a viable evolutionary path; we should be paying attention instead of ridiculing it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No Mac support? IDK what you mean? -- EVERY Mac is a PC; and every Mac owner I know has Windows installed alongside BSD, er, I mean "OSX"... (Mostly because they actually live in the real world, with real-world needs and requirments, and so their PC has to be able to do useful things -- i.e. be something OTHER than an oversized music-player/web-browsing appliance).
Thus every [useful] Mac IS Zune compatible!
-AC
The "insanity that is getting music onto an ipod"? This is the process: 1) plug it in 2) wait 3) there is no step 3. If your music isn't already in iTunes, then you have the additional step of 0) telling iTunes to import you music. Either way this is a pretty far-out definition of "insane".
It seems to me that tablets are inherently going to be kind of sucky at content creation. Of course, "content creation" is a pretty nebulous term, but you're probably not ever going to, for example, want to do web development on a tablet (you really want a keyboard). Same deal for composing music (seems like you'd need a MIDI keyboard). Same deal for simulated painting. Sure you can do it, but the capability is kinda limited without multiple levels of pressure sensitivity.
I'm a little confused by the reference to OneNote - doesn't it already run on tablets (at least, Windows tablets)? And OneNote is not really what I think of when I think "content creation". I thought it was mostly a note-taking application, although honestly I haven't used it all that much.
If only Microsoft were releasing a new version of Windows that runs on both x86 and ARM with a new UI optimized for tablets...
Required reading for internet skeptics
It's pretty clear by your comment that you've never used an iPad. You probably haven't ever even seen a person USE the iPad. The only time you see anything relating to someone else's content is when you open the App Store or iBooks.
Sure, they aren't going to make it hard to buy stuff from the Apple store on an iPad, but to suggest somehow that this is the only function of the device, that all UI interactions lead the way of purchasing somebody else's content, is just to again make yourself out as a fool.
Are they though, really? I don't think they really will make such a bold move.
They certainly are interested in talking about making this move, because Intel chips are way too hungry for tablet use. My feeling is that they are just announcing vaporware again, and Windows 8 will be just like Windows 7 with a different skin and more driver and compatibility issues.
What Microsoft says it's doing, and what it shows off as mockups and teasers, usually has little to do with what they eventually ship. I don't want to call you a sucker for buying into their vaporware bullshit schemes for what must be the 20th time for you (assuming you are older than 15) but there it sits, anyway.
typical Microsoft... if it doesn't do Office and Windows it's not a product... those morons. Release the product, get it into the market/eating up share first, then add e-mail. It's not exactly hard. That's how Apple have been doing it for years. Make something everyone wants, and force them to adapt their environments to bring it internal. Remember how everyone was going to ban the iPad/iPhone from their offices? then senior management stepped in and DEMANDED those products be supported by internal IT. (Apple has an app for that) and now they're making billions of dollars. Microsoft are morons as usual. Give the people what they want. When they then tell you to add something, add it. If they don't, don't bother.
Here's yet another example of truly technical users switching to Apple products ahead of the curve, truly embracing the terminal aspect for that work.
UNIX users have seen the future (yet again), and it's just fine by them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"used to"? There's a mobile version of Office 2010 included with every 7.x Windows phone. It's pretty good (or at least better than the office apps I've tried on other phone platforms) considering that this seems inherently awkward on a phone.
I like how you're posting anonymously and still felt the need to sign your post.