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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.
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
I've stopped believing anything Microsoft announce until I can actually buy it in a shop.
I've said this before, and I'll probably end up saying it again. Microsoft is a "Windows" company. That is their product, that is what they sell. Everything they do is tied to windows in some way, INCLUDING Xbox (portability to Windows). This article only amplifies my point. Which is why Balmer needs to go, he's killing Microsoft.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
That is their belief, but it will kill them in the end. Protecting current profit streams has killed a great many companies and will continue to do so. RIM is dieing of this disease right now.
You got that backwards - OS X is made to run on everything that Apple sells. They didn't have an OS and invented a phone for it the way windows mobile was birthed. They had this vision of a phone and needed an OS for it. If you already have an in-house developed OS, modifying that is the most obvious thing you can imagine.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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
Being able to do something is VERY different from being able to do something well.
It's not about the parent not knowing the limitations (I don't see how you came to this conclusion). It's about the apologists who equate "can be done" with "the best way to do it".
I could write programs for my old Palm on the device itself, but that did not in any way make it a good tool for developing apps! You'd have to be some kind of masochist to use an iPad to develop an app or write anything longer than a short email.
In that sense, the parent is right. The iPad is first and foremost a content consumption device. That you can also create content isn't really meaningful as the iPad is a ridiculously poor tool for many (all?) content creation tasks.
Required reading for internet skeptics