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Microsoft's Killer Tablet Opportunity
snydeq writes "Advice Line's Bob Lewis sees ripe opportunity for Microsoft in the tablet market: Forget about outdoing Apple's iPad and give us the features that finally improve the way we work. 'The game isn't beating Apple at its own game. The magic buzzword is to "differentiate" and show what your technology will do that Apple won't even care about, let alone beat you at. One possible answer: Help individual employees be more effective at their jobs,' Lewis writes, outlining four business features to target, not the least of which would be to provide UI variance, enabling serious tablet users to expose the OS complexity necessary to do real work."
isn't Metro meant to be a one size fits all? And no desktop apps.
So if you come up with a world beating vertical app you have to go thru Microsoft.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
Help individual employees be more effective at their jobs,'
Really? Gosh, Apple would never think of that! How many other vague, handwaving ideas like that can they come up with?
Didn't Microsoft spend about a decade failing to get any traction with their windows tablet PCs before Apple came along and showed them how to do it right?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
All of my corporate clients have iPads, yet even the least informed immediately realize the limitations of not being able to run any real desktop or access the company files.. While consumers could care less, businesses will adapt anything that improves productivity while conforming to security's infrastructure.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
...How large is the market for such a tablet going to be?
The mobile professionals in need for more muscular arms or faster legs - either carry the extra weight of the batteries or to put the tablet in the dock to recharge it.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
consumers could care less
No they couldn't. Consumers don't care about accessing company files.
Vmware's got an app for that: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vmware-view-for-ipad/id417993697?mt=8
On the other hand, with a move to more web based applications you can now easily access your data from a device like an ipad...
Plus since the ipad doesn't store any data locally, it's less dangerous should it go missing.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I will say that, in my experience, the current crop of tablets aren't great at data input in the corporate environment.
I want something that I can write on with a stylus and it will, at the very least, sync to my outlook and preferably my document management system (Hummingbird DM, which to be fair is probably 10 years old now).
Reading the article I get the impression that this guy would like emacs org mode. Very similar ideas. The added bit is that he wants to embed other files in the document. And to top it all off instead of using a file as an outline, he wants to use a file system. That way you don't have to embed anything. It's just a normal file.
In spite of myself, I think it's a brilliant idea. I'm not sure why he thinks Microsoft will understand it. This is a Un*x idea through and through. Use the file as the lowest level metaphor in the system. Build tools that allow you to operate efficiently on files. I don't think it would be very difficult to implement. And I don't think it has anything to do with tablets. It's just a good idea period.
enabling serious tablet users to expose the OS complexity necessary to do real work.
Isn't the "real work" stuff like the "true Scotman" ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
I wholeheartedly agree. I believe the merits of these new table devices are their simplicity and, well, lack of thunder underneath their case. That's not to say they are inferior; they are well capable to fulfill their users' needs. But they probably pale if I compare their hardware to my full-featured convertible I bought four or five years ago. I should point out that it was heavy as hell, and its batteries barely survived the three hours mark.
I've also skimmed through what the article proposes. Well, actually, it doesn't propose that much. It's rather vague and I think, the author is oversimplifying many aspects. The devil in the detail might come to bite the author's ass if he ever tried to build such a system. For instance, what's up with the Triple UI approach he described? I don't know how he envisioned the details here, he's a bit light on that, but if it's anywhere near where I suspect he's trying to go (and I'm really guessing here): It may sound good on paper to empower the user with everything, but overconfidence may lead to people breaking stuff.
to provide UI variance, enabling serious tablet users to expose the OS complexity necessary to do real work.
Nah, can't be stupid shit. Sounds too much like someone's resume or some company's "mission statement".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You could say the same thing about their handset opportunity, or their MP3 player opportunity, or before that their PDA opportunity.
They have no special advantage here, they're late to market, they have a sort of half baked touch / non touch solution coming out, their software is generally badly regarded, their prices too high, second class maps, second class webmail, second class search.
Anyone of those could be a disadvantage, but to have them all in one package.
Put it this way, I wanted to track my stocks, I am normally a Visual C++ programmer, but I decided to write it in Java for android. It's just easier runs more stable for longer and the interface is better with touch. I would previously have written that for Windows, but there's too much C#, Silverlight, god knows what garbage on Windows. So Microsoft will go away soon enough.
But not yet, because it was still Eclipse on Windows that I wrote the app in, there isn't a good Android PC yet, big screen keyboard, port of eclipse. All of these would be trivial to do, but they haven't happened yet. So the end result is inevitable, it will just take time.
Advice Line's Bob Lewis needs to learn about computers. There has been windows tablets available for over 20 years. he has been able to go out and buy a Windows Tablet for years.
Hell right now even the new Fujitsu Stylistics are nearly the same price as ipads.
So what is this guy whining about? the fact he has not even bothered to look?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"Too many people are "STATUS" oriented, so they pick iPad.
It is the APPS that make the system!"
I love how you contradict yourself.
People pick iPad because it has the apps. android has almost nothing right now in apps. It's why you see businesses with iPads on the hands of everyone and NOT galaxy Tabs.
The android devs are getting there, but they only recently have had decent hardware to work on as android tablets from a year and a half ago were garbage.
But right now it's not "status" like you trollishly proclaim, but its the APPS.
Call me when I can send the display output from my android tablet wirelessly and effortlessly to the plasma on the wall in the board room. Because that is another killer feature of the ipad in business.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
TFA in other words:
It is mission critical to have a holistic integration on next generation value-added enterprise, while eating your own dogfood and leveraging the core granular competencies to bring the sustainability to the customers.
Bitch, pahhhleaz!
Too many people are "STATUS" oriented, so they pick iPad.
It is the APPS that make the system!
Doesn't the Apple App Store have a largest number of apps, though?
I know, it's a coincidence. Those people who picked Apple couldn't possibly have done it for any reason other than to look cool...
Amen. Plus I know a few business people who bring iPads to meetings, scroll up and and scroll down a few times and then take it back. They do nothing. If you really want a tablet for professionals and business people, make one with a responsive enough stylus with no parallax error.
"Americanizm"
Tablets have been called a niche item since the days of Tablet PCs - my killer tablet? What I have been crying for all along, a digital artist's tablet. This means a higher resolution screen (better than 1280x800 - try more like a full 1080p screen resolution so that most programs will work in portrait - and preferably in a 4:3 format), dedicated graphics (many digital art programs benefit from this), a Wacom digitizer, and a dual battery design so you can carry a couple of extra cells and swap them out without having to power down.
That is the problem most Tablet PC manufacturers made. They thought they could make a device for the business world that would replace the very low cost and versatile pen/pencil and paper. No tablet will ever be as thin as paper, so carrying a dozen tablets and spreading them out will never work (and there are many times when people want to look over several sheets at once and "100% zoom"). However, if they had focused on the artist and the art student, created a series of specialty pens that had the look and feel of traditional media (a square "charcoal/pastel stick", a fine brush, a wide brush, etc) then marketed it as "get unlimited art tools and supply for only $1500, and carry your entire studio in you bag" or "never worry about using hazardous chemicals to clean up, just click save and go" then they might have had a chance.
Anyway, there is my take on it. You want to differentiate yourself on the market? Think who would benefit from a pen input and design the system around them. I don't want an over-bloated eReader with LCD screen. I don't want a dumbed-down laptop. I don't want a walled garden of apps that only some single company wants to restrict myself to. I don't want a giant smartphone that doesn't work as a phone. I want a portable digital art studio, and I do believe that pen input tablets are the ideal solution. A shame not one company had the foresight to create one.
Early radio phones, even early mobiles were a disaster to use. A car phone wasn't always just your mobile in your car, it was a major installation.
Early mobile phones came in a suitcase. So... where did you leave all the stuff in your normal case? Carry 2 suitcases? Not very high powered right?
But tech progressed and right now with bluetooth headsets and voice dialing we are getting damned close to the perceived convenience of Star Trek communicators.
I think tablets are a dead end. The future is retina displays and neural input. It is obvious really, holding a screen and a keyboard in whatever combinations just ain't convenient. Laptops ain't any better, we just got used to their inconvenience. If you see some people type on a phone, you can easily forget just how fucking akward it is to use... but we move on.
I think tablets are the very early ancestors of anywhere computing. Not anywhere as in anywhere I sit down but anywhere as in on the move. Not traditional computing work tasks such as writing a document or doing design, but informational and entertainment computing. Google maps has completely replaced my need for a map. I used to have several. Recently threw them out. Don't need them. Not that I use Maps all that often but that is the real convenience, when I need it, it is right there, up to date and ready to use.
Music, movies and games. We used to have to sit down to play them or bring very specialized travel sets with us. With a phone/tablet, you can play almost any game, wherever you want, when you want. Yes, they are akward and simplistic and underpowered. But that will chance. I still got an old phone that can play snakes, compared to that, modern mobile games are a million times better. NEITHER is yet anywhere as convenient and reliable as old LCD games or as rich and powerful as PC games but... getting there.
I remember the Walkman... it was all the rage for a while and then it died. It wasn't until years later that personal audio made a come back with the portable MP3 player. Why?
Walkman's just weren't convenient with their tapes, it takes a lot of work to mix a tape and then you have the same limitted tracks in the same order unless you bring bulky tapes (check tape size vs MP3 player). Only the hardcore persisted, some bought mini-disc but the majority didn't bother.
Now the MP3 player is back with a vengeance.
I see a LOT of people with iPads that barely use them, they just ain't that comfortable to use right now or all that useful but that will change. Those cheap nasty headphones of the walkman (orange foam pads) have evolved into in-ear buds and massive headphones depending on taste. Tablets will evolve too. How? If I knew that I would be to busy being filthy rich to post on slashdot.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Android devs have only had something decent to work with for the last 12 months, and there are already many times more useful business apps on the android market than in the apple market, despite there being far less apps in total and having had less time to develop them.
The iPad is a status toy, anyone who thinks otherwise is just trying to fool themselves.
Apple makes gorgeous meticulously designed products that make people's lives easier.
To combat this, apparently Microsoft needs to produce something that will make employees more effective at their jobs.
Tablets do not represent a tool for longer term intensive use. They are for entertainment, casual computing and casual web-surfing. For that that perform very well. However, this is the only thing you can do well with a limited UI, namely no keyboard, no mouse, and limited power, but more screen-area than a smartphone. Apple already has all of these covered and in addition has the "lifestyle" factor so critical for a device you do not really need.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"Real work" is not helped by "exposing the OS complexity."
Out of all the users in my company, I can think of only 1 or 2 who even understand what a file structure is, much less make use of it. Almost everyone throws everything into the a pile in the My Documents folder. No subfolders. Most users want to be able to get to Excel, Word or any job specific app, and want it to open up to their most recent documents. iPads with keyboards would work great for 99% of them.
How about a tablet that just runs an X server - like the old X-Terminals?
For the business user they should have plenty of access to servers to run the software on - Linux or Mac.
Users are not currently expecting to run Windows on tablets so now is the ideal opportunity to get another product out there.
iPads with keyboards would work great for 99% of them.
So actually any notebook, notepad, subnotebook,... would also work great for them...
Actually, 99% of them need only a paper notebook and a telephone.
In love, war and slashdot discussions, everything is allowed.
Microsoft already had a tablet that would make employees potentially much more productive. It was called Courier, the internet was crying out for them to make it, and they cancelled the whole project.
unless it has automated access to every single aspect of your life.
Like every iPad I have used...
-- no sig today
I believe that using American as a synonym for illiterate is not considered politically correct these days...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Um, I've only been in the Android market for a few months, but sending anything to anything was already there when I opened the box on my S2.
Streaming video over WiFi was a breeze. Sure, my shite TV hasn't got WiFi but plenty of others do. Streaming video to my laptop with HDMI output is too easy.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
That was as much about the tablets themselves as it was about the tablet "experience" in the OS.
Yes, WinXP and Vista were NOT "tablet ready" in any real sense of the word. but then again, absolutely NONE of the hardware was really 'tablet ready" either.
I remember working with a "late model" tablet about 6 months before the iPad was announced. This was a top of the line demonstration model that we were testing for possible use in some specialized applications with the company I was working for at the time.
What was this tablet like? Imagine a 14 inch 4:3 resolution screen laptop from that era With the screen mounted directly to what would normally be the keyboard surface, and no keyboard. Just an ordinary laptop, sans keyboard.
It was heavy, bulky and SLOOOOOW. Prone to overheating when put in it's protective case, HOT and uncomfortable to hold when not in it's protective case and just generally difficult to use. And that's BEFORE you even start talking about working with software or the UI of Windows XP tablet edition!
The big "Sea Change" that Apple brought about was as much about the shitty hardware of existing tablets as it was about the inadequate UI. In many cases, it was MOSTLY about the hardware, as the old style win-tabs would turn people totally off before they even booted the damn things up!
In contrast, the Apple iPad was sleek, reasonably lightweight and uncomplicated. The carry-over of the touch and gesture-based interaction from the iPhone made it simple and largely intuitive to use, and it made tablets even more enjoyable to use than laptops or netbooks for surfing and casual use (which is what most consumers do with them anyway.)
So it's no surprise that the iPad did well. To be honest, even if iOS hadn't been ported to the iPad and it had used a more touch-friendly version of OSX it would have been a smashing success based purely on the hardware alone. Loading it with iOS and tying it to the App store just sealed the deal.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
You may find this agreeable.
Sadly, as far as the topic goes: Microsoft had their chance to revolutionize the tablet market, with the Courier, and they dumped it in favour of Windows 8. That train has already left the station. It would have completely decimated iPad sales if it had been released; when it appeared, the gadget geeks fawned over it as much as consumers later obsessed over the iPhone 4. Unfortunately MS thought the market segment was too narrow, and Billy G finally dismissed it on the grounds that it didn't have fucking Exchange integration, which is both ridiculous and could have been fixed in a later software patch. It was everything the Newton was, and so much more.
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Not only that, but Microsoft themselves have been there before. At the start of the decade, they were the ones pushing for "tablet computing" as a work-enabling tool.
I'm sure you know how that ended.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
I have a Asus eee slate right here.little expensive but I think it heads in the direction that will help.of course you will bash the OS, but it is still the corporate norm. This slate is an i5 core, completely wirelessand good sized keyboard, touch, includes stylus, and will run your office apps. I think is a good step in making all the right programs more portable.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
Well, Microsoft already *has* a tablet-ready operating system that will run desktop applications. It's called Windows 7. I happen to have a Lenovo S10-3t, a netbook that converts to a tablet. The bundled apps that take over the screen work ok -- except that the device itself is too fat and heavy to use as a tablet for long. The biggest problem with Windows 7 is that provides an approach for controlling desktop apps on a touchscreen that almost works, but which is throw-the-damn-thing-against-the-wall frustrating. I think *adding* UI features to run desktop UI apps on a tablet is inherently futile. App UIs have to be redesigned from the ground up for tablets.
What Microsoft has to do to make people sit up and take notice is produce a version of Microsoft Office with an appropriately tablet oriented UI. Since an office app is at best marginal without a keyboard, someone needs to manufacture a decently thin and light tablet with a an optional wireless keyboard. That should be an affordable addition. Bluetooth keyboards for iPads are dirt cheap; I bought my wife one that snaps over her iPad2 to double as a protective case for something like $35.
A typical word processing document has more content than will fit on the screen. Handling that efficiently and effortlessly presents a challenge to tablet UIs.I'd say tablets are the clear winner for content that readily fits on a screen (e.g. movies) and just as good as desktops for content in which navigation to distant parts of the document are infrequent (e.g. ebooks). But desktop UIs have a killer feature when it comes to navigating to distant parts of a document: the humble scrollbar. Scrollbars are going out of style because they don't work well on tablet UIs. The mechanisms for scrolling through content on tablet UIs work, but they're much less precise and convenient, unless there's a way to differentiate areas by content (e.g.. the scrolling mechanism in iOS for the contact list, which works impressively well for a solution that doesn't use a keyboard).
So a tablet version of office, running on a tablet with a wireless keyboard, would still be a little awkward. I think that could be fixed by having a scroll wheel type control on the keyboard, and some kind of on-screen feedback widget that would pop up in response to show you how far you are scrolling into a document.
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Hi, I used to be a complete skeptic when it came to tablets (not just iPads). Then, recently, I saw someone with an iPad + stylus + Notes plus in a meeting, just happily jotting down his hand-written notes on the iPad. And just watching the ease with which he could do that might just have sold me a tablet.
To elaborate a little: I dislike typing for note-taking, so I stick to the pen-and-paper approach but this means my notes are scattered across a number of notebooks (depending on which were lying around when I grabbed one for wherever the next meeting was). Being able to take hand-written notes that all end up on the same device, nicely browsable and printable - yeah, that can win me over.
Hi, I used to be a complete skeptic when it came to tablets (not just iPads). Then, recently, I saw someone with an iPad + stylus + Notes plus in a meeting, just happily jotting down his hand-written notes on the iPad. And just watching the ease with which he could do that might just have sold me a tablet.
To elaborate a little: I dislike typing for note-taking, so I stick to the pen-and-paper approach but this means my notes are scattered across a number of notebooks (depending on which were lying around when I grabbed one for wherever the next meeting was). Being able to take hand-written notes that all end up on the same device, nicely browsable and printable - yeah, that can win me over.
Is there any trouble caused by the rest of the user's hand resting on the touch screen?
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Enabling hand writing input anywhere one could bring up a virtual keyboard would be an incredible boon to the usefulness of a tablet for me. I can't touch type on a virtual keyboard, so I'd have to LOOK for the "keys" I want as if I were a two-finger typist. It would slow me down FAR more than stylus-driven handwriting recognition would.
And for crying out loud, spend some time on a diagramming tool that can "snap" to geometric shapes if you turn that feature on (e.g. You roughly diagram a box and a proper box shows up that you can then resize and reshape to fit, rather than being left with your unevenly scrawled lines.) But don't FORCE the diagramming UI to do that -- just make it an option that is the initial default.
In short:
I still want my Alan Kay Dynabook!
Wah! :P
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
This has to be about the most clueless advice I've ever read about how to build a better tablet. First of all, just about everything the author mentions already exists and has existed for years with Windows tablet pcs. Speech and handwriting recognition, having a filesystem, and the nebulous "The filesystem is the CMS is the PIM is the email client" already existed or could have easily have been built into the existing tablet pc ecosystem. If those are the features you really care about, why not just buy a laptop or netbook?
At no point in this article does the author acknowledge the importance of the defining features of tablets, namely that they should be portable, have good battery life, have a good screen and have a responsive and well designed touch interface. I consider these to be pretty much the essential basics when it comes to any tablet that hopes to be widely successful. Yet, going on two years later, almost no other company has succeeded in integrating these features into a compelling product despite having a template to work from. iOS itself is not that ambitious an OS. It's actually not the flashiest or most eye-candy-laden OS out there -- not by a a long shot. It doesn't even have the most intuitive user interface all the time. But for core tablet functionality, it is extremely good and is perhaps still unmatched in the industry.
You have to understand how the features of a tablet all work together to support the overall use-cases that you designed the tablet for. So if it is a tablet whose defining features are: (1) not having a keyboard, (2) probably held and used while standing up or lying down, (3) may spend prolonged time outside of the home or away from an outlet, (4) will be used under varying lighting conditions, then why do we see so many tablets these days that are bulky, heavy, have poor screens, and poor keyboards? I don't get that. This is working against your own best interest. Now, there are a lots of tablets that do more than an ipad in a technical sense but since they are such poor tablets they don't differentiate themselves sufficiently from a netbook or laptop to justify the costs.
I think if Microsoft or any company wants to beat Apple at making a better tablet then they need to acknowledge the unique constraints and opportunities of the form factor they are working with. Add features that truly leverage the benefits of a portable device. Aim for a battery life of 15+ hours. This is more than a whole workday because it gives you leeway in case you forget to recharge the device overnight from the previous 'whole day' of work. Find a good balance for security that sits somewhere between the locked down iTunes Appstore and the Android Market. Apps need not be rejected on silly grounds like conformance to a style guide or ease of use but they damn well better not be obvious malware or trojans. With the resources that these companies have it their disposal, how hard can it be to run each app in a sandbox with a monkey-like testing environment and monitor for anomalous outgoing connections to China or some place?
Every one of the major competitors to Apple have lots of cash on hand, well into the billions. If one is serious about tablets, why not buy up or seriously invest in every company that is trying to build reflective screen technology? There are whole classes of use-cases related to the outdoors that are poorly served by any tablet today. Shit, at a minimum, whoever gets this right can crash the ebook market which is a pretty significant market in itself.
Perhaps, I am a fool and this is not as easy as I think, but I never said it was easy anyway. And yet, the problem can't be money since Apple did not have the billions upon billions of revenue that it has now when it was designing the ipad. They just had a very clear idea of the device they were working on and what its purposes were. To this point, Amazon with its
You don't seem to understand my frustration.
My frustration isn't with the iPad, the iPad does what it is /intended to do by Apple/ fantastically well.
It is in no way intended for a business environment however. Those that keep trying to force it to be are just using it as a status object. The thing IS a toy. Its a toy for consumption of the internet, the same way a Nintendo Entertainment System was a toy for consumption of the programs written and stored on compatible cartridges. Neither of those devices has any place in a serious workplace. Technically the Nintendo could be used for displaying presentations etc(I saw this done once by the IT shop, coolest way to sneak a video game console into work ever), but it was in no way what it was designed for.
I bought one of the things for my aunt. She uses it to get email and check facebook. Which is the type of activity the iPad is good for. At the time the Android devices were far inferior in user experience.
The Galaxy Tab has changed this a lot and if I were buying it now I would be weighing my options much more carefully.
As you can see however, my frustration has nothing to do with the iPad itself. I personally don't like any Apple products except for the Mac computers, and those are on the way out the back door for me as well because they're moving towards a walled-garden approach with them the same as everything else. If however they simply provided me with an "advanced user" interface I'd probably have many more apple products in my own home.
Have you ever checked the android market? There are hundreds of thousands APPs there for users to download and they will run on tablets as long as they announce they support large screens (most people announce any size). I make games for android, and they were all readily available on all tablets as soon as they were released on the market... no refactoring was needed. The tablet apps you are referring too are probably the Tablet ONLY apps those are just a few indeed (assuming you chacked the android market and know what you are talking about... and not only mumbling some rumor you heard from some apple fanboy)... This caused a lot of confusion I guess... kind of back fired on Google.
Sorry, but despite dreams and wishes of the shareholders and shills, MS is not the company to use opportunities. They had a lucky break once and that was it.
The MS approach is to wait until they're sure a market exists, then enter it with a plan to outspend the competitors until they go broke. Seriously, I've been watching these jokers for almost 20 years, and I've never seen them employ any other strategy.
It'll be a very cool day in hell when MS takes on a market with actual innovation.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I have recently worked on a project that was about developing a tablet version of existing software. Target system was a x86 tablet under Windows 7.
Lessons learned:
1) Using the standard Windows GUI elements with fingers on a touch screen is difficult, because the accuracy is much worse. A stylus is better, but still inferior to a mouse. We (that is, our GUI designer) had to duplicate most GUI elements in double or triple size. After that, our application was reasonably user friendly.
2) Even when the application is tablet-friendly, you still need to manage your Windows settings occasionally. Which brings you back to the above accuracy problem, and right-clicking is slow and awkward compared to the mouse. There goes much of the usefulness of the context menus in the Windows 7 GUI. In short, it sucks. "Throw-the-damn-thing-against-the-wall frustrating" describes it well.
So I think Microsoft needs to re-design both the OS and the applications before Windows and tablets will be an attractive combination. Windows re-design is under way with Windows 8, but I'm not aware of a similar project for Office.
C - the footgun of programming languages
businesses will adapt anything that improves productivity while conforming to security's infrastructure.
ROFL
You've never been in a large corporation, have you? Politics and whatever the decision makers believe in plays a much bigger role than productivity, even if you manage to measure it.
The last company I worked for introduced the iPad into the company as an "information device for the top 50 managers".
Top 50 wasn't selected by who actually had the most immediate need to have an information device with them, it was by selected who the top 50 people in the corporate hierarchy were.
In other words, they handed out shiny toys to themselves. You could literally smell the ego-boost for weeks when you entered their offices and they were reading their e-mail on the iPad instead of the desktop PC that was an arm's length away.
That is how corporations select what to adapt. Playing golf with the CTO has ten times the chances of landing you the deal that presenting excellent performance measures does.
Yes, I have a low opinion of most managers. I've worked closely with too many of them. There are exceptions, as everywhere. The average manager could be exchanged with a 9 year old and aside from the redecorated office, nobody would notice.
And yes, there were studies about decision quality of so called top managers against random selection and kids. In almost all of them, either the kids or random chance wins.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
or any other "free" cloud services in which you are storing your companies files because you are not able to easily store files locally.
Says you. Fortunately there's no English language authority, only groups who document usage and meaning (ie dictionary folks).
The language evolves, sometimes quite rapidly. A great example of radical change over a relatively long time span is the word "nice". An example of change in a short time span is "gay".
In the end, the correct usage depends on the context, which includes the forum and audience. The TV journalist is probably ok with their usage of "begs the question" because they will be understood by their audience. A student in a philosophy class wouldn't get away with it.
They already did that 11 years ago. It was called the Tablet PC. It was expensive and sold so poorly-- the iPad outsold it's entire installed base within 9 months.
Depending on the application. Some will try some palm rejection techniques, but the ones I've used weren't the best and you'd still get some phantom marks. Others allow you to define an area where you will put your hand, but this is very restrictive and feels unnatural. But even if these techniques were perfect, writing on the iPad still suffers from its capacitive screen, in that the stylus must be large and chunky with no extra features. You end up zooming in very close to your text and writing very large to compensate. With a digitizer, the stylus looks and feels just like a pen. It writes with the same accuracy and offers features like pressure sensitivity. Further you can have extra buttons on the stylus for erase mode or alternate pen modes. None of this is possible on the iPad.
I agree with your first point, but the second and third are a little silly. It's true that neither of those features were shown in the video, but it doesn't seem far-fetched to add those back in through apps or updates. Tagging could be as simple as writing in a special 'title' field, or tapping and holding on a word in the document, then selecting 'make this a tag' from the pop-up menu. With theoretically sufficient OCR, you could even search through the whole thing. Similarly, creating forms and organizing into folders are pretty minor tasks. Given that the only material ever presented was a couple of concept mockups, it's not surprising that they focused on the unique highlights rather than pragmatic details.
But that being said, targeting artists and visually creative people was a very big point of why Courier was so brilliant. Instead of trying to target a completely different audience from Apple, the Courier would have slipped in and stolen Apple's primary target market away from them, leaving them with a restrictive, crappy consumer device as their flagship portable computer. In politics such an incredibly perfect opportunity to steal mindshare and audience away from your competitor rarely happens. Instead MS has gone after Apple's current direct target with a consumer-oriented device, and is trying to break into a market already dominated by a well-supported product, the exact thing that's protected Windows on the PC from being displaced by competitors. It's suicide; they've been trying to market tablet PCs running Windows "for the other 50% of the people out there" for twelve years now, and no one wants them.
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tbh 4 all intensive purposes ur rite sum ppl dunno wen 2 let go uv dat old skool grammer dis b 2012 only looser's wanna hate their dum and i don't want nuthin 2 do wit dem
That sounds like an ugly hack. From what I've heard, Lenovo solved that problem with its Thinkpad Tablet by using digitizer for its stylus rather than it imitating touch - so it can actually distinguish between stylus and your hand, and ignore the latter when stylus is active. It sounds like a better engineering solution to me.
Zero and here is why: Geeks think like geeks and NOT the public and sure as hell nothing like consumers. For those that may have missed it let me give you the opportunity to see through the eyes of the consumer:
A Phone is NOT a computer but "A screen i poke that makes calls, plays angry birds and lets me Google and comes with my contract" which is why they don't care how locked down it is, they toss when they get a new contract and figure since phone A is different than phone B nothing will work from one to the other but the SIM card.
A tablet is NOT a computer but "A big phone I can't call on that I poke that surfs and lets me watch movies" so they will have NO desire to run Windows on it, because windows runs on computers and that is NOT a computer.
Finally the reason Linux and ARM are failwhales on the netbook space is because there is no such thing as a netbook it is instead a "baby laptop and babies can do everything a big computer can do only slower, because babies are smaller than big people" got it?
So MSFT can shoot themselves in the face with Windows 8, aka "Ballmer wants to be Apple so damned bad he's gonna fuck the desktop trying to build a WinPad" all they want, it just won't matter. to the public MSFT makes ONE thing, and that is "The thing that lets me run my programs and has a keyboard and is called Windows" and frankly they don't have a fricking clue if its XP or 7, its just Windows. MSFT has been trying to sell tablets for a decade now and gotten nowhere because people are hostile if you break their perceptions. i have allowed over 200 customers to play with Win 8 here at the shop and down to a man THEY ALL HATE IT because "That's not Windows its a cell phone!" and therefor isn't what they expect nor want. Pads and cell phones are supposed to act like phones and NOT like Windows, and when they hear the word "Windows" they want a desktop or a laptop/"baby laptop" and THAT IS IT.
So all the Linux guys can quit freaking about "ZOMFG they are locking down Win 8 so I can't hack it" because this thing is gonna make MSFT Bob look like a good idea. the quicker MSFT just accepts they are the new IBM, with a well paying niche they are gonna be in forever, the better. because if people want an iShiny they'll buy an iShiny and if they want Windows they damned well better get a keyboard and mouse/trackpad with the thing along with a desktop and start button or they WILL be pissed.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
android has almost nothing right now in apps
That's BS right there. Care to name any useful app that iOS has but Android does not?
God don't ever go down to the southern delta bottoms then bud, your head would asplode! There a sentence like "I'ma fixing ta get right on that, probably tamarrah" would be perfectly acceptable. What many have labeled "ebonics" is simply MS delta bottom speech which if you don't know how "is and be" replace about a dozen words depending on context you'll probably need a translator. Hell I've lived in the south all my life and even i need a translator once I get around Yazoo MS.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I work for a company big enough that my CEO could get the ear of Steve Jobs. Mr. Jobs told him that he did not care about our corporate purchases. That was nearly 2 years ago. The market and the strategy have proved him correct.
Businesses of almost any decent size always seem to think that their "buying power" entitles them to discounts. As Apple has proven, if you make a product that everyone wants, it will find its way into the corporate world. Not only did Apple not give any discounts, they charge a premium for their products and got one of the largest corporate quarterly profits in history as a result. Kudos.
Everyone wants their iGadgets to be usable in the corporate world. But allowing corporate data onto those devices is a nightmare in the making. Because they are owned by the individual, not the company, pushing policy to them is not acceptable. Allowing unfettered, unencrypted access to the corporate network is just not possible. How many unencrypted lost devices with GBs of customer data have to be lost/stolen before everyone accepts that as fact?!
Along comes portable device virtualization. This is coming soon for Android devices. I don't know about iOS. When robust enough, users can opt to allow a virtual corporate "machine" to be created on their own device. That virtual device within the physical device is then given the necessary access. Pushing policy (like forced encryption, 30-second screen-lock timeouts, etc.) can be done. If the device is lost, then that virtual portion can be remotely wiped. No harm.
That's the future of personal portable devices. I don't want corporate control over my personal devices, so I have both a company phone and a personal phone. Clunky because I carry them both around. Once I can go corporate-virtual, I will ditch the company physical device and be that much happier. Consumers will be that much happier too since they can get a new personal device whenever they want, rather than being limited by company policy (or politics) as to when they can upgrade.
So MS (and any other company) will be forced to compete with Apple at the same level. There is no providing the functionality that Apple doesn't. The market does NOT want another device. They want ONE device - And one device only - that gives me corporate and personal capabilities, but also keeps them separate. And companies want to know that their data is secure.