Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
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!
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.
Don't have a full blown tablet I use the ipad mini aka Apple Touch.
Usage wise they are as you said a cool gadget for consumming content and writing short comments. If you want to produce content get a laptop.
That said they are great for traveling and if I was still in a job where I was spending a good portion of the month in a hotel I would have purchased a full blown tablet and carried that around with me in addition to my laptop.
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.
"Real work" is not helped by "exposing the OS complexity."
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
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
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)
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
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
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.
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.
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?