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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: Forget the iPad, Surface Is the Tablet People Want
zacharye writes "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer undoubtedly knows that Apple has sold more than 100 million iPad tablets at this point, but according to the outspoken executive, that's not the tablet people really want. While speaking with CNBC, Ballmer said no company has built a tablet he believes customers want. 'You can go through the products from all those guys and none of them has a product that you can really use. Not Apple. Not Google. Not Amazon. Nobody has a product that lets you work and play that can be your tablet and your PC. Not at any price point,' he says."
"Nobody has a product that lets you work and play that can be your tablet and your PC. Not at any price point,"
That's actually a true statement. Ballmer's problem is that it is still a true statement after Surface debuts.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
- too expensive
- too confusing (it's obvious that the iPad won't run Mac OS X apps, it's not obvious that the RT Surface won't run Windows apps)
- too late
(and I write this as a guy who'd like to replace his Fujitsu Stylistic Tablet PC w/ a Surface (Intel version, if it's possible to install Mac OS X on it)
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Microsoft has had their OS in tablets for years and they never took off. The reason: They tried to be both a tablet and a PC.
The iPad showed tablets work great as tablets, not PCs, and vice-versa, and in one year probably sold more than all other tablets combined in history.
Now Ballmer wants to do the combined tablet/PC again. Honest, it'll work this time.
You can do all that with a crayon, too, but I wouldn't recommend it. I've hand compiled programs into machine code with no more than a pencil and a legal pad. I've edited photos by coloring them in, or by hand-cutting masks for use in a dark room. I've written term papers with a pen and ruled notebook paper. And I have both a 1st and 3rd gen iPad.
You can do all those things on an iPad, but it's a painful, slow, imprecise process which pales in comparison to even the most basic laptop (like my 11" Acer Timeline), and is only slightly less arduous than a root canal when compared to a fully featured computer (like my quad core i7 with a 30"+2x20" color corrected IPS monitors).
The GP is correct - you can't do any sort of real photo editing on an iPad. Or general drawing,drafting, or handwritten note-taking for any kind of advanced or technical class that can't be done better with a pencil and paper. IMHO, Jobs missed the boat on creative types by not putting a Wacom-style digitizer over the screen. Lightroom or Photoshop on such a beast would be very cool indeed. As it is, it's no better than a crayon, which is what the best stylus is. Yes, I can touch type on it, but get into anything that requires lots of numbers or symbols and you will either become one with the shift key or decide that it's faster just to wait to get back to the office and type on a real keyboard.
I like the iPad, and it's passable for content creation or editing for temporary or low-intensity products. It may still be as good or better than the Surface. But, on average, it's nowhere near high efficiency for technical or detailed artistic creation.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
By this interview, Ballmer proves what I had suspected: that Microsoft doesn't understand why tablets are popular, and what tablets are for. And this failure to understand is why they are ruining Windows, by trying to make it a "universal" OS.
Tablets are not a substitute for a laptop or desktop PC, nor do most people want them to be. They are a more convenient and portable way of surfing the Web, listening to music, watching videos on YouTube or Netflix, playing simple games, doing Facebook, reading e-books, and so forth. They are, in short, content consumption devices. They aren't good at producing stuff, and aren't supposed to be. A tablet is not a "junior laptop" and when Microsoft tried to treat it as such with their previous attempts, they failed miserably. But nor is a desktop or laptop a scaled-up tablet; if it was, no one could ever get any work done.
Ballmer doesn't seem to understand that for the average home user, firing up MS Office is a rare use case, and one that is easily enough satisfied by a 6-year-old system running Windows XP that the buyer sees no reason to upgrade. As for businesses, they like things the way they are; many of them would still be running Windows 2000 if they were able to. Microsoft doesn't see that the fact that they would benefit by people spending more money is irrelevant; what matters is if the buyers see the benefit in spending more money. And when it does come time to spend, they have to demonstrate why their product is better than the competitor's. It's not enough any more just for them to show up.