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With the Surface Pro, Microsoft Is Trying To Recreate the PC Market
An anonymous reader writes "An opinion piece at ReadWriteWeb makes an interesting suggestion: Microsoft's efforts in the tablet market aren't aimed at competing with the iPad or any of the Android tablets, but rather inventing a new facet of the PC market — one Microsoft alone is targeting. Quoting: 'Microsoft wants everyone to think the Surface Pro 3 is a tablet, but its pricing gives the game away. Microsoft wants to recreate the lucrative PC market that made the company billions of dollars by repackaging a PC into tablet clothing and then hammering away at the Surface product line until everybody believes that PCs never really went anywhere, they just got a touchscreen and a cellular connection.' This is also supported by the lack of a smaller Surface tablet, which many analysts were predicting before this week's press conference. Microsoft is clearly not pursuing the tablet-for-everyone approach, but instead focusing on users who want productivity out of their mobile computing device. The Surface Pros are expensive, but Microsoft is hoping people will balance that cost against the cost of a work laptop plus a personal tablet."
To Microsoft, everything is a PC which is going to run Windows and Office.
They've never really been able to see past that.
My personal desktop has never had Office (or open Office, or any office suite on it), because for personal purposes, I have simply never needed one. I use my tablet for infotainment and looking up stuff on the web when I travel. I don't use it for heavy work.
I'm not sure that most people want what Microsoft thinks is the tablet market. In fact, given the sheer number of less-powerful tablets out there that people are happily using.
Microsoft has ever really predicted much in the way of new markets or products, or led the way in innovation. They have mostly stuck with their tried and true "all roads lead to Office".
If I wanted a laptop, I'd buy one. I'm not convinced that what they're selling is what most people are looking for.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Don't think iPad. Think Macbook Air with a detachable keyboard.
This article about post-PC devices separates computing into "work", which it defines as focused activity, and "relationship-centric computing", essentially the digital version of social grooming. Phones and tablets are purportedly better for "relationship-centric computing", while PCs are better for "work". It appears Surface Pro is intended to be portable enough and to have a mode simple enough for "relationship-centric computing" while being able to shift to "work" as needed.
Price!
The steps from tier to tier for processor, storage, and memory options are too convoluted and expensive. Apple is bad enough when paying for upgrades, but this is even worse.
$129 for keyboard is insane.
They're a fantastic business machine. They really are.
But at the same time, Microsoft is losing a whole generation of users who are learning that they don't need Microsoft. I would argue that a lot of Apple's success today stems from the fact that they were the dominant machine in schools 30 years ago.
Kids today are running around with 7" tablets. Sure, they're infotainment, but they do everything on those tablets. Web, Skype, Netflix, they type up homework, and of course, play games. It is a major strategic mistake to ignore the 7" tablet market.
Dogged determination and perseverance?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Meaning it is best at neither. Just muddled enough to offend everyone.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Microsoft is hoping people will balance that cost against the cost of a work laptop plus a personal tablet.
I think Microsoft's target audience here started pretty damned small, and shrinks every day as "normal" tablets become more and more compatible with 3rd party peripherals.
Increasingly, I see people using a tablet exclusively, with some form of docking station to make it more convenient to use as a desktop device. They don't lug around a laptop and a tablet, they just have the tablet and maybe a PC back at the office if they need either some serious horsepower or multiple feet of screen real-estate. So okay, for more than the price of a tablet plus a PC, the top of the line Surface Pro 3 config addresses the horsepower issue, while still having a tablet-sized screen - Too little for too much and targeting too few as a bonus.
Don't get me wrong, I think MS has the right idea on this one, and may actually have led the curve for a change; but until they can also do it for under $300, they may as well not even have tried.
duh.
MS is leading the way to a place where you carry you computer all the time and just drop it into a cradle when you need a bigger screen.
Something that works for well over 80% of the populace.
I'm not a fan, but the iPad would be horrible to do that with. With it's in ability to shop more then 1 window at a time.
And I own an iPad, and I like it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I bought a Surface 2 (RT, not Pro), and I've been very pleasantly surprised at just how good a work device it is.
My uses, as an IT manager:
note taking in meetings with OneNote
reviewing documents (Word/Excel/PDF)
presenting (PowerPoint)
email (Outlook or Mail)
web browsing
cloud storage (OneDrive)
Remote Desktop (Citrix Reciever)
entertainment on airplanes: video, ebooks
Surface 2 does all of these well. Better than the iPad I had previously for the pure-work tasks, albeit somewhat worse for the 'entertainment' tasks. Since my focus for this device is work, I've really enjoyed it.
I think I'd like the SP3 even more, because I'd get all of the above plus Visio, although I'd have to check out the size/weight for myself.
If what you want is more 80% entertainment / 20% business, or if you are in a business where MS Office/Exchange/etc. are not critical, the iPad is hands-down better, but I think that for many business-types, Surface deserves a look.
Personally, the Asus Transformer got 90% of the way to what I was looking for back in the twentieth century. Microsoft's latest offering appears to go the last 10%. I'm a Linux geek personally, but I do need to be able to run MS-Office compatible software on whatever platform I use. Microsoft's pitch -- "runs all your favorite MS software on your device of choice" is actually a powerful incentive for marketing to professionals. If they are addressing the perceived shortcomings of the tablet form factor, I suspect they may well be onto something.
Not planning on ditching my Android devices anytime soon, nor installing Windows on my Linux PC's - but I can sure see a lot of professionals doing so just for the ability to more or less seamlessly integrate their mobile devices with organization infrastructure. I may not like MS software, but nothing integrates with a Windows-based infrastructure like MS-Windows - hardware platform notwithstanding.
The tablet PC is not new. It preceded the iPad and Android tablets by several years but the technology sucked. It's better now to the point that a tablet PC is workable and for my money, MS is proving the point well with the Surface Pro line. The iPad succeeded where the previous tablets failed because they reduced functionality down to media consumption only while taking advantage of the then more advanced technology to create a far more elegant design. It’s still not suited to real work while the Surface Pro actually is. I welcome it. I have an iPad and I hate having to switch to my laptop every time I think of some small bit of work I need to do. There is a huge market for a device like this among business users and less casual home users like me. I hope they succeed and if it brings them a windfall of new money. That’s exactly as it should be.
Sure, these kids won't need Microsoft until they get a job. The surface is for corporate folks that need a portable computer to do work and are aware that carrying a laptop will make them look out of touch (pun intended).
love is just extroverted narcissism
Try shopping on the interwebs. I have a Nexus 7 3.0, and have had no problems finding a wide range of accessories on Amazon and ebay.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
but I don't want a separate device just to do Office...I want whatever device I use to be able to run "everything I use" so I can combine stuff, rework, sort, juggle, scrape and reformat all that stuff into one coherent work output. If, like the Surface, the other apps from other suppliers are either not present or unusable with a touch screen, it's dead in the water. And it's dead in the water if I have to buy again software I've already paid for on another platform. And don't say Cloud. Cloud is dead because using it makes me legally non-compliant.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
They're a fantastic business machine. They really are.
How so? What fraction of business users have even considered Windows 8 and above for their desktops / laptops? Less than 5%, if that. A business machine that cannot run Windows 7 or Windows XP is dead on arrival.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Nah, there are hipsters and those who want a Mac because it has an image of cool that they want to emulate. The large majority of Apple users though are those that moved iPod->iPhone->iPad and have been tethered to that ecosystem for the past 15 years (or gathered into it at some point). Mind you, these are also people that have never used Mac's for work and are more or less forced to learn MS tools in high school, university or in the work force.
These factors aren't changing any time soon. Companies (except for hipsters in ghetto POS replacements, cash rich software companies, and graphics industries that are tied to proprietary Mac only products) generally don't invest in Apple for business, and I don't see that changing unless the value proposition changes significantly.
Where does this leave microsoft? I see their business pretty static for the long haul, and frankly, they should just adjust their business expectations. Not all software development companies can/should continually expand into new markets in the hope of increasing shareholder value. If I was MS, I'd secure shareholder value by locking into a holding pattern around product lines that make money while innovating incrementally sustaining their dominant positions in the markets they occupy. Constantly chasing the panacea of everything for everyone is and will continue to hurt their bottom line and errode their value.
Bye!
I can build a PC from components that can be purchased. If I could the same with a tablet then microsoft might be able to get somewhere with recreating the PC.
Let me buy a tablet motherboard, a tablet CPU, a tablet memory chip, a tablet enclosure... and then push a tablet OS onto it... and yeah... the tablet might become very much like the PC.
But if I can't buy the components to build one then it never will be the PC.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
> try out Integer Basic in an emulator and then try AppleSoft Basic.
Why in an emulator? I just run them directly on my Apple 2e. The Integer ROM is great because it comes with the mini assembler and sweet 16.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Looks like a great product if I only look at the specs and pitch. But unfortunately I already own a Surface with Touch Keyboard, and that has tainted my impression. The original Surface is slow, keyboard is doesn't work well, Surface needs a flat surface to actually work well, and the UX.
Improvements:
* Slow => fixed by using Intel.
* Keyboard => no longer the mostly useless Touch Keyboard
* I'm hoping it's actually usable in my lap
Still issues (general experience with Win8; 1 desktop, 1 Surface RT):
* UX: there's no way getting around it, Win8 is schizo. In theory, on a Surface, I would never need to go to the desktop. But I have to switch to the Desktop to change settings like sleep mode timer and the built in version of Office. Win8 will some time let applications will install tons of random icons to the Start Screen, but not include the important ones such as the actual application link. Weird.
Hover over Flash elements is a serious usability issue. It works maybe 30% of the time in touch interface, the other 70% I would have to reach for the keyboard and hover my mouse over the element to control it.
The color of tiles does not make any sense. The tiles waste too much empty space and the text is too small for quickly identifying applications. I'm not 18 anymore so I don't have eagle eyes.
Trying to restore even the Surface back to "factory" takes 2+ hours. Then at least another 2 hours getting it updated. Why?
A camal is a word used by illiterates like you
And there are those who want a Mac because the hardware is decent, well designed, and it ships with a Unix and a GUI OS that works quite nicely?
Shouldn't the credit for that really go to Intel?
It was Intel, who in order to ward off the perceived threats they faced from PowerPC as well as other RISC vendors, as well as x86 clone makers - AMD, Cyrix... that they invested more in their fabs and R&D, and did what they could to make their boxes the most cost effective. In the long term, DEC couldn't sustain it for long, and neither could HP or SGI. Nobody made not just microprocessors, but equally cost effective peripheral chips the way Intel did, and that's what saw to it that computers were inexpensive. DEC made a valiant effort w/ their Multias and SGI w/ their Indys, but nobody could really come close.
Where Microsoft did help was in making their software adapt for SMP, multi-processing, multi-threading & the like. While they did ignore making RISC versions of their bestselling s/w, they did make their software adapt for more multi-threading applications - as did other vendors. As a result, Intel and AMD could both toss more cores into a CPU and get appreciable performance boosts. But the other OSs - Linux, the BSDs, OS-X also made good use of this as well.
I had used a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 all through graduate school. It was great for me then because I did all my typing at my home desktop or in one of the university's many computer labs. I did not need a full computer to be mobile, especially when I've lost several laptops to damaged power jacks over the years. Now that I'm in the corporate world and need to be able to work on a report in a hotel or at a client's place of business, I needed something portable. However, I still wanted a tablet for personal use. The Surface Pro 2 filled exactly that niche. It's got honest-to-goodness Microsoft Office for when I need it and a pretty decent keyboard (if you disable the glitchy trackpad) to boot. At home, I disconnect the keyboard and watch Netflix in bed. The pen is even better for drawing than my Wacom tablet, because I can draw right on the screen. I'm a young, technologically-savvy professional. I'm the target audience for the Surface Pro line.
The Windows battle is largely over, and they have lost.
On mobile devices, which are the most ubiquitous form of computing on the planet today, they are effectively out of the game for this round. Their only shot there is to become the next big innovator launching the next paradigm of computing—something that MS has never been able to do before.
In productivity computing, a decade ago it was still a Windows world, but I've seen shop after shop effectively go Mac in recent years. First the door is opened—and once employees and/or departments are able to opt for Macs to do their work, the balance goes from 90/10 Windows to 90/10 Mac in the space of one or two upgrade cycles. Apple significantly outpaced the PC industry overall in unit shipment performance over 2013 (particularly 4Q) and this matches what I'm seeing in business meetings across partnerships—senior reps from four companies are in the room and now the Windows guy is the odd guy out and everybody snickers a little. Or you're in a multi-hour videoconference on GoToMeeting and the one guy that's sharing a Windows screen rather than a Mac screen stands out like a sore thumb. It's the opposite of what you'd see over the '90s and '00s.
But Exchange and Office remain ubiquitous—more and more people in business are using a Mac but their Mac is invaribaly outfitted with MS Office (because iWork simply doesn't compare) and their entire business lives are accessed from Outlook. Finding ways to better integrate mobile Android/iOS offerings into their Exchange/Office universe would open a natural space for strong growth and continued dominance in critical business infrastructure. The focus on Windows and hardware is a head-scratcher.
The most worrying thing for Microsoft is that I've started periodically receiving OpenOffice/LibreOffice/Google Docs/Drive word processing and spreadsheet documents over the last year or so. That never, ever happened for the first decade and a half of my life in business (since about 1997) and now, suddenly, I've received about 20 documents like this this year from people at five different companies—without anyone mentioning it or even apologizing ("Hope you can open this!").
I don't know if the investment required to make a plausible attempt at reversing Windows' downward slide in market position is worthwhile. I suspect it's far more important for MS to shore up and grow their Exchange/Office business. Nobody is really challenging them yet in this space, but if a viable competitor were to emerge, the forces and trends related to Windows now pull *away* from Microsoft platforms rather than irresistibly toward them.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
It still amazes me that you can't just run normal Windows on the ARM-based surface. The Windows kernel has always (well, the NT fork that is modern Windows) been built for multiple processor architectures. The whol C# infrastructure is as cross-platform in architecture as Java is (if not in CLR implementation availability). Ballmer must have really been off his meds when they didn't leverage those advantages to have "real Windows software" on the ARM.
But of course Ballmer's MS was all about ignoring the fact that legacy apps are all Windows has ever had going for it. People wrote for it because people already ran it for their legacy apps, and the cycle continued. Now what?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I have seen many combo products in my life fall flat on their face. Basically if you try to be both you usually fail at being either. At this point people want their tablets for the consumption of things too big for their phones. So books, movies, slightly bigger games, and better web surfing. Few people want much more than basic consumption. With their laptop/desktops people want to create. This means a bigger screen, great input devices, and enough horsepower to handle the tools as most people are in a hurry to create content for school or work.
So people don't mind so much if their laptop is a bit big if it then doesn't get in their way of getting things done, such as hesitating, not being able to run some critical work related application, or running out of juice. And with this being a business/school tool cost is not a huge factor.
But with a tablet most people are doing one thing at a time so sheer horsepower is not needed, plus they are doing simplistic clicking and swiping so more than a touch screen isn't usually needed. So they want battery life, they want lightness, and generally not being work related it needs to be cheap.
So it looks like the new surface is the worst of both worlds, a compromised battery, compromised screen size, compromised input devices, compromised ability to run all applications, and a huge compromise on the price.
So I suspect that they are going to aim this at the "mobile professional" the reality being that the mobile professional who can afford a dataplan will not be doing much along the lines of content creation as they have people for that. So for the mobile professional they will want the lightest coolest tablet or large screened mobile phone around, with gobs of battery life.
This leaves the non-mobile professional who should just buy a laptop or desktop.
But I foresee a huge number of bought off news outlets blah blahing about how the surface will change the face of computing, and I also foresee a bunch of 2nd rate broadcast TV shows where they pull out their surface to show the crime photos or whatnot and one of the second rate stars will say, "Hey that is cool, I didn't know you could click the keyboard on like that, how very cool and available June15th."
Not just business.
I use a surface pro for music production and live performance. It's the only tablet that can run a full version of Pro Tools (or in my case, Cockos Reaper) including VSTi's and VST's. I've written control programs for mixers using Cycling 74 tools and the touch interface is spectacular, not to mention I've got a keyboard right there built into the cover. Right now, I'm in the process of trying to get the WIFI n interface to offload effects processing chores (using ReaMOTE), but the damn thing has enough power that it can handle almost all of the native effects for live performance. I have friends who have tried to incorporate their iPads in music production, but the peripherals are mostly toys and the software consists of badly crippled versions of real tools.
I honestly don't understand why Apple hasn't come out with a full Mac tablet. Artists and musicians would eat them up.
I can't speak for using it as a business machine, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be ideal. As a creative tool, there is nothing else like it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Part of what killed SGI, HP, and other RISC vendors was the fact that commodity hardware became "good enough", and 3D graphics went from the realm of high end workstations to part of every single bargain basement PC. High-end SCSI controllers made way to "good enough" ATA-66 drives, then SATA drives.
Another part was that application makers ended up standardizing on Windows as "good enough", where before, they would make versions for Solaris, Ultrix, UNICOS, Dell UNIX, BSDI, IRIX, and AIX. At best, an application vendor might support Linux, but Windows has become "good enough" for most things.
"Good enough" is what describes computing in the past decade. Even though archival-grade tape drives are arguably one of the best ways of backing up a machine, hard disks are "good enough". ECC RAM was the standard for workstations, but it got dropped. Computer cases that could withstand almost any post-SHTF scenario gave way to plastic enclosures, as they are "good enough".
Things may change. Right now, there is so much lipstick on the 8086/8088 pig that it is a wax model of a race car, but eventually there is only so far that that architecture, even with AMD's 64 bit extensions can go. Eventually computing will move to emulating legacy code and using low level architectures with hundreds of registers, but it may be a ways away, especially with the fact that we still have not gotten to the "lets add tons of cores" phase yet.
The aqueduct?
Honestly, my only issue with them is the price. When you're looking at over $1k, I would prefer to just use a Nexus 7 for $250 and buy a cheap ultrabook for $400-$500.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Actually in the high end Automation and Smart building world most of us doing the programming use macbooks.
Why? best bang for the buck, and the ONLY way you can get a 1920X200 screen on a 15" laptop with 32gig of ram and enough i7 speed to run several VM's.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This is absolutely correct. I don't doubt the hipsters and the cool-seekers exist, but the fact that some people don't even grok that there is a whole archetype of other mac users says mare about them than the 'mac users' they claim to know so much about.
After ~9 years of a painful linux desktop experience I switched to OSX. Been ~6 years now and I've never regretted it.
Invaders must die
For a superior Apple 2 experience I recommend this.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
MS really did two things right early on. They made their OS easy to program to, and they supported every mishmash configuration of hardware and software that you could get to install. My mom's co-worker had three computers on her desk to do billing with; a Wang word processor, a CP/M machine with (IIRC) Visi-Calc, and some IBM monster with a flat-file database for contact management. To bill she would pull up the customer info in the DB, the hours billed in the spreadsheet, and type it all into the Wang.
When she got a Windows 3.1 machine and could copy and paste info from one app to the other it utterly revolutionized her work flow. It changed the dynamics of her entire office as well, since the bosses could now buy just one less-expensive computer per desk even the receptionist ended up with a PC. The economics of scale involved in putting a PC on every desk brought the price down to the point where a PC in the home was actually affordable.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Ruggedize these things and every lineman, every CCTV installer and every warehouse forklift driver will want them. No, I don't want to have to use a touch screen on my desk, but when I was out in the field I would have killed to have something as light and portable as this while standing on the top of a ladder.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
> For one, though you will undoubtedly disagree, they ensured the popularization the PC.
No. IBM associated their monopoly with the PC. Microsoft just took advantage of IBMs good name.
Also, Apple and friends established the microcomputing market. IBM just came in as a johnny-come-lately spoiler.
Ultimately IBMs marketing muscle and Microsoft's subsequent dominance RETARDED the industry and delayed the introduction of better hardware and better operating systems.
Fixating on Apple II misses Macintosh, Atari, Amiga & Acorn.
Compared to the DOS that lurked beneath any Microsoft product leading up to 1995, AppleDOS is not so bad. Even VMS is not so bad.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
No, they don't. There's the Panasonic Toughbook for the linemen, which is a multi-thousand dollar full laptop. The CameraMaster only works for analog cameras, which are a rapidly-diminishing portion of the market. The PDT/PDR/whatever devices currently in use in warehouses are dedicated single-use machines, again costing quite a lot. The forklift driver can't review the MSDS for the stuff he's moving on them, or check his email.
Yes, I've worked in all three industries, I'm quite aware of what is available and what is actually needed.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
If by "without a mouse" you mean "with a trackpad, like the Surface covers all include" then yes I have. It works fine. Touch is fine for reading the docs, but for creating them, yes, you'll want the keyboard+trackpad cover. That would be why Microsoft sells them. Crazy, right?
I run legacy Windows software on Win8 all the time. I really don't even begin to understand your complaint there. It works exactly like it does on Win7 except the corners of windows are sharp and the borders aren't transparent. Oh, and the RAM usage is lower due to page combining. What the hell are you complaining about?
Surface Pro runs Win8 Pro, which is perfectly compatible with Active Directory unless you're still running your domain controllers on Server 2003 or older, in which case you have *FAR* bigger problems. GPO works just fine. If you absolutely must, though, you actually can install Win7 on a Surface Pro...
I'd ask if you've ever actually tried using one, but your moronic questions make it pretty clear you haven't. Or that you are utterly incompetent at all things IT-related, I suppose. In either case, your post is valueless and irrelevant.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
News at 11. Glad to see the circle-jerk here is just as strong as ever - gotta reassure ourselves that MSFT is (still) on the brink of doom after all.
Some people don't want 2 devices for 2 separate functions; there's a real market for one device that can scale up when necessary, and the Surface 3 Pro is aimed at those people. Not everyone of course - some people enjoy having multiple devices, but a decent chunk, myself included just want one that you can accessorise into a full-on power PC if you want, which this does nicely.
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