MS Hypes Win7 Tablets For CES — Again 188
jfruhlinger writes "About a year ago at this time, we were all hearing exciting news about Windows-based tablets that Microsoft would be unveiling at CES. They would transform the industry and strangle the iPad in its cradle! Well, now the hype machine is starting again, for the same products that never materialized last year. This time around, though, the market has changed so much so quickly that Microsoft's tablet bid isn't cutting edge; as Ryan Faas points out, it's desperate."
Fool me once (Score:5, Funny)
It's like George Bush said. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice. . .you can't fool me again.
Re:Fool me once (Score:4, Funny)
I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It’s a world of madmen and uncertainty
and potential mental losses.
Rarely is the question asked
“Is our children learning?”
“Will the highways of the Internet become more few?”
“Do you have Blacks in Brazil?”
“Why dont’t the French have a word for ‘entrepreneur’?”
How many hands have I shaked?
They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pant leg of opportunity.
I know that the human being and the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope,
where our wings take dream.
Put food on your family!
Knock down the toll booth!
Make the economy gooder!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher! Make the pie higher!
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Snopes says those are all actual quotes from our dear ex-president. Idiots say the darndest things, don't they?
Re:Fool me once (Score:4, Informative)
Hilarious, yes, but still a totally false equivalency. Barry is nowhere near as retarded as Bush. You got one quote. One. Those Bush quotes aren't even the tip of the iceberg. Dude was DUMB, man. Fucking stupid. Calling him retarded is an insult to the mentally challenged. There's a guy working down in the lobby of my building selling popcorn as part of a special needs program. He'd make a better president than Bush did.
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Bush is a calculating politician who knew how to play on his strengths to win the office twice.
I think you've got Bush mixed up with Karl Rove and Dick Cheney.
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Fool me one... shame on, shame on me. Fool me twice, fool me can't get fooled again.
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I have a suspicion that halfway through that recitation he realized that the next words were "Shame on me" and tried to avoid saying that. A three word clip of Bush saying "Shame on me" would be very popular with certain media.
A classic case of putting the mouth into gear before engaging brain.
Microsoft's relevance... (Score:2, Interesting)
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with how many distros are out there, the QA departments of game companies would have to be beefed up like crazy.
Which is why a company like Opera has no chance whatsoever of being able to distribute a browser in binary from for Linux. Oh, wait...
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Admirable, but a browser is still this far behind from today's game complexity that it would be like comparing Emacs to Halo.
Ok, ok, car analogy... hmmm a course bicycle to a Ferrari?
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Admirable, but a browser is still this far behind from today's game complexity that it would be like comparing Emacs to Halo.
Ok, ok, car analogy... hmmm a course bicycle to a Ferrari?
That is entirely incorrect. A browser makes heavy demands of its host operating system including audio and video. About the only thing browsers don't do much is 3D graphics. Backing away from the browser example, 3D graphics is highly compatible across Linux systems because it is entirely based on freedesktop/Mesa.
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I'm sure it's not as easy as Windows but it's lazy developers and profit hungry publishers that stop games from showing up on Linux and nothing else.
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I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that simple games are easier to port than big ones.
I know, I know, crazy talk.
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Consoles long ago stole the crown of premier gaming platform.
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You seem to forget about PC Gaming. Porting to *nix would suck. I love *nix and all, but lets face it, with how many distros are out there, the QA departments of game companies would have to be beefed up like crazy.
You know... this argument is thrown out all the time and I don't think it holds water. If someone were really concerned that their game would not run on some specific software configuration (that's all distros are... where are my files again?) they could package their own libraries for their game into their own ./lib folder like they sometimes do with Windows. All that you need to specify is what minimum version of the kernel you need and that you use nVidia's binary drivers or ATI's... pretty much anyone
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You seem to forget about PC Gaming. Porting to *nix would suck. I love *nix and all, but lets face it, with how many distros are out there, the QA departments of game companies would have to be beefed up like crazy.
they could start just supporting Ubuntu, it is easy to set up, even some extremely comp-illeterate people could install it with a few pointers these days. All the cool kids running fedora/slackware/roll-your-ownix can easily set up a seperate ubuntu install for games, should the games in question not run on their system, in a quarter of the time it would take to set up a dual boot windows install for games, never mind the financial cost
Debian and ubuntu derivates would also be pretty easy to support, if per
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Too late, Windows instances are being funneled into VMware clusters at a high rate, at least in my data centers here in enterprise land. The population of Windows instances also land on some dedicated blade servers, but not many in the big picture. The future of Windows in the enterprise looks to be one of the many hosted OSes in the VMware framework. Being slightly more work to care for, they will eventually phase themselves out of the data center in the long-run, being relegated to the desktop, if at a
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Mac? And PHP?
Glad you're paying your bills with it, but that's pretty lame. Non-compiled server-side languages, yeeeuck!
If you don't have a Mac? More like 'If you don't NEED a mac' (For a Linux box? What's the point of paying that much more for the same intel hardware that you could get on any off-the-shelf windows rig for significantly less?)
WebOS? (Score:2)
Makes me wonder what happened to the rumored HP WebOS tablet.
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http://www.informationweek.com/news/smb/mobile/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228800597&subSection=News
Todd Bradley, the head of HP's Personal Systems Group, announced on August 20, "You'll see us with a Microsoft product in the near future, and a WebOS-based product in early 2011."
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It's being recalled due to a firmware backdoor password security problem!
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Still slated for springtime 2011 release last I heard. I'm fairly excited about it, for all of Palm's faults, WebOS really was something.
UI Upgrade? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:UI Upgrade? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:UI Upgrade? (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone mod parent up about WIMP !
As a game programmer, designer, and the UI work I've done, I've found the exact same thing. Right-Click. Nope. Tooltips. Also can't do those on a touchscreen. Vertical/Horizontal scroll bars? Functionally the user can "scroll" by dragging _anywhere_. The more I use iPhone apps, the more I am impressed with the set of controls, and the SDK Apple has provided. Just the screen lack of screen real estate forces you to consciously priority WHAT and HOW MUCH info you show to the user.
The Nintendo DS can use the IMP* metaphor because you have a touch pen. Finger touch-screen needs to use IM** metaphor.
WIMP = window, icon, menu, pointing device
*IMP = icon, menu, pointing device
**IM = icon, menu
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Putting any of these WIMPy (scuse pun) OSes on a tablet and trying to use it like a desktop/laptop is destined to fail.
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I am writing this with a pen on my tablet with Windows 7 loaded on it. Not everything that can be done with a pen works with a finger based touchscreen, but some things would still be OK. You can do a right click by pressing and holding for about a fifth of a second. This is also done on the iPhone. The pen allows for doing it quicker with a button on the side, but this obviously wouldn't work with a finger unless you are willing to have hand surgery!
However, you don't need to use the context menu as much a
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The pen allows for doing it quicker with a button on the side, but this obviously wouldn't work with a finger unless you are willing to have hand surgery!
The funny part about this is that I always thought you had to have re-constructive surgery to be able to actually use those pen buttons because they are in the most odd positions.
(Yes, I own a tablet with a pen, but I never use it because it's really a PITA and I usually defaulted to cradling the tablet and using the mouse/keyboard.)
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It depends on what you want to use it for. I have a W7 tablet, and have been very happy with it. The core UI isn't designed for multitouch finger swiping like the iPad, but it works extremely well for writing on it, whiteboard sharing, etc. There are a lot of ideas for what makes a useful tablet. Apple's idea brought the fact that tablets exist to the forefront of the general public's mind, and shaped their ideas of what a tablet is, nevermind millions of them have been running Windows for a decade, just at
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Judging from the articles I've seen, what MS is showing isn't a traditional tablet, its a new twist on the "tablet convertible" style of notebook computer, or, looked at differently, a scaled-up slider phone. Its primarily designed for keyboard (plus, presumably, some kind of pointing device) use, with a new "layered interface" (whatever that means) mode that is used when th
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For those who don't know, they actually did this for the Microsoft Courier. I'm usually disinterested in Microsoft products. They're usually conservative, unimaginative knock-offs of other products in their space. But in that case, they nailed it. It was a device people looked at and thought, "this is something I really, really want."
Then they killed the project. Foot... meet bullet.
http://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft%20courier [google.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFQWc79TYcU [youtube.com]
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Pity it was a poor design concept. Perhaps if it used a flexible screen, allowing you to use it as one large screen, it would have been worth looking into. But otherwise, the advantages aren't anywhere near as large as they first appear. I mean, who cares if you can display two pages on separate screens when turning a page on an iPad is easier than turning the dead-tree version.
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My laptop is a tablet. It's not Windows that's really the problem. It's the lack of Tablet centric apps.
I use ArtRage which is designed for a tablet and it works great. Most other apps though just assume you have a mouse. But as far as using windows is concerned it works fine.
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It's the lack of Tablet centric apps.
And that's the problem. Your tablet is as useful as the apps it runs. Apple understands this. They even did this on the original Mac, where they didn't give developers the tools to port DOS apps, but forced them to rethink the UI for the new interface.
To me, it doesn't matter what OS it runs under the hood, they just have to force developers to add a Tablet View (with specific tablet-oriented controls) to their Visual Studio apps. They should also replace the windows shell with a tablet-friendly shell, but
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I can see the arrangement as being very attractive especially if you could turn the tablet into a PC or netb
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I for one look forward to the brilliant success of the Windows tablet, in an unbroken string of triumphs from DOS to the Windows phone!
After all they invented "innovation"...
They're so clever they can make their Windows 7 OS work in anything... even in computers!
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The elephant in the room for Microsoft is MSOffice. If it can't run that, then Microsoft's cash cow becomes less relevant. Microsoft is more interested in getting MSOffice everywhere. So MS thinks that if the screen is big enough to squeeze a version of the full blown MSOffice product on it then it should run an OS that will allow it to do that. Anything less does not feed the cash cow. Rewriting MSOffice to use a touch interface properly is another problem that needs dealing with.
This is why the phone
Curious timing (Score:2)
Re:Curious timing (Score:5, Insightful)
You can tell how much they missed the boat on this by looking at their new phone OS, or at least what they named it. I wouldn't be surprised to see them use it for future tablets and stop trying to put Windows 7 and its successors on tablet devices. The funny part is that they called it Windows Phone 7, which (at least to me) indicates that they had no thought at all of using it for tablet devices, even after watching Apple port their iOS to tablets.
It's pretty clear that they intent to pound their heads into the wall and continue pushing their failed strategy. It's starting to look sad.
Win7 (Score:5, Insightful)
There's nothing inherently wrong about running Win7 on a tablet. As long as the gui shell is optimized for the form factor and method of input, then it has a fighting chance. However, people will invariably want to run standard Windows applications on the device, and that is where the user experience will be miserable.
Apple really pulled a strategic coup with the iPad. First they built up an impressive array of modern applications totally designed around a multi-touch interface (via the iPhone), then they built a tablet that was fully compatible with that massive suite of applications.
MS has a massive application base, but there is no acceptable manner of utilizing those applications with a touch-only interface (and oh, has that been tried and tried). Couple that with Microsoft's heavy-handed treatment of developers of late (C# only for Windows Phone 7), and the tablet version of Win7 will never build up that critical mass base of applications it must have to survive.
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There's nothing inherently wrong about running Win7 on a tablet.
Yes there is. A touch screen is NOT the same as a mouse and keyboard.
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You're conflating the GUI layer (Aero) with the operating system (Win7). The OP mentioned a suitable gui shell would be required. Presumably, this wouldn't be Aero.
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i love to demonize microsoft as much as the next guy, but ... C# is not the only development environment for WP7, there is also SilverLight, opening up development to a much broader developer audience.
not to mention that Android development tends to be Java based, and iOS development until very recently was ObjC only.
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The problem with Windows is the horrible (or just plain missing) UI guidelines and design. That is the main reason why you just can't transform Windows desktop applications to miniature ones, the developers don't have a uniform way of handling UI. The great thing about developing for either Qt, Java or Mac (and might I say, Gnome as well) is that the UI can be adapted fairly quickly for just about any layout/format. Even though Microsoft tried to change that (poorly) by pressing on MVC and cross-Windows lan
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First, that was a nice insightful post.
long long ago microsoft was in the same exact position when it was trying to make the jump from the non-mouse world to the WIMP world. Boy did that transition period suck. All sorts of kludge drivers to try to get mice to emulate key strokes to move a cursor like it was a mouse pointer. Different programs had different drivers or even different input modes (one frame might only take text input and the drapwing pane only mouse, or moving the mlouse over a text area
Windows 7 tablet, or WP7-based tablet? (Score:4, Interesting)
Big difference.
Scaling a PC OS to a tablet always seems to result in failure.
Scaling a good touch-oriented phone OS up to a tablet, however, seems to work well.
See, as an example, the success of the iPad (basically a giant iPhone) and the various Android tablets (pre-Honeycomb, basically giant Android phones, such as the Huawei S7 and the Galaxy Tab series mentioned in TFA).
Oh yeah - I love my Huawei S7 (Android-based tablet, pre-Honeycomb, running 2.1 and with a 2.2 Froyo upgrade in the pipeline). Android took the entry barriers to the tablet market and hit them with a nuke.
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I forgot to say - I don't consider WP7 to be a "good" touch-oriented OS (IMO it's a massive step backwards from WM6.5, so many of the features I liked were removed so I'm guaranteed to move to Android now), but WP7 has a far greater chance of producing a non-sucking tablet than Windows 7 does.
Re:Windows 7 tablet, or WP7-based tablet? (Score:4, Interesting)
Android-based tablet, pre-Honeycomb, running 2.1 and with a 2.2 Froyo upgrade in the pipeline
I can just imagine Steve Jobs reading that comment, thinking about all the billions of people who don't understand a single word of it, and laughing maniacally all the way to the bank.
Just one problem: Windows 7 is no touch OS. (Score:5, Interesting)
Why haven't MS developed a touch-based shell for Windows 7? They could sell it as Windows 7 Tablet Edition. Yay, they'd get a new product to sell, too!
I've used Windows 7 as a touch OS, and I can tell you it's no pleasant experience. You know the virtual keyboard that iOS and Android pops up as you give a text box focus? Yeah. Windows 7 doesn't support that. It has a virtual keyboard, but you can only click to open it manually. Click to open it. Every time you want to type. Oh, and the dpi setting support to make things easier to point and click at? Well, Windows applications don't use to have good dpi setting support. Their GUI's will break, or simply ignore the setting, and keep using small fonts. And what about window management? Clicking at window borders to resize them, to give room for... Wait a minute -- why do you have to window manage at all? That was taken out of iOS and Android, for a reason.
There are a dozen more reasons it'll make your skin crawl. It's an as poor OS for tablets, as Windows Mobile 6.5 is for mobile devices. It's as if Microsoft didn't learn! Why hasn't Ballmer learnt? Why is he so stubborn. It's his job to understand these things, and lead his company in the right direction! Windows 7 Tablet Edition should have been developed *along with Windows 7* itself! Because even back then, after Windows Vista, did visionaries in the tech industry see this as becoming huge in the future. But no -- MS seem to be willing to repeat their Windows Mobile mistake again. Trying to shoe-horn an OS design in a form factor and a human/computer interface it was never intended for.
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It's an as poor OS for tablets, as Windows Mobile 6.5 is for mobile devices
You misspelled "ass"
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Because Windows 7 wasn't designed for touch based screens, except as an after thought. That's why.
If Microsoft was smart, they'd rip out a whole new OS based on touch screen that wasn't WINDOWS anything. Just a kickass OS that was designed for touch screens. THEN they could bolt on Windows compatibility shell on top for a "desktop", perhaps something like WINE. Hell, adopting WINE would be such an awesome move by Microsoft at this point, I wonder wh
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They are those things because they are a Windows company. That is their bread and butter, and it is killing them. Everything they do is designed to protect "Windows". Windows that are shuttered all the time are worthless.
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I'm convinced Microsoft hasn't done it for the simple reason that they aren't capable of doing it.
The root of this is Microsoft's business model for the past 15 to 20 years: Do things on the cheap and release the result as a major new product. Usually this means a trivial amount of additional development on an existing product which is then released as a brand new product. Regardless, the model is tiny costs, big revenue.
Whenever Microsoft
Microsoft is tied by the "velvet handcuffs" (Score:2)
I'm convinced Microsoft hasn't done it for the simple reason that they aren't capable of doing it.
I do think they are quite capable of doing it. I just think they are far more capable of sabotaging any and every threat to Windows and Office even if it's an internal cannibalization/evolution effort. This is the company that has protected that business model from Apple, IBM, Netscape, US Goverment... all comers.
They are king of that mountain, but they're also chained to it. They will milk those cash cows till they're running dry... and then, and only then will they change significantly. Problem is, will
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Ballmer is a sales guy. I he's gotten something to sell you, then what he has is the best to sell.
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You know the virtual keyboard that iOS and Android pops up as you give a text box focus? Yeah. Windows 7 doesn't support that. It has a virtual keyboard, but you can only click to open it manually. Click to open it. Every time you want to type.
That is incorrect. I am using my Win7 tablet now (using the standard, off the shelf desktop version of Windows), and you can dock the keyboard so it is always on screen. That is the way use mine, although I use the handwriting recognition rather than onscreen keyboard.
And what about window management? Clicking at window borders to resize them, to give room for... Wait a minute -- why do you have to window manage at all? That was taken out of iOS and Android, for a reason.
What? Windows has had a maximize button since version 1! I find it hard to get my users to NOT run everything fully maximized.
Re:Just one problem: Windows 7 is no touch OS. (Score:4, Interesting)
...you can dock the keyboard so it is always on screen.
So the option is to either hit a button every time you want the virtual keyboard, or to always have it up, taking space? Neither option is all that great.
Windows has had a maximize button since version 1! I find it hard to get my users to NOT run everything fully maximized.
How difficult is it to hit the maximize button with a finger tip? And whether maximized or not, how much space is taken up by the title bar? A tablet certainly has more screen real estate than a phone, but it's still pretty valuable.
I think the point is that you have to have different ways of interfacing with a tablet - don't have small elements that could be difficult to hit with a fingertip (especially since you can't 'hover' and fine-tune your position like you can with a mouse) and don't waste screen space.
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So the option is to either hit a button every time you want the virtual keyboard, or to always have it up, taking space? Neither option is all that great.
No option is perfect. I find the iPhone's way is exceedingly annoying. The way it keeps popping up all the time, interrupting the flow. The way it uses far too much of the screen (especially in landscape mode) so that it results in a smaller screen than my old Nokia phone. (Obviously this will always be difficult for any phone sized device, but since Apple don't allow any programs to change the standard interface I can't get a replacement for the keyboard - like an implementation of the old palmpilot system
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I think that MS WILL come out with something soon (Score:2)
Mind you, they will likely have xp or a stripped version of win 7 since the hardware will have to be cut down to compete with the bare min specifications the opponents will have.
^_^ I envision tablet PC's filling a gap between laptops and phones/book readers. Dirt cheap, multiple purpose, used the way netbooks were mea
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At lower and lower price points thanks to lower *nix hardware needs
I'm seeing €150 androids in papers already, how is ms going to compete with that ?
Re:I think that MS WILL come out with something so (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows, on the other hand, has a huge amount of well known legacy applications, and when a product is sold as "Windows" people expect that it, and the disk they just got at best buy, will work on it. Trouble is, the vast majority of those 3rd party applications will suck without a proper mouse and keyboard. Not much MS can do about that.
There isn't anything much wrong with the NT kernel(I'm sure hardcore geeks and purists could pick some nits; but the same could be said of linux.), nor does MS have no ability to design a new touchable shell; but making 3rd party stuff not just tear you out of that shell and poke you in the eye with how much they suck would be somewhere between heroic and impossible.
This, I suspect, is why Apple, with their iPhone, Google(de facto, they don't actually stop you) with Android, and MS with Windows Phone 7, enacted a "no legacy" policy.
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Legacy applications? Can I install them through the App Store, or Package Manager?
Fools all! (Score:2)
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For a few more weeks, then it'll be 2012 is the year of Linux on the Desktop. // Free as in "Free Beer, Tomorrow"
Yet another Apple killer from Redmond .. Yawn (Score:3)
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
Fool me over and over and I'll just blame someone.
Like so many of Microsoft's products it'll probably be "Pretty good", but rooted in the monolithic CYA culture at Microsoft which can't escape the extreme luck, by which Microsoft's products were selected to be industry standard by business, just because, there will still be some significant element of "They Just Don't Get It" that will hold it back and it will be quietly consigned to a dark corner with other "Killer" things from Microsoft over the years.
Perhaps they should try something different, perhaps a card trading game or pogs or collectible little plastic figurines...
I might sound like a snide, sarcastic git, but their track record isn't very impressive, even when they decide to lose $$,$$$,$$$,$$$. for a few years, pushing it.
Like it or not, Microsoft has become Brand X.
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I don't know... through sheer persistence, the Xbox has finally become a decent console.
But it's still lost them billions of dollars, its profitability is debatable and the next generation console will cost them billions more. Microsoft live and die on Windows and Office, nothing else really makes them any significant amounts of money.
I do agree about the Microsoft mouse though, probably the best thing Microsoft have ever produced. But, if I remember correctly, isn't it just some product they bought in and re-labelled?
Re:Yet another Apple killer from Redmond .. Yawn (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft live and die on Windows and Office, nothing else really makes them any significant amounts of money.
Probably why they're willing to throw a lot of money to expand into something else. Their stranglehold of the PC and Office market may last for several more decades, but they realize that they've already saturated both markets and there isn't much room for growth in either. They're trying to find the next thing that will make them significant amounts of money so they can live and die on X, Y, and Z instead of just X and Y. It's a little like how Apple lived on died by the Mac. Then the Mac and the iPod. Then the Mac, the iPod, and the iPhone. Now the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPod. More legs to stand on.
But, if I remember correctly, isn't it just some product they bought in and re-labelled?
You're thinking about DOS. Ba-zing!
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The worst thing about succeeding with a game console is that the customers are notoriously disloyal.
The moment a cooler must-have game comes out on another platform, they'll ditch the XBox.
Worthless article (Score:2)
What's your take? Can Microsoft make real news in a Windows 7 tablet presentation? Is Windows 7 likely to be a dominant force in the tablet market during 2011? Let us know in the comments.
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TFA is worthless. Just a rehash, nothing new. It's so lacking in substance it has to encourage its readers to supply content by ending TFA like this:
"Lacking in substance."
Isn't that the point, considering the topic of the article?
Back to old communication technology (Score:2)
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MS tribe keeps communicating with vapor signals.
I've got a "vapor signal" for them. :-P
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If they're smart they'd start the push for this kind of functionality in the Windows 7 phones, not the tablets. Let's face it, for what 90% of consumers do with their computer, a smartphone has the processing power for. Even mid range games are becoming playable on standard phone hardware, and the next generation of phones promises dual core with dedicated graphics. Add in a docking solution and the UI issues for things like document editing disappear. Hell, you could even make a tablet dock (basically
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You suffer from the same problem Microsoft does. Your basic assumption is that Microsoft is a WINDOWS company, not a Technology Company. I don't want a device so bloated it has two separate interfaces, I don't need more bloat from Microsoft. My Droid Phone has more power than a computer from 10 years ago, and does more with less than typical desktop does. It is limited in ways that I don't care about when I'm on the road, and I don't want the bloat of all the crap I have to run on my laptop just to be conne
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Microsoft is in the market to sell WINDOWS products, not technology products. Their bread and butter is tied to WINDOWS, not technology. The difference is Focus.
My comment comes from a story from 100 or so years ago, when a guy running a Railroad said he was in the "railroad business". While that is true, it was short sighted. The business he was in was Transportation, not railroading. Along comes cars and trucks and railroads are ... not nearly as dominant as they once were, because of short sighted thinki
Re:Microsoft can still win (Score:5, Insightful)
They've done better than that. They've got laptops that convert into tablets with a twist of the screen. I've got one. I like it as a laptop, but I *never* use it as a tablet.
The problem is that it's all very good to say "UI-switching problem", as if that were a single, discrete problem that could be solved by something like enabling touch input. It's not.
The problem is with the "value proposition", which runs roughly like this: "Use the apps you've already invested in exactly the same as you always have, but on a *tablet*." On paper that sounds like genius, but unfortunately it's not a self-consistent idea. Tablet interaction is radically different than mouse and keyboard driven interaction, so if the apps don't behave radically differently, they're going to suck in tablet mode.
You can't fix this problem by imposing a shallow tablet interface on top of the old app (which Win 7 does with approximately as much success as is possible). The app's UI has to be redesigned from the ground up to give users a tablet experience, not a mouse/keyboard experience simulated on a tablet.
Re:Microsoft can still win (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft still has the chance to beat Apple
I think this is the type of thinking that is why MS is behind Apple. Apple doesn't seem to give a damn about beating MS or Google or HP or Dell. Steve Jobs for years has said he doesn't care that Apple doesn't have a huge marketshare in computers. The fact that they make money and that they have loyal customers is their primary focus. Apple cares only about putting out products that they think are good products and will make them a lot of money. It just happens that their last series of consumer products starting with the iPod to the iPhone to the iPad have taken the market.
MS has always defined itself and its strategy on the market and competitors and not the goal of being the best. They have only wanted to beat everyone else. When they beat Netscape they let IE languish for years until Mozilla and Chrome started to eat their marketshare. They let Window Mobile stagnate until Apple and Google made them almost irrelevant.
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Never viable (Score:5, Insightful)
The Courier was never viable, nor even a real product - it was an attempt to use the classic FUD cloud to head off the iPad. But if the vapor is too thin, anyone can see through it and that was true in this case.
Imagine the batter life and weight of a Windows 7 tablet with two screens. Imagine the hassel of a mechanism that would fold easily while also letting you hold it open cradled in a hand or two.
Courier was never more than a concept video, and not even a well-thought out example of that. It looks amazing in the same way riding a dragon through the sky seems awesome and amazing, because it's not going to happen in reality.
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Re:You'd better hope Win 7 for tablets does well (Score:5, Informative)
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Android is owned by the Open Handset Alliance, not Google. Google only owned it long enough to get people signed up
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Android is owned by the Open Handset Alliance, not Google. Google only owned it long enough to get people signed up to the OHA and transfer ownership to them.
(The fact that wireless carriers, hardware manufacturers, software and online services firms all have a stake in Android is probably part of the reason for its success.)
That fact is also the reason why Android is chained to phones and will not make a strong move to unlocked tablets like iOS did. A decent non-contract/unlocked tablet with wifi (possibly video) VOIP is a telco's nightmare.
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Well who doesn't "prefer an old, well-known, slowly dying monopoly like Microsoft"?
Given a choice, I mean.
Those Mozilla and Android upstarts are just muddying the waters, right?
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Around the time the I-pad was coming out MS was showing off it's own prototype tablet software called "Courier" that even the most diehard Apple fan agreed was better than anything Apple had come up with. It never saw the light of day as Ballmer fired the mastermind behind the project after "disagreements" over it's potential for profits.
Courier was never a real product. The "demo" [youtube.com] most people saw wasn't even a demo. It was a complete mock-up of how MS envisioned it should work. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were just as real as the tablet in the demo. In the past MS used these "demos" to scare off competition. "Why buy a competing product when MS is going to have a product out soon?" Unfortunately, Apple actually had a product within months to sell and people aren't fooled by MS promises anymore.
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Oh hey Mr. Ballmer, you'll find the chairs to your left.
Thank you sir! (Score:2)