Ballmer Promises Microsoft Tablet By Christmas 356
judgecorp writes "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told an audience at the London School of Economics, that there will be tablets running Microsoft's Windows operating system available by Christmas. 'We as a company will need to cover all form factors,' he told an audience of students and press. 'You'll see slates with Windows on them – you'll see them this Christmas.' Mind you, if he's talking about the rumoured HP Windows 7 slate, he may not be so pleased when it appears. A recent YouTube video showed a supposed prototype which has been described as a 'trainwreck in the making.'"
And in typical Ballmer fashion (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm betting that the tablet will be running the exact same bloated Windows OS that is meant for PC's. Ballmer still wants to see the same Windows start menu, etc. on every single device no matter how big or small. He should learn a lesson from Apple with the iPhone & iPad. What makes them so popular is that Apple did NOT take the Mac OS-X GUI and try to shoehorn it on a smaller device. The smaller screens necessitated a much simpler and more user friendly interface. Until Ballmer accepts this and lets Microsoft develop a new UI paradigm for portable devices they're doomed to failure over and over again.
Re:Once again.... (Score:1, Insightful)
If by "a few months late" you mean "a decade ahead," then yes. Except for the billion dollars short part.
Re:Once again.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Once again.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft a few months (years) late and a billion dollars short... and the market analysts noticing at long last [bbc.co.uk]
Shares in Microsoft have already fallen 23% since April this year, with analysts concerned that the computer giant is failing to assert itself in the growing smart phone and tablet computer markets.
Ballmer's just trying to prop the value of his share options up before they force him out.
Re:Once again.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft is anything but late to this party. They have been trying to launch a tablet for over a decade now. They've tried again, and again, and again, and they have failed every single time.
I've lost count of how many times they have tried, but it goes all the way back to Windows 95 for Pen Computing, or whatever it was called.
Re:And in typical Ballmer fashion (Score:2, Insightful)
he smaller screens necessitated a much simpler and more user friendly interface.
Not just the screen but also the input selection. Apple decided to go with all touchcreen and few physical keys. That necessitated them developing multi-touch and gestures. Or vice-versa. In retrospect what Apple did wasn't exactly revolutionary but just them being practical. Multi-touch existed long before the iPhone and iPad. To my knowledge no one put them on mobile devices before. Also Apple used touch as much as possible. Sliding vertically is the same as scrolling. Sliding horizontally is page flipping, etc. Compare that with MS. MS has had tablets for a decade or more. However besides swapping out a stylus for a mouse, MS has put in very little thought or development about optimizing the UI for tablets. There is no sliding. Clicking and dragging on the stylus is the same as with a mouse; however, with a stylus, it's not very as comfortable or elegant.
Re:Once again.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I seems like Microsoft has always been a "me too" company.
Where do you think "embrace, extend (and extinguish)" came from? Microsoft has always been late to the market with technology, and that technology usually takes a couple of iterations to become really usable. In some cases, the technology is becomes pretty good, in other cases it gets deprecated and thrown out because even they can't make it work.
Now, some of their stuff has gotten mature and fairly usable, but some rots on the vine and is mostly an expensive transitional technology that people buy and get burned with.
But, except for Clippy, I am hard pressed to think of many situations where Microsoft felt like it was innovating. Granted, some of that might have been behind the scenes in APIs the the like (eg .NET), but as an end-user, Microsoft has been rolling out features that Mac, UNIX (and now Linux) have all incorporated for a long time.
I don't hate Microsoft in quite the knee-jerk way I used to, and I honestly find most of their modern products to be pretty damned god and stable ... but it's hard to really think they've ever led the way in consumer technology that makes me say "ooooh, I gotta get me some of that".
For the last bunch of years, they mostly seem to be watching what others do, come late to the game and then throw resources at it until they get it right (Sharepoint) or throw it away (Zune).
Why not? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Once again.... (Score:4, Insightful)
For the last bunch of years, they mostly seem to be watching what others do, come late to the game and then throw resources at it until they get it right (Sharepoint) or throw it away (Zune).
I don't anyone who administers Sharepoint will ever claim that MS "got it right." ;)
Re:Once again.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ding, we have a winner. Microsoft has had ample entry points into this market, and frankly the sales and adoption have been pathetic.
Don't get me wrong, people who have adopted them are satisfied with their pen computers, but the sales have been in the low 200K units per year out of the 40M laptops or so sold per year. A tiny fraction.
Repackaging WinMo or Win7 into an iPad like form factor will not result in success
Market Promises Disinterest right now. (Score:3, Insightful)
No one cares Balmer. Get a new idea. Stop copying Apple. Apple is a dick company... Why cant Microsoft initiate, rather than follow Apple. By the time Microsoft copies Apple's inventions, Apple has already dominated the market and Microsoft's pathetic copy is dead before it ever comes out.
Microsoft is run by a fat fucking idiot. Lets face it.
Re:And in typical Ballmer fashion (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, in this industry, sometimes just being practical is being revolutionary. Its amazing the degree to which people will throw themselves against the same obstacle over and over again without re-thinking their assumptions.
This thread is filled with examples of tablets with windows on them and none of them have been serious commercial successes. MS has tried time and time again to enter this market and they have failed every time. One would think by now that they would do the practical thing and consider the platform from the ground up, bu they didn't do that over the last 10 years.
Re:It's a reaction to Wall Street (Score:5, Insightful)
You cut the rating for a billion dollar profit company to neutral? lol
There are two reasons to buy shares in a company:
1. Growth, which pushes up the value of those shares.
2. Dividends, which give you a better return than a savings account.
Windows may still bring in lots of profits, but the opportunities for growth are far less than a company entering new markets... and most people would rather own shares in growing companies than fat old companies that pay out dividends with a stable or declining share price.
Re:Once again.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft has always been slow to adopt new technologies until they've been proven. They like to see other peoples mistakes and learn from them (though they don't always do so). As the saying goes, you can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs.
However, addressing the "trainwreck" article.. it's rather stupid comments...
"Why include a “CTRL-ALT-DEL” button on the device’s chassis unless you expect the software to crash on a regular basis?"
What century is he living in where c-a-d still reboots a computer? It's used for several tasks these days, like.. oh, i don't know.. LOGGING IN?
"What’s with having a mechanical button to activate a virtual onscreen keyboard?"
Maybe because onscreen buttons may be obscured by apps running?
"but an unmodified version of Windows 7 on a small touch screen translates into icons roughly the size of theoretical particles"
Obviously he's never used Windows 7 on a multi-touch screen. You can use multi-touch to pinch-zoom the icons to whatever size you want.
That's what causes a "trainwreck in the making?" Stuff that he simply doesn't understand.
Re:Doing it just to do it (Score:2, Insightful)
Windows on tablets haven't been exactly very good either. Because of the small form factor, tablets have been expensive compared to laptops and desktops. MS never made any real changes to Windows to take advantage of the touchscreen. In terms of pure functionality, tablets were just laptops with touchscreens and a stylus but a lot more expensive. It is not a big wonder why they didn't sell very well.
On the other hand, the iPad is not as cheap as the cheapest laptops but not as expensive as the most expensive ones. Where the iPad differentiates itself is that it is optimized for consumption not productivity. As millions have been sold, Apple seems to have recognized that there was a market for such a device. Personally it doesn't meet my needs yet, but it might as Apple makes improvements to it.
Re:Once again.... (Score:3, Insightful)
But the XBox is exactly what I am talking about when I mention throwing resources at it until it is relevant. The XBox cost them loads of money until it became profitable. Nobody else could afford to be "successful" the way Microsoft is since it takes billions of dollars to prop it up until it is viable.
Actually, I don't. I completely get why it is easier to deliver a good user experience by putting up guard rails and foam padding.
I'm not so sure ... I have seen more innovation and change in user interfaces from iPad apps than I have seen in the industry in 20+ years. It is the first time someone has fundamentally changed the way I interact with a computer.
How? I assume by making sure that the dev kit forall of their platforms is consistent? Is doing things the same way you've always done them "innovating"? Don't get me wrong, it's probably a good thing that people can use the existing APIs -- but that isn't exactly going to drive new ways of doing things.
I assume Kinect is trying to build on what Nintendo built for the Wii? Again, not pioneering anything. It's taking an idea that is now several years old, and putting a little more horsepower behind it.
And, it seems like Surface has been vaporware for a whole lot of years -- I rank it right up with that Microsoft Home of the Future or whatever it's called. It's a bunch of experimental tech that hasn't been ready for the consumer, and doesn't really seem to go anywhere. It's intriguing, but it doesn't seem to be tangible yet.
Re:And in typical Ballmer fashion (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Once again.... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's largely because Apple understand something that Microsoft historically haven't.
A UI that works on a desktop PC does not necessarily work on a handheld device, simply because most of the assumptions made on a desktop PC (large screen, keyboard and mouse control) are no longer true. This has to go beyond just the desktop UI - applications must also account for this.
Hell, even Windows Mobile has historically not dealt with this terribly gracefully.
Re:Once again.... (Score:2, Insightful)
I think corporate hubris has, in recent years, made Microsoft markedly ineffective at bringing true innovation to the marketplace, leaving it lurching from one me-too project to another, wasting vast amounts of money in a desperate attempt to find the next revenue stream to increase profits and ultimately satisfy shareholders.
Re:But does it run (Android) Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
Its the interface and applications. The big problem that Windows has always faced on tablets is that both it and the applications put on it were made for a mouse driven interface. Where Apple scored big was in creating a touch interface, with associated apps, that worked.
All the past tablet computers failed because they didn't have a touch interface that was easy and intuitive.
Unless MS has reworked the interface this "new" tablet is going to be a repeat of the Zune.
_
Re:Once again.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess as a non-gamer, I don't track these things. So they don't register for me. I don't doubt that they are pioneering the on-line parts of gaming, I'm just oblivious to them.
*laugh* Depends on your perspective -- I view it about as innovative as eventually adding TCP/IP to Windows. It seems like it was more inevitable than revolutionary. :-P
But, maybe I'm just old and cynical about these things. ;-)
Re:Once again.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Once again.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Foreseeing something and actually doing it are two very different things.
Apple released the first version of the Newton almost two decades ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MessagePad [wikipedia.org]
Microsoft's PC operating systems divisions, with its internecine management wars, has managed to produce uninspired designs, solutions that have more security holes than a sieve, and has generally stagnated in the arena of innovation.
Microsoft doesn't have a technology problem: they've got a cultural problem. Like Xerox PARC of the days of yore, Microsoft's Research division cranks out all manner of bankable ideas--yet their corporate patrons fail to see the need to actually implement these things to any serious degree.
Re:Once again.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft has always been slow to adopt new technologies until they've been proven. They like to see other peoples mistakes and learn from them (though they don't always do so). As the saying goes, you can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs.
Except for the fact that MS has been one of the pioneers in tablet computing since 2001. Despite having started about a decade ahead, they've never seen the success Apple has with the iPad. And MS has had multiple attempts at tablet computing. I would venture to guess that Apple has sold more iPads this year than MS has sold tablets all decade and the year isn't over yet.
It's the same with Windows Mobile. Windows Mobile preceded the iPhone by a decade. MS laughed at Apple and said the iPhone would never get any marketshare only to see their own marketshare dwindle in the single digits thanks to Apple, Android, and RIM.
In both cases, MS was the pioneer and got beaten by an upstart. It must burn Ballmer that this happened under his watch.
What century is he living in where c-a-d still reboots a computer? It's used for several tasks these days, like.. oh, i don't know.. LOGGING IN?
Depends on the paradigm. The problem is MS still regards everything as a computer whereas Apple, RIM, Android consider mobile devices as appliances. And the paradigm suggests appliances do not need to be rebooted unless there was something seriously wrong. Putting in a reboot button highlights the fact that the OS is not as stable as it should be. Also only in the Windows paradigm does logging in require the three finger salute. Other systems do not require the keystroke to log in and have other ways of handling it.
Maybe because onscreen buttons may be obscured by apps running?
If that's the case, the OS isn't designed well. Again what kind of device is it? Computer or appliance. Also why hasn't the applications and OS been designed not to overcome this problem.
Obviously he's never used Windows 7 on a multi-touch screen. You can use multi-touch to pinch-zoom the icons to whatever size you want.
I think the reviewer is referring to the fact that OS is not optimized to the screen for touch. For other devices you don't need to ever zoom on icons or buttons; they should be properly sized already. You do need to zoom for content like a web page or a document. This gives the impression that sizing and scaling are bolted on rather than built-in.
That's what causes a "trainwreck in the making?" Stuff that he simply doesn't understand.
The problem is that he's reviewing it as a normal consumer who won't tolerate these issues from a device whereas you're reviewing from a geek who expects it of a Windows computer. Most consumers barely tolerate computers and don't want another device that reminds them of their computer.
Re:And in typical Ballmer fashion (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 1.03, 2, 286, 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, Windows for Workgroups, NT, Windows 95 (and possibly even Windows 98) all did not have a free SDK. And the SDK was needed to program for those platforms.
They did not have a free Microsoft SDK. They did not preclude you from rolling your own. Calling conventions were known. API calls were documented (in fact, API of Windows circa 3.1 was even "standardized" by Ecma - you can still download a PDF today). Knowing those, you can write your own prototypes for all system APIs that you need (as e.g. MinGW did - their windows.h and related headers are not derived from MS ones, but made from scratch).
I don't recall where first alternative SDKs appeared, but I do rather vividly recall Borland Pascal and C++ allowing to write very nice GUI apps for Win3.1 without any downloads from MS. In mid-to-late 90s, Delphi was the king of IDEs on Windows 9x, soundly beating anything MS had to offer.
They're not free? Well, yes, the third parties that developed them figured that they'd like to get paid for the work they've done. It's not cheap, so it took a while before free (in all meanings) MinGW got to the point of being usable. Nonetheless everyone could make their own - and many did.
And, from 3.0 until Windows 98 (when I finally stopped writing Windows apps), I spent a lot of money on those "free" SDKs. In the Windows 9x/NT timeframe, $3000/year for MSDN, several thousand before MSDN, so make it around 20,000 (or more). Not counting third party tools and libraries.
It was your choice to use the (rather expensive, indeed) Microsoft development tools. There were other options.
More generally speaking, the availability of a free "official" (or any other) SDK, and openness of platform for development, are largely orthogonal. iOS is not open in that sense not because Apple charges you for a developer certificate, but because they place legal restrictions on development tools, and do not allow free unrestricted distribution of apps. Windows does not have, and never had, that kind of thing. That's why MinGW was possible, even if it took a while to get there.
Re:Looking forward to it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly, the appeal of the iPad (or any tablet) is a smaller, simplified interface that is well suited to the form factor, with a user interface that is suited to the device.
All of the complaining that people won't be able to use it as a "real" computer is tech geeks thinking the rest of the world wants the same kind of machine they do.
Taking a desktop OS and putting it on a tablet and not actually changing much isn't really much in the way of progress -- it's repackaging 20 year old tech in a new box and not really taking advantage of it. If Microsoft just wraps up their existing OS, then it doesn't stand a chance of competing with the iPad.
As has been pointed out, Microsoft has been on tablets for a long time, and haven't really captivated people with it.
Re:Once again.... (Score:3, Insightful)
MS got the marketing right, and the execution wrong, as usual. Wanting to shoehorn a desktop OS and hardware into a tablet yields horrendous results in terms of battery life, ergonomics, and looks. Leveraging Users' training, Apps name brand, file formats and OS design works up to the point where someone comes up with a brand new design tailored for tablets, and another one for phones ...
Re:I'd settle for (Score:3, Insightful)
What makes you think MS will attempt to honestly compete in the slate/phone market? I expect they'll use the same tools they used in the PC market.
Re:Once again.... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Clearly Apple won but it's not as if one direction is obviously superior to the other from an objective viewpoint."
I'm not sure about that. I would think a small screen is simply not going to lend itself to head-shrunken Windows. The size changes the paradigm, that's what Apple got but they didn't get it in a flash. It came because the way music is bought for iPods. Music, to Apple, is mere software. People seem to like a lot of choices as long as they are well organized. That's the problem with the Windows world, it isn't well organized. It's a polyglot that makes most owners scared to death they might have to upgrade their OS. Apple figured out it was the closed garden that makes owners feel safe from the horrors only an OS screwup can inflict.
That said, Apple's machines are not for geeks who revel in a freewheeling environment because they know how to navigate it. Instead of a horror they see an interesting challenge. MS has corrupted that experience, Linux is attempting to give it back. But then Linux runs up against the mass market which doesn't care about computer challenges. So the trick for the Android devices will be to neuter the free-wheeling environment that scared the hell out of most people yet still allow for a geek-appeal to get under hood. The later will help encourage apps to be produced for it...as long as those apps don't reopen the box of horrors users do not want.
Re:Once again.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree.
First off, calling iOS a "phone os" when its core is the same as that of Mac OS is showing that your not really thinking about the difference. The difference between the approaches has nothing to do with the core of the OS and everything to do with the displace and interface levels of the OS. That is where the difference is between iOS and Mac OS X and, in so much as OS X and Windows are similar, it is also the difference between iOS and Windows.
So given that the basic difference is in the UI layer I think its pretty obvious why iOS is better suited to tablets than windows. Windows was designed for mouse interaction and iOS was designed ground up for touch interaction. From a design standpoint, there really is no doubt which tactic is better for designing an OS for a touch based device.
Now that said, design isnt everything. Microsoft wanted full windows on their tablet so that they could leverage a large library of applications for the platform, even though those apps would not be easy to use with a touch interface. Apple managed to get the best of both worlds by releasing the iPhone first (the first phone that provided an easy way for people to build and, more importantly, market phone applications) and then was able to leverage those applications on the launch of the iPad. I suspect if the iPad had come first Apple would have faced an up hill battle trying to get developers and users on board at the same time.
Re:Once again.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Hm, not to me. Or do you consider the gesture support for modern capacitive multitouch systems to just be "an improvement over", say, Graffiti on a stylus-required pressure-sensitive single-touch screen? If so, okay, then you and I set the bar very differently.
Multi-actor mo-cap without a special mo-cap suit, coupled with facial recognition, coupled with voice recognition... to me, it doesn't sound fair to dismiss that as a late-to-market incremental evolution of what Sony and Nintendo did. I mean, with one of these plugged in, you can be playing a movie on your XBox, and when the pizza guy rings the bell, you can just say "xbox, pause" out loud without hunting for the remote or controller. That's a bit more than a wiimote waggle game, or an EyeToy bubble-popping game, or an iSight "laser harp" toy. (In fact, I can't think of an existing mass-market gaming console, or any other living-room set-top box, with infrastructure for speakerphone-style no-headset voice commands.)
Re:Well let's face it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Who cares if there will be a Win7 based tablet. By then there'll be 20 Android based tablets.
Or the wildly successful iPad which actually exists right now.
Re:Once again.... (Score:3, Insightful)
First off, calling iOS a "phone os" when its core is the same as that of Mac OS is showing that your not really thinking about the difference. The difference between the approaches has nothing to do with the core of the OS
/contradiction
It was pretty clear he said that calling iOS a "phone OS" misses the fact that the core of the OS is mostly the same as Mac OS X, but it's the interface that makes the difference.
You know how I figured that out? Because I read the rest of the sentence you cut short. It continued:
and everything to do with the displace and interface levels of the OS.
You don't get to just chop people's sentences apart and pretend like they said something completely different.
Re:Once again.... (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't have to imagine. Grab a free VNC app for an iPad and try it out for yourself. It's horrible. OS X on a tablet is pretty painful too.
Re:Have some Courier New (Score:3, Insightful)
Courier is an IBM thing from the 50's. I guess courier new is MS, but it isn't all that different.
Re:And in typical Ballmer fashion (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is why they are going to die a slow death. And it started two years or three years ago (if not before). I saw the warning signs in 2003. Windows is a flat stable market, it has nothing "new" to offer, nor can it.
Putting Windows anything on a tablet, because it can run "legacy" apps is just stupid. It is NOT a legacy product, and if shouldn't be treated as such.
However, Microsoft COULD have come up with a OS that could be tied to AD (their best product, as bloated as it is) and controlled by Policy that ran on Tablets that wasn't "Windows". But they didn't, and they can't. THEY are WINDOWS. Everything they do is for WINDOWS. And as long as they think in terms of WINDOWS they are doomed to eventual failure, because WINDOWS doesn't do what people need on 4x5 inch screens or 9" tablets.
In short, they've stopped being a "technology company", or "software company" and have become a "Windows Software Company". This is the same problem "railroad companies" faced, thinking they were in the Railroad business, when in fact, they were in the Transportation business.
And this is why Apple is the #2 company in the world (Market Cap) and fast approaching #1 (Exxon), they aren't in the "Macintosh" business. If I was on the board of directors with Microsoft, I'd fire Balmer and find someone that had a vision of what kind of company Microsoft could be. I'd volunteer, but I doubt they'd pick a dumb idiot from the sticks like me.
I am willing to listen to offers ;)