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.'"
Well let's face it... (Score:5, Funny)
Coal is so old fashioned.
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Windows 7 is Clean Coal. Get your coals straight.
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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.
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I'm not supper fond of Windows, but I loathe developing Flash.
I'm more brunch fond of Windows, myself .. gives it more time to digest before bed
Re:I'd settle for (Score:4, Funny)
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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:I'd settle for (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that they're getting to the point where software lock-in, strong-arming OEMs, making vague unspecific threats about patents and generally acting like a street thug isn't going to work.
If everyone is using an iPhone or an Android device, what's Microsoft going to do, hire people to break their phones? Wait, they might just...
They've been coasting on Windows and Office for 20 years, but that ride is almost done. They'll have to compete for real now, and it will be pretty amusing to watch, since they have clearly forgotten how to do it.
Once again.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft a few months late and over a billion dollars short.
Re:Once again.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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"Where do you want to go today? ....wherever Apple and Google are of course!"
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More like...
"Where do you want to go today? Wherever Apple and Google were last month!"
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).
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." ;)
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No, but it has gone from being a technology demo that nobody knew what to do with to something that companies invest time and infrastructure dollars on.
But, yes, you raise an excellent point. :-P
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Still waiting on the mac version of directx
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Still waiting on the mac version of directx
You mean OpenGL?
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The "XNA Creator's Club" on the XBox 360 feels like innovation to me.
They've got a "curated" platform (ie. very closed to normal end-users, just like the iPhone). They've managed to make a hobbyist dev kit for it that lets people tinker with their own XBoxes, do peer review of the software, and distribute that software to regular end-users (and get paid for it), without compromising the securit
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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
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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
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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.
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Yes, when you deliberately break the standards and go your own way, you can consider that "done first", since everyone else is doing it the right way.
... unless it was during the several year period in which they were the only free-as-in-beer graphical web browser of consequence, in which case whatever they were doing was the real standard, and anything else claiming to be one was nerd masturbation.
We have to be at least a little pragmatic.
Re:Once again.... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, to be fair... Microsoft demo'd a lot of features in Longhorn back in 2002 that apple copied and was able to get to market with faster (due to Micorosoft's major screwups in developing Longhorn). Microsoft showed stuff like 3D Window managers with wobbly windows, instant search, etc.. long before they were in other products like Compiz/XGL or OSX.
I think you have your history a little screwed up. Apple released hardware accelerated version of their compositing rendering engine Quartz back in August 23, 2002 (10.2 Jaguar). Previous to that, they had software based Quartz in 10.0 and 10.1 and Quartz evolved out of Display Postscript on NextStep. Apple and Next had been working on search for a long time before that as well.
The taskbar in Windows 95 and quick launch was stolen from the NextStep dock.
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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
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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 neve
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Late? To the tablet market? Does the tech world have severe amnesia or something? It was called Windows XP Tablet Edition and there were plenty of devices sold. Microsoft just didn't anticipate that people would prefer having horrifically hobbled environments that can only execute approved farting applications downloaded through official sources.
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: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
Re:Once again.... (Score:5, Informative)
Repackaging WinMo or Win7 into an iPad like form factor will not result in success
This is a very good point. I've actually used Windows 7 on a tablet PC, yes, complete with touch screen. It's horrible!
Imagine having to do window management on a device like that, stuff you don't even have to bother about on iOS or Android OS. Imagine an OS where lots of apps aren't designed for e.g. changed dpi settings (to at least be able to put your thumb on a maximize widget and not hit the restore widget!) and have their UI's crap out completely at that. Imagine how no text box in the OS will automatically pop up a virtual keyboard, and that the built-in Windows 7 virtual keyboard that's there consumes a third of the entire display on a 1024x600 touch screen. It's like how polished Windows XP 64-bit is for 64-bit apps. That's where Windows 7 is today, at best. They haven't even thought about how you're supposed to *use* Windows 7 as a touch OS yet, it's just a cobbled together mess of mouse interfaces, touch-oriented keyboards, small widgets, and API's for multi-touch features, for the 0.32% that use such devices on Windows 7. And they're already talking of a HP Slate this christmas. This will risk ending up a huge disappointment for HP.
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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.
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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:5, Insightful)
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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.
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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: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.
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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 ...
Well, there are a number still available (Score:4, Informative)
Motion has 3 models available:
http://www.motioncomputing.com/ [motioncomputing.com]
There's the Archos 9:
http://www.archos.com/products/tw/archos_9/index.html?country=us&lang=en [archos.com]
and the Samsung Q1EX:
http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/laptops/NP-Q1EX-FA01US [samsung.com]
and the Panasonic Toughbook is available as a slate.
Sadly, Fujitsy quit making slates though (perhaps they'll go back to making them?) --- interestingly the selection of Windows slates has gotten so low that some people who want a larger format slate are purchasing the Axiotron Modbook (a converted Mac laptop) and installing Windows on it.
William
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The motion computing tablets are $2000+ dollars... not exactly the same thing. Tablet PC's in that price range have been around for a long time.
The Q1 is part of Microsoft's Origami platform launched several years ago, and never really took off because of poor battery life and weight problems in the devices, not to mention resistive touch screen sucks.
The Archos 9 i've been keeping my eye on, but it lacks 3G. At 5 hours, it's battery life is so-so, but it's the best of the group at a good price point.
But does it run (Android) Linux? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I just bought an add-on resistive touchscreen kit for my eeePC 901
http://www.slashgear.com/touchscreen-eee-pc-901-mod-2312854/ [slashgear.com]
Haven't installed it yet, but it comes with Linux drivers. Will post on my /. journal if I reach any success with it later this week.
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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 intuiti
It would have to be in the retail chain already (Score:5, Informative)
To be in the stores for the holiday shopping season, it would already have had to be shown to retailers, the retail space booked and paid for by Microsoft, and the first containers of product on ships in transit from China. It's too late in the retail cycle for this season.
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Damn - you're right. It would have to be arriving right now into the stores from their DCs to be ready for the holidays.
Of course, he said available by Christmas. Doesn't mean you'll be able to find them anywhere except one store out in Los Angeles which has two. Whatever - if Microsoft's involved and it doesn't have more computing power then some small nations have, I assume it will fail.
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Damn - you're right. It would have to be arriving right now into the stores from their DCs to be ready for the holidays.
True if relying on shipping overseas by boat. MS could use air freight to expedite; however, it would be very expensive. It depends on how much MS is willing to spend to make it happen. MS will probably air freight just enough to say they made it in time for the season. If they sell out small quantities they could also announce "MS Tablets sold out everywhere!" type press releases as well.
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.
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Re:And in typical Ballmer fashion (Score:5, Informative)
Since when was Windows an open development platform?
Since it was first made available.
Try writing a decent Windows app using gcc and not making use of frameworks like .Net, MFC, etc.
For starters, all those frameworks that you've listed (and others which you did not) are layers on top of the core Win32 APIs, which can greatly simplify things, but don't really provide new capabilities. A testament to that is that most apps that ship out of the box in Windows don't use MFC, .NET, or any other framework - they're coded against raw Win32 API. .NET is not even a C/C++ framework, so why it's listed alongside gcc is beyond my comprehension. It's like complaining that you can't write Rails apps with gcc. That said, you can write .NET Windows apps using a fully OSS stack - Mono runs on Windows too.
MFC is a proprietary Microsoft C++ framework. It's very archaic, too, and you'd have to be a masochist to write a new app using it. Meanwhile, Qt for Windows is available, works great, and comes with a great free IDE.
This, by the way, is precisely what it means to be an "open development platform" - APIs, ABIs and file formats are all documented, and there are no legal restrictions on their use, so any company can provide development tools and frameworks targeting Windows. Qt SDK is a prominent one, but you can just as well use Java with either of the major IDEs, or any of the dozens of C++ frameworks, or D, or Python/PyGTK, or write your own.
Note that even if you stick to Microsoft offerings, Windows SDK is free, and includes both command-line C++ compiler and C# / VB compilers. As well as debuggers and other tools. VS Express is free, though somewhat limited. It's all still proprietary, of course, so your point still stands - just wanted to point out that you don't need to pay any $$$ beyond that Windows license to develop for it.
The vast majority of Windows development is done using Visual Studio because many people consider it the best development environment (at least on Windows). You're not in any way locked into it.
Re:And in typical Ballmer fashion (Score:5, Informative)
What the fuck. Revisionist much?
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.
Hey, I went and bought a copy of Windows 1.03 -- and even though I also had a licensed copy of Microsoft C 5.1, 6.0, and MASM 4 and 5 I was not able to build an application for Windows. That would require the SDK, which was a considerable expense. I didn't buy the SDK until Windows 3.0.
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.
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.
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Microsoft gives you Visual Studio Express, free of charge.
Re:And in typical Ballmer fashion (Score:5, Interesting)
The trouble is Microsoft has to base it on Windows OS, because the ability to run legacy Windows software is the only advantage they have over iOS, Blackberry, Android, WebOS or any other tablet.
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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 ;)
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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 pag
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:And in typical Ballmer fashion (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
One of the very interesting things that was pointed out to me is that scrolling with a mouse wheel and scrolling with a finger both work the way you expect them to, but they work in opposite directions. With a mouse wheel, moving your finger up moves the document up; on touchscreen devices, moving your finger up moves the document down. That's the kind of thing that makes just putting a desktop OS onto a touchscreen device a losing proposition: you need to change fundamental input interactions in order to make it work the way people think it should work.
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I'm pretty sure Bob was an Microsoft original.
Several christmasses ago (Score:4, Informative)
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Well, no, not since they were first sold. The tablet form factor even predates Apple's Newton introduced in 1993, although that's probably the first really well-known incarnation. At the time Windows was at version 3.1, with Windows 95 still over a year away and Windows NT just seeing the light of day.
if Ballmer wants them under trees, they should be (Score:2)
sold right now. they aren't? well, they won't be under any trees, then.
another opportunity missed.
moving from MachoSoft to MicroSoft, time marches on.
YouTube video is gone... (Score:4, Interesting)
Video has been removed, that could be a story in itself...
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Video has been removed, that could be a story in itself...
Even a video of a Windows product can't stay up for more than a month!
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So what? Will it be any good? (Score:3, Interesting)
I can sell you a tablet *right now* that runs some version of Microsoft's "Windows". You just won't be able to do much with it. I mean, Windows CE 2.11 only does so much.
The problem with this promised Windows 7 Tablet is that it won't do much either. Great, you can surf the web..., what else can you do with it? Very few apps support touch interfaces, and Windows in general is not an OS suited to a tablet computer.
What everyone's forgetting is that Apple made a very smart move by NOT putting OS-X Tiger on the iPad, since that OS wasn't suited to a touchscreen system. Instead, they simply scaled up the iPhone OS which was already made for people with fat fingers.
I mean, can't you just wait for the tablet to prompt you to press CTRL-ALT-DEL? Or tell you that if you want to close the app, press ALT-F4?
This says a lot to me actually (Score:2)
Given their rush to make a release prior to Christmas I think it's safe to assume that Microsoft regards tablet computing as simply a toy not as a real platform.
I mean, if they were concerned about getting a serious toehold in that market they'd release something solid when its ready, not when its sales might artificially peak due to Christmas shoppers right?
Maybe I'm reading too much into this...
Re:This says a lot to me actually (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, if they were concerned about getting a serious toehold in that market they'd release something solid when its ready, not when its sales might artificially peak due to Christmas shoppers right?
MS has done this for years with consumer gadgets. For example, the Xbox and the Zune were pushed into the Christmas shopping seasons. Both allowed MS to claim that they moved millions of each when in reality, they simply pushed the quantities on retailers who would spend several months selling down their inventories. In the case of Zune, sometimes at bargain basement prices.
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Wasn't the iPad released in April/May, what market window is that? Post-grad rush?
17 years too late? (Score:3, Informative)
Sales guy (Score:2)
Makes promises about upcoming technology, news at 11..and then again at 11:30!
Why not? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a reaction to Wall Street (Score:5, Informative)
It said Microsoft was being threatened by the rise of tablet computers such as Apple's iPad, which do not run Windows software.
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The stock market is so dumb. You cut the rating for a billion dollar profit company to neutral? lol
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.
Sant's reindeer get the holiday off this year (Score:3, Funny)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
The 'Trainwreck' movie (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems the 'Trainwreck'-movie has been removed by user from YouTube. Gosh, I wonder why!!
Re:Doing it just to do it (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows has been on tablets for a decade, and they aren't at all bad.
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And, yet, they have utterly failed to make a tablet computer something "mainstream" that Joe User wants, or even knows exists. I'm sure it fits into a niche market, but so far, tablets have been relegated to just that -- a niche market.
I'm curious to see what they build, but by Christmas I think the other competitors will have a big head start and Microsoft will be playing catch up. Then it becomes a matter of watching them grind away un
Re:Doing it just to do it (Score:5, Informative)
From T other FA (eWeek needs better people if they think they can stop me cutting and pasting... sheesh...)
The rest of the article is not worth looking at, let alone reading.
Re:Doing it just to do it (Score:4, Informative)
Why include a "CTRL-ALT-DEL" button on the device's chassis unless you expect the software to crash on a regular basis? What's with having a mechanical button to activate a virtual onscreen keyboard?
I hate coming to the defense of Microsoft, but "CTRL-ALT-DEL" hasn't been a hard-reboot sequence since WinME. It's been used in WinNT/2K/XP/V/7 as a way to access the login prompt because IIRC it's a special sequence that only the kernel is allowed to listen for, so you can ostensibly be assured that no program other than the login prompt is accepting your username/password. A soft-keyboard version of "CTRL-ALT-DEL" would defeat that "security" purpose.
Re:Doing it just to do it (Score:4, Interesting)
So what he's saying is, we don't have a great idea for Windows on a tablet, but we know tablets are hot and we would look dumb if we don't make a windows tablet, so we're creating one just to try to look good. Of course, it will be a POS, but hey, we made it!
Well, that's the thing: Windows' best selling feature is it works on anything. Windows' (arguable) worst feature is that it wasn't designed to work with anything. The bad part of not being in the hardware business (in this context) is that MS doesn't really have the ability to drive the market in that regard. So they seem to be in the position of cajoling some hardware manufacturer into releasing a tablet. Now they can partner with that company to develop features that will work well on a tablet, but it's not the same as Apple deciding "we will make a tablet" and doing everything necessary to make it a success.
I don't know what the answer is for MS. Could be they need to acquire some sort of high-end, low-volume boutique PC manufacturer to serve as a marketing arm for new toys they want to develop. But for now they still depend on the manufacturers to decide what markets they want to get into.
There never was a Courier (Score:3, Informative)
But we won't get the Courier. Ballmer hasn't got the vision to sell something like that.
They also don't have the vision to design it. The whole thing was basically a video mockup, and if you really thought about it the design as it was just was not practical. There is a vast world of difference between what a video effects guy can come up with and what really can be made.
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I submit that a touch device that allowed you to "circle" an object, capture that object into an object clipboard, then drop it into any application which would be able to query the object or act on it in a special app-specific way *could* be developed.
Indeed, this is what OLE intended before it faded away. If a CLR or JVM underlies the API, it should be possible still. Android seems to hint at this, but no one has the wherewithal to bring it all together. MS could do that, but they won't.
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I agree that could be developed. I am saying there was not one line of code written to do anything like that.
It seems like a cool idea though, in fact you could circle several potential objects and the destination could tell you what it understood out of the set you drug.
But, it might make more sense within the context of a specific domain of use rather than a general purpose thing.
I also think the OLE model was too fragile (the linking part) and that in reality you would want a Copy based system, with som
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I'd rather have the Vera Sans Mono.
Have some Courier New (Score:2)
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Courier is an IBM thing from the 50's. I guess courier new is MS, but it isn't all that different.
Re:OMG (Score:5, Informative)
It's windows 7 with some half-assed touch support bolted on. it will run your existing windows software but your windows software was designed for mouse and keyboard. I think you would need to be really desperate to go anywhere near it (this characterization applies to Microsoft, manufacturers, and consumers)
Re:Looking forward to it. (Score:5, Interesting)
But my hope was that it ran a modified version of OSX.
There was a survey that came out a week or so prior to the official announcement of the iPad - I heard about it on the now-defunct podcast "Network World's Twisted Pair". The survey-takers asked people whether they would prefer (on the iPad) a more-or-less standard OS X interface, or an iPhone-style (what Apple now calls iOS) interface. Something like 70% of the people stated they'd prefer the iOS style.
I'm not saying this in an attempt to invalidate your opinion; I'm just pointing out that, among the wider population, the majority of people don't seem to want a computer-like interface to their tablets. We probably could have deduced that even without that survey, though, given the tepid sales previous Windows tablets have seen.
I'd guess the take-away Mr. Ballmer needs to grasp is that the majority of people don't want a "Start" button on their slate...
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.