“The operating system is called Windows,” claimed Steve Ballmer when asked about Microsoft’s plans for the tablet/slate/pad form factor at the company’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting on Thursday. He expressed dismay at the iPad’s strong sales figures, “[Apple has] sold certainly more than I’d like them to have sold,” he said. Ballmer then promised that Windows-powered devices will be shipping “as soon as they are ready,” going on to explain that they would get a boost from Intel’s low-power Oak Trail platform next year.
The message was clear: Microsoft still doesn’t understand why its Tablet PC concept has repeatedly bombed over the best part of a decade. Apple sold more iPads in its first three months of availability than PC vendors sold Tablet PCs in the whole of last year; in fact, the number of iPads sold in that period is likely to eclipse the number of Tablet PCs sold both last year and this. But still the company is persevering: stick a regular PC operating system on a laptop, give it a touchscreen, and then take away the keyboard and pixel-perfect pointing device. Ballmer even reiterated the company’s position: slates are just another PC form factor.
The iPad is a neat package. It’s not a device for everyone. There are lots of things the iPad doesn’t do well; there are many things the iPad doesn’t do at all. But it’s not trying to be these things; it’s a conveniently sized, highly portable, long-lasting media-consumption device. It’s ideal for browsing the Internet, reading e-mail (with the occasional short reply), looking at photos, playing music and videos, and casual gaming. It doesn’t need much in the way of configuration. It doesn’t run Mac software. Every single piece of software on it is designed to be used with fingers. In no way is the iPad striving to be a PC, but it is because of this—because it’s not running software designed for keyboards and pixel-perfect pointers, because it’s running software that’s simple and restricted, because it uses a slow, but low-power, ARM processor—because of these things that it is so good at the things it does do.
Tablet PCs, on the other hand, have had all the size and weight of conventional laptops, with all the software of regular laptops, but without the human interface devices to make them useful. They contained the compromises of the iPad—touchscreens are never going to be as good for text entry as physical keyboards, touchscreens, even with styluses, are never going to be as precise as mice—but without any of its benefits, including the light weight, impressive battery life, and purpose-built software. They made sense in some vertical markets, but as mass-market devices, they’ve consistently failed.
And so it is set to continue because, as Ballmer said, the operating system is called Windows.
The situation on the hardware side will improve; the inexorable march of technology, especially now that Intel is targeting these form factors with the Atom line, will allow Tablet PCs to rival the iPad’s size and weight. The iPad will still have an advantage in the near term—Intel can’t yet match the power consumption of Cortex A8 processors such as the iPad’s A4—but that advantage is diminishing. It won’t be this year, it might not even be next year, but a time will come that PC-compatible hardware is no longer a penalty in this kind of machine.
The PC-style business model—commodity hardware running a Microsoft operating system—may also have some legs in this market. We argued recently that this wasn’t a good fit for smartphones; the restrictions on hardware and software customization give little scope for PC OEM value-adds, and the high margins in that market mean that Microsoft is missing out on a lot of the revenue.
The same may be true of the tablet market, in which case Microsoft should probably produce its own iPad equivalent, but Intel’s involvement means that commoditization is likely to be swift. If these devices are to run Windows, there may also be a case for allowing the full range and flexibility of PC hardware. In any case, the wheels are already in motion and PC hardware is becoming more suitable for tablets, even without Microsoft’s direct involvement.
Source:http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/07/ballmer-and-microsoft-still-doesnt-get-the-ipad.ars
