

Microsoft Is Why Samsung, Dell And Others Didn't Invent The iPad - rosser
http://www.fastcompany.com/3002441/below-surface-microsoft-why-samsung-dell-and-others-didnt-invent-ipad?partner=newsletter

======
brudgers
Without Microsoft, Dell would not exist as a major hardware provider (Samsung
and others, are left as an exercise for the reader).

It was Microsoft's business innovation of separating the operating system from
the hardware that formed the foundation upon which Dell was built, and which
sent companies like DEC, Wang, and Commodore to extinction. IBM and Apple only
survived by reinventing themselves as something different.

~~~
beagle3
I think you're rewriting history here.

CP/M was there long before Microsoft's dominance took off, powering machines
from multiple companies (including the ones you listed). In fact, MS DOS 1.0
was a re-branded QDOS, which was highly inspired by (as in, an incompatible
but extremely similar to) CP/M.

It was Microsoft's execution, NOT innovation, that gave them the lead. And
IBM's lack of foresight, giving Microsoft control of the PC market.

~~~
prostoalex
IBM lacked foresight only in retrospect and we can laugh and point fingers
only because we know the outcome. In any given year the company of that size
probably has access to a hundred various technologies that have not been
market-tested. No company has a record of picking winners and losers
perfectly, most companies need to concentrate, and hence the whole market for
mergers & acquisitions exists.

IBM actually rode the PC market quite nicely and exited it via sale to Lenovo
quite timely as well.

~~~
beagle3
Indeed. I was not implying that they were stupid or that anyone else would
have seen it better; just stating the fact that they did not anticipate what
ceding control of the OS market to Microsoft would mean.

From what I've read, IBM didn't pay much attention to this decision - they
considered MS-DOS 1.0 a "stop-gap" measure to make the PC-g useful (original
IBM-PC model, later followed by XT, jr and AT) while they were getting a real
operating system (CP/M 86) ready.

In fact, IBM's original PC-g seems like it was almost an afterthought ("oh,
Apple implies there actually is a market for a personal business computer?
let's put a leg in this market, just in case"). The original design had very
little IBM in it - it was very close to Intel reference designs for the 8088,
using available off-the-shelf components (the main non-intel parts were a
Motorolla CRT controller, a NEC floppy disk controller which was backward
compatible with an older Intel floppy disk controller; unlike Apple's Woz-
designed Video adapters and disk controllers).

~~~
WalterBright
IBM mounted a major marketing campaign for the PC when it was introduced, and
it made a big splash. It sure didn't look like an afterthought.

When I bought my IBM PC, there was CP/M-86 (in an IBM box) on the shelf right
along side PC-DOS (IBM branded MS-DOS). PC-DOS was $40, and CP/M-86 was (I
don't recall exactly) $180. Everyone bought PC-DOS because of the price.

The company I worked for at the time did buy a copy of CP/M-86, so I had a
chance to work with it for a while. I saw nothing at all to recommend it over
PC-DOS. It was not a "real" operating system any more than PC-DOS was.

CP/M-86 failed because it was way, way overpriced. There was no conspiracy
against it, and it was not technically superior.

~~~
beagle3
> It sure didn't look like an afterthought.

I don't remember the marketing around it; I believe you they made a splash.
But technically, it didn't look like IBM spent a lot designing it.

> there was CP/M-86 (in an IBM box) on the shelf right along side PC-DOS (IBM
> branded MS-DOS)

That was after IBM PC was already a hit. When it was introduced, and for quite
a while after, only PC DOS was available.

> I saw nothing at all to recommend it over PC-DOS. It was not a "real"
> operating system any more than PC-DOS was.

That is correct. Also, when CP/M-86 was finally introduced, it had no software
(all CP/M software at the time was 8080 or more commonly Z-80), whereas PC-
DOS=MS-DOS had already amassed a nontrivial software catalog.

> There was no conspiracy against it, and it was not technically superior.

I totally agree, never said it was. But I do remember reading that the IBM
thought process was that CP/M-86 was the "serious" operating system, since
CP/M had business software already (wordprocessors, payroll software - don't
remember if VisiCalc was already ported to CP/M at the time), whereas PC-DOS
was a newcomer, and therefore cannot be taken seriously (except as a stopgap
measure).

~~~
WalterBright
There was a selection of CP/M-86 software for a while from companies that
hedged their bets and developed for both systems. This ended when they noticed
nobody bought those versions.

I'm not sure just when CP/M-86 was released by IBM, but it was there when the
IBM PC with the 64K mobo and 180K floppy appeared, which is when I bought
mine.

Many CP/M people did buy CP/M-86 at first, but they threw it under the bus
shortly thereafter. Some of them tried to extoll its virtues to me at the
time, but they were clearly disappointed by it.

------
AmVess
Dell didn't invent the iPad because they were comfortable with sitting on
their asses while other companies did the heavy lifting for them (MS, Intel).
From the article, Dell's SVP says,

"The reason we didn't come up with [the iPad] is because there wasn't an OS
provider that could work with a tablet."

That didn't stop Google.

Not to mention, Dell still makes enough cash that they could venture out and
do something on their own instead of relying on other companies to innovate
for them. What do they chose to do? Blame MS for their lack of innovation and
whine that they will now be competing against MS in the hardware arena.

~~~
dasil003
For an innovative software company like Google to step out of their is an
order of magnitude more feasible than a low-margin commodity hardware provider
like Dell deciding to make software.

~~~
Surio
+1 "lest we forget" the laws of margin/commodity in all this innovation back
slapping :)

------
PaulHoule
You could say that Dell is the reason why Microsoft didnt invent the iPad.

Tablets have been a gleam in the eye of the software industry for a long time.
My wife worked for a professor who wanted to make an Apple Newton app for
turfgrass professionals in the 90's and I remember playing Game Boy games in
emulation and knocking off handwritten complaints during bad sales meetings
with a palm pilot in the early 00's.

Microsoft has been fascinated with tablets and pen computing and has made
multiple efforts in that direction over a very long time.

Look at one specific thing.

Back in the early 00's none of that suspend, sleep and restore stuff worked
right on Windows laptops. It just didn't. I was a linux fanatic at the time
and I was always laughing at the business people who had to remove the battery
from their laptop 3 or 4 times a day to get it running again.

Back then, Windows was a real mess and when anything went wrong there was
endless finger pointing. Microsoft seemed to believe that Windows never
crashed on its own, that the fault was always bad hardware, bad drivers,
cosmic rays, whatever.

Vendors of premium hardware, like Apple and Sun, controlled the OS and the
drivers and the hardware. Sun systems were legendary for reliability (even
though they were losing the performance war even in 1992) and Apple laptops
could reliably wake up from sleep 4 or 5 years before Windows laptops could.

By the time Microsoft and the hardware vendors got sleep figured out, there
was the invasion of the "crapplets". Turns out that Dell and HP get kickbacks
from 3rd part software vendors when they pre-install annoying nagware on a
computer you buy. So you've got a brand new Windows machine and it performs
like it's 6 years old because of the junk pre-installed with it.

So it's fair to say that Microsoft has been held back by PC vendors as much as
PC vendors have been held back by Microsoft.

~~~
meaty
> Back in the early 00's none of that suspend, sleep and restore stuff worked
> right on Windows laptops.

Bullshit. It worked fine. But only if you bought a proper laptop (mid-high end
IBM + HP etc). If you bought a crapfest machine cobbled together by the lowest
bidder, you got what you paid for...

Hell we had internal Windows NT machines up for 3-5 years at one point.
Windows doesn't go wrong unless you throw crappy hardware at it.

The bad rep by shoddy hardware vendors is why they invested heavily in WHQL
and testing and qualification.

And as for laughing at the business folk when their machines won't hibernate,
that stinks of typical Linux smugness which in this area is certainly not
justified. Linux's ACPI implementation is shitty and has never worked
properly. I've have well over 50 Linux based laptops pass through my hands in
the last 15 years and like hell hibernate/suspend works on any of them.

~~~
wting
You take his statement (power management works in Linux / doesn't in Windows)
and says it's false because it works in certain contexts (IBM + HP).

Then you hold his argument to a higher standard by applying it to all PCs and
providing anecdotal evidence.

Have you tried suspend / hibernation with Linux on a ThinkPad?

~~~
meaty
Yes I have a T61 which reliably doesn't hibernate or sleep properly in either
Debian or Ubuntu...

------
flomo
It's worth noting that PC manufacturers had a variety of 'palmtops' and
'subnotebooks' based on low-power RISC chips & Windows CE, going back to the
1990s.

IMO, this segment was largely a casualty of Microsoft's disinterest in web
browser development. If they had something approaching a working browser,
these devices might have found their niche. MS also lost interest in CE, which
should have been the place to define 'industry standards' for 'managing the
power architecture'.

When Windows CE was released, it inspired a lot of talk about "Only the
paranoid survive" and "MS doesn't want someone to do to them what they did to
IBM". Somewhere along the way that was all forgotten.

~~~
AmVess
The segment was a casualty of the fact that very different elements of design
were forced to co-exist in a space where nothing worked in a reasonable,
enjoyable or productive manner.

Desktop UI on a tiny device? They were always impossible to use and had vastly
more tradeoffs than bonuses in actual use.

A functional web browser was the last item on a very long list of shortcomings
these devices had.

~~~
cma
That makes it sound worse than it was: it wasn't a desktop is with e.g.
floating windows. It did have trappings of windows 95 that didn't belong:
start menu, task bar, systray

But, apps were full screen. The biggest impediment was internet explorer
couldn't render standard webpages that the desktop version could. That and
resistive touch sucked.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I had one. It was a fun toy. Did about as much as a Palm Pilot.

And that's probably why it failed.

------
halo
But that doesn't explain phone and home electronics manufacturers like Nokia,
Palm, Motorola, RIM, Samsung, Sony and Creative who weren't as invested in the
MS stack as the PC OEMs.

I suspect a major reason was the reaction to the Palm Foleo, a lightweight
instant-on Linux-powered ARM subnotebook designed for web and email. Palm were
widely mocked and berated in the press for developing a non-Windows non-x86
computer and ultimately canceled the device. Is it any wonder other companies
were reluctant to follow in their footsteps?

~~~
tmzt
Of course, and the Foleo was followed almost immediately with the x86-based
netbooks. These devices seem to have grown out of the OLPC and intel's long
time goal of shrinking their chips for mobile devices.

But why was there so much opposition to the Foleo? The software seemed quite
useful, it had WiFi so even the lack cellular wasn't that much of a
limitation. Netbooks may have run Windows desktop software but were largely
used for web browsing and Microsoft Office.

I've heard the argument from some on the Palm team that the Foleo had to die,
that it was more important to focus on the new webOS platform. But what
software was used in the Foleo? A custom system built around Docs-To-Go. A
menu which married keyboard-driven interfaces and full screen applications.
The concern was that the Foleo wouldn't run the same software as the new
hardware devices and also wouldn't run PalmOS software that the Palm
developers were relying on, though they all knew that those revenue streams
were already drying up. Of course, the new devices barely ran PalmOS software
anyway with a required additional download of a trial of an emulator. That
wasn't the death of the new platform though, Android and iOS were.

I'm aware that the Foleo was underpowered, but it was the first generation of
a new device. It was the first netbook, and it is very similar in a lof of
important ways to the new Microsoft Surface going on the size of the display
and use of ARM processor.

------
calinet6
This is remarkably short-sighted and myopic.

Microsoft certainly held a lot of things back by sticking to a status-quo for
as long as possible. But how can you blame them? It was a profitable status-
quo.

Apple just foresaw the needs and wants of the consumer and created a product
that matched them. They innovated on all fronts, without giving excuses or
accepting limitations. I'm not saying they're perfect, but their achievement
is one that could have been done by any company _if_ they understood the whole
picture; including usability, industrial design, aesthetics, software
engineering, functionality, customer service, price point, and marketing.

Apple didn't invent the iPad. The iPad isn't what made them successful. Apple
invented itself, and the iPad came out of it. It was the natural product of a
company designed to create innovative products by taking all aspects of the
experience into account.

Samsung, Dell, and others didn't invent the iPad because they weren't good
enough companies. They didn't exude quality from every pore, and they didn't
understand every aspect required to create true innovation. They can blame
Microsoft all they want, but it won't get them anywhere. They won't be
inventing iPads anytime soon, and they have to look inside their own culture
to see why. But they won't.

~~~
quanticle
_"Microsoft certainly held a lot of things back by sticking to a status-quo
for as long as possible. But how can you blame them? It was a profitable
status-quo."_

That is _exactly_ the Innovator's Dilemma. That is why, IBM, for example
didn't pursue the home PC market with more vigor. The status quo is enormously
profitable. The emerging market is quite a bit less profitable. However, by
the time you recognize that the emerging market has greater growth potential
than the status quo, all of the first mover advantages are taken by companies
who had no choice _but_ to go into the emerging market. Going back to the IBM
PC analogy, Microsoft and Compaq had no choice but to go into personal
computers, because the mini-computer and mainframe markets were dominated by
companies like Unisys, IBM, DEC, and Digital.

In the same way, Apple saw that the personal computer market was dominated by
Microsoft. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the company's marketshare had
declined precipitously and it had ceded all but a few specialized niches to
Microsoft. A lesser CEO would have waged a costly and futile battle to take
back the personal computer market from Microsoft. But Steve Jobs saw that the
battle was already lost. Instead, he focused on consolidating Apple's hold on
the niches that it did retain (high-end, well designed, hardware sold at a
premium price) while expanding out into emerging markets like MP3 players,
phones, and tablets; markets that Microsoft did not take seriously precisely
because its dominance of the desktop/laptop market was so complete. And now
Microsoft finds itself in the same position that IBM found itself in when
Microsoft dominated personal computers.

------
sounds
Two key points from the article:

 _"In order to come out with a tablet, you had to have the ability at that
time to influence and manage the power architecture, as well as a software
layer" - David Johnson, Dell's SVP of corporate strategy_ [1]

 _Peter Hortensius, president of Lenovo's global product group, says, "I think
the global view is that everyone got a little bit surprised by touch
[technology]. We had touch devices, but the industry just didn't connect the
dots like [Apple]."_

In short, the iPad sips power by tightly integrating hardware/software. And
touch was slick and integrated all the way up the stack.

I think the only question now is how many other companies can move fast
enough? It took Apple the better part of the last decade to develop the
hardware + software to where they are today. It makes Samsung's alleged
copying make a lot of sense considering how far ahead Apple is.

Personally I'd really like to see more competition. Hopefully hi-res LCDs,
good UI design, good industrial design, and rapid innovation become common.
Also, if everyone is doing "rounded corners" or whatever it is next year,
Apple won't have all the patents and will be forced to cross-license. I admit
it's not all going to be as rosy as this. But this is better than what
happened in the 90's.

[1] [http://www.fastcompany.com/3002272/top-dell-exec-why-his-
com...](http://www.fastcompany.com/3002272/top-dell-exec-why-his-company-
didnt-invent-ipad)

~~~
Camillo
But Samsung _didn't_ copy. The UK courts have ruled so, and they've made it
clear that they consider it libel to say otherwise.

In fact, I question the article's premise. Samsung _did_ invent the iPad, as
well as the iPhone - except that theirs are called Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab.
And they were able to do so while being a hardware manufacturer whose OS is
provided by a third party, which calls the entire "blame Microsoft" theory
into question.

The fact that Samsung's offerings arrived after Apple's means nothing: it is
clear that they were developed independently, and the fact that they shipped
later must have been due to the additional development time required to make
their products less expensive, and thus technically superior. The timing was
entirely accidental, a mere side effect of the fact that Apple had access to a
mass of brainwashed fanbois that will buy anything with an Apple logo, which
provided them with both the funding and the opportunity to target the deep-
pocketed early-adopter market.

But in a world where Apple didn't exist, Samsung would have shipped the Galaxy
family of products around the same time as they eventually did - and they
would have looked just as they do, too. Any resemblance in design between
Sammy's products and Apple's is due to convergent evolution: it is simply less
efficient, if not thoroughly impossible, to make a smartphone or a tablet that
doesn't feature that shape, that button, that grid of icons in those specific
colors - or even one that doesn't ship in that type of box. Apple's claims to
have "invented" any of that are tantamount to claiming ownership of a law of
nature.

In the end, articles such as this are a waste of time. There is no secret to
Apple's perceived success, no lesson to learn. Their headstart is doomed to
evaporate against Android's irresistible growth, and they will be recorded as
a mere curiosity (to avoid calling it a "fad" as it really deserves) in the
books of history.

Hacker News has limited formatting capabilities, but, while reading the above,
please imagine that there is a banner saying "This is what Android fanatics
actually believe" at the bottom of your screen.

~~~
ghshephard
Brilliant. You actually had me spitting mad until I got to the last paragraph.

The real question I would like to see answered, either here, or in the Fast
Company - is what will the _next_ major advance be, that everyone is
(presumably) hard at work on right now?

I'm very, very impressed with Google Voice on my iPhone. Much more so than
Siri (in terms of speed. Integration with the phone is obviously better with
Siri).

I would like to suggest that high-resolution stylus input, equal to or better
than what you can do with a pen-to-paper in terms of resolution and
responsiveness, will launch the next round of advances.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
_"I would like to suggest that high-resolution stylus input, equal to or
better than what you can do with a pen-to-paper in terms of resolution and
responsiveness, will launch the next round of advances."_

What would be the point? Using touch is faster and more direct for operating a
UI. As for text input, I can type a lot faster on the iPad's onscreen keyboard
than I can write with pen and paper.

Granted, I rarely write anymore, mostly signatures. But I also don't print
documents and I don't keep a paper archive. I think those are all going the
way of the dodo.

~~~
ghshephard
I'm just reflecting on the fact that when I get together with a group of
people, and we start _sketching_ out an idea, none of us would ever consider
using our iPads (and all of us have them) to do it - iPads are crappy for that
sort of quick, on the fly diagraming. We always end up with napkins,
notebooks, and pens. If we're in the office, we always go to a whiteboard.
Nobody ever uses computers/tablets to sketch out a concept - too slow, too low
resolution.

A good high resolution, highly responsive tablet/drawing interface would be a
revolution.

~~~
nicholassmith
Oddly I've found that since I've got my iPad I've switched to using Paper
over, well, paper.

Note, my basic diagrams and workflows and other concept sketches would make
most people cringe in horror, so high fidelity is not a big sell for me.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Try OmniGraffle for iPad, it's awesome. I use it extensively, and its
interface allows me to make diagrams faster than I could on a desktop
computer.

At $50, it's not the cheapest iOS app, but it's worth every penny.

<http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnigraffle-ipad/>

~~~
ghshephard
I use omnigraffle on my ipad extensively - I've got about 20 different
diagrams, some of which have turned into real-physical things ( a brick
walkway pattern, is one example).

It's still about 5x slower for me than a whiteboard or paper napkin + pen,
albeit much easier to edit once you've created something.

------
erikpukinskis
The final quote is telling:

"If I knew [why we weren't first to market with a touch tablet] I might be
retired in a tiki hut on a beach somewhere." (paraphrased)

Steve Jobs _was_ first to market, and he made all those hundreds of billions
of dollars and he was still working on the next thing until his last week on
this earth.

------
bane
Software is why. Apple is really the only company with lots of experience in
both hardware and software.

~~~
kryptiskt
Palm and RIM both straddled that divide.

~~~
masklinn
Kinda. So did Nokia. I don't really know that much about Palm's historical
skill at software, but I _do_ know Nokia was not very good at it, especially
the usability part, and RIM had reached a place where they were content to
remain (keyboard phones for enterprise markets, even though their phones were
more popular with texting teens in europe) static until "somebody" got a
bullet in each of their knees.

~~~
justincormack
The Palm software was OK but it really succeeded because of the app store.
Third party apps were huge in the Palm heyday.

------
outside1234
The enterprise is why Microsoft didn't invent the iPad.

There is so much baggage that Microsoft has to support to make huge amounts of
money with enterprise companies that they can't just drop everything and
reinvent like Apple could.

That's why there is a split in Windows 8 - they can't drop the desktop and
bolt.

