

Ballmer (and Microsoft) still doesn't get the iPad - Tamerlin
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/07/ballmer-and-microsoft-still-doesnt-get-the-ipad.ars?utm_source=Ars+Technica+Newsletter&utm_campaign=601043dd81-Aug_5_2010_Newsletter&utm_medium=email

======
enjo
I doubt very seriously that they "don't get it". What's Ballmer supposed to
say?

"Hey guys, we completely missed on this. Apple brought out this really cool
device that we have no answer for. Our bad. _shrugs_ "

No, I'm sure that they firmly understand what's going on. The question is, do
they still have the technical expertise to actually do anything about it? I'm
not really sure. They remind me of Nokia actually.

Little known fact: Nokia was working on a touchscreen device LONG before the
iPhone came out.

The problem was two-fold: they didn't understand how to innovate the
interface. Their attempt was largely click based. Your finger was supposed to
be more or less like a mouse.

Second, when the iPhone did come out they lacked the technical competency to
respond. Their base operating system, S60, was a poorly engineered mess and at
the lower levels everyone knew it. Trying to bolt on a next-generation
interface was a dead-end, but that didn't stop them from trying. To this day,
the engineering culture at Nokia shows little ability to actually keep up and
compete.

I fear Microsoft is in much the same position. Do they know they're getting
their butts kicked on tablets (and mobile for that matter)? Yep. But unlike
previous times they've gotten beaten up (think netscape/Internet) they just
don't seem to have the ability to respond. In the past they'd hire their way
out of it... but Google has already snatched up and incredible amount of
mobile talent (like Matias Duarte). Not that it matters, because the culture
at Microsoft appears to have become frozen. I'm just not sure that they have
the will, as a company, to respond in any meaningful way.

~~~
jacobolus
Did you read what Ballmer keeps saying though? He flogs Windows as the answer
to everything, and points at the existence of pen-controlled laptop/tablets
with flip-around screens that can run some special tablet-designed software
(on top of stock windows) as evidence that Microsoft “gets it”. He talks about
how wonderful the MS Surface (the giant table thing) is. Etc. Etc.

Microsoft’s strategy would be completely different if they “got it”. They
would’ve taken their billions of dollars in the bank, and hired a team of
people who could get a new platform built. They’d have set internal
expectations high, and kept a tight focus on meeting real needs with an
interface that could delight users.

I think the individual technical expertise probably exists somewhere inside
Microsoft: they do all kinds of neat research, and employ plenty of smart
people. Evidently, though, the institutional structure of Microsoft, with
competing teams vying for resources and squabbling over areas of perceived
overlapping expertise, has prevented them from executing.

In my opinion, everything Microsoft has done over the last 5-10 years (if not
forever) has been a game of catch-up, trying to copy competitors when they see
those competitors as more successful, and seldom if ever really innovating, at
least not in shipping products. The Microsoft product vision seems myopic and
incoherent.

~~~
kenjackson
Curious, how do you know MS isn't doing exactly what you said? How do you know
that project isn't called WP7?

Ballmer may be doing a Jobs. "Nobody reads anymore"... well not until I
release iBooks that is.

At this point there is so little reason to play their tablet hand if it is
WP7. They already have 3rd parties working on apps. The only thing they'd get
is scrutiny.

Update: This is basically exactly what the TechFlash article referred to in
another comment says.

~~~
jacobolus
You’re right, they probably are dumping money at the problem and trying to
catch up. After all, that’s how we got Windows Mobile smartphones, Origami,
WebTV, Ultimate TV, MSN TV, PlaysForSure (haha), the Zune, Bing, Windows Phone
7, and on and on.

The question is: are any of these platforms actually successful? If Microsoft
“got it”, wouldn’t there be some notable successes here among all the
failures? Wouldn’t the company be able to make _something_ other than Windows
and Office reasonably profitable, if they truly understood where technology
was going and what users wanted?

~~~
kenjackson
Well you've conveniently left off a lot of products where they did come from
behind and do quite well: XBox, C++ (remember Borland C++?), C#, Excel, Word,
Hyper-V, SQL Server, even Bing has had 13 straight months of growth.

And even WinMo came out and did match their chief competitor at the time, Palm
OS.

The problem isn't that they can't make products successful -- Zune makes a
profit. It's that they need to make a profit that moves the bottomline, which
is hard if you have Windows and Office.

~~~
jacobolus
Well, first, most of those are very old. Second, did any of those actually
_innovate_? My personal opinion of Word is that it was great as a Mac
application, through version 5.1, and has been shit ever since; I refuse to
use it, after too many horribly frustrating experiences. Excel killed off
superior spreadsheets, and is arcane and needlessly difficult to use. MSN and
now Bing get market share just by being the default in Windows; not sure that
says much about them.

The problem (from my consumer perspective) is that Microsoft’s existence (at
least for the last 15 years) doesn’t result in any products that are
fundamentally better than those that would have been around anyway. The
comparison to Apple (the original topic here) is like night to day.

~~~
kenjackson
Honestly, I think your problem is that you're probably not the target
audience.

Lets take Excel as an example. What is a superior spreadsheet to Excel today?
It is by far the easiest spreadsheet that I've used. Much easier than Google's
or Open Office's. Plus has capabilities that neither has. For example, check
out its support for pivot tables and pivot charts, including accessing RDBMS
and OLAP stores. And with PowerPivot now supports GB in memory warehouses.
Really, give me a spreadsheet that can do what Excel can do, yet I can give it
to a 10 year old kid and they can keep their batting average tracked in it?

And don't forget that Excel and Word (and the rest of Office) come with
powerful addin models. I've seen companies build their entire workflow in
Office. Something you simply can't do with any other product in the market.

Sure Excel may not be innovating in the sense that it doesn't have an external
antenna. But there's a reason that people pay money for it, despite these free
products. And its not because they're idiots. It's because when you actually
stack up the apps, and look at the features, Excel kills it. And Excel 2010
adds a LOT of new features that paying customers want (and have asked for).
Sure, I don't expect the 10 year old kid who is tracking his RBIs to care
about about new built-in calculations or embedded filters in charts, or no PIA
deployment, but for people who demand a lot of their spreadsheets, it can't be
beat.

And you don't think Kinect is a little innovative? Really? Sure, maybe not
your cup of tea, but if people are falling all over themselves for the iPhone
4's gyroscope you have to give MS a little props for Kinect (not to mention
XBox Live).

------
gamble
Microsoft is trapped in a classic innovator's dilemma.

For those who aren't familiar with the book, the basic idea is that well-
managed firms are structured to direct resources toward the needs of their
most profitable customers. In Microsoft's case, that's the corporate IT
department. Licenses to home users are lucrative, but consumers only buy
Windows with new PCs, and MS has little influence on when they upgrade.
Corporate customers have more discretion. Microsoft is built to serve them.

The best proof of this interpretation is that the most successful consumer-
oriented projects within Microsoft have been the ones that were incubated in
isolation from the rest of the company - XBox and the Zune.

It's going to be extremely difficult for Microsoft to compete with iOS and
Android devices, because their corporate customers simply don't care about
them. As a result, middle managers in Microsoft largely don't care about them,
and will never give those projects the attention and resources they would need
to be competitive.

~~~
kenjackson
Based on what I'm hearing from folks in Redmond, WP7 is top priority right
now. I honestly think they'd push back the schedule on Windows 8 for it. I
don't think many middle managers are able to tell the WP7 team, "you're not
important... I'm focused on my enterprise customers". I think it would be
escalated to Ballmer, Sinofsky, and the guy who runs Office.

------
alanh
I’m partial to the theory that Windows Phone 7’s UI is actually part of a
larger “touch” strategy that would cleanly apply to tablets/pads/slates:
[http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/07/why_microsoft_isnt_...](http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/07/why_microsoft_isnt_putting_windows_phone_os_on_tablets.html)

~~~
iamelgringo
I saw a demo of it at Maker's Faire. A young MSFT hacker was using the
accelerometer and touch UI to drive a t shirt cannon that was controlled by
Microsoft's robotics studio. He could rotate the phone, tilt it up or down,
and aim the t shirt cannon. It was really cool.

On top of that, the UI that I could see was rather nice.

------
warmfuzzykitten
Steve Ballmer couldn't find his ass with a stick and a mirror. (Thanks, Lee
Childs.) What amuses me is that people can't bring themselves to say the
obvious: the CEO of Microsoft is a fool.

------
msg
Very similar discussion a little while back:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1563021>

------
nailer
Yes, we know. MS aren't big and scary anymore and they're not really
controlling things anymore. Does NH need their opinions on the iPad? Who
cares?

~~~
tomjen3
Your first claim is false: if MS isn't big, what is?

Second, if MS ever wakes up, they will most certainly be scary. That isn't
likely to happen with Ballmer, but if Bill was ever to return (or even appoint
a new CEO) Microsoft may return to being scary.

~~~
nailer
'Your first claim is false: if MS isn't big, what is?'

You're paraphrasing me. I said MS isn't big and scary anymore. Like a big
scary monster. Of course they're still a large company.

But now anyone doing something in computing is worried that MS will either
incorporate what they're doing into Windows or buy their competitors product
instead of theirs.

------
bradhe
Please, people, listen to me:

 __tablet != slate __

That is all, back to work now.

~~~
Vulture
No one has mentionned price yet. Tablet PCs usually sell over 2000$, that's a
lot of money for a "cool gadget". That is why netbooks are selling like hot
pancakes, you pay only a few hundred bucks for a low power device. The gab
between the iPad and the Tablet PC prices is so huge that no technology seems
to be able to justify it.

~~~
dangrossman
The tablet PC I am using now was only $850 when it was new. HP TX2 from Best
Buy.

------
duairc
I still don't get the iPad.

~~~
cstross
It's quite simple: the iPad is Steve Jobs' second attempt to create the
UberShiny, after the Macintosh, which was version 1.0. (Ignore the Newton;
that was not a Jobs program.)

It's got the same core ingredients as the Mac: utterly, shockingly new user
interface paradigm that is _easier to use_ , a machine which at launch is
locked down tighter than a bank vault (and dismissed as a toy by people still
wedded to the old paradigm), plug-in-and-go computing.

This time, he's added a couple of new twists: the app store (so Apple can veto
apps that don't mesh with their vision of where the platform is going, the
smaller portable gizmos (phone and ipod touch), syncing to a mothership for
backup.

I expect in the longer term, (a) the sync hub will migrate from the (dying)
Mac platform to the cloud and/or Apple's MobileMe service, and (b) we'll
eventually see some opening up of the platform -- I'd _love_ the iPad
equivalent of the Mac II, but that's probably a couple of years away.

For now, Apple have got their pure and shiny platform back, better than before
and _not_ liable to being cloned by Microsoft in the short term (unlike the
Mac platform, which was visibly losing its UI lead over Windows with Win7 and
facing parity as of Win8). I don't think this one will keep them ahead
anything like as long as the Mac did, but it's got to be good for 5-10 years.

~~~
Tamerlin
It's his 3rd, actually -- his second was a dismal failure in spite being a
promising idea, mainly because the execution stank (NeXT -- with a black and
white display, and even slower than the aging contemporary 68K-based mac with
a color display , it cost 3x more).

