

Why doesn't Microsoft understand tablets? - rpsubhub
http://www.quora.com/Microsoft/Why-doesnt-Microsoft-understand-tablets

======
dwc
Read the top two answers (Bill Bliss, Robert Scoble), and it seems they're
missing what I see as the most obvious and comprehensive answer. Bliss touches
on it in passing, but not as a main theme...

The real reason MS doesn't get tablets is that it's a new product category,
and MS pretty much always thinks in terms of how to extend who they are
(Desktop) into any new market. XBox hardly counts; while it's a great product
they did not have to define the market in any way, they moved in and made a
solid product in a well defined market. With Kinect they really did something
outrageously cool, but this isn't usual for them.

Apple, on the other hand, has shown the ability to look at niche markets and
see the bigger picture, turning it mainstream. iPod, iPhone, iPad: all of
these areas had existing companies with somewhat successful products, but
definitely niche.

Sometimes MS reminds me of Xerox's lack of foresight with PARC.

~~~
raganesh
Kinect is not Microsoft's in-house technology. It is licensed from PrimeSense,
an Israeli company: <http://www.primesense.com/>

~~~
contextfree
That's only the hardware. The software was developed internally.

------
brudgers
> _"While the iPad is selling like multi-touch hotcakes, Microsoft is
> significantly lagging behind with its tablet offerings"_

There is a category mistake underlying the article. Microsoft does not sell
tablets. Furthermore, their operating systems have dominated the tablet
segment for more than a decade and been the OS of choice for leading tablet
manufacturer's such as Fujitsu for nearly 20
years.[[http://www.fpc.fujitsu.com/www/content/products/Tablet-
PCS/H...](http://www.fpc.fujitsu.com/www/content/products/Tablet-
PCS/History/tablet-pc-history_07.php)]

The iPad is successful mainly because of Apple's ability to market it to
consumers rather than the businesses which have traditionally used tablets and
are always the centerline of Microsoft's roadmap. But the tablet market did
not spring into being last April - NASA put tablets running Windows 95 in
orbit aboard the Space Shuttle in 1997.
[[http://www.fpc.fujitsu.com/www/content/products/Tablet-
PCS/H...](http://www.fpc.fujitsu.com/www/content/products/Tablet-
PCS/History/tablet-pc-history_09.php)]

------
bluekeybox
A great quote from Robert Scoble: "I remember talking with [Microsoft
executives] on the mobile team when I worked there in 2005. They said they
were going after enterprises only and didn't care about consumers. Apple knew
that wouldn't work. Enterprises don't like new things. Consumers do."

~~~
kenjackson
The mobile team was right... in 2005. In 2005 even subsidized smartphones were
at $399 and capacitive displays were still a tad too expensive.

Even in 2007 when Apple shipped the iPhone, MS probably couldn't do the same
thing with the exact same device. Apple was buoyed by their consumer hardcore
base, which MS doesn't really have. And given that MS already had another
mobile OS that seemed more feature-rich, I think the msPhone would have had
trouble in the marketplace.

The thing that Jobs has seemed to have nailed is timing. Maybe his experience
with Newton left a great impression on him, but he seems much more cautious in
bringing things to market (I know that it almost seems like the opposite). He
put the iPad on hold and moved it to a phone form factor. That was genius. An
iPad in 2007 flops. In iPad, after 3 years of the iPhone, redefines the market
(in part because the phone requires you to make a consumption device -- which
then feeds into your tablet strategy).

I don't think this is so much a question of what did MS miss, but rather what
did Apple get right. Because frankly, no one else other than Apple got it
right either.

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beaumartinez
Microsoft simply doesn't need to "understand tablets", at least not right now.
Microsoft's key products, Windows and Office, are the de facto standards of
the office. Tablets won't change that.

~~~
ralx
True, but I'm not sure about your last sentence, I think that there's a
possibility that Tablets could change that.

------
Sherlock
The article also has something factually wrong (attributed to MS): in the
corporate world, the Ipad is useful for discussing documents o presentations
around a table, between two or three people, when undocking a notebook takes
way more than the time you need to set up an Ipad.

I also made that mistake in the begining, I had to see the Ipad in action to
valuate it as the right tool for that job.

------
cletus
When talking about Microsoft and tablets, two other companies spring to mind:
Apple (of course) and Amazon.

I'm reminded of the command, infantry and police quote (via [1]). Small
startups are typically nimble. They're commandos. At some point the beachhead
is established and you need an army. Once you've won the war you need the
police.

At some point in a company's history it will switch from an attacking posture
to a defensive posture. Microsoft has almost all of the desktop OS and office
software market. There's nothing really left to attack there. So now they're
chasing shadows, afraid of the golden goose dying. Everything is seen as
either a threat to Windows/Office or a means to sell more licenses.

Microsoft bought the (then very successful) Sidekick, tried to do a followup,
for political reasons had the entire thing rewritten in a Windows OS (that
delayed things 2 years) and you ended up with the Kin.

Windows/Office are so big (in terms of MS revenue) that nothing else matters.

Ultimately Microsoft is about selling Windows/Office licenses to large
enterprises and OEMs. Everything else is a distraction (including the
consumer).

Now compare this to (the quite brilliant) Jeff Bezos. When he came out with
the Kindle I was rather surprised to see two teams working on this: the
software team and the hardware team. This entered the public eye really with
the iPhone/iPad when the software was ported there. At first I thought "that's
going to kill the Kindle hardware" and it might, but that's kind of the point.

If the Kindle hardware is good enough to stand up on it's own merits then it
will survive. If not, Amazon is already invested in the tablet/smartphone
segment. So both teams are motivated to succeed. This is an object lesson in
having the right incentives.

Apple springs to mind for the obvious reasons: they completely reinvented the
phone and now the tablet. Now every phone looks like an iPhone and every
tablet looks like the iPad.

Apple, unlike Microsoft, are a consumer hardware and digital content company.
Their OS exists to sell hardware. A lot of people see iOS and think that OS X
is doomed and eventually all Apple hardware will be in Apple's walled garden.

This is a very Microsoft way of thinking.

Under the covers there are a lot of similarities between iOS and OS X but iOS
is still very different. Where Microsoft simply tried (and continues to try)
to sell Windows computers in the form of tablets, Apple made the right tool
for the job. What that does to the future of OS X, if anything, is irrelevant.
The experience is what matters.

Oh and for the record, I don't think OS X is doomed. It's probably not as
important as it once was but it will still power the "trucks" Steve Jobs
talked about last year. If anything, OS X will simply be made to look more
like iOS and you see this in the Lion developer preview.

The problem with Microsoft is they have a business wonk as a leader (who is no
visionary of any kind) and they have no courage for the kind of risky
decisions they'd need to make to reinvent themselves.

[1]: [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/06/commandos-
infantry-...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/06/commandos-infantry-and-
police.html)

~~~
bluekeybox
> A lot of people see iOS and think that OS X is doomed and eventually all
> Apple hardware will be in Apple's walled garden

I think this is precisely the logic behind most of the Apple hate you see
online. What these people (ones who dislike Apple for this reason) don't
realize is that there are so many advanced users (content production,
education, science) for whom OS X is essential that it is never going away,
and that Apple understands that.

~~~
wisty
Plus all the people who build apps for the walled garden.

If you need OSX to make iOS apps, then you better not gimp OSX. Or all the
indy devs will look at Android.

------
iwwr
It would be nice if tablets could interface with printers and other
peripherals and come with a functioning Office suite. Flash and copy/paste
won't hurt either.

~~~
rbanffy
"Functioning" can be a tricky word when it comes to Office suites. I don't
think Microsoft Office is particularly "functioning" and consider mandating
the use of Outlook (not to say Exchange) for office communication a form of
sadistic punishment imposed by clueless corporate IT drones.

BTW, the iPad has copy/paste since ever, as does every Android device. Most
newer Androids also support Flash. At home, I print about a page per month on
average. Do you need printing so much? What do you intend to do with the
printout? Fax it?

Are you using something derived from Windows Phone 7? Last time I heard, it
didn't support either.

~~~
maguay
And, actually, printing from iPad works great now, too. There are ways to get
AirPrint working with any Windows or Mac shared printer, so even if you don't
have a newer wireless printer, you can still use it.

As far as Office suites go, the iWork apps on iPad definitely cover everything
most users need. I've had no problems creating documents in Pages on iPad and
submitting them to my college which requires everything in Word format. The
first couple times, I doubled checked and made sure the exported file looked
fine on a computer, but now I just send them in directly from iPad. It's
worked great for me, and I think it'd cover what most need from home and even
business use of Office. The iWork apps are easily some of the most feature-
rich on iPad.

~~~
JonoW
> There are ways to get AirPrint working with any Windows or Mac shared
> printer

This is my main beef with the current tablets; it can't be your only computer,
you have to have another to update it from/print from (if you don't have a
wireless printer) etc. I would love a tablet that was powerful enough to run a
full blown OS, be it Windows or OSX, but run with a tablet specific skin over
the top. 95% of the time I would use it just as one would use an iPad now, but
in those 5% of times allow me to use the full OS, load up Word and edit a
document, run some random Windows program, connect to a VPN etc.

~~~
pmjordan
If Apple have any sense (and I'm fairly confident they do), they'll beef up
their Airport/Time Capsule wifi base stations to include printer drivers
rather than just accepting raw printer commands from a computer with the
driver installed. While they're at it, backing up iOS devices wirelessly to a
time capsule wouldn't hurt either.

~~~
maguay
I figure they'll eventually include AirPrint in iTunes for OS X and Windows so
it will automatically share any connected printers for iOS devices. They
haven't yet, though...

~~~
pmjordan
There's a simple hack for enabling it on OSX (it worked by default in some iOS
4.2 betas but got disabled). In fact, I think this works for anything running
a CUPS server (i.e. Linux, BSD, etc.), so doing this in an embedded box should
be pretty straightforward. Windows is probably trickier.

Tangent:

Of course I say that, yet I've seen plenty of Linux-based consumer grade
routers fuck up printer sharing despite using CUPS. I suspect most of the
usual suspects (router makers) won't get in there before Apple. (plus they'll
completely fail at marketing that aspect if they do)

I often wonder if there would be a sufficient market for a "better Timp
Capsule", i.e. a well-done, pimped-out NAS/Wifi AP/router/printserver,
specifically targeted at iPad/Smartphone users (but which works fine for other
computers as well). The user experience of all the devices out there (apart
from Apple's) is absolute shite, and Apple's are kind of limited.

