Microsoft AND Intel being effectively missing from the tablet race is staggering. And there are a few reasons why its staggering:
1) Both have known it was coming, maybe longer than anyone else. But got the core requirements all wrong.
2) No one really seems to care.
3) Related to (2), there is no belief that they have anything up their sleeve.
4) Their existing ecosystem, probably a billion units strong, doesn't seem to help their situation at all.
5) Both CEOs seem firmly in place still.
While Intel and MS will make money hand over first for years to come, it does appear to be the end of the consumer market for these two companies. Their focus will be business class computers, workstations, and servers.
Bill Gates (and with him, Microsoft) has been nigh obsessed with tablets since at least the mid-1990s. I think the trouble is more that MS entered the tablet market way too early, and got bogged down by hardware limitations of the era: the CPU etc. had to be something from the laptop world rather than from the PDA world because the latter was not capable of driving a big color display. Laptop CPUs were expensive and relatively power hungry. Big color displays were expensive too, so because of the cost people expected a tablet to replace a laptop. This probably led in part to the decision to run a desktop OS on tablets rather than come up with a new UI model and start a new app ecosystem. Rather than going with the (expensive, crappy, or both) touchscreen technology of the time they mostly used Wacom digitizers. The tablet that so resulted was doomed to be basically a niche product.
I think you could say that MS is in the same situation with respect to the modern tablet market, that Palm was in with respect to the smartphone market about four or five years ago.
As for the other phone makers, remember Nokia and others have been trying and failing to do the tablet thing for years too. Remember all the clamoring (for years) for Apple to introduce a tablet? It was not because all the Apple rumor bloggers had some clairvoyance about the market that Steve Jobs did not - it was because seemingly everyone else had a tablet out, or would soon, and people were afraid Apple would get left behind.
I think the problem wasn't Microsoft entering the market too early so much as never really rethinking their approach to a platform. Their idea for PDAs/phones was a tiny version of desktop windows (compare that to Apple's Newton, with all its flaws). Their idea for tablets was a pen based version of desktop windows.
Microsoft has NEVER really originated a UI paradigm or OS, they just copied/bought/stole stuff from other people, and generally did it badly. (No question they sometimes contribute refinements.)
We're just lucky they didn't try to put a tiny version of DOS on PDAs and a pen driven version of DOS on tablets.
I didn't know that they bought or licensed the entire UI paradigm from someone else. Or do you just mean the low level parts? Because there's more to a UI paradigm than the input device. So, if it's just the screen tech that Apple bought and not the interaction software, I would count multi-touch as an Apple-originated UI paradigm, just as you credit the desktop GUI to Xerox, not Stanford Research Institute where Engelbart invented the mouse.
Also, the iPod scroll wheel is an Apple-originated UI paradigm.
That thing even let you switch between apps with gestures.
The iPod scroll wheel isn't an Apple paradigm either; jog dials for menu selection existed years before the iPod. I remember seeing it on the minidisc recorder in our school's music department.
That's not even a touchscreen. It's a trackpad with multitouch gestures designed for use with a desktop-based GUI on a PC. How is that equivalent to the iOS UI paradigm? That's like saying a mouse is equivalent to a Xerox Alto.
Of course; Fingerworks developed the input device, Apple developed the UI paradigm. There's more to a UI paradigm than the input device. How many times do I have to say this?
The most important part of the user experience that multi touch input enables might just be an onscreen keyboard that doesn't suck by being frustratingly slow and/or error prone. Requiring the user to only ever be touching the screen location of one key at a time slows the user down. And when the inevitable happens, i.e. the user is touching two on-screen keys at once, to take the average (which lots of older single-touch screens did) is not acceptable for text entry.
Xerox didn't "invent" the GUI any more than Apple did. (Xerox got its ideas from Englebart et al.) Apple's desktop UI was "original" insofar as anything is. Windows (and for that matter NeXT) pointedly was not. Similarly Newton had a complete and "original" UI. Then there's iOS.
We're past them now but we still see lots of bad UIs that could learn with their success. I'm thinking about the heterogeneous button layouts on Android and previous generation Windows Mobile devices.
I agree, tablets have been the ultimate fixation in computing devices for a long time. We need only look at scifi -- how many shows have people carrying around pencil-thin panels and pulling up a ship's specifications while they walk and talk with the warp engineer, pounding on a glass table to engage weapons system, or other things like that? Apple hit the right combination of price and style at the right time, and imo took the scifi conception much more literally than their competitors, to bring tablets mainstream.
It's all about the multitouch. Sure a windows tablet with multitouch running XP would have been massively inferior to the iPad but it would have started to realise the potential of the form. Instead years of Wacom pen tablets just made people hate the idea.
This video left me with a strong impression of future general computing usage patterns. It has also been my personal gold standard of a superb video demo.
Interestingly enough, they abandoned it right after iPad's release:
I'm going to -4 on this, but: it absolutely still remains to be seen whether or not tablets are worth a damn.
Seriously, people play shitty games on them, and I guess read ebooks (though I see vastly more Kindles on the subway, than iPads). I do not, at all see a compelling product yet, I see a trendy gadget that early adopters and trend followers have purchased. Sure there's great lip service to how revolutionary this concept is, but that's just talk.
I'm not saying that the iPad isn't the second coming of Christ. I am saying that it's not proven itself to be that just quite yet. I don't think the PC is (even close) to dead.
I have noticed that a surprising number of personal acquaintances that have no computer skills, have iPads. The iPad lets them surf the net, read books, email and run some games. They don't have to think about how to use it, it has great battery life, it does the basics that they want and it is fun. One good friend of mine (former business partner) who is almost -intentionally- computer illiterate goes everywhere with his iPad. He loves it. His use is email, basic web surfing and taking notes about what he wants his employees to do. He runs a notepad for each one and keeps track of tasks he has assigned and how they accomplished it. There are way better project management tools out there, but the point is that he, a techno-peasant, is making his iPad do it.
I think a large percentage of the iPad buyers were not techsavvy and the non-threatening aspect of the device is the appeal.
How does he manage without a Mac to use as a "dock" for the iPad? Sincere question, I am a linux user and have only seen an iPad a couple of times, but I understand you need to dock it via iTunes in order to do certain stuff with it.
And when it randomly crashes hard, leaving you looking at the dreaded "Connect to iTunes" screen.
It somehow knows to do this at the moment you're furthest from being able to find a computer with iTunes. My iPod Touch did it when I was on the Pacific coast of Colombia for a month (note the complete absence of roads and towns along said coast).
Getting to a place where I could listen to music again involved an overnight trip on a cargo boat through pirate-infested waters.
But I suspect that was an edge case that Apple didn't have in mind when they designed that feature.
I imagine that if Apple is seriously planning a future where the iPad is the only computer that 'normal' people need then the iTunes requirement will disappear soon. I imagine that some sort of iTunes in the cloud is currently in the works, where all your music and videos are stored by Apple (for a modest fee) and you can either stream directly or sync a subset of it for offline use.
Did you actually read the comment you're replying to?
In this particular anecdote, the nearest Apple store would have been in San Diego, 3200 miles away. The nearest internet connected computer capable of downloading iTunes was a mere 150 miles away in Buenaventura, a 2 hour motor launch, followed by a (weekly) night boat from the village I was in.
It was meant to illustrate that sometimes you take your mobile devices away from civilization. Suggesting that the solution is to bring them back to civilization sort of misses that point.
I did. But if something hard crashes, then it's a fair assumption you're going to have to take it to somewhere where they can fix it. My point is that, if you ignore the out-in-the-wilderness scenario, iPad support is probably friendlier than most PC support for normal people.
If you take your dell laptop back to PC World, don't expect much.
To me this list sounds like a lot of occasions that you'd need a computer - but in actuality, my mother who is an early adopter at nothing except iPads, has been running like this since day 1.
And, as my life is itinerant, I've done multiple 6 week stretches without syncing. It works fine.
You're likely right in that tablets aren't about to kill PCs, but suggesting that tablets remain a simple "trendy gadget" seems a bit silly, especially considering Apple's Q1 reports [1].
Perhaps the iPad isn't to your taste, but it was to 7 million others. (And some 16 million overall.) One could argue that Apple does, in fact, have the largest consumer base of early adopters and trend followers of any company, but when you fan base grows larger than many other markets, you kind of have to call it main-stream.
I'm pretty sure that the iPad isn't the second coming of Christ. I'm comfortable saying that. But it's something other than a trend at this point.
If you are going to go calling tablets of any kind "main-stream", then I'm afraid you are devaluing that term to the point that it is meaningless. TVs are mainstream. Cars are mainstream. Computers overall are mainstream, though it is still easy to find homes in which "the computer" is put somewhere "out of the way" and gets maybe an hour of interaction a month. Tablets are not mainstream.
No, I'm really not. That would be one extreme, sure. However reducing the meaning of the term "mainstream" by saying it applies to things as rare as tablets are today is to go to the other extreme.
Both of my parents recently retired. Now they're traveling a lot, and they wanted a portable device so they could send pictures, do email, and do basic web browsing. They didn't want a full laptop, and they didn't like the netbooks. So they bought an iPad.
Two weeks later, they bought another one so they wouldn't have to share.
My parents are early-adopters on nothing. They didn't get a car with air-conditioning until the late '90s. They didn't get a microwave until the mid '90s. That they jumped on the iPad when it came out, and then it won them over so immensely that they purchased another tells me something.
This is all anecdotal, but I know a number of people who bought their parents iPads for Christmas. In all those cases, their parents haven't touched their home computer since they got the iPad. The iPad, along with its competitors, are all the computer a good segment of the population needs.
I love Steve Jobs' analogy here. He essentially said that desktop computers will stay around, but they'll be the trucks of a car-dominated industry. My parents (and most consumers) never do heavy work on their computers. What they've always needed--and what these new tablets are finally delivering--is a fast, dependable car that runs a long time between refueling.
That list is pretty close to my list with the addition that I find the iPad to be an excellent device for video content (mostly BBC iPlayer but also stuff through iTunes).
If I want to watch with more than one person I use our 50" plasma - but if its just me I'm more likely to just sit on a comfy chair and get comfortable with the iPad. Watching extended videos (i.e. more than short YouTube clips) on a laptop or desktop just feels wrong to me.
It's not all content consumption, either. My wife's studying for an MBA at the moment and as well as using GoodReader extensively for the course material (in PDF), also finds it really easy to create mind maps while working.
I'm watching this space very, very closely (i.e. tablets specifically for reading PDFs of articles). There are a lot of options but none are quite perfect:
* iPad
Pros:
- Color screen
- Can zoom to exact size desired
- Multi-touch
- Papers.app (easy sync/organization for PDFs)
Cons:
- Not e-ink
- Battery life
- Not as light/thin as Kindle
* Kindle 3
Pros:
- E-ink
- Amazing battery life
Cons:
- Zoom is limited to a couple sizes
- No touch screen
- No expansion card & limited to ~3GB internal
- No real way to organize large number of PDFs
* Kindle DX
Pros:
- Larger screen means PDFs are sized just about right without zoom
- Same pros as K3
Cons:
- Larger screen means it's a bit too awkward to hold with one hand
- A bit on the heavy side
- Same cons as K3
In my opinion the perfect PDF reader tablet would have a (color) e-ink display with multi-touch for scrolling and an arbitrary zoom. Kindle 4 maybe?
I'm not sure e-ink is an asset in a PDF reader. I use my iPad for a lot of technical papers and books. It's much faster than an e-ink display would be, and the page turning lag is still annoying. E-ink would be insufferable.
I have a k1, k2, k3 and iPad. In fact, I brought the k2 and k3 and iPad on a vacation with me to Kauai. Don't try and read complex PDFs on a kindle. I have several dozen downloaded onto my iPad (dropbox+goodreader make this trivial) - the kindle is not the right tool for flipping through PDFs. I have logged about 40 hours reading on the kindles in five days - (mostly on the beach, a little at coffeeshops) - but linear text reading (novels) is really their strong suit. I don't think I've ever run into anybody that tried to use them for technical/reference/diagrams and was happy with the results. Too slow, no easy way to hop around in the doc.
The iPad, on the other hand, is almost perfect for this. The screen needs to be higher resolution, easier to read in sun (though a matte screen protector helps a lot) and I'll be perfectly content.
As it is, I have not printed a single 8 1/2x11" printout in six+ months - the iPad has let me go almost 100% paperless. (11x17 printouts of network diagrams still useful in meetings)
Couldn't agree more.
I love my Kindle for reading long-form (novels, non-fiction). But I read a lot of medical journals and while you can read them on the Kindle, it is sub-optimal at best. Plus I'm a pathologist and most of my journals have pretty pictures where color is nice to have. I'm currently using a rooted Nookcolor (which is okay), but I'm a recent Mac convert, so I'm looking to pick up an ipad on the refresh.
Yes, it is really all you need. Recent updates have enabled annotation and other nice features and it was one of the first apps to jump on the dropbox bandwagon so it is easy to keep papers in sync on the device and across platforms.
Still you have to wait for the page to render. When you are turning a page in a book or a printout you are doing something that requires some kind of activity from your part, but when you have clicked the button you are just waiting for things to happen.
I don't mean to say that this is a big problem, and I haven't been using E-ink readers that much. But when it comes to digital reading, I appreciate the snappiness of scrolling fast through pages and also the "jump to" functions, whether it's via links or "go to page" actions.
Battery life is not an issue with my iPad. When using it for only reading (i.e. not streaming video), it can easily go for a week without charging. Even with video, on a full charge, it can easily play 8 hours without recharging.
A major selling point for me is not only organising papers but the ability to annotate papers with full text search for your notes - something available with the mendeley app on the iPad. If no other reader includes this ability soon I know a lot of academics planning on getting an iPad v1 once v2 is launched.
Check Adam from Notion Ink. Next pre-order round starts soon, next week I think (note: I haven't received mine yet, from the first pre-order. Others have, though).
First, that is all the vast majority of people do on their desktop computers, yet devices like the iPad are far more convenient and prices about equivalently[1].
Second, that is invariably how a disruptive product is defined. 'I have yet to see a use for 2.5" hard drives beyond certain toy value because the storage space is so limited.'
[1] Of course the iPad is less powerful for those dollars, but we are talking the vast majority of people who have never gotten their CPU beyond 10% utilization except when playing a movie with Flash.
Apple, Amazon, etc. are selling these in numbers that rival game consoles. Based on the market's reaction, tablets are neither a fad nor unproven. They're the next major form factor, and I don't see them going away. This format is on the rise as traditional desktop hardware declines.
Desks are not going out of style, so whether the PC is dead isn't necessarily the right question. People will continue to sit at desks and use computers. Microsoft's style of a desktop OS, though, could be on its way out. The hardware will be changing. Gamers, high performance computing (science, 3d, graphic design) and corporate networks will be the only ones who really need the 'tower' style computers. People who just want to read mail, browse the web, listen to music and use office software could basically take a tablet and plug in a monitor, mouse and keyboard for desktop use. Which OS they are going to use, how much flexibility it has and what sort of interface is the big question.
The real contest will be between notebooks, tablets and mini-tablets (previously known as phones). To break it down even more, the issue is whether you have a keyboard, monitor and display ports built in.
I'd love to have a tiny slab the size of a 13" Macbook with no monitor or keyboard (so, even smaller!) that I could use as a desktop. Oh, oops... I just described a Mac Mini. Looks like someone is ahead of me here.
But think of what the tablet means: Small, super-light, instant-on hardware with long battery life; paired with a lean OS and small, fast, and focused apps. You can see some of the tablet/phone learnings leaking into other form factors, like the new Macbook Air. Tablets and phones are just the two current form factors for this new era of always-on, always-at-your-side computing. That's the shift that MS and Intel seem to be struggling with.
Ebooks outsell paperback and hardcover novels (not combined) on the internet's biggest bookseller - we can safely say that many people definitely read ebooks on tablets (assuming we're including Kindle).
When reputable manufacturers bring mainstream tablets (i.e. Android pads that support the Market) to the $300-400 range, I believe that mainstream consumers will give them at least equal consideration with laptops in the same price range.
Technology-wise I see absolutely nothing preventing Apple from being able to port and merge OSX and iOS down the road. And if Nvidia's ARM chips work out it looks like tablets might just be able to replace laptops. Imagine a MacBook Air without the keyboard and running both iOS and OSX.
1 + 4 + 5 = classic disruption theory. The margins, cost structure, and organizations that have made them so successful so far are what's preventing them from seizing the tablet space. The CEO's are in place because they have made so much money from the old business.
MS and Intel are still aware of the disruptiveness of "Tablets" (a poor description for the phenomenon, but descriptive enough), but they are chained to their existing org-charts, ship schedules, and revenue streams. Whether or not they'll be able to pivot fast enough is still up in the air.
The really interesting aspect is that the important part in market growth isn't when the disruptive technology takes the lead in marketshare, or when it starts eating into the marketshare of the old guard significantly. Rather, it's the inflection points of growth that are important. When a big company is past its knee (still growing but growing at a smaller and smaller pace over time) while the little guy is growing at a faster and faster pace, that's when to pay attention, because lots of things happen quickly and by the time the marketshare starts shifting it's already too late, the die has been cast.
> While Intel and MS will make money hand over first for years to come, it does appear to be the end of the consumer market for these two companies. Their focus will be business class computers, workstations, and servers.
If it were just the end of the consumer market, then Intel and MS should be concerned, but at least they could take comfort in the fact that they still dominate the enterprise space. The issue is that their dominance in the enterprise space is eroding as well. For Intel, a central issue is the ascension of ARM. Smooth-Stone (a well funded startup), Dell, and NVIDIA (see Project Denver), as well as others, are now prototyping ARM-based servers for datacenters. A related issue is that Intel's latest processors now overshoot the performance needs of a majority of customers. Meanwhile, Microsoft's enterprise business is eroding due to several trends, such as cloud services (e.g., Gmail) and cloud computing (e.g., PaaS and IaaS). And both companies have to overcome some reputational issues stemming from their historical power in the PC space through the Wintel standard.
Intel and Microsoft have tremendous resources to respond to these threats, but the clock is ticking.
"For Intel, a central issue is the ascension of ARM. Smooth-Stone (a well funded startup), Dell, and NVIDIA (see Project Denver), as well as others, are now prototyping ARM-based servers for datacenters. A related issue is that Intel's latest processors now overshoot the performance needs of a majority of customers."
Yes, there are signs that the x86 architecture is in the early stages of being disrupted. Here is an article I posted in October that uses Christensen's disruptive technology framework to assess the threat posed by ARM:
> Microsoft AND Intel being effectively missing from the tablet race is staggering.
The real staggering fact is that it's just not the tablet market. Both Microsoft and Intel are also absent or significantly behind in smart phones, eBook readers, portable media players, connected TVs, and almost every market that represents computing (devices) beyond the PC for consumers.
The xbox/zune/netflix combo is really amazing. And the kinect is poised to create a different revolution in a different space. Tablets are not the whole future of computing, not by a long shot.
>While Intel and MS will make money hand over first for years to come, it does appear to be the end of the consumer market for these two companies. Their focus will be business class computers, workstations, and servers.
the server market, for all of my career, really, has been following the consumer market. The stuff you see in a server is basically upmarket desktop kit; the primary difference being the addition of ecc in various places.
If ARM beats X86 on the desktop, within a short number of years, they will beat x86 on the server, too.
Now, arm is a /long way/ from winning the desktop market, and I'm not at all sure they will. I'm just saying... /if/ x86 loses the consumer market, they will also lose the cost-sensitive server market.
x86 only owns the server market because the r&d and economies of scale paid for by the consumer market.
Personally, I find that... unlikely. Of course, that's a market I know nothing about, so I could very well be wrong. It doesn't really change my argument, though. s/desktop/consumer hardware/g and you get the same meaning. It's the mass market that makes things cheap, and if you can cram enough power in to a tablet CPU that it can replace the desktop, you can bet that us server folks will start using those CPUs (maybe modified with ecc support in the ram/cache) for our own applications
The real difference for us server folk is that tablet CPUs are always going to be behind the curve in terms of raw power. Likely, that will result in server boards accelerating further in to the 'massively multicore' direction they are going now. Which is okay with me; 1024 chickens, for what I do, actually work better than four strong oxen.
You really see offices full of workers staring at tablet PCs, trains & planes full of road warriors bashing out long reports on touchscreens?
The home market may primarily shift to tablets; I'm not convinced by that and I think there's still a problem with the use case for content creators on tablets which includes an awful lot of school children. But the market I absolutely can't see abandoning PCs as we see them now and moving to handheld touchscreens is the office market and that's far from insignificant.
Tablets cost considerably less than desktop computers. There is nothing preventing you from being able to plug a second monitor and a mouse into a tablet and use it exactly the same way that you use a laptop and a desktop today.
At the moment, they're significantly more expensive and less compatible. They're also, by virtue of design, far easier to steal / lose and we've had quite enough (UK) stories about laptops being left on trains by mistake or stolen from homes and critical data being leaked as a consequence. Also, I can't see many people wanting a 10" desktop monitor or a 17", let alone 22", tablet.
I don't dispute it could happen, but I'd be surprised.
Microsoft actually jumped the shark on tablets with the whole XP Tablet edition years ago. The hardware just wasn't ready and interacting with Windows XP and it's app via a stylus is just not compelling. XP Tablet is Microsoft's Newton, an idea ahead of it's time.
I think there is an anti-tablet culture at MS stemming from the failure of the early laptop-based tablets.
Once MS has a solid hold with Win Phone 7 you'll see that interface transition to tablets.
I'm glad someone remembers Windows for Pen Computing. It's also the first instance I can think of of Microsoft using vapourware to obliterate a potential competitor (Go in this case).
I wouldn't count them out. They've ported NT to ARM. The Windows Phone 7 shell, which runs on CE currently, could easily run as a front end to NT/Win8 on smaller devices. The touch device model and API is fully developed in WP7 and Win7. They have all the pieces in place to release a very compelling product--both from the end-user perspective, in the WP7/Metro shell, and the developer perspective, with excellent tools and a solid OS underneath. Whether they'll do it is another question.
If they can't get enough devices out in the market to make it a compelling target platform for app makers, it won't matter that they have all the pieces.
That's increasingly looking like the outcome. Why would anyone develop an app for W7 before iPhone or Android, assuming they don't have incumbent knowledge of the W7 environment (and even then...)?
I wouldn't underestimate the huge number of .Net / Windows developers that exist for Microsoft's ecosystem. If they manage to line their technologies up just right and make a big push for the mobile space, there's a huge developer mindshare that's entrenched in the Visual Studio / .Net world. A lot of these people have never used a Mac or other OS, and never programmed for another platform. Many of them don't have the interest to switch over to Java or ObjC and would prefer to work in the MS ecosystem. These are the people who would be developing the apps.
If a developer's personal inertia / sloth around learning a new framework is such a factor that they'll choose to develop for W7 rather than iPhone or Android, that doesn't bode well for the quality of the app they're going to produce. Most great devs I've ever worked with are perfectly happy jumping languages / frameworks if it means their work will be more successful.
This has been Microsoft's strategy all along, and it has been an abysmal failure.
A mobile app blown up for the desktop sucks as a desktop app, and a desktop app shrunk down into a mobile app will suck as a mobile app. Apple figured this out, and had the talent to invent a usable interface paradigm for mobile. Which led them to the highest market cap in the tech industry, with a lot of growth potential left.
I remember playing with one of intel's tablet prototype units way back in 2007. It was bulky and was running XP and used a stylus for input. Obviously it was more for testing feasibility of the platform more than anything but it was incredibly unusable and uninteresting at the time. They were aiming for a fall release which obviously never materialized.
So they have been thinking about the tablet space for a while, they just haven't been approaching it the same way as Apple has and I think realized that it would have been a shitty product if they had released it.
It's looking like Nokia's about to get shaken up, which might possibly entail a jump to Android or Windows Mobile. Where does that leave MeeGo? Can Intel go it alone as the only major commercial sponsor? Whose devices will run it?
Agreed but they have so much cash they could buy a company that does tablets well then rebrand/integrate. Never underestimate what a billion dollars can do given the willpower to use it.
It won't do them any good if they don't have people in house who "get it". Look what happened with the Kin after they acquired Danger.
Edit: another thing, the top dogs in this space (Google and the staggeringly efficient Apple) have a lot of cash and are much more focused. So if they were to go all in in any market segment their money is likely to go a lot further than it would at Microsoft.
1) Both have known it was coming, maybe longer than anyone else. But got the core requirements all wrong.
2) No one really seems to care.
3) Related to (2), there is no belief that they have anything up their sleeve.
4) Their existing ecosystem, probably a billion units strong, doesn't seem to help their situation at all.
5) Both CEOs seem firmly in place still.
While Intel and MS will make money hand over first for years to come, it does appear to be the end of the consumer market for these two companies. Their focus will be business class computers, workstations, and servers.