Microsoft shoots down Windows Phone 7 tablet hopes, says tablets are PCs - Page 3

I hope Microsoft never fires this guy.

See, that's the genius behind Microsoft's admittedly-late, but refreshing insight - tablets, at their core, are PCs. We get email, movies, music, documents, photos and virtually all of our content through these devices, they just look and interact differently.

Let's dispel the myth right now - There is *NO* tablet market right now. None. There is only the iPad market. Why has the iPad succeeded in 15 short months where all others have failed? Because people have the same dilemma with existing Android and Windows tablets today that they did for the iPad a year ago. "If I have a PC and a phone, why do I need this third thing?"

Apple was very careful with the timing and release of the iPad. They didn't release a product and hope people caught onto the idea of using it. They made absolutely sure that their entire existing ecosystem of devices, software and services were in place to support the product when it finally shipped. Everyone said the iPad is a blown up iPhone. Well guess what, they were right! And that is every reason why the iPad works - it took everything that consumers loved about the iPhone and made it that much better.

Compare that strategy with Android and WebOS, where they have decent hardware on the market with none of the ecosystem to back it up. Google is struggling to get some sort of movie and music system working for Android while WebOS is slapping together 3rd party services to fill in the missing pieces of their platform, pieces which are already coherent and mature on competing platforms (Kindle for books, Skype for videochat, etc).

Microsoft is *finally* taking the hint here, and thus was born Windows 8. We have yet to see how this will all play out, but what Microsoft is saying is all of these devices, laptops, PCs, tablets, phones, etc, really all do the same thing. Microsoft is unifying their entire ecosystem around the new Windows 8 UI in hopes to provide a consistent experience for both developers and consumers across ALL of their devices. You won't have to make the distinction between a tablet device and a "real" computer - you simply pick up the device you want, and enjoy that clean experience no matter what you choose with all the power of a "real" computer behind it.

That's what Microsoft is betting on, and time will tell if their huge gamble pays off. The tip off will be how much Apple adopts this philosophy into their own products, if at all, as iOS and Mac OS X continue to blur together.

Yes, Windows 8 shares a lot of similarities with OSX Lion. They both have added elements from their mobile OS and they both aren't quite ready to be a great tablet OS. The main difference is that Apple recognizes the second point and Microsoft doesn't.

Ask yourself, though, "What makes something a 'tablet' OS?" What does that even mean? Does that imply that tablets will always be inherently inferior to "full" computers due to their limited nature? I'm sure Apple would be quick to disagree with you, as they have been pushing hard from the start to market the iPad as something more than a consumption device that can get real work done.

What makes a tablet device work is it is fast, has excellent battery life, and a UI that lends itself well to multi-touch. Apple's choice is to start fresh with iOS, which shares a lot of code base and foundations that make up Mac OS X, whereas Microsoft is to bring Windows down to a multi-touch environment. Both have advantages and disadvantages, but there is no reason to say one is better than the other. It remains to be seen.

A tablet and a laptop don't have to be mutually exclusive devices, and there's no reason why they cannot share the same operating system.

I think Microsoft is on the right vision, being a convergence of all the devices to one OS. However, they are attempting to do in 1-2yrs what Apple has spent since 2007 no doubt planning and moving towards. So Apple has 5 solid years of experience and UI finesse across the whole range of UI options (based on device format, ie iPhone, iPad, aTV, Mac) and each one is the best in class.

Now when Apple no doubt next year (same year as MS's attempt) unifies the 2 OS's (iOS will gain the Lion UI when docked w/ a monitor/keyboard/mouse) both will be at architecturally the same place.

However, as everyone on this board knows, MS has let's say less of a track record, of knocking it out of the park on the first swing. So the likelihood of MS's Win8 working their way their hope across the whole ecosystem compared to Apple's fully operation battle station (had to throw some Star Wars in there :-)) the battle will be interesting to watch.

Meanwhile, the others, Android/Chrome, WebOS, RIM have no choice but to largely sit out this next wave of computing next year. The two major players will be MS and Apple, but this time the world is in a better place for Apple (ie as computing has become more personal and always present, "it just works" becomes more important) to be much better appreciated. I think MS has the uphill battle hill, and the other OS creators will be fighting for scraps.

None of the others can even quite handle a tablet UI, and now we're talking a TV and full desktop UI just for fun, and by next year, not a chance!

Do not mistake unification of the UI for unification of the OS. Even if iOS did gain the Lion UI when docked it would not ever be identical to OS-X internally. The security sandbox and the lack of an exposed file system are just two ways in which it will never run a full desktop OS, and by design.

The two OSes will share some elements, but they will never be unified.

Sure, MS has been shipping tablets that run desktop OSes for years, there's no reason why you can't - except that it tends to produce a crummy product.

Full pre-emptive multitasking will negatively impact your battery life, which is why iOS doesn't supply it.

iOS security features work directly against it ever being a self-hosting system from a development perspective - a general purpose OS like windows will never be able to implement such controls without endless 'PC wants to do X' dialogue boxes.

Existing desktop OSes are hugely bloated, as are their compiled binaries. There's no way to reduce that without ripping huge chunks of functionality out of them.


There are plenty of reasons.

Under the hood, OS X and iOS already share a lot more in common than not. It's just that some features (like sandboxing and inaccessible filesystems) are mandatory in iOS, but optional (in the first case) or absent (in the latter case) in OS X.

The unification will come not by changing iOS to make it more like OS X, but conversely by changing OS X to make it more like iOS.

By introducing features like mandatory sandboxing in all 3rd party apps sold through the Mac App Store, they're stepping towards unification.

And don't forget, during Jobs's most recent keynote, he spoke specifically about how he and his top team had been brainstorming for the last decade about how to deemphasize user-accessible filesystems on Mac OS. He spent quite a bit of time talking about how changes in Lion were making that dream more of a reality.

Now, it's just a matter of giving 3rd party developers an opportunity to catch up with Apple's evolving paradigm for document storage, and then they can flip the proverbial switch to make OS X's filesystem just as hidden (but present) as it is already hidden (but present) in iOS.


By the way, iOS is a fully preemptive multitasking operating system. But they have rules in place that define a limited set of situations in which 3rd party applications are allowed to use that capability.

There are absolutely common elements, there is absolutely common code, but they remain resolutely two different OSes.


They will definitely carry some elements across, such as full screen Apps, but it will never become full unification. There are simply too many things that we're used to being able to do on a computer that they'd have to take away. The sandboxing is a great example, the new Lion sandbox isn't just the same thing as the iOS sandbox - it's different because we need different things on a desktop.


A lot of App data can stay in the App's silo on the cloud, but so much cannot. If I want to do different kinds of image processing using different applications then they all need to be able to see the media files. If I want to do software development, I kinda need a file system - the non-FS based dev environments are all pretty nasty.


It is internally, but it doesn't permit it to client apps except under very restrictive conditions, OS-X does and always will.

The two OSes are related, they will continue to influence each other and grow together, but they will never be unified - and for good reason.

Yeah, but let us see the growth curves on each of those devices.

I will say that until the iPad is fully independent of computers, this Fall, then they are not really pc's.

They will then be truly post-pc devices and will need their own bar on the bar graph - further lessening the size of the "tablet" bar.

My question is ... what constitutes a pc?

Oh my, you made my day!!!! hahahahahaha rolf!