Microsoft axed Courier tablet in favor of 'Windows Everywhere' strategy - report - Page 2

Based on the concept video and where W8 Metro UI is at right now there is no way the Courier could have been made in any reasonable timeframe. And HW-wise I don't think you could get any reasonable usage out of a device of any reasonable weight that needs to power 2x7" displays.

[QUOTE=FreeRange;1979996]
Highly rational argument there, the others are better because there not Microsoft. Doesn't matter what any of them actually do, the others are simply better because there not Microsoft.

Well done.


Business skipped Vista because it got a bad rep. As long as Win8 doesn't, business will upgrade to it as part of there normal PC lifecycle. A lot may not bother if they've just gone to Win7, but anyone who hasn't moved over will be going to Win8.

it's time for the "Windows NOwhere" strategy....hope it catches on.

Microsoft doesn't give a crap about creativity. Not among its employees. Not among Windows users.

The only thing Bill Gates created was a monopoly, by devising ever-more-efficient FUD-driven ways of stepping on young, vulnerable competitors' necks. And by devising ever-more-restrictive software licensing schemes to lock in corporate IT customers. It worked beautifully. And it froze innovation in personal computing for more than a decade.

Legacy Windows makes too much money for Microsoft for them to risk it by developing something new that might compete against it. The only reason why Microsoft is developing WP7 is because they have nothing to lose in the smartphone OS space. Windows Mobile 6.x was already dead at the hands of iPhone and iOS. So WP7 can't threaten any existing Microsoft product. Live or die or stagger forward aimlessly like the living dead, WP7 won't hurt legacy Windows.

Microsoft is happy to coast along. To milk Windows and Office for every dollar they can get. Yes, Windows 8 will run on ARM-based tablets. Yes, there will be a Metro GUI overlay that the OS and all-new apps can use. But no, it won't be radically different under that layer. Same old API, different CPU architecture.

Good luck getting all your developers to move from Intel to ARM, Ballmer.
Maybe you could do what Apple has done on each of its CPU architecture transitions.
68k -> RISC, then RISC -> Intel, and now Intel -> ARM (iOS.)
Worked beautifully for Apple.

Right, it seems like we're still pretending that Courier was a real product that would have shipped if only MS management had gotten behind it. Based on the story's description of different prototypes for different desirable traits (weight, battery life, design, performance) that seems highly unlikely.

It's the same fallacy that drove the original spate of Courier excitement-- that somehow figuring out a cool UI and form factor ideas was the biggest part of the challenge, and then building something would be relatively trivial.

And of course the actual nitty-gritty of getting all those tradeoffs (size, weight, performance, cost, durability, battery life, user experience) is by far the hardest part. It's the thing Apple doesn't get enough credit for-- balancing every part of the all over experience in order to get the best blend, in an actual shipping product.

I bet MS could have released a Courier-like device if they didn't mind having it weigh 5 pounds, or get 2 hours of battery life, or have a tendency to break at the hinge, or cost $1500, or have some kind of critical usability issue. It sounds like they may have solved some or all of those problems one at a time, on different devices.

That is just light years from being able to solve them all at once, on one device. It's why I dismissed the Courier videos back when-- it was pretty clear that actually making something like that was going to take a vast amount of engineering, if it were even possible at all. A demo of a feature does not a product make.

@ addabox,

I do give credit to MS for making compelling concept videos. While useless in and of themselves, it's possible to make a good and bad vision of the future. Their newest one is pretty slick and the level of production for the sets for this "vision" is cinema-level impressive.

•

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0
However, RiM's "vision" is awful.

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http://gizmodo.com/5855291/blackberr...essing-as-hell It's not even cool in a dystopian sort of way but I'll defer to Sam Biddle of Gizmodo for a run down of that video.

"RIM has a video forecast for the not too distant future, and it's a horrible corporate snooze fest. It's dull, derivative, and, worst of all, doesn't make you look forward to the future whatsoever. Unless you really love cubicles.

"What're these future folk up to? Requesting app permissions at lunch, typing on a virtual keyboard (UGH), losing their phones at a coffee shop, depressingly using augmented reality to find a new desk assignment, and other mundanities."

I'm going to throw in with Gruber on this one (yes, I know, many of you loath him, get over it). That is, Microsoft's concept videos don't really serve them, and take attention and resources away from building shipping products.

What have we seen from MS concept videos over the years that have actually made it into shipping products? Where has a video seemed to inflect the actual work done in any useful way?

Apple never makes concept videos (the Knowledge Navigator piece is the exception to prove the rule, and came at a bad time in Apple's history), they just ship products. I'm sure MS has people working on bits and pieces of the stuff they think would be cool, ala Courier, but it doesn't seem to come together. Magic sidewalks and airplane windows are fun, how do you get from here to there?

BTW, why do all concept videos come from the timeline where they passed the Anti-Bezel Act of 2022?

To be clear, my praise of their quality videos is not praise of the video's usefulness. It's entertainment value only.


Check out RiM's video (if you dare). In the scene with the guy's arms outstretched pressing small points of text on the screen the bezel is thin but they pan to the side and you see a very thick very AIO that is even less futuristic than a 5yo Dell XPS One. Maybe it's suppose to house all the company's servers¡

Yeah, they have the money to do up the production design pretty well. Maybe that's a bad thing, since it leaves the executives at MS feeling like they've actually accomplished something.



Heh, I noticed that. Like the art department was hard pressed to come up with something futuristic to mount on that VESA swing-arm so they just pressed something lying around into service. How much you want to bet the screen action is the same unit, with the UI matted in so as to reduce the bezel?

[QUOTE=timgriff84;1980199]
you must not be in business. it is not like your home PC at all. updating to a new generation OS is a huge pain in the butt for any business, and very expensive. resulting compatibility issues across generations of hardware and software are serious problems. staff training is not trivial. and the server OS is by far the most important of all, the brains of your system.

so as a result, you go with the server update first, since those are designed to be fully backward compatible up to a point - but the latest Windows 11 server does not fully support XP any more. once that is all set and running good, you then update chunks of your company. but the common denominator for all the proprietary software you have to use for that will not be the newest OS - Windows 8 in this discussion - but the last widely adopted one - definitely Windows 7 now and for several more years, which they are all just finally catching up to. the proprietary software companies are always a year or several behind the latest OS release. and promises from MS that Win 8 will be backward compatible with all their Vista or Win 7 software is bull. that never turns out to be 100% true. and businesses hate trouble shooting even small IT glitches.

so enterprise updates OS' slowly, every 5-8 years or so when they finally must. XP worked great for most for a long time and they are just now finally moving on - to Win 7. they don't need Mango or all those other bells and whistles at all. in fact, they will turn them off as much as possible.

That was only in concept form, the final product might use a single 10" display

Sure. Or the "final product" might have been any number of other arrangements. That's the thing, it doesn't sound like there ever was a stable, single, finished thing to point at and say "That's what we would have gotten had MS not axed the project."

Instead, there were any number of prototypes designed around one feature or another. So in that regard whatever they were doing resembles the concept video that had everyone so fired up-- a tech demonstration with no guarantees that anything very useful would have ever come of it.

I'm still bemused at how many people thought the video equalled a shipping product, or that Apple must have been really scared, or that it all represented a masterstroke on the part of MS. Shrug.

Well... that gets a bit confusing as well because the apps that run on a Windows 8 tablet are also going to run on a Windows 8 desktop.

The "traditional" Windows desktop is (in a sense) being wrapped up as an app on the new Metro interface.

It's kind of like if Apple wrapped OSX up as a virtual machine app that could be launched from the iOS springboard like any other app. Then they made this new iOS + OSX VM the same OS across all laptops, desktops and tablets.