What I find surprising is that, in the process of writing a historical review on Microsoft, anyone would ignore the fact that MS has repeatedly identified areas of profit, moved in, failed spectacularly, iterated aggressively, and ultimately become dominant, at least for a time. e.g. What killed Netscape?
Microsoft's surface tablets are signs of big things to come. They're currently too expensive for what they are, but they could find a huge niche. They're portable tablets meant for content creation, not mere consumption. If you want a tablet that will let you draw, take notes, etc. as easily as on paper, iPads aren't even close to the current Surface. The surface pro would have been exactly what I wanted in undergrad physics for a lecture-hall machine. Many artists probably feel the same way now.
Tablets have long been too underpowered to tackle real creative tasks. The surface proves that the hardware has changed, although the cost is still high. I expect the next few generations of surfaces to get cheaper and more refined rapidly. People who love tablets are soon going to want something more than a glorified phone, and the Surface is going to be the go-to option.
Yeah, so MS might dominate the content-creation/student/artist tablet niche. Big whoop. Well, success in any consumer hardware niche might do for MS what it did for Apple. Namely, make them a huge pile of cash and jump-start their supply-chain so they can move into other areas. It might not play out this way. Apple has been looking for ways to make the iPad more content-creation friendly beyond just marketing them as such. Still, iOS on an iPad is a huge step behind Win8 on a Surface pro for creative tasks right now. All MS has to do is keep iterating the Surface and avoid another Vista-style PR blunder with Win9.
> What I find surprising is that, in the process of writing a historical review on Microsoft, anyone would ignore the fact that MS has repeatedly identified areas of profit, moved in, failed spectacularly, iterated aggressively, and ultimately become dominant ...
When was the last time they have actually managed to pull this off? Maybe the Xbox? It was never dominant or an area of profit. .NET? Never dominant or a direct source of profit.
The days you are referring to are long gone. It's not the same company anymore and it's not the same world anymore.
Xbox, Xbox Live, Xbox 360... yeah, sorry, they pretty much perfectly illustrated that point.
Considering the early advantage Java had over C#, who seems to be laughing now? Business apps (you know, the boring 90% of software) seems overwhelmingly in favor of those two languages, with C# doing a bit better.
Disagree about C#/.NET "doing better" than Java (by which I think you mean more widely deployed). Java is nearly ubiquitous in big corps from Cisco to LinkedIn and everything in between. On the desktop, C# obvious wins, however.
But your point still stands: MS went from a standing start to a credible competitor, overcoming their early embrace-and-extinguish failures like Visual J++.
Another important realization is how many games are now being written in C# thanks to Mono/Unity, and on iOS no less! Arguably they may not be getting a "direct benefit" from this, but for example I would have never imagined ever being proficient in C#, yet here I am now with this skillset and fluent in a tech I would have otherwise had no interest in whatsoever. Because of this, I now actually have a favorable opinion of .NET, and while not having a particular interest in enterprise, would certainly be more likely to use these technologies for it if for whatever reason chance took me to that space.
Bing is also getting better and better. As an advertiser we're seeing more and better viewers and upping our bing spend significantly. Their reps are also great and showing up at conferences pretty often.
I don't know why you are saying the Xbox was never dominant. I don't think anyone could see the 360 doing any better. .NET is doing extremely well given the alternatives.
Microsoft doesn't make money from consumers because there is basically no money in the consumer software market (not billions of dollars anyway). They stay in the consumer market not for profit but for mindshare.
Balmer explained it in his exit interview:
Q: I'm curious why you guys are so taken with being a player in consumer. Why not 'just' be IBM? You're already so successful in enterprise, why not just focus there?
Ballmer: I would say -- and I'm going to actually even let John (Thompson) echo, because this is one where I think the board and I are on the same page together, but it takes some thinking to get there.
The key isn't are you in consumer or are you in enterprise. If you're going to be in e-mail, you're going to be in e-mail. You can't say, okay, I only want to be in enterprise e-mail. If you're in real time communications, what, you only want to let enterprise people talk to enterprise people but never talk to consumers? These experiences span.
Similarly, if you're in devices -- and we are in devices. With Windows, the Windows operating system means we are in device definition. And nobody has ever managed to figure out how to build a device for a user that was just enterprise or just consumer. These core experiences do span, 'consumer and enterprise.' These core devices span consumer and enterprise.
So I know there's a lot of press, blah, blah, blah about this, but the truth of the matter is I don't even know how you could opt, what it would mean to just opt to be all enterprise, unless you want to look like Oracle and not participate in certain high value activities, or you want to choose to look like Apple and not participate in certain enterprise activities. But that's not where we grew up. We grew up with a horizontal experience called Windows and Office that's equally applicable to people in their personal lives and their professional lives.
It's a long play. Xbox got them in to the fray. Xbox 360 got them to the front of the pack. Xbox One is probably where the plan is supposed to come together.
I don't think Xbox ever dominated the console market the way Windows dominated the desktop operating system market or Office dominated the office application suite market. Not even close. Same goes for .NET. These are clearly very successful products but are very far from "dominating the market".
MS currently has an advantage in digitizer features on the Surface. But if a swing like this was going to happen, for the reasons you suggest, it would be happening right now.
Furthermore, even if such a swing does begin, you are assuming two things: Firstly that Apple will not respond effectively to MS establishing such a niche. Secondly that Android will also fail to compete for that niche.
The problem is that all the innovative new mobile creativity apps are currently coming out on iOS, digitizer tech or no. Apple has never subscribed to the creation/consumption world view, or even used the term 'consumption' to my knowledge. It sounds like something people died from in the Middle Ages. Their flagship day one launch apps for the iPad were all creative apps - Garageband, Pages, etc.
It's very difficult to change fundamental things in your well-established, popular OS. See Windows x86/x64, see the difficulties of redesigning iOS in version 7, see the disappointed people who buy an Android hybrid and try to use it as a laptop replacement.
For some reason, I have all kinds of tablets at home -- iPad Air, Surface 2 (with RT), Sony Xperia Z, ... Currently I feel that it'd be a shame if the Surface didn't become more popular, even the RT version is so much more that the other two platforms. I am not speaking about Metro, you can love it or hate it -- but the fact that it has proper support for keyboards (with shortcuts and everything) and also it's much more gesture-driven than the other two platforms. Obviously it's severely lacking apps compared to the other platforms, but the fundamentals are simply great and I'd be sad to see this platform disappearing. As I said, it's features will not be easily and quickly integrated into Android or iOS, as 'responding effectively' is not as simple as it might seem.
Apple performed a complete, ground-up redesign of their entire iOS UI layer from drawing board to shipping product in less than a year. Evolving a platform isn't a quick or easy task. It took Google maybe 3-4 years to pivot Android into a truly effective iOS competitor, and MS took even longer to respond because they had to start again from scratch. However adding a digitiser and better keyboard support, if they ever bother, would take a few months work. Even for much more ambitious projects Apple has demonstrated they are at the top of their game and as agile as ever, or as anyone else.
They may well add the digitizer, but I don't think Apple will bother with better keyboard support than they already have. I think they view laptops and tablets as being complementary devices. A digitizer might make a tablet a better tablet, but a keyboard just turns it into an inferior laptop.
As tablets do evolve Apple's advantages in market share, app ecosystem dominance, software development and their 64-bit processor technology head start all place them on the strategic high ground in all the ways that matter.
> Apple performed a complete, ground-up redesign of their entire iOS UI layer from drawing board to shipping product in less than a year.
Well, but that's mostly redrawing the existing widgets, it looks different, but works like how it used to work. (They added some stuff like the control center on the bottom, but they haven't really _changed_ how things work.) Also, I don't consider it to be a successful restyling (it's less straigthforward to figure out whether an icon is a button or not, and so on), but that might also be a matter of taste. What I'm trying to say is adding a digitizer to iOS does not mean that you only need to write drivers and design the hardware -- you need to change some UI paradigms. And that's hard. Windows classic desktop is now touch and digitizer-enabled in the case of Surface Pro, but the whole thing is not too useful.
Apple is in a difficult position exactly because iPad Mini is so successful at the moment. Eventually large phones will devour that market as one mobile device (large phone) is usually better than two mobile devices (phone+tablet), or at least that's my prediction. They must target the same use case what Surface is trying to target: a super-lightweight laptop replacement what can sometimes be used as a tablet but renders your old, clunky laptop mostly irrelevant.
I don't think it'll get devoured. iPad in general has had enough of a headstart to have an ecosystem grow around it. Whether individual consumers will leave iPad mini for one larger combined mobile devices, perhaps. But I think we'll see a trend of iPad minis get used in businesses and dedicated single-use devices (we're seeing it with POS some already - that will likely grow). Now, it may be that android 7" tablets take some of that market too, but... I'm not sure it will. cheap android tables (sub $100) aren't all that usable for day to day business stuff (I've tried a few - mighty slow, for starters), compared to the punchiness of an iPad mini.
The entire market for tablets may shrink if consumers opt for just one larger device, but iPad mini will likely still be a steady device for a long time to come. Now that I've said it, apple will drop them next quarter! ;)
I think you're not seeing a swing because the devices are too expensive. However, as more of my friends buy new machines, I'm seeing more and more of them buy computers that have a "tablet mode" and digitizer.
I think Android will always play catch up due to the fragmentation. Great quality apps take a lot refinement and it's near impossible to do when you have > 10 main devices to build/test against.
I think MS took the right approach with the Surface/Metro, they really needed to reconsolidate their consumer software/hardware stack to provide a good user experience.
"When you care enough about software, you'll make your own hardware" -- Alan Kay.
>> "When you care enough about software, you'll make your own hardware" -- Alan Kay.
Sure, but why it has to be a low margin, overcrowded smartphone market? It's better to focus on new category of devices such as thermostats;-). Microsoft's situation is different here because they have no choice - Nokia pretty much the only vendor for WP.
There seems to be an underlying assumption that in a year or two, the Surface will have fixed all it's main flaws while the iPad and android tablets will stay more or less the same.
One can argue if the iPad is a glorified phone or not, but I think Apple isn't moving any slower than Microsoft, and it is reasonable to expect a more capable iPad in the years to come. Although it's third party hardware, stylus support has come a long way, even if it might not be as good as the Surface digitizer, it might as well be good enough for average users.
The race is on, and I wouldn't bet my shirt on Microsoft taking the lead anytime soon (in 5 or 10 years, I don't know)
Microsoft already has a huge pile of cash. That's not the problem. The problem is that the execution is good, but not good enough. Compromize and difficult choices (Surface vs Surface RT) everywhere.
They released the music kit for the Surface, but where are the vast amount of great music production / performance apps from various well established companies such as Korg, Moog, Cubase, all of which are available on iOS?
>> "Yeah, so MS might dominate the content-creation/student/artist tablet niche"
I doubt it. A keyboard alone isn't enough to win that market, great software is. Look at the content creation apps available on iOS - iMovie, Garageband, iWork, Paper, Brushes, DM1, Amplitube, Notion. It's going to be hard to catch up with that. They are built for touch. The people using them don't need a keyboard. A keyboard isn't really the ideal input device for someone creating content unless it is written content. For everything else touch seems to work better.
I would like to add to that, quality of design that third party apps and native apps on Mac OSX seem to have (in general) is much higher; this brings the more 'artsy' and student vertical onboard. UI/UX has obviously been a large part of OSX for quite sometime, which is obviously aided by Apple's minimalist design philosophy.
Moving from OSX to Windows I have noticed a large lack of ease of use and good UX flows in a lot of third party apps.
>"Moving from OSX to Windows I have noticed a large lack of ease of use and good UX flows in a lot of third party apps."
I would say that is because you were really used to OSX. I was the other way around and really dislike the whole OSX UI experience.
I think it is just a bias based on our previous experience. Right now after moving freely between OSX, Ubuntu and Windows at different jobs for the last 5 years, I still prefer the UI experience of Windows (I only wish Windows would have a command line similar to Linux's one and it would be perfect)
True but you must admit that Windows XP's default theme never really inspired any designer. The aero themes that followed are pretty good but to '3D' for my tastes.
I wish Microsoft would could out with a desktop OS (like windows 7) with pixel scaling and a nice flat UI (so I don't have to install some sketchy theme that screws up my font sizes and close/minimize/maximize buttons)
a while back i noticed this when i moved from windows to osx. and still i feel a little (not as much though) that osx is not as "fluid" and has less "finesse" and that the UI in osx is not well designed, especially things like buttons, menu, placement of items, and even the look of the buttons, the dock, etc.
It seemed possible that it was due to my getting used to Windows and not being familiar with os x.
A part of me though thinks that Windows UI is in fact superior to OSX ui, and that OSX has a somewhat amateurish feel to it. If I ran a design-centric company and my OS looked like that for a decade, it would bother me strongly.
What you describe in your first sentence is absolutely their MO. I don't think anyone making any sort of serious attempt to understand Microsoft ignores that or is unaware of that. The whole uncertainty surrounding Microsoft for the last 10 years (fair or not) is the fact that that approach doesn't work for them anymore and hasn't worked in years, their lack of dominance in the mobile industry being the prime example of that failure, despite having a significant head start (likewise for tablets). Yet, in a lot of ways, they still to this day cling to that strategy. You cited Netscape as an example, but Netscape is the most recent example I can think of of this strategy working for them.
I actually want Microsoft to succeed; I want them to do much better than they have been. Microsoft does certain things really well that their competitors don't, and I would especially love to see more competition in the mobile and tablet space. Their own processes and business strategies seem to have calcified around 2003, which have since dragged down a lot of things that could have been great products.
Totally tangential, but this is ignoring the fact that they actually have been doing really well in the one area that you would think would be the only thing people care about: profit. But no one seems to care about that, even though I personally don't think that that profit is going to dry up anytime soon. They could keep going like this forever, and people would still talk about how they're dead or dying. I understand why this is, it's just unfortunate that simply being a successful business isn't enough to avoid being branded a failure.
Also, I think a big problem with Microsoft's strategy is it's based on attempting to replicate the same level of success they enjoyed with Windows and Office. Microsoft's strategy isn't to become a strong competitor, Microsoft's strategy all too often is to attempt to become the overwhelming market share leader. They see that things like Windows and Office enjoy 90-95% market share in their respective market segments, so new products are designed with that goal in mind (achieving monopolies rather than trying to simply put great products on the market and having those products compete solely on their own merit). This is why everything they make tries to be everything to everyone, but such products usually end up appealing to no one.
I think a lot of Apple's success (one possible example of many) is due to the fact that they consciously don't try to please everyone. In fact, they make many decisions about such things knowing full well that those decisions will turn off many potential customers and put a ceiling on their potential market share. Their goal is to make what they think will be very desirable products for some target audience, as opposed to making something that they think will appeal to every customer in every segment of the market. IMO, Microsoft is constantly forcing itself to strive for an ambitious but impossible goal that tends to water down whatever the original product vision was.
Did Microsoft profit from browsers? Or was it a threat to existing platform profits that it temporarily pushed back via antitrust-inducing bundling tactics in order to scorch the earth for others trying to make inroads? And looking back, how did that go for them, they may have stalled human progress for a while, but what did they do with the time it bought them?
The Web is/was a threat to Microsoft because if everything is a web app you suddenly have no platform lock in. I think Google foresaw this, or is at-least betting on it, with Chrome OS. Why would anyone use Windows; an expensive, proprietary, bug ridden OS when they can use Linux or Chrome OS to perform the same tasks?
> Why would anyone use Windows; an expensive, proprietary, bug ridden OS when they can use Linux or Chrome OS to perform the same tasks?
Because for most people, for most setups, for most use cases, it just works. Expensive? It's rolled into the price of the PC they bought. Proprietary? They don't care. Bug ridden? I rarely see a Windows machine crash these days. Even the years old XP machines I deal with sometimes, for all they need a good fix to be running at acceptable speeds, still run.
With Chrome there's certainly an argument that it can be more convenient than Windows. However, the argument for Linux needs to be stronger than being a free version of Windows or Mac OS with relatively poor hardware support and access to the underlying code that most people won't understand anyway.
Are updates included for free? If not, it could be more expensive in the long run.
>I rarely see a Windows machine crash these days
I wasn't just talking about Windows and besides, not all bugs are visible -- they might manifest themselves as security holes. Companies (should) care a lot about security, if they did, I'm sure they'd be more interested in OSS.
I think I'm trying to reason with HN and not the average Windows dependent company. How many of us have relatives using Linux or Chrome OS? Very few? That could change down the line.
Did you even use Netscape in the 90's? While most of the non tech loved it's bloated and "friendly" interface, the tech crowd I ran in used IE because it was lean, fast and didn't try to be some sort of "suite" that took over your PC.
Sure MS leveraged their dominance in the OS world with brutal effectiveness, but Netscape was far from the ideal browser. In fact, Opera was our "Firefox" of the time as it could fit on a floppy disk (I'm dating myself here) and seemed lightweight in comparison to even IE.
Speaking of FF, Firefox was born out of Netscape's overall crappiness/bloated nature. IE didn't start sucking until after the US gov came down hard and MS essentially threw their hands up and abandoned innovation as a result of being pounded in the courts. Firefox re-lit the fire of web innovation (along with the whole web 2.0 movement and post dot com bubble rebuild) and then Google simply out Firefoxed Firefox with Chrome.
>> Did you even use Netscape in the 90's? While most of the non tech loved it's bloated and "friendly" interface, the tech crowd I ran in used IE because it was lean, fast and didn't try to be some sort of "suite" that took over your PC.
Apparently, You never participated in the IE4/Nashville beta.
Shortly before Windows 98 took the world by storm, Microsoft unleashed a new Beta of Internet Explorer for all the people who drank the kool-aid of Dynamic HTML that was being marketed at the time. One of the "features" of the Nashville beta was the HTML-ifying of the desktop and file manager. Now, everyone that's used Windows since knows that you can right-click on the desktop, and hide desktop icons. This was considered a feature in the Nashville beta, because it gave more screen real estate to .htm files you could create for every folder, including Desktop. Before uninstalling the (crashy) beta, I spent a good 2 days with all sorts of spinning .GIF files on my desktop thinking I was the coolest person ever. Eventually, I realized my PC was performing at approximately half it's normal speed, exhibiting symtoms such as Explorer taking 45 seconds (I benchmarked) to render C:\WINDOWS\system32 with HTML, and did a full Win95 reinstall in order to remove the tendrils Nashville inserted.
I'd say IE4 was when it "started sucking", myself.
Did you use all the hypothetical 90s browsers that never existed because there was "a monopolist giving away a bundled product for free and reducing the incentive for others to enter that market"?
No? Well that's my point.
And IE sucked from the very beginning, each and every time Microsoft could get away with it sucking due to lack of competition. Where was the spell checker? Clearly veto'd by the Office team, till IE10.
The "most innovative" browser took till 2012 to figure out that people wanted to spell check what they typed into a browser, or they intentionally hobbled their industry-crushing browser to benefit their older cash-cows. Either way it's bad. It had to be just good enough to starve the competition (and often it was easier to do that with "innovations" in bundling, lock-in and other dirty tricks than it was with features, speed or security) and then they left it to rot, when we had no other options to turn to and it took a concerted community effort to make many websites even bother to support any browser other than IE.
Firefox added spell check in Oct of 2006 (according to Wikipedia) Nitpicking yes but the modern innovation in browsers didn't start in 2012 with Chrome more like 2005 with the first stable versions of FF. I agree Chrome put the whole market into another fenzy but you clearly missed the years prior when FF was the shit.
Also, MS didn't make IE "just good enough" they integrated the browser into the entire OS! Good or bad, they made a huge bet on the web as the future but when the DOJ essentially slapped them down they said "fuck it" and starved the market for half a decade until FF came around and the government/public had moved on from the whole Netscape fiasco enough for them to start giving a shit again. Why would you innovate on a product with the potential that any "feature" you added would put you back in court against the US Government. No thanks.
I'm not sure why you think I'm such a Chrome fan, especially as nearly every other reply assumes that if I don't like monopolists interfering with the browser market to prop up their obsolete platforms I must be a Netscape fanboy.
Though, I have used Firefox since the days of Phoenix, back when some of the most important bugs where for evangelists to convince important websites to support anything other than IE (often just IE on Windows, since the Mac version was different, technically better, yet worse because lots of things didn't work on it). Presumably this is why everyone else thought IE was "better" since most of the web was written for it, and it alone.
But there were other browsers, remnants of a once thriving, competitive market, e.g. Omniweb for Mac OSX had inline spell checking in about 2000 (might even have had it back on NeXT). Safari launched with it in 2003 I think. There were plugins for IE and Firefox from around the same time. Firefox was held back because the Netscape spell-checking code (for the email component) was licenced so that was something that got ripped out when Mozilla was launched. Even so, they beat Microsoft (which had more money than God and had already written the most used spell checker on the planet) by 6 whole years!
Everybody else was adding a free browser to their OS and it was obviously going to become a requirement, as it is today with smartphones. It would have been foolish for Microsoft not to do it, and it was foolish of the US DoJ to think otherwise.
Otherwise, Microsoft rewrote the browser so that the components could be used by other programs and by outside developers, so it wasn't a bundled product, it was integrated into the operating system. This might have been a mistake (or not), but it was required because Microsoft had already signed a consent decree with Janet Reno that stated that Microsoft was allowed to add to the OS but not to tie separate products.
Life is hard when politicians interfere with software design.
Componentizing IE resulted in it being a better browser than Netscape, and made it much easier for third parties like AOL to adapt it using the SDK Microsoft provided. Netscape couldn't offer that, though it probably wouldn't have: Netscape prevented third parties from changing Navigator, and it could only be downloaded from Netscape.
Netscape finally lost for a lot of reasons. One was because it decided to rewrite its crap code just as Microsoft had done. That meant it stopped shipping new browser versions with new features. Its market share plunged and AOL, which had bought it, decided to make it open source, which is where Mozilla came in....
Incidentally, Microsoft didn't run into the same problem because it had two browser development teams working in parallel, one on the old version and one on the componentized version.
I won't entirely blame the legal interference for Microsoft's software design in IE.
It would have been possible to keep the core HTML components without shipping a functional browser frontend.
It would have also been possible to make these core HTML components versionable, so that a given Windows version could offer multiple versions of IE at the same time.
The fact that they failed to do both of those things wasn't the fault of the courts. Some of their design decisions were explicitly made to make the browser itself appear more integral than it really was.
Netscape was a buggy piece of software back then, and when IE 4 and IE5 came out they were a breath of fresh air for the general user.
This was mostly back in the 28.8 and 56.6k modem days, and Netscape's caching of content was a joke:
Resize Netscape's window and what does it do? It would block (single thread) and re-download the content (HTML, images) instead of using the stuff in its cache. You could wait 30 secs before you were reading your page again. IE would instantly (well, disk cache and then re-render) redraw the page - on most non-heavy pages, you could interactively resize the window with no issues.
Netscape also inconsistently progressively downloaded content - something IE could do very well, making for a much smoother browsing experience.
From a UI perspective on limited connections, the difference was like night and day.
No it's not, those two things are completely independent. I know this because I was a web designer at the time and I remember. CSS 1.0 was largely pushed forward by Internet Explorer which I believe had cursory support in v3 and support dwarfing what Netscape was feebly able to role out in v4 browsers.
What one product being innovative has to do with it providing incentive for others to enter that specific market? Either IE provided innovative features at that time, or it didn't.
Netscape story? MS because dominant in browsers (for a while) because of the nasty lock-ins, not because of any positive iterating. Their own slowness became their downfall - IE didn't iterate for a long time, and when they realized that competition is way ahead it was too late for them.
Exactly. That's why I believe nothing will change in Microsoft with the new CEO, open sourcing of ASP.NET and other moves. It's simply not in their DNA to change and become fast followers. Lock-ins, closed silos - that's Microsoft areas of domination ever since.
Nothing unusual about the lock-in strategy. I would argue Apple does the same with iTunes/App Store walled-garden, same for Facebook, and Google - their Android playstore, GMail/GDocs esp. for small business.
It is been a dream for many companies to own the full stack - client onwards all the way till the server. MS tried with Active-X controls in their browsers which only worked well with IIS servers. Apple is pretty much doing the same with their offerings.
No, that's revisionist history. IE 3 was a better browser than Netscape at the time, and IE 5 was much better than Netscape 4. CSS support, for example.
Nope, IE wasn't better, at least not in my experience. Even if it was better in some aspects, it wasn't decisive to gain huge advantage. IE gained it mostly by being preinstalled with Windows.
Yes, exactly. And not just lock-in. For those that were around at the time, think of the IE5 tcp shenanigans to make IE seem "faster" when talking to IIS by messing with sequence numbers, sending RST instead of FIN, etc.
Speaking as an artist, my Samsung Series 7 Slate running Windows 8 with the Mischief art application is pretty much the perfect portable digital art studio for me.
If you think the Surface tablets are overpriced, then you don't understand why Apple makes so much money when all the other computer companies are failing - profit. Without profit, it's hard to do interesting things.
The Xbox is quite successful, but it's a lot of work to make not a lot of money. Why? The razors and blades concept doesn't work so well as making a 30% margin on a product people really, really want to buy.
I'm not seeing a large niche for them in content creation. If we were starting off with tablets being the dominant player; the thing that most people used and grew up with, then it'd be different. However, the content creation market is already fairly competitive, and the pain points this would solve over and above what's already there don't seem significant.
The questions in that regard seem as follows:
Why would artists opt for a, relatively small, imprecise pen over something from Waccom?
Why would programmers opt for working on a small laptop analogue compared to a computer with multiple monitors?
Why would writers opt for this over a computer or a laptop?
I can see people writing a blog post on one, or sitting in a lecture hall with one - but even there, the advantage over an apple laptop; which is pretty light already; seems negligible.
Unless you have to travel a significant distance on foot. There it has the advantages that tablets always had: Light device, relatively good battery life.
But by and large, the competition for Surface in the tablet space seems likely not to be other tablets. It seems more likely to be the tools - some of which are, when you get down to it, fairly specialised - that people are already using.
When I connect my surface to two 1080p monitors, and an 8-port USB hub, I don't even remember that I'm using a Surface, unless I need to do a resource-intensive task.
The problem with that is that they cannot make Win32 a legacy product.
They tried to do so because you can argue that in the enterprise, iPad can deliver a better Windows experience via VDI than the garbage PCs that dominate the market.
Once I'm delivering a quality Windows experience to my users by turning the client device into a TV, the next step is to further simplify. That expense app? I can use VDI to deliver some awful Enterprise Software via IE9.... or buy a solution with an iOS app! Something like 40% of enterprise users are using a defined set of < 7 PC applications to do specific things. That's easy pickings for a mobile application, and a great way to reduce Microsoft spend -- which is a big black hole in every enterprise org.
The other issue is the channel. If they get real about hardware, they are screwing Dell, HP, Lenovo. That's a symbiotic relationship that generates alot of MSFT business.
Contractor problems. I have a second hand Surface Pro. Its much lighter than a laptop, but more powerful than the laptop I had before. It runs Visual Studio, Eclipse and all the other tools I need very well. When I'm at a client site or at home I can use the USB port to dock into monitor, keyboard and ethernet. When I'm in meetings I make notes with the pen. When I'm in between on the train I can use it in tablet mode or mini-laptop mode.
I figure that in a few years I'll be able to do all of that on a smaller 8" form factor - even better.
I've done a bit of development on a 7" tablet and it's kind of painful, even if you're using "just" a text editor (or an IDE like Eclipse with most of the chrome hidden).
At some point you start hitting some physical limits of the human body. At 7" or 8" you can't have a full-size physical keyboard and there are only so many lines of code you can fit onto the screen, and so forth.
Personally (and I do mean this is personal preference and not the One Right Solution For Everybody) carrying around a 3-5lb notebook isn't a big deal because I'm already going to be carrying pen, paper, a few medications, and a charger or two. Even if my main computing device weighed zero pounds I'd still be carrying a small bag.
Apple were not the first company to create a phone with navigation features.
Surface is a tablet which can also run Photoshop, AutoCAD, MATLAB, Visual Studio, Flash, and whatever other weird legacy apps are kicking around. It can multitask. It has a proper digitizer. It has a kickstand and a very innovative cover. Yes it's not a laptop. No it doesn't have the Android store. That doesn't mean it's useless.
(P.S. just noticed my hacker news account is 1337 days old today. wheee.)
You had me interested right up until Flash. Really?
Adobe and Autodesk all have multiple apps on iOS. How many Metro apps have they released? That's the metric that counts when we're talking about tablets.
All the software you're talking about only really works in desktop/laptop mode with a mouse. As long as that is true, MS will be an also-ran in the tablet space.
>"Adobe and Autodesk all have multiple apps on iOS"
They don't really compare well, iOS versions lack a lot of important features in comparison with the windows ones.
>" How many Metro apps have they released? "
I believe the point is they don't need to, they desktop software runs just fine.
>"All the software you're talking about only really works in desktop/laptop mode with a mouse"
Not really, all those apps actually benefits from the use of a stylus (actually artist prefer that more than using a mouse) and that's something that you can't really do with an iPad (I own an Ipad2 and I had really tried hard to do anything productive on it without luck)
For me its the form factor + the power to use a full blown OS when travelling. I don't have to lug around my laptop anymore. On my way I can get some work done; when feeling tired I can switch to the Metro, play games for sometime and get back to work again. I find it to be really productive. I have also set it up so when I am back home it automatically syncs the changes to my laptop (using BitTorrent Sync).
I was disappointed that the iPad turned out to be essentially a giant iPhone. The Surface Pro looks like it finally delivers on the promise of a slate that runs a real O/S. There's a bit of sticker shock if you compare it to a Nexus or iPad, but it's not bad for an ultraportable with a high-res display and Wacom digitizer. I ordered the Ivy Bridge model during Best Buy's fire sale, and I'm looking forward to putting it through its paces.
"I made the switch back to an iphone recently after having a Windows phone for about a year. I really liked the OS but I had nothing but trouble with the hardware. I went through three different handsets and all of them ended up failing on me. Eventually I gave up and just bought an iPhone 5c. I have to say that after a year on the Windows phone I had forgotten what the Apple app store looks like. I think I had managed to convince myself that the Windows app store was pretty solid. Jesus Christ was I wrong."
That even someone directly targeted by Surface "professional-stylus-user" demographic, and who was willing to try Windows Phone, now has one foot in another ecosystem that also offers a quite popular tablet? Surface (and PC Gaming) wasn't enough to keep him on Windows Phone, but maybe iPhone will be enough to pull him to iPad (even if it's not as good for some tasks, but better for others e.g. gaming) if the two competing attempts at lock-in clash (and they will, because lock-in is lock-out if you're on the wrong side of it).
>"I think I had managed to convince myself that the Windows app store was pretty solid. Jesus Christ was I wrong."
True, but keep in mind only refers to games in that article, which is hands down the stronger point of the app store. I don't play games any more and I hardly miss anything from iOS that doesn't exist in the Windows Phone Store.
iPhone completely changed my life overnight, mostly due to its navigation features and ability to look up phone numbers.
I'm not disputing that the iPhone changed smartphones forever, but looking up numbers was something existing smartphones had apps for, long before the iPhone.
I have a first generation Surface RT and I want nothing more than to put Ubuntu on it and get real work done. Since that is not possible, it goes unused.
Combining 2 devices into 1. This is useful for many people. While there are compromises with hybrids, sometimes the end result is good enough for people, e.g. camera phones.
Out of pure academic interest, how many New Yorker covers have been drawn on the "content creation" Surface tablets compared with the "mere consumption" iOS devices? Or how many world renowned artists are having exhibitions of their Surface art vs their iOS art?
So you can draw on a surface... How many tablet users need more drawing capabilities than an iPad grants? The Surface, in it's existing form, is not a viable product.
Microsoft's surface tablets are signs of big things to come. They're currently too expensive for what they are, but they could find a huge niche. They're portable tablets meant for content creation, not mere consumption. If you want a tablet that will let you draw, take notes, etc. as easily as on paper, iPads aren't even close to the current Surface. The surface pro would have been exactly what I wanted in undergrad physics for a lecture-hall machine. Many artists probably feel the same way now.
Tablets have long been too underpowered to tackle real creative tasks. The surface proves that the hardware has changed, although the cost is still high. I expect the next few generations of surfaces to get cheaper and more refined rapidly. People who love tablets are soon going to want something more than a glorified phone, and the Surface is going to be the go-to option.
Yeah, so MS might dominate the content-creation/student/artist tablet niche. Big whoop. Well, success in any consumer hardware niche might do for MS what it did for Apple. Namely, make them a huge pile of cash and jump-start their supply-chain so they can move into other areas. It might not play out this way. Apple has been looking for ways to make the iPad more content-creation friendly beyond just marketing them as such. Still, iOS on an iPad is a huge step behind Win8 on a Surface pro for creative tasks right now. All MS has to do is keep iterating the Surface and avoid another Vista-style PR blunder with Win9.