Why doesn't Microsoft understand tablets?

http://www.quora.com/Microsoft/Why-doesnt-Microsoft-understand-tablets

by rpsubhub • 15 years ago

21 30 15 years ago

iwwr• 15 years ago

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

rbanffy2• 15 years ago

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

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

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

maguay3• 15 years ago

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

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

dwc• 15 years ago

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

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

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

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

allenp2• 15 years ago

I agree with your assessment of MS extending who they are in the marketplace but they did push the market on the Xbox, specifically with the Xbox Live service. Neither Sony or Nintendo have made significant strides in this area and Live has been on the Xbox since 2002.

jordanroher2• 15 years ago

True, though you could say the Dreamcast first put a toe in that water with its modem and Phantasy Star Online. But the original Xbox was a great step forward for gaming consoles: built-in hard drive, Ethernet port, dual analog sticks in the proper position for 3D gaming... uh, and the hilariously oversized controller: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/8/29/

raganesh• 15 years ago

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

kenjackson2• 15 years ago

The licensed some of the camera technology from there. Most of the body tracking software was done in-house.

contextfree• 15 years ago

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

wisty3• 15 years ago

Scroble gave some insight into why this is the case.

MS is a bunch of different businesses (Windows, Office, etc). all operating at arms length (more or less). With that sort of structure, there's no room for revolutionary products, just incremental improvements on the existing business lines.

OK, there's great research being done on the monopoly products. Monopolies always do great research. But the company is not going to throw its weight behind new product lines.

IIRC, Apple is a lot more mobile, internally. It's nowhere near as polished as Microsoft (yeah, OSX looks better, but that's just a matter of aesthetic taste - something Apple has and MS doesn't), but it's much better at wild innovation.

bigfudge• 15 years ago

I'm not sure what polished means, in this context. Do you mean that there aren't entrenched vested interests within the firm, or that people are asked/enjoy being flexible and moving around the product line?

beaumartinez• 15 years ago

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

ralx• 15 years ago

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

Sherlock• 15 years ago

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

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

bluekeybox2• 15 years ago

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

kenjackson2• 15 years ago

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

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

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

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

cletus• 15 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a very Microsoft way of thinking.

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

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

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

[1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/06/commandos-infantry-...

bluekeybox2• 15 years ago

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

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

wisty3• 15 years ago

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

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

brudgers• 15 years ago

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

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

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

Why doesn't Microsoft understand tablets?

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