A decade ago Bill Gates, founder and former chief executive of Microsoft, presented a new class of computing to the world: a tablet PC that offered a fully functional computer with the “intuitive aspects of pencil and paper.”
Since then, Microsoft has struggled to gain traction with a slate-like device, yet each year the company announces new products, software or operating systems that try to promote a world of Windows-based slate computers.
Next month, at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft will give it another try, presenting a slew of new slates that it hopes will offer some competition to the Apple iPad, which has quickly become the leader in this market.
A person who works at Microsoft said the company was encouraging partners to build applications for these devices that use HTML5, the Web programming language. This person said the applications would not be sold in an app store, as with the Apple iTunes model, but Microsoft will encourage software partners to host the applications on their own Web sites, which will then be highlighted in a search interface on the slate computers. It is unclear if these applications will be ready for C.E.S. as most are still in production.
Another person with knowledge of Microsoft’s plans said Steve Ballmer might demonstrate a tablet and other companion devices running the next operating system, Windows 8.
#28 No, it ain’t fer to change. Is just not ready and not working, period!
I ended up fixing the computer with windows. Same problems with drivers as 5 years ago, same undocumented or poorly documented apps (I mean, how hard is it to document a command line program, geez!), same issues regarding distros & software.
Such a humongous waste of time that I went back to windows for troubleshooting (successfully I might add) computers.
Bah, still not worth the effort. Kiddie OS. Unix is another thing altogether.
Linux is finally ready for regular people. But the future is i os, Android, Chrome and whatever builds on these.
I know you guys won’t agree because most of you are still running OS2.
Microsoft rose to desktop power on the backs of business users by providing something that was “good enough.”
Businesses responded by redesigning the desktop as little as they could, fitting the computer monitors in the unused space in the corners of the cubicles. Businesses are simply looking for the simplest and cheapest solution.
Microsoft won the “race to the bottom” and in the process commoditized the PC to such an extent that the Taiwanese and Chinese survivors are the most risk-averse accountants in the world. (Why else are they STILL making PCs with PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports? Antediluvian hold-overs about as useful as tits on a bull.)
But people never LIKED PCs and/or Microsoft.
I predict businesses love Android, Google apps and the Chrome OS because it COSTS LESS than Microsoft, just like businesses liked Microsoft because it originally COST LESS than IBM and the mainframe/IT project developmemt and deployment mentality.
An app store, combined with a plethora of vendors, peppered with a dash of open source, has the same advantage in cost (and time is money,) that Microsoft had in the nineteen-eighties.
Businesses are run/operated by accountants with cut-throat, nickel-and-dime mentalities.
They would sell their own mothers by the pound if they could get a decent return on their cutlery investment.
Their absence of loyalty is the stuff of legend.
Businesses don’t consume anything; they acquire depreciable assets at the lowest marginal cost possible and try to hang onto it way past its depreciation deadline.
The only thing hate more than spending money is spending money when they don’t need to, viz: unjustifiably.
As for Apple, its a consumer products company that USES computer as a strategic advantage to fill perceived market niches.
Its customers couldn’t care less about hardware specs, OS or computer language. That’s NOT what they’re shelling out their money for.
Consumers LIKE Apple, not in spite of but because of the abuse Steve Jobs and the designers have put people through over the decades of coming up with cool sh•t to play with.
With enough money and time… the Microsoft Juggernaut will eventually crank out a usable tablet.
Windows 7 is actually a pretty good product.. and Windows XP is one of their longest living operating systems and is fine if modded correctly.
They occasionally find an acorn every now and then…
Aren’t we all running Windoze for Pen now ? Oh no, that was another M$ FAIL !!! Why should that change now ?
And if Ballmer demos it, it will be cancelled within days !!!
msbpodcast,
you are correct about Jobs. I wanted to say this for a long while: Jobs abuses people, and he attracts people (employees and customers) who are attracted to abusive personalities.
This is the reason apple never rises above 10% of market share in PC sales. Only about 10% of people will put up with people who are abusive.
Whoo, glad you brought that up.
Dvorak should look into Jobs abusive personality, see if their is substance to this.
If Microsoft would just create a solid OS, one OS, and then merely keep working the bugs out of it, and adding on a few new features every year, that would be fine, Something like what Linux authors are doing. But not these completely new OS overhauls, that end up having all new bugs that’ll take another decade to work out. Windows is too much a Bells and Whistles platform. I use XP, and I’m glad it came along after 98, because it was much more like what I was use to using on my retired Amiga3000. But Vista seems more desktop eye-candy that anything else. And I saw no reason to upgrade PC hardware, in order to be able to upgrade OS software. Vista and 7 are likely more about pushing the hardware forward, than a useful and stable code base.
Linux might stand a chance at competing with Windows, if the PC makers didn’t keep reinventing the chip sets to favor Microsoft wares. Thus always locking Open Source wares out of the latest drivers and such.
Legacy really has little to do with it. The keyboards and mice haven’t changed that much in a decade or more. So there’s little problem making drivers that work for all of them, new or ancient. While printers seem to have a two year lifespan, before being considered obsolete. If for no other reason than to spur new printer sales. Whatever you want to call Legacy wares, can easily have driver support until the cows come home, with any OS. It’s not like there’s an economy of space on today’s hard drives, that it can’t be spared for keep drivers for 20 year old anything. Or the binary language of computing has radically changed. And the OS shouldn’t be so damn picky and snooty as to refuse to work with anything too old. Microsoft and IBM use to bow to major business’ demands, to remain compatible with very old software suites and office hardware. And it’s always be Microsoft’s choice to keep the 3.5″ floppy drives in PCs. Rather than allowing writable CD and flash drives to replace them as OS backups. Mainly from paranoia about OS piracy. Everything else, gets moved forward, like graphics cards, storage drive interfaces, and memory add ons.
I recently saw a Tv ad for the Windows 7 phone. And it responded to voice commands! Now that would be quite a time saver, if it were true. But I wonder of the usual level of background noise, tends to prevent this? And does it only work for a small command vocabulary, rather than translating thousands of spoken words to text messaging? It stroke me that if the so-called “Cloud” had any real usefulness, it would be to provide on-the-fly vocal to text translations. Where as no one PC or handheld device could be powerful enough to handle the task. And huge network of PCs or servers, via the Cloud, could do it easily, thru distributed computing. But the current ads for “the Cloud” just sound like Microsoft’s .NET scheme, renamed and revamped a bit.
#25 Of course MS failed. It’s too damned difficult for the current crop of idio… errr, customers. Mac is easier for them.