6 ms·
Bill Gates (and with him, Microsoft) has been nigh obsessed with tablets since at least the mid-1990s. I think the trouble is more that MS entered the tablet ma
by tesseract 16y ago
Bill Gates (and with him, Microsoft) has been nigh obsessed with tablets since at least the mid-1990s. I think the trouble is more that MS entered the tablet market way too early, and got bogged down by hardware limitations of the era: the CPU etc. had to be something from the laptop world rather than from the PDA world because the latter was not capable of driving a big color display. Laptop CPUs were expensive and relatively power hungry. Big color displays were expensive too, so because of the cost people expected a tablet to replace a laptop. This probably led in part to the decision to run a desktop OS on tablets rather than come up with a new UI model and start a new app ecosystem. Rather than going with the (expensive, crappy, or both) touchscreen technology of the time they mostly used Wacom digitizers. The tablet that so resulted was doomed to be basically a niche product.
I think you could say that MS is in the same situation with respect to the modern tablet market, that Palm was in with respect to the smartphone market about four or five years ago.
As for the other phone makers, remember Nokia and others have been trying and failing to do the tablet thing for years too. Remember all the clamoring (for years) for Apple to introduce a tablet? It was not because all the Apple rumor bloggers had some clairvoyance about the market that Steve Jobs did not - it was because seemingly everyone else had a tablet out, or would soon, and people were afraid Apple would get left behind.
- cookiecaper 16y agoI agree, tablets have been the ultimate fixation in computing devices for a long time. We need only look at scifi -- how many shows have people carrying around pencil-thin panels and pulling up a ship's specifications while they walk and talk with the warp engineer, pounding on a glass table to engage weapons system, or other things like that? Apple hit the right combination of price and style at the right time, and imo took the scifi conception much more literally than their competitors, to bring tablets mainstream.
- greendestiny 16y agoIt's all about the multitouch. Sure a windows tablet with multitouch running XP would have been massively inferior to the iPad but it would have started to realise the potential of the form. Instead years of Wacom pen tablets just made people hate the idea.
- widgetycrank 16y agoI'm not sure if anyone remembers the Microsoft Courier tablet demo, which came out before iPad's announcement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmIgNfp-MdI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmIgNfp-MdI This video left me with a strong impression of future general computing usage patterns. It has also been my personal gold standard of a superb video demo. Interestingly enough, they abandoned it right after iPad's release: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Courier#End_of_Courier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Courier#End_of_Courie...
- podperson 16y agoI think the problem wasn't Microsoft entering the market too early so much as never really rethinking their approach to a platform. Their idea for PDAs/phones was a tiny version of desktop windows (compare that to Apple's Newton, with all its flaws). Their idea for tablets was a pen based version of desktop windows. Microsoft has NEVER really originated a UI paradigm or OS, they just copied/bought/stole stuff from other people, and generally did it badly. (No question they sometimes contribute refinements.) We're just lucky they didn't try to put a tiny version of DOS on PDAs and a pen driven version of DOS on tablets.
- whatusername 16y agoAside from Xerox, what large company has originated a UI paradigm or OS? Apple bought the multi-touch stuff, MS licenses Kinect, etc, etc. Nintondo maybe with the Wii?
- philwelch 16y agoApple bought the multi-touch stuff I didn't know that they bought or licensed the entire UI paradigm from someone else. Or do you just mean the low level parts? Because there's more to a UI paradigm than the input device. So, if it's just the screen tech that Apple bought and not the interaction software, I would count multi-touch as an Apple-originated UI paradigm, just as you credit the desktop GUI to Xerox, not Stanford Research Institute where Engelbart invented the mouse. Also, the iPod scroll wheel is an Apple-originated UI paradigm.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- seabee 16y agoWell count yourself wrong: http://www.amazon.com/Fingerworks-IGESTURENUMPAD-iGesture-Pad/dp/B00013MVT4 http://www.amazon.com/Fingerworks-IGESTURENUMPAD-iGesture-Pa... That thing even let you switch between apps with gestures. The iPod scroll wheel isn't an Apple paradigm either; jog dials for menu selection existed years before the iPod. I remember seeing it on the minidisc recorder in our school's music department.