8 ms·

Microsoft Is Why Samsung, Dell And Others Didn't Invent The iPad

36 points by rosser 14y ago

bane 14y ago
Software is why. Apple is really the only company with lots of experience in both hardware and software.
- kryptiskt 14y ago
  Palm and RIM both straddled that divide.
  - masklinn 14y ago
    Kinda. So did Nokia. I don't really know that much about Palm's historical skill at software, but I do know Nokia was not very good at it, especially the usability part, and RIM had reached a place where they were content to remain (keyboard phones for enterprise markets, even though their phones were more popular with texting teens in europe) static until "somebody" got a bullet in each of their knees.
    - justincormack 14y ago
      The Palm software was OK but it really succeeded because of the app store. Third party apps were huge in the Palm heyday.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
    Palm split into PalmOne (hardware) and PalmSource (software), though.
  - bane 14y ago
    To be fair, everybody who makes hardware makes some software. I think the difference is that Apple does it not just as a side-project to make the hardware turn on, but as a serious and well integrated part of the holistic device production.
sounds 14y ago
Two key points from the article: "In order to come out with a tablet, you had to have the ability at that time to influence and manage the power architecture, as well as a software layer" - David Johnson, Dell's SVP of corporate strategy [1] Peter Hortensius, president of Lenovo's global product group, says, "I think the global view is that everyone got a little bit surprised by touch [technology]. We had touch devices, but the industry just didn't connect the dots like [Apple]." In short, the iPad sips power by tightly integrating hardware/software. And touch was slick and integrated all the way up the stack. I think the only question now is how many other companies can move fast enough? It took Apple the better part of the last decade to develop the hardware + software to where they are today. It makes Samsung's alleged copying make a lot of sense considering how far ahead Apple is. Personally I'd really like to see more competition. Hopefully hi-res LCDs, good UI design, good industrial design, and rapid innovation become common. Also, if everyone is doing "rounded corners" or whatever it is next year, Apple won't have all the patents and will be forced to cross-license. I admit it's not all going to be as rosy as this. But this is better than what happened in the 90's. [1] http://www.fastcompany.com/3002272/top-dell-exec-why-his-company-didnt-invent-ipad http://www.fastcompany.com/3002272/top-dell-exec-why-his-com...
- Camillo 14y ago
  But Samsung didn't copy. The UK courts have ruled so, and they've made it clear that they consider it libel to say otherwise. In fact, I question the article's premise. Samsung did invent the iPad, as well as the iPhone - except that theirs are called Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab. And they were able to do so while being a hardware manufacturer whose OS is provided by a third party, which calls the entire "blame Microsoft" theory into question. The fact that Samsung's offerings arrived after Apple's means nothing: it is clear that they were developed independently, and the fact that they shipped later must have been due to the additional development time required to make their products less expensive, and thus technically superior. The timing was entirely accidental, a mere side effect of the fact that Apple had access to a mass of brainwashed fanbois that will buy anything with an Apple logo, which provided them with both the funding and the opportunity to target the deep-pocketed early-adopter market. But in a world where Apple didn't exist, Samsung would have shipped the Galaxy family of products around the same time as they eventually did - and they would have looked just as they do, too. Any resemblance in design between Sammy's products and Apple's is due to convergent evolution: it is simply less efficient, if not thoroughly impossible, to make a smartphone or a tablet that doesn't feature that shape, that button, that grid of icons in those specific colors - or even one that doesn't ship in that type of box. Apple's claims to have "invented" any of that are tantamount to claiming ownership of a law of nature. In the end, articles such as this are a waste of time. There is no secret to Apple's perceived success, no lesson to learn. Their headstart is doomed to evaporate against Android's irresistible growth, and they will be recorded as a mere curiosity (to avoid calling it a "fad" as it really deserves) in the books of history. Hacker News has limited formatting capabilities, but, while reading the above, please imagine that there is a banner saying "This is what Android fanatics actually believe" at the bottom of your screen.
flomo 14y ago
It's worth noting that PC manufacturers had a variety of 'palmtops' and 'subnotebooks' based on low-power RISC chips & Windows CE, going back to the 1990s. IMO, this segment was largely a casualty of Microsoft's disinterest in web browser development. If they had something approaching a working browser, these devices might have found their niche. MS also lost interest in CE, which should have been the place to define 'industry standards' for 'managing the power architecture'. When Windows CE was released, it inspired a lot of talk about "Only the paranoid survive" and "MS doesn't want someone to do to them what they did to IBM". Somewhere along the way that was all forgotten.
- AmVess 14y ago
  The segment was a casualty of the fact that very different elements of design were forced to co-exist in a space where nothing worked in a reasonable, enjoyable or productive manner. Desktop UI on a tiny device? They were always impossible to use and had vastly more tradeoffs than bonuses in actual use. A functional web browser was the last item on a very long list of shortcomings these devices had.
  - cma 14y ago
    That makes it sound worse than it was: it wasn't a desktop is with e.g. floating windows. It did have trappings of windows 95 that didn't belong: start menu, task bar, systray But, apps were full screen. The biggest impediment was internet explorer couldn't render standard webpages that the desktop version could. That and resistive touch sucked.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
      I had one. It was a fun toy. Did about as much as a Palm Pilot. And that's probably why it failed.
  - quanticle 14y ago
    Desktop UI on a tiny device? They were always impossible to use and had vastly more tradeoffs than bonuses in actual use. And Microsoft is making exactly the same mistake again with Metro on Windows 8. Only this time, instead of bringing the desktop UI to mobile, they're bringing the mobile UI to the desktop. How many failures is it going to take before Microsoft realizes that different form factors require different UIs?
brudgers 14y ago
Without Microsoft, Dell would not exist as a major hardware provider (Samsung and others, are left as an exercise for the reader). It was Microsoft's business innovation of separating the operating system from the hardware that formed the foundation upon which Dell was built, and which sent companies like DEC, Wang, and Commodore to extinction. IBM and Apple only survived by reinventing themselves as something different.
- beagle3 14y ago
  I think you're rewriting history here. CP/M was there long before Microsoft's dominance took off, powering machines from multiple companies (including the ones you listed). In fact, MS DOS 1.0 was a re-branded QDOS, which was highly inspired by (as in, an incompatible but extremely similar to) CP/M. It was Microsoft's execution, NOT innovation, that gave them the lead. And IBM's lack of foresight, giving Microsoft control of the PC market.
  - WalterBright 14y ago
    CP/M, in turn, was highly inspired by DEC's PDP-11 operating system.
    - protomyth 14y ago
      Technically, but not business model-wise.
  - prostoalex 14y ago
    IBM lacked foresight only in retrospect and we can laugh and point fingers only because we know the outcome. In any given year the company of that size probably has access to a hundred various technologies that have not been market-tested. No company has a record of picking winners and losers perfectly, most companies need to concentrate, and hence the whole market for mergers & acquisitions exists. IBM actually rode the PC market quite nicely and exited it via sale to Lenovo quite timely as well.
    - 14y ago
AmVess 14y ago
Dell didn't invent the iPad because they were comfortable with sitting on their asses while other companies did the heavy lifting for them (MS, Intel). From the article, Dell's SVP says, "The reason we didn't come up with [the iPad] is because there wasn't an OS provider that could work with a tablet." That didn't stop Google. Not to mention, Dell still makes enough cash that they could venture out and do something on their own instead of relying on other companies to innovate for them. What do they chose to do? Blame MS for their lack of innovation and whine that they will now be competing against MS in the hardware arena.
- mdonahoe 14y ago
  Google had irrefutable evidence that it was possible (aka, the iPad)
  - AmVess 14y ago
    My point was that Google chose to innovate by stepping outside of their core business and trying something new to them. By many accounts, this is doing well for them in their efforts with Android. There was nothing stopping Dell from doing the same.
- dasil003 14y ago
  For an innovative software company like Google to step out of their is an order of magnitude more feasible than a low-margin commodity hardware provider like Dell deciding to make software.
  - Surio 14y ago
    +1 "lest we forget" the laws of margin/commodity in all this innovation back slapping :)
halo 14y ago
But that doesn't explain phone and home electronics manufacturers like Nokia, Palm, Motorola, RIM, Samsung, Sony and Creative who weren't as invested in the MS stack as the PC OEMs. I suspect a major reason was the reaction to the Palm Foleo, a lightweight instant-on Linux-powered ARM subnotebook designed for web and email. Palm were widely mocked and berated in the press for developing a non-Windows non-x86 computer and ultimately canceled the device. Is it any wonder other companies were reluctant to follow in their footsteps?
- gnaffle 14y ago
  I don't think this is the reason. I think the main reason was that many of those companies were invested in their own platforms, so most likely every new technology or project would be evaluated in terms of "how does it fit with our existing platform strategy". Even Nokia kept their Maemo tablets as a hobby project even though they were taken by surprise at their popularity.
- tmzt 14y ago
  Of course, and the Foleo was followed almost immediately with the x86-based netbooks. These devices seem to have grown out of the OLPC and intel's long time goal of shrinking their chips for mobile devices. But why was there so much opposition to the Foleo? The software seemed quite useful, it had WiFi so even the lack cellular wasn't that much of a limitation. Netbooks may have run Windows desktop software but were largely used for web browsing and Microsoft Office. I've heard the argument from some on the Palm team that the Foleo had to die, that it was more important to focus on the new webOS platform. But what software was used in the Foleo? A custom system built around Docs-To-Go. A menu which married keyboard-driven interfaces and full screen applications. The concern was that the Foleo wouldn't run the same software as the new hardware devices and also wouldn't run PalmOS software that the Palm developers were relying on, though they all knew that those revenue streams were already drying up. Of course, the new devices barely ran PalmOS software anyway with a required additional download of a trial of an emulator. That wasn't the death of the new platform though, Android and iOS were. I'm aware that the Foleo was underpowered, but it was the first generation of a new device. It was the first netbook, and it is very similar in a lof of important ways to the new Microsoft Surface going on the size of the display and use of ARM processor.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
PaulHoule 14y ago
You could say that Dell is the reason why Microsoft didnt invent the iPad. Tablets have been a gleam in the eye of the software industry for a long time. My wife worked for a professor who wanted to make an Apple Newton app for turfgrass professionals in the 90's and I remember playing Game Boy games in emulation and knocking off handwritten complaints during bad sales meetings with a palm pilot in the early 00's. Microsoft has been fascinated with tablets and pen computing and has made multiple efforts in that direction over a very long time. Look at one specific thing. Back in the early 00's none of that suspend, sleep and restore stuff worked right on Windows laptops. It just didn't. I was a linux fanatic at the time and I was always laughing at the business people who had to remove the battery from their laptop 3 or 4 times a day to get it running again. Back then, Windows was a real mess and when anything went wrong there was endless finger pointing. Microsoft seemed to believe that Windows never crashed on its own, that the fault was always bad hardware, bad drivers, cosmic rays, whatever. Vendors of premium hardware, like Apple and Sun, controlled the OS and the drivers and the hardware. Sun systems were legendary for reliability (even though they were losing the performance war even in 1992) and Apple laptops could reliably wake up from sleep 4 or 5 years before Windows laptops could. By the time Microsoft and the hardware vendors got sleep figured out, there was the invasion of the "crapplets". Turns out that Dell and HP get kickbacks from 3rd part software vendors when they pre-install annoying nagware on a computer you buy. So you've got a brand new Windows machine and it performs like it's 6 years old because of the junk pre-installed with it. So it's fair to say that Microsoft has been held back by PC vendors as much as PC vendors have been held back by Microsoft.
- meaty 14y ago
  > Back in the early 00's none of that suspend, sleep and restore stuff worked right on Windows laptops. Bullshit. It worked fine. But only if you bought a proper laptop (mid-high end IBM + HP etc). If you bought a crapfest machine cobbled together by the lowest bidder, you got what you paid for... Hell we had internal Windows NT machines up for 3-5 years at one point. Windows doesn't go wrong unless you throw crappy hardware at it. The bad rep by shoddy hardware vendors is why they invested heavily in WHQL and testing and qualification. And as for laughing at the business folk when their machines won't hibernate, that stinks of typical Linux smugness which in this area is certainly not justified. Linux's ACPI implementation is shitty and has never worked properly. I've have well over 50 Linux based laptops pass through my hands in the last 15 years and like hell hibernate/suspend works on any of them.
calinet6 14y ago
This is remarkably short-sighted and myopic. Microsoft certainly held a lot of things back by sticking to a status-quo for as long as possible. But how can you blame them? It was a profitable status-quo. Apple just foresaw the needs and wants of the consumer and created a product that matched them. They innovated on all fronts, without giving excuses or accepting limitations. I'm not saying they're perfect, but their achievement is one that could have been done by any company if they understood the whole picture; including usability, industrial design, aesthetics, software engineering, functionality, customer service, price point, and marketing. Apple didn't invent the iPad. The iPad isn't what made them successful. Apple invented itself, and the iPad came out of it. It was the natural product of a company designed to create innovative products by taking all aspects of the experience into account. Samsung, Dell, and others didn't invent the iPad because they weren't good enough companies. They didn't exude quality from every pore, and they didn't understand every aspect required to create true innovation. They can blame Microsoft all they want, but it won't get them anywhere. They won't be inventing iPads anytime soon, and they have to look inside their own culture to see why. But they won't.
- quanticle 14y ago
  "Microsoft certainly held a lot of things back by sticking to a status-quo for as long as possible. But how can you blame them? It was a profitable status-quo." That is exactly the Innovator's Dilemma. That is why, IBM, for example didn't pursue the home PC market with more vigor. The status quo is enormously profitable. The emerging market is quite a bit less profitable. However, by the time you recognize that the emerging market has greater growth potential than the status quo, all of the first mover advantages are taken by companies who had no choice but to go into the emerging market. Going back to the IBM PC analogy, Microsoft and Compaq had no choice but to go into personal computers, because the mini-computer and mainframe markets were dominated by companies like Unisys, IBM, DEC, and Digital. In the same way, Apple saw that the personal computer market was dominated by Microsoft. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the company's marketshare had declined precipitously and it had ceded all but a few specialized niches to Microsoft. A lesser CEO would have waged a costly and futile battle to take back the personal computer market from Microsoft. But Steve Jobs saw that the battle was already lost. Instead, he focused on consolidating Apple's hold on the niches that it did retain (high-end, well designed, hardware sold at a premium price) while expanding out into emerging markets like MP3 players, phones, and tablets; markets that Microsoft did not take seriously precisely because its dominance of the desktop/laptop market was so complete. And now Microsoft finds itself in the same position that IBM found itself in when Microsoft dominated personal computers.
erikpukinskis 14y ago
The final quote is telling: "If I knew [why we weren't first to market with a touch tablet] I might be retired in a tiki hut on a beach somewhere." (paraphrased) Steve Jobs was first to market, and he made all those hundreds of billions of dollars and he was still working on the next thing until his last week on this earth.
outside1234 14y ago
The enterprise is why Microsoft didn't invent the iPad. There is so much baggage that Microsoft has to support to make huge amounts of money with enterprise companies that they can't just drop everything and reinvent like Apple could. That's why there is a split in Windows 8 - they can't drop the desktop and bolt.

36 points by rosser 14y ago

bane 14y ago

Software is why. Apple is really the only company with lots of experience in both hardware and software.

kryptiskt 14y ago
Palm and RIM both straddled that divide.
- masklinn 14y ago
  Kinda. So did Nokia. I don't really know that much about Palm's historical skill at software, but I do know Nokia was not very good at it, especially the usability part, and RIM had reached a place where they were content to remain (keyboard phones for enterprise markets, even though their phones were more popular with texting teens in europe) static until "somebody" got a bullet in each of their knees.
  - justincormack 14y ago
    The Palm software was OK but it really succeeded because of the app store. Third party apps were huge in the Palm heyday.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  Palm split into PalmOne (hardware) and PalmSource (software), though.
- bane 14y ago
  To be fair, everybody who makes hardware makes some software. I think the difference is that Apple does it not just as a side-project to make the hardware turn on, but as a serious and well integrated part of the holistic device production.

sounds 14y ago

Two key points from the article: "In order to come out with a tablet, you had to have the ability at that time to influence and manage the power architecture, as well as a software layer" - David Johnson, Dell's SVP of corporate strategy [1] Peter Hortensius, president of Lenovo's global product group, says, "I think the global view is that everyone got a little bit surprised by touch [technology]. We had touch devices, but the industry just didn't connect the dots like [Apple]." In short, the iPad sips power by tightly integrating hardware/software. And touch was slick and integrated all the way up the stack. I think the only question now is how many other companies can move fast enough? It took Apple the better part of the last decade to develop the hardware + software to where they are today. It makes Samsung's alleged copying make a lot of sense considering how far ahead Apple is. Personally I'd really like to see more competition. Hopefully hi-res LCDs, good UI design, good industrial design, and rapid innovation become common. Also, if everyone is doing "rounded corners" or whatever it is next year, Apple won't have all the patents and will be forced to cross-license. I admit it's not all going to be as rosy as this. But this is better than what happened in the 90's. [1] http://www.fastcompany.com/3002272/top-dell-exec-why-his-company-didnt-invent-ipad http://www.fastcompany.com/3002272/top-dell-exec-why-his-com...

Camillo 14y ago
But Samsung didn't copy. The UK courts have ruled so, and they've made it clear that they consider it libel to say otherwise. In fact, I question the article's premise. Samsung did invent the iPad, as well as the iPhone - except that theirs are called Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab. And they were able to do so while being a hardware manufacturer whose OS is provided by a third party, which calls the entire "blame Microsoft" theory into question. The fact that Samsung's offerings arrived after Apple's means nothing: it is clear that they were developed independently, and the fact that they shipped later must have been due to the additional development time required to make their products less expensive, and thus technically superior. The timing was entirely accidental, a mere side effect of the fact that Apple had access to a mass of brainwashed fanbois that will buy anything with an Apple logo, which provided them with both the funding and the opportunity to target the deep-pocketed early-adopter market. But in a world where Apple didn't exist, Samsung would have shipped the Galaxy family of products around the same time as they eventually did - and they would have looked just as they do, too. Any resemblance in design between Sammy's products and Apple's is due to convergent evolution: it is simply less efficient, if not thoroughly impossible, to make a smartphone or a tablet that doesn't feature that shape, that button, that grid of icons in those specific colors - or even one that doesn't ship in that type of box. Apple's claims to have "invented" any of that are tantamount to claiming ownership of a law of nature. In the end, articles such as this are a waste of time. There is no secret to Apple's perceived success, no lesson to learn. Their headstart is doomed to evaporate against Android's irresistible growth, and they will be recorded as a mere curiosity (to avoid calling it a "fad" as it really deserves) in the books of history. Hacker News has limited formatting capabilities, but, while reading the above, please imagine that there is a banner saying "This is what Android fanatics actually believe" at the bottom of your screen.

flomo 14y ago

It's worth noting that PC manufacturers had a variety of 'palmtops' and 'subnotebooks' based on low-power RISC chips & Windows CE, going back to the 1990s. IMO, this segment was largely a casualty of Microsoft's disinterest in web browser development. If they had something approaching a working browser, these devices might have found their niche. MS also lost interest in CE, which should have been the place to define 'industry standards' for 'managing the power architecture'. When Windows CE was released, it inspired a lot of talk about "Only the paranoid survive" and "MS doesn't want someone to do to them what they did to IBM". Somewhere along the way that was all forgotten.

AmVess 14y ago
The segment was a casualty of the fact that very different elements of design were forced to co-exist in a space where nothing worked in a reasonable, enjoyable or productive manner. Desktop UI on a tiny device? They were always impossible to use and had vastly more tradeoffs than bonuses in actual use. A functional web browser was the last item on a very long list of shortcomings these devices had.
- cma 14y ago
  That makes it sound worse than it was: it wasn't a desktop is with e.g. floating windows. It did have trappings of windows 95 that didn't belong: start menu, task bar, systray But, apps were full screen. The biggest impediment was internet explorer couldn't render standard webpages that the desktop version could. That and resistive touch sucked.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
    I had one. It was a fun toy. Did about as much as a Palm Pilot. And that's probably why it failed.
- quanticle 14y ago
  Desktop UI on a tiny device? They were always impossible to use and had vastly more tradeoffs than bonuses in actual use. And Microsoft is making exactly the same mistake again with Metro on Windows 8. Only this time, instead of bringing the desktop UI to mobile, they're bringing the mobile UI to the desktop. How many failures is it going to take before Microsoft realizes that different form factors require different UIs?

brudgers 14y ago

Without Microsoft, Dell would not exist as a major hardware provider (Samsung and others, are left as an exercise for the reader). It was Microsoft's business innovation of separating the operating system from the hardware that formed the foundation upon which Dell was built, and which sent companies like DEC, Wang, and Commodore to extinction. IBM and Apple only survived by reinventing themselves as something different.

beagle3 14y ago
I think you're rewriting history here. CP/M was there long before Microsoft's dominance took off, powering machines from multiple companies (including the ones you listed). In fact, MS DOS 1.0 was a re-branded QDOS, which was highly inspired by (as in, an incompatible but extremely similar to) CP/M. It was Microsoft's execution, NOT innovation, that gave them the lead. And IBM's lack of foresight, giving Microsoft control of the PC market.
- WalterBright 14y ago
  CP/M, in turn, was highly inspired by DEC's PDP-11 operating system.
  - protomyth 14y ago
    Technically, but not business model-wise.
- prostoalex 14y ago
  IBM lacked foresight only in retrospect and we can laugh and point fingers only because we know the outcome. In any given year the company of that size probably has access to a hundred various technologies that have not been market-tested. No company has a record of picking winners and losers perfectly, most companies need to concentrate, and hence the whole market for mergers & acquisitions exists. IBM actually rode the PC market quite nicely and exited it via sale to Lenovo quite timely as well.
  - 14y ago

AmVess 14y ago

Dell didn't invent the iPad because they were comfortable with sitting on their asses while other companies did the heavy lifting for them (MS, Intel). From the article, Dell's SVP says, "The reason we didn't come up with [the iPad] is because there wasn't an OS provider that could work with a tablet." That didn't stop Google. Not to mention, Dell still makes enough cash that they could venture out and do something on their own instead of relying on other companies to innovate for them. What do they chose to do? Blame MS for their lack of innovation and whine that they will now be competing against MS in the hardware arena.

mdonahoe 14y ago
Google had irrefutable evidence that it was possible (aka, the iPad)
- AmVess 14y ago
  My point was that Google chose to innovate by stepping outside of their core business and trying something new to them. By many accounts, this is doing well for them in their efforts with Android. There was nothing stopping Dell from doing the same.
dasil003 14y ago
For an innovative software company like Google to step out of their is an order of magnitude more feasible than a low-margin commodity hardware provider like Dell deciding to make software.
- Surio 14y ago
  +1 "lest we forget" the laws of margin/commodity in all this innovation back slapping :)

halo 14y ago

But that doesn't explain phone and home electronics manufacturers like Nokia, Palm, Motorola, RIM, Samsung, Sony and Creative who weren't as invested in the MS stack as the PC OEMs. I suspect a major reason was the reaction to the Palm Foleo, a lightweight instant-on Linux-powered ARM subnotebook designed for web and email. Palm were widely mocked and berated in the press for developing a non-Windows non-x86 computer and ultimately canceled the device. Is it any wonder other companies were reluctant to follow in their footsteps?

gnaffle 14y ago
I don't think this is the reason. I think the main reason was that many of those companies were invested in their own platforms, so most likely every new technology or project would be evaluated in terms of "how does it fit with our existing platform strategy". Even Nokia kept their Maemo tablets as a hobby project even though they were taken by surprise at their popularity.
tmzt 14y ago
Of course, and the Foleo was followed almost immediately with the x86-based netbooks. These devices seem to have grown out of the OLPC and intel's long time goal of shrinking their chips for mobile devices. But why was there so much opposition to the Foleo? The software seemed quite useful, it had WiFi so even the lack cellular wasn't that much of a limitation. Netbooks may have run Windows desktop software but were largely used for web browsing and Microsoft Office. I've heard the argument from some on the Palm team that the Foleo had to die, that it was more important to focus on the new webOS platform. But what software was used in the Foleo? A custom system built around Docs-To-Go. A menu which married keyboard-driven interfaces and full screen applications. The concern was that the Foleo wouldn't run the same software as the new hardware devices and also wouldn't run PalmOS software that the Palm developers were relying on, though they all knew that those revenue streams were already drying up. Of course, the new devices barely ran PalmOS software anyway with a required additional download of a trial of an emulator. That wasn't the death of the new platform though, Android and iOS were. I'm aware that the Foleo was underpowered, but it was the first generation of a new device. It was the first netbook, and it is very similar in a lof of important ways to the new Microsoft Surface going on the size of the display and use of ARM processor.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

PaulHoule 14y ago

You could say that Dell is the reason why Microsoft didnt invent the iPad. Tablets have been a gleam in the eye of the software industry for a long time. My wife worked for a professor who wanted to make an Apple Newton app for turfgrass professionals in the 90's and I remember playing Game Boy games in emulation and knocking off handwritten complaints during bad sales meetings with a palm pilot in the early 00's. Microsoft has been fascinated with tablets and pen computing and has made multiple efforts in that direction over a very long time. Look at one specific thing. Back in the early 00's none of that suspend, sleep and restore stuff worked right on Windows laptops. It just didn't. I was a linux fanatic at the time and I was always laughing at the business people who had to remove the battery from their laptop 3 or 4 times a day to get it running again. Back then, Windows was a real mess and when anything went wrong there was endless finger pointing. Microsoft seemed to believe that Windows never crashed on its own, that the fault was always bad hardware, bad drivers, cosmic rays, whatever. Vendors of premium hardware, like Apple and Sun, controlled the OS and the drivers and the hardware. Sun systems were legendary for reliability (even though they were losing the performance war even in 1992) and Apple laptops could reliably wake up from sleep 4 or 5 years before Windows laptops could. By the time Microsoft and the hardware vendors got sleep figured out, there was the invasion of the "crapplets". Turns out that Dell and HP get kickbacks from 3rd part software vendors when they pre-install annoying nagware on a computer you buy. So you've got a brand new Windows machine and it performs like it's 6 years old because of the junk pre-installed with it. So it's fair to say that Microsoft has been held back by PC vendors as much as PC vendors have been held back by Microsoft.

meaty 14y ago
> Back in the early 00's none of that suspend, sleep and restore stuff worked right on Windows laptops. Bullshit. It worked fine. But only if you bought a proper laptop (mid-high end IBM + HP etc). If you bought a crapfest machine cobbled together by the lowest bidder, you got what you paid for... Hell we had internal Windows NT machines up for 3-5 years at one point. Windows doesn't go wrong unless you throw crappy hardware at it. The bad rep by shoddy hardware vendors is why they invested heavily in WHQL and testing and qualification. And as for laughing at the business folk when their machines won't hibernate, that stinks of typical Linux smugness which in this area is certainly not justified. Linux's ACPI implementation is shitty and has never worked properly. I've have well over 50 Linux based laptops pass through my hands in the last 15 years and like hell hibernate/suspend works on any of them.

calinet6 14y ago

This is remarkably short-sighted and myopic. Microsoft certainly held a lot of things back by sticking to a status-quo for as long as possible. But how can you blame them? It was a profitable status-quo. Apple just foresaw the needs and wants of the consumer and created a product that matched them. They innovated on all fronts, without giving excuses or accepting limitations. I'm not saying they're perfect, but their achievement is one that could have been done by any company if they understood the whole picture; including usability, industrial design, aesthetics, software engineering, functionality, customer service, price point, and marketing. Apple didn't invent the iPad. The iPad isn't what made them successful. Apple invented itself, and the iPad came out of it. It was the natural product of a company designed to create innovative products by taking all aspects of the experience into account. Samsung, Dell, and others didn't invent the iPad because they weren't good enough companies. They didn't exude quality from every pore, and they didn't understand every aspect required to create true innovation. They can blame Microsoft all they want, but it won't get them anywhere. They won't be inventing iPads anytime soon, and they have to look inside their own culture to see why. But they won't.

quanticle 14y ago
"Microsoft certainly held a lot of things back by sticking to a status-quo for as long as possible. But how can you blame them? It was a profitable status-quo." That is exactly the Innovator's Dilemma. That is why, IBM, for example didn't pursue the home PC market with more vigor. The status quo is enormously profitable. The emerging market is quite a bit less profitable. However, by the time you recognize that the emerging market has greater growth potential than the status quo, all of the first mover advantages are taken by companies who had no choice but to go into the emerging market. Going back to the IBM PC analogy, Microsoft and Compaq had no choice but to go into personal computers, because the mini-computer and mainframe markets were dominated by companies like Unisys, IBM, DEC, and Digital. In the same way, Apple saw that the personal computer market was dominated by Microsoft. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the company's marketshare had declined precipitously and it had ceded all but a few specialized niches to Microsoft. A lesser CEO would have waged a costly and futile battle to take back the personal computer market from Microsoft. But Steve Jobs saw that the battle was already lost. Instead, he focused on consolidating Apple's hold on the niches that it did retain (high-end, well designed, hardware sold at a premium price) while expanding out into emerging markets like MP3 players, phones, and tablets; markets that Microsoft did not take seriously precisely because its dominance of the desktop/laptop market was so complete. And now Microsoft finds itself in the same position that IBM found itself in when Microsoft dominated personal computers.

erikpukinskis 14y ago

The final quote is telling: "If I knew [why we weren't first to market with a touch tablet] I might be retired in a tiki hut on a beach somewhere." (paraphrased) Steve Jobs was first to market, and he made all those hundreds of billions of dollars and he was still working on the next thing until his last week on this earth.

outside1234 14y ago

The enterprise is why Microsoft didn't invent the iPad. There is so much baggage that Microsoft has to support to make huge amounts of money with enterprise companies that they can't just drop everything and reinvent like Apple could. That's why there is a split in Windows 8 - they can't drop the desktop and bolt.