4 ms·
Microsoft has serially dropped the ball on this. They could have done a good tablet virtually any time, but the internal politics always got in the way of the d
by kabdib 13y ago
Microsoft has serially dropped the ball on this. They could have done a good tablet virtually any time, but the internal politics always got in the way of the design and engineering. It would have needed to run Windows, for instance, which would have killed it.
One of the most successful consumer products, the Xbox 360, runs Windows, but it's got most of the bullshit stripped out (e.g., no registry, no WMI, no services to go sideways).
Putting full-blown Windows in everything is a huge mistake, and unless a project can get the political capital to overcome that, it will doom it.
- marknutter 13y ago> It would have needed to run Windows, for instance, which would have killed it. Why do you say "would have killed it"? That's exactly what killed the original tablet PCs.
- kabdib 13y agoHad MS decided to do a tablet entirely in-house, I mean. (I'm talking pre-Surface, which is why this is a somewhat tortured argument. But it also proves my point :-) ) Microsoft needs to wake up to the fact that Windows as it exists today is a really crappy OS for embedded systems. Worse, the management culture of "We need to put Windows in everything else, too" is going to continue to kill perfectly good future projects.
- glenra 13y agoMicrosoft actually used non-windows OSes for lots of tablet-like devices. Windows CE was "windows" in name only - IIRC it was a small custom OS they rebranded from some company they bought, much like what Apple did with the first iPod OS. PocketPC also was stripped-down, not full-blown Windows.
- kabdib 13y agoWinCE is also an architectural train wreck. It is unbelievably bad on the inside. I have personal experience with its USB stack, which is so full of layers that we couldn't get more than about 10 mbits/second out of it (on hardware capable of well over 300 mbits/second).