5 ms·

Because it's an awful productivity device? It has no usable filesystem, poor integration between applications, awful input device support, a tiny screen and is

• aaronblohowiak 13y ago
  >impractical for office work yet a lot of people bring them to meetings as an alternative to an iPad. If you are mostly an email person, being able to open these attachments is useful.
  • kyriakos 13y ago
    everytime i see people with ipads in meetings (same applies for android tablets) they usually use them as document viewers. why do you need a full office suite to do that?
    • Silhouette 13y ago
      ...use them as document viewers. why do you need a full office suite to do that? You don't, but unless the only people you work with are the kind who like to look at things and talk lots but never actually produce anything of value, there are other considerations.
      • doorhammer 13y ago
        I think these points are specifically addressing bringing an ipad to meetings where you're less likely to be producing so much as consuming or discussing (most of the time).
        • Silhouette 13y ago
          Right, but that suggests there are also desktop/laptop machines running "real Office" that the same people use for creating new material. Microsoft still make an awful lot of money serving that market. Meanwhile, the norms for selling tablet software are very different to traditional business software. ("What, you want me to pay TEN WHOLE DOLLARS for an app that's going to save me at least an hour every day? Are you crazy?!") Releasing a full office suite onto tablets is not a no-brainer decision in that context, and I'm not surprised the new CEO hasn't pushed the button yet. It seems unlikely that a tablet version would make anything like the revenues per user the traditional desktop version did. Perhaps MS can establish some sort of subscription SaaS model here, but I'm extremely sceptical about the long-time viability of that model as a replacement for traditional COTS software products. On the other hand, if a tablet version provided a decent viewing platform for people who do do more reading than writing, it could potentially damage desktop sales if those people would otherwise have been added into the site licence or similar for the full desktop suite but no longer feel they need to be because they can just use the tablet at their desks as well.
          • deleted 13y ago
            [deleted]
    • bananas 13y ago
      Well the meetings I've been in, I'm constantly waiting for those people with quotes like: "oh it's not rendering properly - I can't see the project plan" "it's on page 450... the app closed on page 300" "It's attached to the document - all I can see is an X" etc etc... I'll be damned if I couldn't be doing something more productive then...
      • r00fus 13y ago
        So are these actual quotes from people you've interacted with? Otherwise, your comment is a strawman. I've been in meetings with people who have iPads, most with keyboard cases. In one such case, this woman (a PM for our project) asked meaningful questions, took notes, then sent out the minutes and action items as soon as the meeting closed. I was sitting next to her the entire time, so I saw what she used: Mail.app, Safari for various internal and cloud-based web-apps, Skype, and Fantastical for giving herself some tasks/reminders and setting up a followup meeting. She made big use of the multitouch gesture for iPad app-switch in a very elegant and no-fuss kind of way. The copy/paste seemed a bit time consuming, but clearly she was used to it and didn't make a fuss about it. While in some organizations you may need a full-on laptop, that use-case is being chipped away every year. btw, that example about project plan is really Microsoft's fault - Microsoft really needs to provide a non-Windows (preferably web-compatible) .mpp viewer, yes, I have MOOS, but it's pretty sad that the PM has to export the Gannt chart or hope the team has the right viewer.
        • bananas 13y ago
          Yes they are. I spend a lot of time in meetings with these people. Definitely not a straw man. The project plan was an embedded WMF so its not about Microsoft project.
  • genericuser 13y ago
    >yet a lot of people bring them to meetings as an alternative to an iPad Do you mean a lot of people bring iPads to meetings as an alternative to devices practical for office work? Or am I missing something?
• atourgates 13y ago
  Have you tried one with a good bluetooth keyboard/enclosure? I was surprised with how much of a difference it makes. I got an iPad3 at launch, and never bothered with a keyboard cover. It was, like you said, an awful productivity device. I got a keyboard cover with my iPad Air, and it made a night & day difference in terms of productivity.
  • Pacabel 13y ago
    How does that help remedy the other four problems he mentioned, especially the ones totally independent of input devices, though?
    • cmsmith 13y ago
      It doesn't, and you know that.
  • nirnira 13y ago
    I tried using iPads with keyboard covers. Having to constantly switch between tapping the screen and typing was a dealbreaker for me. There's zero integration for keyboards beyond the ability to type in textboxes and a few system shortcuts. You can't even select apps with the arrow keys on the homescreen!
    • stcredzero 13y ago
      Well, if your expectation is to just turn the iPad into a laptop, it's not going to work out. If you want to turn it into an iPad you can type faster on, it will be much better.
      • nirnira 13y ago
        Funny, Microsoft seems to have figured out how to strike a middle ground.
        • stcredzero 13y ago