Rene Ritchie of iMore has some smart things to say about Microsoft, Windows 8, and the Surface, as well as how all of that relates to Windows 8 tables as a hole (referencing Microsoft’s latest Windows 8 ads).
All emphasis is my own::
With these latest commercials, Microsoft shows they’re no closer to learning that lesson today than they were back with Bill Gates and the Tablet PC. They’re still mired in Windows and in Office. They’re so afraid of letting go of past success that they’ll take future failure instead. They’ll refuse to compromise on anything other than making the user experience horribly, needlessly, compromised.
[…]To mainstream customers, tiles that change pictures seemingly at random are disorienting, multiple apps at once is stressful, Power Point is something best left locked in beige cubicles (even though Microsoft could make it, and all of Office, available for iPad any time they so choose) … [With the iPad,] There’s no duality, no confusion, no feeling caught [with the iP — and yes, compromised — between the OS that was and the OS that needs to be. There’s just the iPad.
Instead of competing with that [The simple experience of the iPad], trying to out do Apple at that, Microsoft, like almost everyone else before them, has fallen into the feature set trap. Here’s the problem with that — it doesn’t matter what something can do, it only matters what you can do with that something.
These ads will help Microsoft convince some people to buy a Windows 8 tablet rather than an Android tablet or another kind of Windows PC. It won’t convince the hundreds of millions of iPad customers and iPad-inclined customers to do anything other than to continue buying iPads.
To do that, Microsoft will need to find the testicular fortitude to let go of Windows. To let go of the desktop. To do on mobile what they did on gaming and create an a Xpad (or whatever) as courageously as they created an Xbox. (I’d use Windows Phone as a better, closer example, but shoehorning the name Windows into that product, good as it is, highlight the same symptoms of the same fear and creates a similar problem.)
In 2010 Apple showed everyone in the world how to sell hundreds of millions of tablets. 3 years later, there’s no evidence that most competitors have paid the slightest attention.
And that’s unfortunate not only for the tablet market, but for all of us.
Yup. Truer words were never spoken. I love the fact that other companies are trying to innovate against the iPad – competition is great for everyone, including Apple, and especially for consumers, as it encourages even greater innovation and forward thinking as companies compete – but so many tablet makers have missed the mark almost entirely. And Microsoft is among the worst offenders.
I highly recommend checking out the original article over at iMore, which goes into more detail about why Windows for tablets just doesn’t make sense.
