Guardian: “Microsoft beats Apple to the Tablet”. Really?

I hate to point this out, but contrary to what the Apple fanboys would have you believe, Microsoft beat Apple to the Tablet 7 years ago lol – they just f***ed up the marketing (as always).

As always, Apple loses the time-to-market battle, but will no doubt win the fanboy opinion battle. A few months a from now, the notoriously anti-Microsoft media will be proclaiming how brilliant Apple is for “inventing” the Tablet. 

Guardian: “Microsoft beats Apple to the Tablet”. Really? « Sharing the truth one thread at a time

Why consumers won’t buy tablets – CNN.com

 Why consumers won’t buy tablets – CNN.com

Ok – so this guy really doesn’t get it (not surprising – there are few tech columnists out there who grasp anything that is not already mainstream). Then, hardly anyone else gets it, either. The one things he does have right in the whole article is that tablets are too expensive – but this is, of course, driven by the fact that they have never caught on enough to drive the prices down.

However, he also makes the statement “…you need a keyboard for doing real work…” This is entirely, utterly incorrect. The problem is, you do need a keyboard to do any real work only if you insist on working the same way you do on a device that has a keyboard.

Later, he says “…a Netbook like a $200 Acer Aspire One offers a better bet: it has a real keyboard, its own storage, and you can take it on the road and do real work on it, like a notebook computer or a Netbook.” Other than the keyboard statement, this is utter rubbish. A tablet has comparable storage to a laptop. And as for taking it on the road and doing real work – a tablet works better in a meeting room, on an airplane (where there is rarely room to open your laptop anymore), and my table gives me 7-9 hours of battery life. And if you are using the table as a tablet, the keyboard becomes irrelevant.

Later, he says “…you’ll probably be able to plug a keyboard into any of these yet-to-be-released tablets…” – get with it, I have been using tablets with support for USB and/or Bluetooth keyboards since 2002, and they are the same keyboards you use with your desktop, so nothing special to buy.

Working on a tablet is a different user experience, and requires a different way of working – a way of working which seems more natural if you are used to working with paper and pen. In order for a tablet to be effective, one has to get used to working with handwriting again, and get away from on-screen typing, and also away from converting handwriting to text all the time.

I learned this way back when Tablet PCs first came out (I have been using a tablet pretty much continuously since 2002). When I got my first tablet, I soon realized that I  could not use it the same way I did a “normal” computer. So, I tried a little experiment. I got rid of all of my computers except the tablet. For six months, I used the tablet exclusively. Honestly, it was really, really painful at first. Then, I gradually learned to do things in ways which made sense on the tablet – and many of these new approaches were much more natural than working with a keyboard and mouse. What did I learn? Here are a few examples:

• Handwriting is a slow way to create large documents – typing is much faster (even for me)
• Creating large documents with a pen may be slow, but marking up someone else’s document is great
• It is more effective to leave most of your handwriting as handwriting
• Dictating documents and presentations was quite effective (even more so on my later tablets than on my first)
• When dictating documents, you have to stop think of correcting and formatting as you go (a BAD habit to begin with). Just dump your ideas out as fast as possible, knowing that you are going to go back and edit and format later.
• Brainstorming tools are great

I also use the Tablet to read ebooks (in standard formats, rather than proprietary formats) so I do not have to blow several hundred dollars on a Kindle that does nothing but display ebooks.

Think back to the days before we used computers for everything. When you were working on a document, would you typically start at a typewriter? Or would you start with a notebook, or a pad of paper, collecting notes and ideas, creating outlines, and even writing drafts? Then you would take all of that and create the final document.

Think of the tablet the same way. using tools which are tablet-aware (such as Microsoft OneNote, MindJet Mind Manager, and others), use the tablet as you would you pad of paper. Make notes, scribble ideas, brainstorm, create outlines. Even better, you can even clip notes form online sources and collect them together as part of the process. Then after you have done all of your intellectual work, you can do the final stage – typing up the results.

Note that I admit that there are something for which a keyboard is needed. Creating and editing any significant documents requires a keyboard. Does that mean I consider my tablet “just an accessory” to my main computer? Not at all. Most of the tablets available today are convertible, and hence have a keyboard available – giving you the best of both worlds. In my case, I use a slate table – but I also have a stand for it, and a Bluetooth keyboard (I can use my tablet on its stand at my desk, with a wireless keyboard, mouse, and network – then grab it, go to a meeting – come back and set it down and I am good to go).

About the only reason I have other computers is that I spend a considerable amount of my time doing development, and my tablet does not have the computing power, memory, or screen size to be an effective development machine.

The biggest barrier to acceptance of the Tablet PC form factor in the consumer market is indeed price (and price to power ratio). In addition, as I have said before, the Tablet PC has been marketing cluster$!&% by Microsoft from day one. This is a shame, because with a good marketing campaign, and a little bit of evangelism, tablets really cold become a dominant form factor.

PS – Others with no clue:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/08/tablets-are-toys-not-mainstream-machines.php

Here they claim “It’s because you can’t work on a tablet. You can’t get things done without a decent working keyboard”. I beg to differ, and might even go so far as to say the author is full of crap.

These are the same kinds of people who said consumers would never want computers in their homes, and that nobody wanted a GUI interface.

PPS – I am also in the process of looking for a Tablet for my daughter, who is starting university in September. I a looking strongly at the HP TouchSmart TX2 series – they seem to be pretty well configured and priced reasonably in the $1000 (Canadian) range. More than a NetBook for sure, but not much more than a comparably configured laptop.

Apple plays softball with Palm – Fortune Brainstorm Tech

Apple plays softball with Palm – Fortune Brainstorm Tech

Once again, Apple demonstrates that it is the most proprietary, closed organization in the consumer marketplace. Again, is MS pulled something like this, there would be lawsuits and a DoJ investigation.

So, why can Apple get away with this?

As I have said before, Apple is the most anti-consumer organization in the high tech world…I mean, even if you can justify DRM on CONTENT, how can you possibly justify DRM on headphones? There is nothing going on here but greed, and a total lack of respect towards customers.

Apple Adds Still More DRM to iPod Shuffle

Apple Marketing and Political Mud-slinging

I was wathing one of Apple’s “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” commercials last night, and noticed how much Apple’s marketing campaign resembles the mindless mud-slinging which permeates the political campaign process. I cannot remember the last time any of these commercials actually mentioned anything good about the Mac, or even mentioned anything about the Mac’s capabilities.

I am sorry, but saying “you should buy my product because XYZ sucks” is a pretty lazy marketing campaign – especially from an organization that pretends to be innovative.

Rumor: Tablet Mac to appear this fall

 

Rumor: Tablet Mac to appear this fall…

I agree – competition is good, and anything which livens up the Tablet market is also good.

The depressing thing is, shortly after Apple releases a Tablet, the whole world will be proclaiming how cool and hip Steve Jobs is for inventing the Tablet computer.

Interesting article on the "OS Wars"

This article from PC Magazine is interesting. It does a fairly good job of looking at the pros and cons of various OS’, without the silliness of most such discussions. The only aspects of it I think are a little unfair are the “Price” and “Installation” scores, both of which rate Mac OS better than either Windows XP or Vista.

On the price side, while it is true that you can buy Mac OS for less than Windows, you cannot (at least if you are a typical user) install it on your existing, non-Mac hardware. So the true cost of a typical user switching to Mac OS includes the cost of buying a completely new computer, at a premium price.

On the installation side, again the comparison is not quite fair. Both Windows and Linux are general-purpose OS’ which have to be able to install on a wide-range of hardware and almost unlimited permutations of hardware configurations. Again, Apple does not have this problem with Mac OS, since Apple tightly constrains (though not as tightly as it used to) the hardware configurations with which Mac OS must contend.

Overall, though, not a bad article.

Must you be either 100% Microsoft or 100% NOT Microsoft?

I was reading this interesting post Coté’s Excellent Description of the Microsoft Web Rift « SmoothSpan Blog, as well as the post to which it refers. It is an interesting discussion of the fears many have with respect to choosing to work with Microsoft technologies versus non-Microsoft. The chain is worth a read, whether you agree with the ideas or not.

One statement I found particularly interesting was

This thing he calles “lock-in fear” and the extreme polarization (encouraged by Microsoft’s rhetoric, tactics, and track record) that you’re either all-Microsoft or no-Microsoft is my “web rift”.

While I would not disagree that Microsoft strongly encourages the use of its tools and technologies (after all, that is what most companies do, isn’t it?), I see far more rhetoric and tactical positioning on the part of non-Microsoft, anti-Microsoft, and Open Source communities insisting that one must be 100% non-Microsoft (and preferably not even play nice with anything Microsoft), or you are obviously a Microsoft fan boy.

I guess that the point that I am making is that a large part of the “lock-in fear” is created not by Microsoft’s behaviour, but by the behaviours of the anti-Microsoft crowd.

Vista is a failure? Mac is a success?

This post was prompted by a post I saw on the WordPress “TagSurfer” about the current market share between various operating systems and OS versions. I cannot find that post again, so I looked up the stats at http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=10, and the numbers looked much the same as I recall from the post.

What jumps out at me from the stats is this: Vista is at 9.19% (after about a year in the wild), and Mac is at 6.81%. And yet, Vista is widely perceived as a failure, and Mac is perceived to be on a roll. How much of a roll can Mac be on if they still do not have the market penetration of a new OS that everyone supposedly hates?

What these numbers say to me is that marketers, fan boys, and other obsessives can spin the numbers to say whatever they want you to buy!

Leopard will open the Mac OS X floodgates (and embarass Microsoft)?

Leopard will open the Mac OS X floodgates (and embarass Microsoft) - nice thought, but not very realistic. The fact is, Apple will continue to eat away a Microsoft’s dominance, especially in certain segments of the market (primarily those who would not be running Windows anyway), but will not become the dominant desktop OS (and hence, will not destroy Microsoft) unless Apple stops being a radically proprietary, closed environment, and lets users buy the OS and run it on whatever hardware they want. Same battle Apple lost in the 80s – seems they never learn.This assumes, of course, that Apple wants to be an OS vendor – maybe they are not stupid, they just do not want to compete in that market.