Microsoft to Relaunch Windows Slates Again at CES

[talkingfuture]

They'd make more money bringing out Office for iPad.

They're sitting on a goldmine but are too distracted and misdirected to.

True, MS are a software company after all and they could make tons of money making iOS apps, they have far more talent and resources than any other iOS developer. I don't think that Ballmer is the kind of guy who could swallow his pride and go for it though.

 

[Otaviano]

Microsoft just needs to hurry up and fire Steve Balmer, the longer they wait the more ground they lose.

 

[The Great Boony]

ZunePad!

 

[rmwebs]

Here's the deal. As it currently stands:

IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE TO RUN WINDOWS ON A DEVICE THE SIZE OF THE IPAD

Goy ya attention? Good...now hear me out.

As we all know, Apple spent a long time porting the base of OS X over to the ARM processor for the iPhone. This gave them a monumental step up when the iPad was released because the backbone of the 1 single OS they use is compatible with it out of the box. This theoretically means Apple could turn round and ship an ARM based laptop (I know they wouldn't, I'm just giving examples).

Meanwhile the folks over in Redmond have an OS which runs only on Intel/AMD processors. So their tablet would at very least run with an Atom. I cant see windows being ported over to ARM processors on the grounds that the OS would have to be pretty much rewritten from scratch....something which they have never done before.

Now, you're probably thinking 'So what - they will use an Atom processor'. Thats all well and good, but an Atom processor generates a LOT more heat than an Apple A4 (aka ARM Cortex-A8). So for the tablet to actually work, its going to have to be a lot thicker, or get a lot hotter.

Then you have the issue of everything else.

Power - Apple would win on Battery performance simply because of the amount of time/money invested into perfecting it on their devices

Speed - Even if Windows was ported over to an ARM, or if they chose an Atom...its going to be slow as hell. The beauty about iOS is that because the way it runs (e.g no 'true' multitasking, just state-saving) it means that theres very little chance the entire memory and CPU are ever at full capacity. Windows would either end up being slow after opening a few apps, or would require a limitation of say 3 apps open at a time, maximum.

Usability - Running windows on a toch-screen would be a nightmare. I'm not being bias here either - running a copy of Snow Leopard on one would also be a nightmare. They are operating systems that are designed for mice...not fingers. How do you right click on a touch screen? How do you drag a box over some icons on your desktop? It would be awkward and require strange gestures.

Portability - This goes back to my point about the CPU and heat. Assuming they wouldn't have a metal back as the heat-sink (Which would end up hitting 70-80 Celsius) they would either be forced to put a fan inside, or some form of thin heat-sink. This would make it a LOT thicker and because they would likely use an atom CPU, its unavoidable.

Then there's the 'squeezing it all in'. How many Windows machines use custom-built motherboards? Very few. A lot now use ITX or micro-ATX motherboards, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if they tried to use one of these. Building motherboards is not easy. As you may have seen on the iPad, Apple had to do a lot of work to get it to fit and the order of components on the boards have to be really shifted about.

I'll be very interested to see what the tablets look like. If they can pull it off, good on em...but personally I would say they need a new mobile OS (not built on windows...maybe the Windows Phone 7 OS?), make it ARM based and get some help from HTC or another Android-based phone maker.

And One More Thing...
Why are the likes of HP, Dell, Toshiba, <insert-pc-makers-here> going to bother LICENSING Windows for a tablet when they can use Android for free and hit a bigger user-base? This is where Google has the upper hand on Microsoft. We have Apple providing the 'high-end' OS, Google providing the 'free yet functional' OS, and Microsoft providing the 'expensive and bloated' OS.

Seriously, I cant see the manufacturers wasting much time with 'Microsoft Windows Portable Tablet Edition 7 Ultimate Home Premium' when they can slap Android on it.

 

[DrV]

Frankly iWork is a joke compared to Office.

Which part of it?

I have been a power user of MS Office since the days of Windows 3.1, and I have been using Word even when it was a text-based application (and, BTW, the best text processor available then).

At the moment I have both iWork and MS Office 2011 in my Mac and Office 2010 running on Win7 on my desktop. So, I have the opportunity to compare the two. And here is what I've found:

Word vs. Pages:

• If you want to create a long document with a lot of cross-references and illustrations (book, academic thesis, instruction manual), go look somewhere else. Word has still the tendency of corrupting the files once they get complicated enough. Pages does not really offer the necessary facilities for such work.
  
• If you want to write a quick business document, both will do. Word is better in terms of universal compatibility, as most of the people still send .docx's around (most of the time the reason is beyond my comprehension).
  
• If you want to make something good-looking, you are faster and better done with Pages. While Pages is not exactly a DTP program, it has some quite nice features to that direction.

I use both, and I need both.


Excel vs. Numbers

Excel blows Numbers out of water. Unfortunately the rate of development of Excel has been extremely slow, it has most of the deficiences it had in the 97 version (limitations in two-dimensional graphs, only a small number of points allowed in a graph, bad interpretation of date data, etc.) Numbers is fine for making a quick good-looking pie or bar diagram, but not much more.


Keynote vs. PowerPoint

Keynote is better for making good-looking presentations. PowerPoint is engineerish in some ways, and while the difference between the two is not that big, Keynote is better. A lot of things I do with my Keynote are not doable in PowerPoint. On the other hand, there are some things which PP can do (such as 3D arrows and boxes) better than Keynote, but still I find Keynote a better companion on the road (especially with iPad as a remote control).

So, I find it difficult to call iWorks a joke. I use both, and if Numbers got up to speed with Excel, I'd happily abandon Office.

However... On the tablet format... Serious work? No. And this has nothing to do with operating systems or companies. Keyboard is a superior way of inputting large amounts of text, and a 10" display is ridiculously small for many tasks.

 

[Nicksd84]

I know I'm a very small sample size, but working as an external auditor it's pretty astonishing how many clients have brought the iPad in some capacity into their work force. People seem to like Windows 7, but really MS's products have lacked true vision for so long and it seems like they won't have their locked in tie ins via enterprise with this thing. Or I guess more accurately would be to say these things.

 

[BiteMyApple]

Oh, the hilarity.

 

[MCP-511]

Steve Ballmer should not be in front of people period. I'd say the same thing if he worked somewhere else.

 

[Cresence]

I've been a heavy Windows user for 20 years, and I'm still not interested. Why on earth would I want a bloated Swiss Army knife of an OS on a portable device when I can get something that is compact and responsive, qualities that Windows lost years ago? I think Microsoft is in trouble, and they know it. They've lost the market and have failed to hold onto the imagination of consumers.

 

[Lesser Evets]

This is just hilarious.

So coming onstage and saying what appears to be exactly the same thing again is just sort of humorously pathetic.

Exactly what my first thought was...

Ballmer: I know I introduced this vapor-ware last year, but I'm re-introducing it this year again, and we'll go beyond a CGI idea that became the great, golden hope of thousands of Apple haters. It'll be ready in a year or two, when we figure out how to make it and program the language to run it....which is almost impossible for Microsoft, but we're going to do it sooner or later. Sure, I trashed Apple last year, laughed at the idea of iPads and iPhones and was proven wrong every time, but this time I'm right: people want pad computers running windows 7.

Fail Pt. II

I wonder if this year they introduce their pads with an image of an apple on them, again.

 

[Henriok]

The Tablet could of course be based on Windows 7 just like iOS is based on Mac OS X. Slap on the kind of development platform that WP7 and Xbox 360 have with Silverlight and XNA, and a revamped windowing model built from the ground up for touch (just like WP7).

After that. Make it so it is tightly integrated with all the business stuff that MS have: Azure, Sharepoint and Exchange and all business software like CRM and sales software. And why not Remote Desktop client, Terminal Services support and a complete server admin (Domain, Computers, Users, Printers, IIS, SQL, SAN,…) suite?

It's just software so include it all! ...and the intended customers have probably already payed hundred of thousands of dollars for the server software. Release it complete with everything included and pay for the upgrades in the future.

And a consumer version that's just like WP7 but larger.

 

[caspian]

Viewsonic tablet running win7

Duh! Tested and was a flop...no need for a relaunch Mr Balmer. You should concentrate in get a new tablet OS and not a refurbished OS. Tq...

 

[Skika]

A slate computer from Microsoft . How innovative, where do these guys get this stuff??

 

[Popeye206]

Microsoft just needs to hurry up and fire Steve Balmer, the longer they wait the more ground they lose.

I couldn't agree more.

All I can envision is Balmer standing on a stage and saying something like "Oh, and look, us too! Really, us too!"

Yes, it would be nice to have more apps on an iPad, but I also can't see doing complex spreadsheets on an iPad or any other tablet. It's a light duty machine. It's not a replacement for your computer if you have a need for heavy use.

Apple realized that touch-based computing is different and put the iOS on the iPad. The Apps are small, memory and processor efficient and not bogged down. Plus, I can't imagine my fingers trying to hit menu items that are 1/2 their size on a tablet and being productive. If MS puts Windows 7 on a slate... it will be amazingly bad.

If MS wanted to amaze us... do something ORIGINAL! Show us something new. Really new. Not just another variation of the same thing.

My prediction for CES... Google and Apple will steal the show and not even be there.

 

[0815]

Which part of it?

I have been a power user of MS Office since the days of Windows 3.1, and I have been using Word even when it was a text-based application (and, BTW, the best text processor available then).

At the moment I have both iWork and MS Office 2011 in my Mac and Office 2010 running on Win7 on my desktop. So, I have the opportunity to compare the two. And here is what I've found:

Word vs. Pages:

• If you want to create a long document with a lot of cross-references and illustrations (book, academic thesis, instruction manual), go look somewhere else. Word has still the tendency of corrupting the files once they get complicated enough. Pages does not really offer the necessary facilities for such work.
  
• If you want to write a quick business document, both will do. Word is better in terms of universal compatibility, as most of the people still send .docx's around (most of the time the reason is beyond my comprehension).
  
• If you want to make something good-looking, you are faster and better done with Pages. While Pages is not exactly a DTP program, it has some quite nice features to that direction.

I use both, and I need both.


Excel vs. Numbers

Excel blows Numbers out of water. Unfortunately the rate of development of Excel has been extremely slow, it has most of the deficiences it had in the 97 version (limitations in two-dimensional graphs, only a small number of points allowed in a graph, bad interpretation of date data, etc.) Numbers is fine for making a quick good-looking pie or bar diagram, but not much more.


Keynote vs. PowerPoint

Keynote is better for making good-looking presentations. PowerPoint is engineerish in some ways, and while the difference between the two is not that big, Keynote is better. A lot of things I do with my Keynote are not doable in PowerPoint. On the other hand, there are some things which PP can do (such as 3D arrows and boxes) better than Keynote, but still I find Keynote a better companion on the road (especially with iPad as a remote control).

So, I find it difficult to call iWorks a joke. I use both, and if Numbers got up to speed with Excel, I'd happily abandon Office.

However... On the tablet format... Serious work? No. And this has nothing to do with operating systems or companies. Keyboard is a superior way of inputting large amounts of text, and a 10" display is ridiculously small for many tasks.

Thank you - finally someone with an fair comparison. Seems to me most people see the MS Office vs iWork too much as a thing of religion instead of some realistic comparison. Yes, Office has more features - but how many of them are you really using? If you need them, good, stick with Word, if not, you have choice.

I would say that iWork is fine for 99% of the home users and 90% of the business users. Yes, MS Office has features that iWork does not have - but most people don't need them. I see rather the downside of all these features: Word is bloated, slow to load, huge memory footprint and too much stuff I don't need (it is still present in the cheap student versions, only disabled in the UI). I used to use Word, but I started using Pages more and more. Also as mentioned by the poster above: excel is far more advanced that numbers - but guess what: for me numbers is good enough (and that is ME, I'm not speaking for everyone) and its very fast - again, if you need it, go with excel.

Bottom line: If you need all those fancy features, go with Office - if not, you have the choice to use iWork which has less features, but is snappier (and looks better in my opinion). But stop saying EVERYONE needs those exotic features in Word if it is just you that needs them.

 

[Popeye206]

Which part of it?

I have been a power user of MS Office since the days of Windows 3.1, and I have been using Word even when it was a text-based application (and, BTW, the best text processor available then).

At the moment I have both iWork and MS Office 2011 in my Mac and Office 2010 running on Win7 on my desktop. So, I have the opportunity to compare the two. And here is what I've found:

Word vs. Pages:

• If you want to create a long document with a lot of cross-references and illustrations (book, academic thesis, instruction manual), go look somewhere else. Word has still the tendency of corrupting the files once they get complicated enough. Pages does not really offer the necessary facilities for such work.
  
• If you want to write a quick business document, both will do. Word is better in terms of universal compatibility, as most of the people still send .docx's around (most of the time the reason is beyond my comprehension).
  
• If you want to make something good-looking, you are faster and better done with Pages. While Pages is not exactly a DTP program, it has some quite nice features to that direction.

I use both, and I need both.


Excel vs. Numbers

Excel blows Numbers out of water. Unfortunately the rate of development of Excel has been extremely slow, it has most of the deficiences it had in the 97 version (limitations in two-dimensional graphs, only a small number of points allowed in a graph, bad interpretation of date data, etc.) Numbers is fine for making a quick good-looking pie or bar diagram, but not much more.


Keynote vs. PowerPoint

Keynote is better for making good-looking presentations. PowerPoint is engineerish in some ways, and while the difference between the two is not that big, Keynote is better. A lot of things I do with my Keynote are not doable in PowerPoint. On the other hand, there are some things which PP can do (such as 3D arrows and boxes) better than Keynote, but still I find Keynote a better companion on the road (especially with iPad as a remote control).

So, I find it difficult to call iWorks a joke. I use both, and if Numbers got up to speed with Excel, I'd happily abandon Office.

However... On the tablet format... Serious work? No. And this has nothing to do with operating systems or companies. Keyboard is a superior way of inputting large amounts of text, and a 10" display is ridiculously small for many tasks.

I agree... I would not want to CREATE a long complex document, or work on a long spreadsheet or create a presentation on an iPad or any other tablet... period. Think about it. Why? Too cumbersome and too slow. Yikes.

I may want to do some light writing. I may want to adjust a spreadsheet or update some numbers and I may want to play a presentation or make a small edit. So really... I don't need any of these in full force on my iPad. I need players and light versions for minor edits.

I also agree... MS office is their bright spot. They are the standard there. But even Apple could make a clone player and editor based on what's in iWork.

 

[0815]

MS launching tablet ... again???? How many times can you launch a product class? Should be: "MS tries again to fix MS based tablets market. " or maybe "MS tries again to catch up on the tablet market"
MS was ignoring the market for too long. They launched long time ago the tablet market, they failed and didn't revisit to improve it. Only after apple came along and did it right, they try to revisit it. Hope they learned some lessons from the success of the iPad and don't make the same mistakes again.

 

[PlipPlop]

You can have it, but it'll either be slow as crap, or get 4 hours of battery life, with fans blowing hot air out the sides. At least until they move to ARM.

Ive built my own HTPC using an Intel Atom with nvidia ion 2. I have Windows 7 on it and its great for browsing the internet and watching hd videos. No slow down what so ever. Ive even played a few games on it. HL2 lost coast got 34 fps on the benchmark. Doesnt even have a fan in case and never overheats. Granted my htpc does have one of the better atom cpus and the ion2 helps a lot. If they use similar components in the new slates ill buy one asap

 

[res1233]

This is going to fail for one simple reason: Nothing has changed.

How many times does Microsoft have to release the same product over and over again before they get the idea that maybe a full desktop OS on a tablet doesn't work? Someone at Microsoft is being extremely lazy. After the first time, they should have figured it out. Heck, after the iPad was a roaring success, they should have figured it out. If Microsoft keeps up this idiocy, they're facing extinction in the future, however distant it may be. Ballmer has to go.

 

[Muscleflex]

just reading page one - you guys stopped and think maybe they're talking about mobile windows 7 rather than the PC version?

and maybe this is the reason why MS hasn't produced office app for ipad? they're working on a version for their tablet version maybe...

 

[Slix]

"Oh, we'll get it out next year. Maybe the year after. The iPad will never win!"

Yeah, ok.

 

[womble2k2]

If he starts going on about how "The operating system is called Windows 7" I'm going to loose faith in the company as a whole. Ballmer shouldn't be in charge anymore, he's missed the boat on so many things now.

Ballmer is building a Slate coffin for the death of his career.

It does make me wonder though if the reporter of the original article was confused and meant Windows Mobile 7, as that would be more logical. Mind you, logic and Microsoft are not the best of friends!

Phil

 

[res1233]

From the article:

This person said the applications would not be sold in an app store, as with the Apple iTunes model, but Microsoft will encourage software partners to host the applications on their own Web sites, which will then be highlighted in a search interface on the slate computers.

Do they expect this to somehow be a better experience than either the iPad or Android-based tablets? Do they really? If this person is correct anyhow, although that does sound like a very Microsoft way of doing things.

 

[ten-oak-druid]

It's scary to think how far Microsoft would have fallen had Apple not been around to create new markets.

Now we see MS pushing Apple's vision of a tablet.

 

[res1233]

It's scary to think how far Microsoft would have fallen had Apple not been around to create new markets.

Now we see MS pushing Apple's vision of a tablet.

It's true. In just about all the markets Microsoft is in, the market was created by Apple. One notable exception is the gaming market.

EDIT: Before the trolls jump me, some of those markets were not CREATED by Apple, but took off once they entered it, so it's almost the same.