When Microsoft Corp.'s Tablet PC was first announced back in 2002, the analyst team at Microsoft ensured that I had a machine. They shipped me a Compaq TC1000T tablet PC with a 1GHz Transmeta Crusoe chip, 512MB of RAM, and a 30GB hard disk. It took forever to boot Windows XP Tablet edition.
That was the machine tucked under my arm in a 2003 meeting with Bill Gates. He looked at me and asked, “Why the hell do you have that?” I told him his analyst relations team sent it to me. He said it was too damn slow, and started showing off his new NEC device.
When the flagship doesn’t move, the fleet is in trouble.
Cut to CES in 2010. Microsoft has been trumpeting tablets (or “slates”) again, against a backdrop of Apple Inc. rumors. Ballmer even waved things that looked like tablets at CES Back in January.
In reality, the tablet never went away. Companies like Fujitsu Ltd. and Motion Computing sell tablets for field use and medical applications. Hewlett-Packard Co. and Lenovo Group Ltd. still sell consumer devices. The tablet discussion was about opening up new vistas (sorry!) to Windows 7.
And then the iPad hit. I’m not going to describe what is so eloquently covered elsewhere, but let me say this: The iPad doesn’t run Mac OS X; it runs the iOS, and not even the most current version. And it boots immediately. It streams video flawlessly. It turns on and it delivers.
I can tell you from personal experience that Bill Gates loves the idea of the tablet. The problem is, Microsoft wants the tablet to be a universal device, not a specialty device. What Apple has shown is that a specialty device can become a general platform. The iPad has driven genuine innovation in software. Apps, like Flipboard, integrate social media into a magazine-style interface; MLB at Bat and Marvel Comics demonstrate new interactions and models not delivered well on previous hardware. They all play off of the iPad’s sense of intimacy.
So what should Microsoft do with its tablet/slate strategy?
♦ Don’t use the word “tablet” or “slate” in the same sentence as “PC.”
♦ Start a new division away from the gravity of Microsoft legacy marketing, engineering, and expectations.
♦ Abandon Windows 7 and create an embedded, instant-on OS that is elegantly different from Apple’s offering. Windows CE was dumbed-down Windows, as is the current phone incarnation. They need to create a new OS that is elegant, not cluttered.
Think like customers, not engineers.
♦ Learn from Apple’s customers. (Don’t hold on to the stubborn position that the Windows platform is right in the long run. That line of thought led to the “next great tablet,” the Ultramobile PC, or UMPC, and we know where that went because nobody reading this knows what I’m talking about.)
♦ Control the hardware.
Now, controlling the hardware doesn’t always work out well. With UMPC Microsoft created Origami as a Windows shell, but it only worked in certain cases. Most of the experience was just Windows on a smaller screen. The most recent tablet-like announcement from Microsoft was Surface, which put Windows into a $10,000 coffee table. Most of the cool things demonstrated with Surface have been duplicated and eclipsed by people gathered around an iPad.
Microsoft must also rethink the partner strategy so the market isn’t confused by dozens of slates with no core identity. Windows 7 cannot be the identity for a Microsoft slate device. For Microsoft to succeed, it needs to differentiate the slate from other devices, give it an identity, or risk the slate just being a Windows 7 machine you can write on, which is the essence of the Tablet PC.
In the 1960s, Sony Corp. abandoned its large-format radios, complete with wooden cabinets, to create the first personal portable pocket transistor radio. That was audacious. If Microsoft wants to get back into the device market and quench the geek-lust of its chairman for a good personal computing device, it needs to be audacious.
