The message was clear: Microsoft still doesn’t understand why its Tablet PC concept has repeatedly bombed over the best part of a decade. Apple sold more iPads in its first three months of availability than PC vendors sold Tablet PCs in the whole of last year; in fact, the number of iPads sold in that period is likely to eclipse the number of Tablet PCs sold both last year and this. But still the company is persevering: stick a regular PC operating system on a laptop, give it a touchscreen, and then take away the keyboard and pixel-perfect pointing device. Ballmer even reiterated the company’s position: slates are just another PC form factor.
via Ars Technica – Ballmer (and Microsoft) still doesn’t get the iPad. Yet another in the long story of why Apple wins in this market and Microsoft fails. The iPad isn’t just a computer scaled down. It’s not a scaled down version of Mac OSX either. The iPhone runs a flavor of Mac OSX that has been customized to fit the hardware. The iPad is more of a scaled up version of this rather than a scaled down version of the full Snow Leopard. This lends two things:
- Touch works beautifully since touch is a first class interface on the iPhone.
- Doing one thing at a time is already perfected, great for an overall slower and smaller machine than a normal laptop (ie. closer to a netbook or slate as Steve Ballmer calls them).
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