“The ‘recomplicated’ Windows [8/RT] hands the Cupertino company an intriguing opportunity,” Jean-Louis Gassée writes for Monday Note. “They can capitalize on Microsoft’s misstep, extend a welcoming hand to the Windows users who intend to switch to Apple, and make the iPad the sine qua non of what a Post-PC device should be. (I use the ‘Post-PC’ moniker for lack of a better one. For me, it doesn’t stand for the end of the PC but for its broadening into three instances: classic, tablet, smartphone.)”
“Now that all OS X and iOS software is under one hat, Craig Federighi‘s, perhaps we can expect these [current] workflow speed bumps to be ironed out. Multiple concurrent applications, a document store that’s common to all apps,” Gassée writes. “This is Apple’s opportunity: Stick to its guns, keep laptops and tablets clearly distinct, but make iPads easier to love by business users. The comparison between a worst-of-both-worlds Surface hybrid and the iPad would be no contest. iPad mini for media consumption, everywhere; iPad for business and everything else.”
Gassée writes, “Apple can finish the job [former Microsoft Windows honcho Steven] Sinofsky started.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Steven Sinofsky? Puleeze. Apple is going to finish what Steven Jobs started.
Jean-Louis Gassée….some doer he is….
He was a VP at Apple. BE OS, which he was CEO of, was seriously considered by Apple as the replacement for Mac OS Classic.
You’ll do better to know what you’re talking about before running off like that.
Nice.
He was a nothing.
The iPad is already good for business..that’s why enterprise has adopted them. MS should just learn to deal with reality and get back to making software.
The iPad is already good for business but it could be better.
For example:
Pages when used with Apple Bluetooth keyboard needs to support common keyboard coomands such as:
Command X, Command V, Command B, Command I, Command U.
There are similar issues with formula building in Numbers.
iPad already support keyboard shortcuts:
http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/5918/ipad-use-keyboard-shortcuts-with-bluetooth-keyboard/
Pages, and many other apps, when coupled with the Apple Bluetooth keyboard, does support many of the commands listed in your post, eg. command v to paste, command c to copy.
Not to mention PDF recognition on Pages. A biggie for me.
Windows 8 does not need to be finished, but finished off. The only thing Windows 8 requires is a coup de grace.
Because Jean-Louis says so!
“Microsoft’s misstep?”
More like a decade long march to mobile oblivion.
+1,000,000
I can understand how the author confused Steven Sinofsky with Steven Jobs. 😉
as far as a Microsoft “misstep”….HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA
Microsoft only had 1 misstep: appoint Steve Balmer as CEO.
The only thing Sinofsky “started” was to begin the process of trying to play catchup to Apple.
He then proceeded to make quite a lot of mistakes the prime one being to confuse a tablet with a desktop. Along the way he managed to alienate a good cross section of OEM’s who suddenly found themselves in direct competition with the mother goose!
WIth this kind of start probably a good thing he isn’t around to finish anything off…
Actually, it would be more accurate to say what Star Trek NG started with the Data Pad than to give Sinofsky credit.
The iPad, and iOS, in general needs to have the following new feature baked into the OS:
– a file system accessible to commonly used apps either natively on the device or in the cloud, like Dropbox, but within Apple’s iCloud infrastructure.
At the moment if I need to send a marginally complicated email with attachments from many sources, I have no choice but to revert to my Mac.
The iPad as a compartmentalised app serving device is without parallel. It’s main weakness is when you need to pull disparate resources together and combine them into one that it becomes apparent that it is a single app focused device.
Whether that is good or bad from the viewpoint of simplicity is yet to be seen, but as a business oriented device I find this shortcoming slightly crippling.
Spot on. This
alone would be a huge draw for the business customers.
I take Jean-Louis Gassee’s comment about Sinofsky to mean that he started the beginning of the end with the two-headed catastrophe of Windows 8 and Surface.
Yes, you are correct… After turning Vista into the respectable Windows 7, something that had the long-term potential as the “standard” version of Windows (the “next” Windows XP), he leads the effort for a bigger catastrophe than Vista.
Maybe he was forced into it, and then turned into the scapegoat. Maybe it was his idea. It doesn’t really matter. Windows 8 is what it is (a buggy bloated kludge), and no one seems to be happy with it (except Apple).
I don’t think Sinofsky can be entirely faulted for merging tablet-like components into Windows 8. Microsoft has always harbored the intent of unifying their mobile and desktop offerings, no matter how kludgey the resulting two-headed monster might be.
Recall they implemented a drop down menu on WinCE which mimicked the desktop version of Windows XP. Using a WinCE device was a nightmare straight from hell because the smallness of the screen meant that drop down menus were lost amidst the clutter and you often lost track of the menu listing because you had to scroll offscreen to view additional menu items.
What they are doing now is to kludge a tablet metaphor into a desktop class device, in effect reversing what they did with WinCE. But the end result will be the same – a disaster in the making.
Miss step…. That’s an understatement …
MDN Take: +1
I love the term ‘recomplicated’ to describe Windows 8/RT
Window still dominate 80% world wide user…..
So?
That’s only if you bury your head in a dark place and pretend the iPad does not exist.
Yes, Window do. So sad.
What percent of the volitional user?
Windows 8 doesn’t.
I remember those days in wich we used to read about the Macbook Tablet…
I still think it would be great to have the whole OS X experience on a Tablet 😉
http://www.modbook.com/