“Microsoft’s Windows Phone president Andy Lees at the Worldwide Partners Conference once again tried to shoot down hopes for tablets based on Windows Phone 7,” Electronista reports.
“The use of the mobile OS would be ‘in conflict’ with Microsoft’s notion of having the full speed of a computer in any design, including truly mobile tablets. He insisted that users would want to do PC-style activities on a tablet and saw Windows 8’s networking and printing support as being important,” Electronista reports. “‘We view a tablet as a PC,’ Lees said.”
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Electronista reports, “A focus on PC features has so far done little to improve Microsoft’s share. Windows was once the only real tablet platform but was almost immediately eclipsed by the iPad, which went on to outsell Windows Tablet PC’s lifetime sales in just nine months. In early 2011, 99 percent of tablets were non-Windows devices.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: What we wrote on June 1st works just as well today: Microsoft, in trying to cram everything into Windows 8 in an attempt to be all things to all devices, will end up with an OS that’s a jack of all trades and a master of none (which, after all, ought to be Microsoft’s company motto).
By the time this hybrid spawn of Windows Phone ’07 + Windows 7ista actually ships, one can only dream where Apple’s iOS and Mac OS X will be! For Microsoft, it’ll be more like a nightmare. Perhaps Microsoft will someday put some scare into Google’s Android/Chrome OS, but only time – and a lot of it when measured in tech time – will tell. We simply do not see the world clamoring for the UI of an iPod also-ran now ported to an iPhone wannabe that nobody’s buying to be blown up onto a PC display.
From what we’ve seen so far, Windows 8 strikes us as an unsavory combination of Windows Weight plus Windows Wait.
Not to mention that probably no one on earth knows how much or what kinds of residual legacy spaghetti code roils underneath it all (shudder). Is Microsoft giving up on backwards compatibility? If so, people might as well get the Mac they always wanted. If not, then Microsoft’s unwilling to do what it takes to really attempt to keep up with the likes of Apple or even Apple’s followers. No matter what, if Microsoft’s going to ask Windows sufferers to “learn a whole new computer” (and that’s exactly how they’ll look at it, regardless of how Microsoft pitches it), millions will simply say, “Time to get a Mac to match my iPod, iPhone, and iPad!”
As if they needed it: More good news for Apple.
Related articles:
Microsoft developers horrified over Windows 8 preview – June 13, 2011
More good news for Apple: Microsoft previews Windows 8 (with video) – June 1, 2011
Ballmer needs to promote this man!
Make him co-CEO.
Once again Ballmer demonstrates his unorthodox skill at cloning the right type of person at the right time to further erode Microsoft’s clout and prestige.
Still working on the vision thing.
Andy Lees:
In time, he expects that PCs, tablets and phones will come together into a “unified ecosystem.”
That’s where Apple IS. Years ahead of those guys. Same APIs for Computer, Phone, Tablet.
I wonder if Microsoft will consider “tablets as PC’s” when they are counted as part of Apple’s computer market share, or when iOS surpasses the installed base of Windows.
(Sound of sustained clapping)
Agreed! An iOS device can get back any OS X feature by just not stripping it out. iOS is a subset of OS X. Apple just adds the software routine back in. Microsoft never started from scratch like Steve Jobs did at NEXT with UNIX. Apple dropped the OS9 and moved on to OS X now with it’s stripped out iOS.
Ballmer can’t get there with Windows and count or don’t count iOS devices. They still are killing your old school Windows OS.
iOS has already surpassed Windows in market share.
In Q3 2011 (the current quarter for which Apple will release its results next Tuesday) will show Apple has sold to consumers approximately 10 million more iOS devices (iPad+iPhone+iPod) than Microsoft has shoved Windows 7 licenses into the channel (24.75 million). Add Mac OS X, Android, and Linux into the mix and the market share of all flavors of Windows could be down in the mid-30s.
Coming soon to a WIndows 8 app store near you: 10,000 different registry cleaners, antivirus and anti malware apps!
+1 Too true!
That’s very true! A Windows 8 tablet will have a HUGE head start in the “number of apps” stat, because there are so many of those “helpful” utilities that already exist.
windows desktop overloads (the guys who make the billions for msft) will never let the windows mobile guys (pitiful profits or losses) usurp them. They have sabotaged or poorly supported every win mo initiative: look at the long line of stuff that gone nowhere or died off : win ce, windows mobile, Danger, Pink, Zune, Zune Phone, Courier, Kin, WP7 etc (some of these os’ are interlinked but I’m too confused to untangle the mess).
windows 8 will be disaster: they’ve announced they’ll support all kinds of legacy hardware and software and then also use it for tablets…
Turf war vs common sense.
overloads = overlords
Works either way!
Successful corporations are those that have the capacity to learn – learn from past mistakes, learn from consumer habits, learn from the mistakes of others, learn from history; anything really, just learn.
Microsoft achieved its success by the accident of a burgeoning PC industry, licensing DOS to IBM and basically the stupidity of IBM managers not making the OS exclusive to its platform and then later copying the GUI from Apple which by that time was run by a sugar water salesman who didn’t know how to defend its IP and sold it off too cheaply.
But Microsoft as a learning organisation is sorely lacking, at least until Baldy is ousted and someone with vision takes over. It’s been proven over a period of 10 years that consumers are simply not interested in a tablet that runs full blown Windows. The sales numbers have been underwhelming and yet Microsoft persists in its delusion of launching a tablet with Windows 8 layered on top.
For all of Ballmer’s bluster, there’s one thing for sure – delusion runs deep in his bald head. This time he won’t be able to bulldoze the opposition aside like he did with desktop Windows. Another fail by Microsoft.
Ballmer give us blue-eyed bald men a really bad rep.
Love it.
Absolutely the right move!! I hope they keep making these “right moves” for as long as it takes.
-Fig
Microsoft won’t make a tablet OS because it knows that by doing so would be to admit that Apple was right.
“‘We view a tablet as a PC,’ Lees said.”
Sounds like Lees needs to look up the definition of insanity. You know, the one about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Same strategy? Same results!
Brilliant!
…morons.
Translation:
We have ceded the market to others.
Steve Jobs once said that he is as proud of the many things that Apple HASN’T done as is the few things that they have.
Trying to be all things to all people usually means you end up being nothing to no-one.
This is just another opportunity for Microsoft to create (yet another) version of Windows, called WinTab (that’s what we’ll call it, Microsoft will call it Windows Tablet 8 ME CE Professional Lite). The interface will be a large window pane, broken into four quadrants (just like a real window!), each quadrant filled with tabs! Because WinTab doesn’t need apps, it just needs Tabs (not Tiles, that’s Windows Phone 7). Amazing new technology! Just tap a Tab, and BAM! you get transported to whatever function you wanted to do, like see what time it is.
Windows 8 – It’s Ballmer-icious!!
Ballmer: “I can’t do it… *pant* it’s too hard… I can’t make a PC tablet!”
Yoda: “that is why you fail.”
MS still thinks that Office and Windows form their ticket to mobile nerdvana.
They were wrong 10 years ago and 200 million iUsers later, they are still wrong.
Bold statement!!
Is this Microsoft backing the Tablet as a computer? If so, should all the iPads be counted as PC’s with the results shown in the hardware section?
The facts continue to mount in a never ending line of Apple supporting moves by Ballmer. This could be a historic unknown takeover of Microsoft by it’s corporate reveal Apple.
Mr Jobs looked at the live show of Ballmer on night on the cable TV and just thought what he wanted Ballmer to do. From that night forward Ballmer has marched to Steve’s secret plan- destroy from within.
Bye, bye Steve Jobs Microbot!!
Actually Sell, sell…
Andy Lees? the guy who killed SideKick because it was outshining Windows? Microsoft’s tablet debacle is its karma for what it did to Go Corp’s Penpoint tablets.
“We view a tablet as a PC”
And that’s why Windows Tablet PCs have always sold like utter dog shit. It’s also why the iPad was able to dominate the market overnight.
Thank you for never learning, Microsoft. Thank you.
It’s not like they would have charged any less for a stripped down version of Windows for tablet computers. That would weaken the revenue pillar of Windows.
Ding dong the witch is dead!!!!
That sound you hear is Apples marketshare increasing by 300% in a single day!!!!!!
iPad is officially a PC
> We view a tablet as a PC
Nothing captures the difference between Apple and Microsoft better than that quote.
An iPad is definitely NOT a Mac. And it’s why Apple will NOT produce a hybrid device (laptop with touch screen).
Fumbling and bumbling, the way we like it. Keep it up Microsoft, for as long as it takes. 😆
Meanwhile, where’s the real competition???