“Last week Microsoft kinda-sorta announced its new Microsoft Surface tablet computer. This week will come a Google-branded tablet. Both are pitted against the mighty iPad. Both companies see opportunity because of what they perceive as a Steve Jobs blind spot. And both companies are introducing tablets under their own brands because they can’t their get OEM’s to do tablets correctly,” Bob Cringely writes for I, Cringely.
“For all the speculation about why Microsoft or Google would risk offending hardware OEMs by introducing name branded tablets, the reality is that neither company really had any choice but to make the hardware. In the commodity PC market, no one company is likely to be willing to make the investment necessary to compete with the highly-integrated iPad,” Cringely writes. “Samsung tried, and even then it didn’t pay off for them. Taiwan Inc + Dell just don’t seem to run that way. Furthermore, it is a lot easier to make a product when you control the operating system. You have the experts right there.”
Cringely writes, “Both Microsoft and Google can compete at around the same price as Apple (for the WindowsRT and Android versions) but no less. Microsoft’s Windows 8 version will cost more due to the Intel tax and the Windows license tax… The real question is software. iPads suck for productivity apps like Office. This is of course by design, because Steve Jobs did not value the enterprise market (that’s the blind spot). Both Microsoft and Google tablets will be aimed squarely at that spot, with the Microsoft tablet being essentially an Office/Exchange machine and the Google tablet dedicated to Google Apps… I have to assume that Apple is going to provide a major revamp of iWork one of these days, plus an integrated iPad/Macbook Air type of productivity product… With Steve Jobs gone and Apple finally allowed to take some cues from the marketplace, what these two tablets may do most of all is awaken a sleeping giant, filling him with terrible resolve.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: People who actually use iPads know that they do not “suck for productivity apps.” That is extremely weak, yet widely-sown FUD from the iPad roadkill.
Good luck with making better, more integrated products than Apple, vertical integration newbies.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers “Judge Bork” and “Jeff C.” for the heads up.]