Now let's take a step back and see what it is.

It's a tool which has the ability to manage 40 TB of data in real time and provide more than 12000 pieces of data for each patient. Can you imagine how rich a resource that is?

Let's say that microsoft invests considerably in a centralized server and continuously mines the data coming in and strips patient data live to the bare minimum the ER doctor needs to see. Moreover, what if they see trends in what is happening in an entire city, before people even realize it and alert the authorities to prepare before some wave hits. Imagine if they could work with people to reduce costs by mining this truckloads of data in real time. Why are they aping Apple? Why?

Microsoft had IBM's "A Smarter Planet" initiative before the latter even dreamed of it, but did they even know about it?

It's the proverbial story; don't look where you can't go or you'll miss the riches below. They have some absolutely amazing gems locked up in the research labs that can change entire industries if leveraged in the right way. Moreover, Microsoft has the might to do it.

They don't need an iPad killer they need a Microsoft Executive Killer(tm).

Nobody framed it better than Apple themselves at the iPad launch. On the big screen was an iPhone, a MacBook, and in between them, an iPad. Steve called it a new category, and that wasn't just marketing speak. It really is a new kind of gadget, designed to make you do things that you previously did not do. This is why everybody says they have no use for it.. because they truly don't, until they have one in their hands.

With that in mind, Microsoft and the rest of the tablet me-too wave, probably don't appreciate what they are up against. There is no tablet market, there is an iPad market. Microsoft's best shot would be an X-Pad. Everyone else should get behind Google. But really, I think Apple is going to own this category for a good decade.

Is there anything about what you need to do which can only be done on an iPad? Such a revival is easier on a new platform where you don't know what to expect yet. However, I don't see anything which would prevent someone bold enough from cleaning up their part of the web.

I think maybe the point is that while there's nothing technically special about the platform, at the high end its developers are in a league of their own when it comes to UI. This is of course a distilled version of the entire Apple developer culture, which has always taken this stuff more seriously than Windows and certainly *nix.

But please don't turn the web into a console game.

It is at the time when the definition of a word changes that the greatest oppertunities present themselves.

There is no iPad market, there is no tablet market - there is a computer market. This is what MS is up against...

[Sent from my iPod touch]

I think Steve was spot on with his car vs truck analogy: the iPad will be like a car, which everyone will have, and the computer will be like a truck, which people only have for special purposes.

That's what computers used to be anyway, and I think it will be fantastic to have them back in their niche again, instead of trying to please everyone.

In terms of niches, it's more like the XTerms of yesteryear. The terminals weren't much for horsepower; they were basically UI's that allowed you to work more or less transparently with whatever machine you wanted to, like that Cray Y-MP or SP2 cluster in the data center next door, or the SGI Indigo down the hall.

Snip the wires, shrink it down, modernize the internals and put a slick visual UI on it, and you have an iPad. Well, conceptually, that is.

This is what the iPad was made to do, and IMO is one of the reasons that it's successful -- it isn't pretending to be something that it isn't.

Microsoft has all the pieces - money , good engineers, marketing etc. but it's not working. They have the financial space to do something radical and disruptive to themselves and jump on that if it pans out.

Either that or just get some strong with real vision at the helm who is capable of turning it around.

Perhaps its much the same thing

They don't have the most important thing. Leadership. Everything about Ballmer reminds me of a salesperson who is trying over-hype a product in to selling it to you. With very little knowledge as to what the product actually does.

Like Ballmer, Steve Jobs is also not a tech nerd (in the sense that they are not developers/programmers or engineers), but Steve always seems to have a more in-depth knowledge about Apple products and knows it inside out.

On the other hand the top three guys at Google are hackers.

Leadership matters.

Though Jobs isn't a certified engineer, he did wrote code, soldered chips on motherboards, etc. He certainly knows what parts a computer is made of, how software works, etc.

It's 'did write.' Just FYI, in case you're not native and that wasn't just an auto-complete gaffe.

Ballmer's focus seems to be on metrics and sales figures instead.

It reminds me of IBM -- there was an amazing amount of very cool new stuff appearing out of the TJ Watson lab (when my parents were IBM'ers, I got to read their journals regularly). IBM brought very few of them to market, even when other companies did so with gusto (PDAs are an example -- IBM had working prototypes stuffed on a shelf somewhere long before Apple started even hyping the Newton).

And the defecutives didn't learn their lesson -- when their server market started suffering when the bubble burst, my mother started asking friends and colleagues about potential candidates for IBM tools and servers when she became a marketing exec there. I gave her a list of companies like PIXAR, Blue Sky Studios, Digital Domain (you see where this is going). 3 months later I went to Linux Expo with my mother and several of hear colleagues, all of whom wondered why IBM hadn't gone after those markets -- the people who gave my mother her mission stopped her from going after the companies I referred her to.

We were particularly impressed by their foolishness when we attended Carly Fiorina's keynote -- in which she listed nearly every company I'd suggested, some with video interviews, and making a big deal about how HP had provided them with Linux based solutions.

Look at Apple, they are not afraid of killing the iPod market with the iPhone.

edit: s/no/not/

Microsoft should have been fine, but it looks like they are so locked on what they are doing now and allowing middle managers to play politics instead of technology (see the Clear Type stories for instance) that they are heading to the iceberg. The Titanic was "unsinkable" until it hit the iceberg. Microsoft's software is not really geared for mobile and replacements with reputations are appearing on other platforms. I believe Microsoft's strengths now are inertia, document formats, and servers (specifically Exchange and SQL).

If I was in charge of Microsoft, I would probably do a modified version of the OS X -> iOS strategy. Use a beefed up version of Silverlight refocused on touch and make sure the new apps run under Windows 7 also. Make sure you ship an "App Store" to enterprise customers that automatically installs the right apps on machines and does backups.

A viable alternative made and sold by ... Microsoft? This wouldn't be taking away from Windows, it would be designing and selling the right tool for the job.

I think MS Office is much better positioned for tablets than most people realize. Ribbon strips provide friendly finger-sized buttons that are perfectly sized for tablets. If they can add media center and some sort of X-Box gaming they'll have a killer device. Granted, Apple will still own the "consumption device" market but there is a big need for "business tablets".

Microsoft has had a decade of chances in this market to pull off the "business tablet" market you're suggesting. And, well, they just haven't done it yet.

If this is such a competitive advantage, why wasn't the iPad put on a Mac OSX architecture? Sometimes, an interface reboot is downright necessary. The Xbox 360, I'd argue, is the most successful non-Windows-related product they sell because it's clear that the interface design was tailored for the product.

That's their problem. They don't know when to let go of their legacy and start fresh.

It's not clear what "version 3" of MS's tablet strategy really is, or whether their product-development effort has reached that level yet. But if history is any guide, we'll know it when they ship it. Most likely, it will happen around the same time that Apple's proprietary, grasping nature starts to become self-defeating.

You can't beat the PC for breadth, depth, and availability of specialised apps. They've been evolving for 30 years now. But when the iPhone SDK became available there were 0 applications, and in less than 30 months the industry's grown an entire replacement software ecosystem that covers a great deal of what users want to do.

I just installed an iPad for our sales guy - the iPad acts like a giant remote control for powerpoint (or whatever the apple eqivalent of powerpoint is).

It shows you thumbnails of all the slides, lets you click between them and read notes - all while the iPad displays the main presentation on it's video port. You can even make edits with the on-screen keyboard - while the presentation is running.

Compare that with any conference you have been to with Powerpoint on a PC. During the 5mins of trying to make powerpoint appear on the non-primary display of the laptop you then get introduced to the owners desktop, the photos of his kids, all the little popup reminders from explorer, the cell phone sync software, the corporate login complaining that it can find the domain controller.

Then if they need to switch to another slide you have to drop back into edit mode, and wait while they navigate through powerpoint to the slide and restart the view again.

If I was presenting to anything more important than a parent-teacher conference, the iPad would be worth it for that alone.

I've used a lot of shareware and small developer type apps on osx, windows and linux, and the osx stuff is noticeable better in the UI department; it's pretty brutal how little effort most small dev's put into the UI or even graphic design.

Even large developers have trouble creating well designed Ui's; I'm thinking of Quicken, which has always struck me as amateurish and dated though I haven't used it in a while so maybe it's improved.

Point being, if you simply put a desktop OS on a tablet, most developers aren't going to do anything to make the experience great. This is something clearly lost on Ballmer as well.

The last time they did so was when Allen and Gates decided there must be a market for BASIC on Altair and microcomputers in general. Maybe Traf-o-matic was an innovation, too. However none of their significant products afterwards was anything new :

  * common programming languages for different systems
  * MS-DOS, built from a borrowed clone of CP/M
  * Xenix, an AT&T licensed Unix
  * Windows, a pale copy of existing GUIs of the time
  * Word, a Wordstar rip-off
  * Multiplan, a VisiCalc rip-off
  * Excel, a Lotus 1-2-3 rip-off
  <snip some years>
  * C# and .Net, an enhanced java

ETA the downloadable demo is really cool. You can run the demo before it's done installing and it will download the rest of the program in the background, prioritizing features you're trying to use. Sweet!

(Tangentially, we also got the Comic Sans font about the same time, so I guess that cancels out the good stuff.)

But that is what Microsoft has done historically.

The old solution was to use profits from already owned market segments to invest much more in other market segments, until they own those too.

I don't know either why it stopped working.

Could the problem be a lack of a monopoly leverage? They can't threaten hardware/software makers anymore?

Or maybe the problem is just leadership, as others wrote?

Or maybe they have just screwed over too many people (to paraphrase an old Netscape executive, too many people has woken up with a bloody computer monitors in bed)?

They no longer can use one monopoly to create another. That's what landed them in trouble in the US and in the EU. Their historical model of growth is no longer possible.

I would suspect they rely too much on focus groups to drive product development. There is only so much consumers can tell you about what they need. You can't just round up a bunch of consumers and ask them what will be the Next Big Thing. Well... You can, but you will end up with a Kin or a Zune in your hand.

I tried to write that in the paragraph starting with: "Could the problem be a lack of a monopoly leverage?". :-)

>>That's what landed them in trouble in the US and in the EU.

I wonder if that is the reason. They kept ignoring the monopoly laws and paid fines ten years later, when they courts had managed to get to the (then ancient) transgression.

>>I would suspect they rely too much on focus groups to drive product development.

Hmm.. a point which seems to fit well.

I believe top management really wants to completely ignore the law and employ every subcriminal tactic available in the books and, perhaps, write a couple new ones in the process. I also believe they don't have the guts this would take, as they believe that their past transgressions brought attention enough for someone to end in jail.

That and the lack of balls to design products no focus group wants, but build them because you know people will want them once they see them.

Out Apple Apple.

One can dream, right?

I kind of doubt it given J Allard was forced out of the company over the Courier.[1] Frankly, I think that's one of the single most boneheaded moves Ballmer's made -- Allard is largely responsible for reviving Microsoft's brand image with the under 30 crowd heading up Xbox and Zune development.

A decade ago, nobody would have described Microsoft as a cool brand, but flash forward today every frat boy in the country owns an Xbox 360.

Robbie Bach, head of the E&D division, went out at the same time. Then again, E&D was largely dysfunctional because there's been an odd combination of failing to leverage MS technology when it would make sense while trying to shoehorn MS techs into places where they just didn't work. See buying Danger and then pretty much scrapping their technology to build the Kin as a prime example. It pretty well illustrates the institutional schizophrenia the company shows to the world.

[1] http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/05/25/microsoft.over...

I am not sure many people describe it that way now.

As in "general cool", I can't remember a single one. Perhaps the Xbox 360 makes the cut, but only in the 25+ gamer scene.

There would also be some "fashion-victim cool": those who just need the latest shiny toy. Those were the ones who jumped into Vista, Office 2007 and then to 7 and 2010 just because there is a newer version, disregarding whatever feature they needed. Obviously, they are not restricted to the Microsoft space - and I have pushed my PPC iMac well beyond its last supported OSX version (the G3 runs 10.4, but is not very snappy). These people also swap hardware like crazy, often having 8-core, 64-bit desktops where they check their hotmail accounts and zip through Facebook at speeds unheard of.

Create a stripped down, simple OS based on Windows (even iOS is derived from OSX), create a compelling app store, and a framework for writing apps for it based on Silverlight. Bam! Very compelling piece of hardware. Not only that but these type of apps are what Silverlight was destined for. I'd much rather write these types of apps in Silverlight than Cocoa Touch.

Microsoft just has shitty marketing. But maybe that's what you meant.

Microsoft was over 5 years (1848 days) later than Apple to "get" what an MP3 player was. During that five years, Microsoft had a total R&D budget of over $25 billion, or $13,698,630/calendar day.

Of course we don't know how much of that budget was allocated for the Zune, but one could easily imagine it being in the hundreds of millions.

You say they got the MP3 player, I say if you throw enough money at a problem, eventually, no matter how hard you try to ignore it, the solution will present itself. And in this case, it was simply to copy their competitors.

edit: typo

I really think the failure was purely marketing, judging by the accounts of people who used the service, that and people's assumption that anything from Microsoft cannot be innovative or interesting - it's a self-fulfilling prophecy in a lot of ways. Microsoft could have released the iPad, and it probably would have been a total flop, even if it had all the hallmarks of the iPad ecosystem. (There are a few things that could stand-in for the iPhone's app store like Flash and WinMO apps.)

And the beaming feature may have been nice in theory, it was widely considered to be hobbled with DRM.

Lastly, let's not forget the seemingly inane decision to bypass what little music people had from PlaysForSure campaign and re-implement a completely incompatible new format.

Marketing? Maybe, maybe not. To me it sounds like a severe lack of execution. They made consumers re-purchase music, didn't offer much differentiation from their competitors, and were five years late to the party.

In comparison, it's reported that the entire iPod development process, from the form factor, to the scrollwheel, FireWire, OS, and iTunes integration only took 18 months.

How many people actually bought PlaysForSure music? I don't really see how that's a huge deal. You could still use all of your existing MP3s, DRM-free AAC music from iTunes, and WMA files from Windows.

>it was widely considered to be hobbled with DRM.

Here I definitely think that's the anti-Microsoft spin machine at work. The problem with the beaming feature is that no one owned a Zune, so it was useless. If it had more market penetration, it could get really interesting. But people don't want to believe that anything coming out of Microsoft can get better, so the reviews said it sucked.

>it's reported that the entire iPod development process ... only took 18 months

Pro-Apple spin machine at work.

Do you own one? I've never met anyone that did. I see the Zune HD has a web browser... How does that experience compare with browsing on the iPod touch? How does battery life compare watching youtube video?