I think you mean Eee Slate.  Since, you know, the Eee Pad Transformer is just Android and not capable of full content creation.  The Eee Slate is Windows 7 and a full OS and that tablet has been hugely popular.  

I think you mean Eee Slate.  Since, you know, the Eee Pad Transformer is just Android and not capable of full content creation.  The Eee Slate is Windows 7 and a full OS and that tablet has been hugely popular.  

I think you mean Eee Slate.  Since, you know, the Eee Pad Transformer is just Android and not capable of full content creation.  The Eee Slate is Windows 7 and a full OS and that tablet has been hugely popular.  

You have the nail on the head Mark. I have bought and tested Ipad 2 ,  I have used an Iphone , I am the head of IT within a 200 user based company and both of those devices were rubbish! – why?…. because our whole infrastructure is windows based.  I use a WP7 now and it is a breeze , cannot wait for the time my mobile staff have windows 8 slate/tablet which they dock when in the office and then pick up and walk away with they hit the road!.

Does Microsoft have the resources to pull of some amazing things here?   Absolutely!

Is it difficult to “break” with the ways they have been thinking as a corporation for years?  Absolutely!

At this point, it’s just a game of wait and see… anyone who counts Microsoft entirely out at this point in the game, is pretty short sighted.   There’s far to many resources that “can” be thrown at this problem to call them a non-player.   That said, Microsoft has not yet (IMO) demonstrated that they can break their corporate “groupthink” and actually provide a product which addresses the intuitive useability issues which made the apple product so viable and was a problem for windows devices.

I think it’s way to early for anyone to provide much intelligent comment yet… in either direction.

Lets say you buy a kick ass Windows 8 tablet…you use the app store to buy and download all your touch based apps for on-the-go use (Netflix, ESPN, Youtube, Facebook etc), you check your email, you do some IMing, you play a few touch games…now you get to your job and dive right into work…why are you carrying multiple devices when Windows 8 does it all? You plug your Win8 tablet into a dock with keyboard and trackpad, or you use a BT M&K and you switch to “Desktop mode and open an AutoCad file and do what you gotta do…one device regardless if its work or play/on the go or at a desk.

Understand that Window8 will have:

an apps store

can print with ease

can play ANY file online and off

will run on ARM chips

will have touch based games and apps

will also have the competitor’s features like itunes and Google Music

Will not be a walled garden

the list goes on and on.

Their is nothing on an iPad that a Window8 tablet wouldn’t be able to do with the same amount of ease, but their is A LOT of things a Win8 tablet could do that an iPad couldnt (Flash,Silverlight, Office 2010, AutoCad, WMV, free Hulu etc.).

People do want Windows applications, regardless of your assumptions about what I’m assuming.  They have wanted them.  They will continue to want them.  You apparently (here’s another assumption) WANT to rewrite the last 30 years of technology history or WANT to miss the point of what has driven that history.

No doubt, the slow motion of history grinds on, and we should move beyond the desktop model.  I am very glad we are.  But the focus is not the latest-greatest, cool technology (except for technophiles).  The consumer focus (the real issue here) is only on what an application (not a device) will do for them.  So people will continue to want the things like what Windows (or Mac, etc.) applications do for them.  Consumers don’t buy technology — they buy personal benefits.

IMO, Microsoft offers a pretty good package out of the box. If you get a computer with Windows pre-installed, that’s where all the garbage gets slopped into Windows. 

IMO, Microsoft offers a pretty good package out of the box. If you get a computer with Windows pre-installed, that’s where all the garbage gets slopped into Windows. 

I have a $1,700 HP Envy 17 with every bell and whistle you would want and a 64 GB AT&T 3G iPad 2 (which I’m using to write this) and guess which one I use 90-95% of the time to do those things?

Sure, if I want to use Photoshop, Premiere, AutoCAD, or a few other apps, I’m better off with the laptop, but outside of work, I don’t really have the need or want. I disagree with the mentality that people want to be able to run windows apps because there really aren’t that many that people use anymore. The browser reigns supreme these days.

I have a $1,700 HP Envy 17 with every bell and whistle you would want and a 64 GB AT&T 3G iPad 2 (which I’m using to write this) and guess which one I use 90-95% of the time to do those things?

Sure, if I want to use Photoshop, Premiere, AutoCAD, or a few other apps, I’m better off with the laptop, but outside of work, I don’t really have the need or want. I disagree with the mentality that people want to be able to run windows apps because there really aren’t that many that people use anymore. The browser reigns supreme these days.

Who gets paid?

Microsoft.

Apple, apple has done a hell of a job convincing people their better and candy coating their shiny tech devices. It’s only been in the past 5 years that they’ve ponied up and realized that to increase the market share they have to be taken seriously at higher levels. And their succeeding, however Android is in… and it’s not going anywhere… it’s not an argument of whats better, just what you prefer. I seriously expect with the recent influx of Android tablets, Apple will lose a pretty large chunk of market share. That being said Apple is too solidified with their core users, their not going anywhere, and even if they lose market share, they’ll still probably have the majority.

The question is, with chromebooks, Android and iOS, is MS “too little, too late”? This is really the only move they can make, and they have to make it now… With cloud services starting to take hold, they might start actually losing their hold on the enterprise… won’t happen over night… but when corporations start turning to google or Apple to host enterprise level applications in the cloud… that will be serious writing on the wall.

If the Windows 7 Phone marketplace didn’t show us anything else, it showed us that app developers can use Microsoft tools to build full-featured applications that run on multiple processor platforms with no changes.  Being based on .NET 4 (Compact Framework), WP7 apps can run on ARM processors, Intel processors, etc., and these apps remain unmodified between each platform.  That means a developer or a software vendor writes an application once, and it runs on all Windows platforms, including tablets and desktops of various CPU types.  It’s the .NET technology (and also Silverlight) that basically guarantees this portability.  This is great for the customer, since their apps are plentiful, high-quality, and less expensive.  And the large majority of phone apps will be ported to the Windows 8 tablet platform, so the number of apps available to the typical user will increase even more.

However, other hosting technologies will need to be built into Windows 8 to allow applications built for an Intel CPU to still run on a different processor (such as ARM).  Many legacy Windows applications are not based on the .NET framework, and therefore are not automatically portable to different environments.  If they are compiled for an Intel processor, they cannot automatically run on a Motorola, TI, ARM, or any other type of CPU.  Short of all these vendors recompiling and repackaging their product for individual processor types (which isn’t going to happen), Microsoft’s either going to need to make a general statement like “If you want legacy, buy an Intel-based tablet”, or they’re going to have to provide a “Virtual Windows 7″ mode that emulates the target CPU type, allows these foreign-CPU applications to run on a different processor anyway.  I obviously don’t know where they are with that issue, or just how big an issue it really is.  We’ll see soon, I guess.

Getting back to the main point — What’s going on here, I believe, is somewhat of a revolution in the classical Windows application technology model.  Microsoft promised it in 2000 with the advent of .NET, but it’s really only able to deliver now.  I believe the Windows 8-based tablets are going to replace a lot of the corporate PC inventory and (I believe), probably within their next replacement cycle in the next few years, for most corporations.  More importantly however, I think the consumer market is going to adopt the tablet even more quickly, and this consumer move is really what drives the corporate market.

While the iPad and Android tablets look really good, they lack a fundamentally important aspect, regardless of their current popularity — being able to run Windows applications without employing some sort of strange “dual boot” scenario (where the customer pays for two OS packages and can’t switch between them) or “virtual hosting” software (where everything is slower and some devices are not supported).  It’s a fact that many consumer PC users require MS Office and many other popular Windows apps.  MS Office is just one notable example of popular applications people have already paid for, depend upon, and certainly are not going to scrap just to get a tablet.  Let’s not forget that there are literally thousands of really good, mature, and full-featured applications that run under Windows which do NOT run or perform adequately (if at all) on these other platforms.  This one issue is a huge deal.

Finally, I believe the tablets will relatively soon have both the processor power, memory, and the accessory interfaces capable of competing with or beating most desktops except the highest-end and most expensive ones.  I’m talking about high-capacity, fast Solid-State-Memory hard drives, high-speed interfaces such as Thunderbolt, external-monitor support via HDMI, etc., all standard on new models.  Another alternative to multiple external interfaces could just be a single, high-speed, general purpose interface, designed to connect to a “tablet docking station”.  It’s the docking station that would directly connect to all the other stuff.  Maybe we’ll see a little fiber optics here.

While we’re certainly not there yet, we’ll get there soon.  At that time, I will just buy a tablet and hook it up to my external monitors, keyboard, mouse, and network when I need to sit at a desk and write or do most of my correspondence.  I certainly won’t need a bulky, expensive PC tower, but I certainly still need the Windows applications and all my accessory hardware.  And when I’m done sitting at my desk, I can walk off with my full-function computer in my hand (including all my documents).

That’s the future I see for the short term, and I’m seeing it happen amazingly quickly.  However, I think the fact is obvious that none of the other vendors can give us the software future we require the way Microsoft can.  For the most part, Apple and Android certainly give us cool-looking hardware, sexy user interfaces, built-in or phone-like apps, and flashy demos.  But for me personally, my life doesn’t revolve around such shiny, showroom stuff.  Don’t get me wrong — I have no problem with “cool”, and it would seem Windows 8 has plenty of its own.  I’m just talking about I have a problem with “cool instead of functional”, which I believe the other tablet platforms would be.  I have no interest in buying them.

By the way, I don’t work for Microsoft, nor do I own any of their stock.  No one is paying me to say this stuff.  So calm down.

Later …

As for Windows 8, no doubt it is an ambitious project and a bold move by Microsoft, based on the demo video that you link to in this article, Microsoft still has not solved the following problem you state:

“Where they’ve fallen short is in everyday usability: when you pick up the slate because you want to check your email, or movie times at the local cinema, or kill a few minutes browsing Facebook. Windows 7, for all its finger-oriented tweaks, still felt like it would rather users had stylus-nibs for fingers.”

When the demo goes into the Office Suite, the user is still left feeling like they should use a stylus rather than a finger to negotiate the small icons and the traditional fit and feel of Windows. Until Microsoft rethinks core application suites, such as Office, for a touch interface, I fear that future Windows tablets will suffer the same fate as Windows tablets for the last decade.