Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: Forget the iPad, Surface Is the Tablet People Want 403
zacharye writes "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer undoubtedly knows that Apple has sold more than 100 million iPad tablets at this point, but according to the outspoken executive, that's not the tablet people really want. While speaking with CNBC, Ballmer said no company has built a tablet he believes customers want. 'You can go through the products from all those guys and none of them has a product that you can really use. Not Apple. Not Google. Not Amazon. Nobody has a product that lets you work and play that can be your tablet and your PC. Not at any price point,' he says."
In Your Dreams Mr. B. (Score:5, Insightful)
One vendor lockin in enough and with the Copyright Board saying jailbreaking tablets is verboten, one is all I care to have.
There you go again Ballmer (Score:5, Insightful)
"Nobody has a product that lets you work and play that can be your tablet and your PC. Not at any price point,"
That's actually a true statement. Ballmer's problem is that it is still a true statement after Surface debuts.
MS Surface problems (Score:5, Insightful)
- too expensive
- too confusing (it's obvious that the iPad won't run Mac OS X apps, it's not obvious that the RT Surface won't run Windows apps)
- too late
(and I write this as a guy who'd like to replace his Fujitsu Stylistic Tablet PC w/ a Surface (Intel version, if it's possible to install Mac OS X on it)
Apple has sold 100 million units (Score:4, Insightful)
Track Record (Score:5, Insightful)
Go back and look at Balmer's track record with his "statements". It's not really good at all.
Listen to th market not the CEO (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. Tim Cook Will say the iPad is what people want. Balmer will say the Surface is what people want. Google will be pushing Chrome...
Time will tell what people really want. Focus group are sometimes wrong. Even what the internet buzz thinks it want isn't what people really want.
We here tend to figure if people didn't make the same choice that we made, some how their decision is corrupted by marketing, or misinformation, while we are more pure... But we all see things and weight them differently. If someone says they like x for reason y. You really shouldn't discredit reason y, if reason y is important to them. Reason y may not matter to you. But that is the great thing about choice... We get to pick what we want. So trying to discredit someone elses choice is just stupid.
Loser (Score:3, Insightful)
The iPad isn't perfect, yet, but the Surface is so far down from perfect that it is not even a contender. Ballmer is dreaming. Or spinning PR.
Re:There you go again Ballmer (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because 'work' is almost always (except a very few niche cases) about creation, and creation without precision input devices is tedious and frustrating. Precision input in this case means a keyboard that I can type at full speed on, and a pointing device that is pixel accurate. Even with the keyboard cover that the surface uses, I don't think it meets either of those criteria.
100m tablet already sold. Where does MS fit in? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not like people with tablets will be racing to go buy ANOTHER tablet.
Just seems to me Microsoft jumped into the market two years too late. This isn't a knock on Surface or anything, just an observation.
Re:Download an app???? NO!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait. You're trying to do real work on a tablet? I'll see you in 34 years after you write your first "grad school" paper using only a tablet.
Just because the capability exists, it doesn't mean that it does the job very well.
Ballmer, back to the previous tablet mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft has had their OS in tablets for years and they never took off. The reason: They tried to be both a tablet and a PC.
The iPad showed tablets work great as tablets, not PCs, and vice-versa, and in one year probably sold more than all other tablets combined in history.
Now Ballmer wants to do the combined tablet/PC again. Honest, it'll work this time.
Re:MS Surface problems (Score:2, Insightful)
- too expensive
Compared to what? a 64GB iPad (3rd generation) is $649 and a 64GB Surface tablet is $699, but the surface comes with a cover that includes a stand and a keyboard AND a customized version of Office. Both will run anything you can find in their App Store -- granted, Apple's has a bit more at the moment, but that could easily change. So, to me, the Surface seems more like a bargain than the iPad.
- too confusing (it's obvious that the iPad won't run Mac OS X apps, it's not obvious that the RT Surface won't run Windows apps)
Obvious to who? When I first saw an iPad I expected it to share apps with a Mac. At least the Surface will do that, since the Win8 desktop can also run things from the App Store. I don't know Apple, so the Mac may be able to access the App Store, too, which would still leave the Surface as a better bargain because of the included extras (heck, it even has a full-sized USB port -- does Apple ever use standard ports or devices?)
- too late
Too late like AMD getting into the PC CPU market? Too late like Android coming out after the iPhone? With the Microsoft behemoth behind it, Surface may stand an actual chance. Unlike the Zune, which no one really wanted to begin with, a significant number of people have been looking/searching/waiting for an alternative to the Apple-dominated tablet market. Personally, I'm happy with my Xoom, but I can easily see the appeal of Surface for large number of people who grew up on Microsoft-based systems.
A bit of disclosure: I dislike Apple because I seem to be incapable of using things without thinking about what I'm doing FIRST and even attempting that makes Apple products much more difficult to use. I dislike Microsoft because, as a developer for [mostly] Microsoft-based software for the past 30 years or so, I've felt my life was controlled by their whims on changing OS and compiler features. I don't like Windows 8 because my desktop is *NOT* a phone or tablet and I think it is wrong to assume all devices benefit from the same interface -- that is just plain dumb thinking.
Re:Download an app???? NO!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
You can do all that with a crayon, too, but I wouldn't recommend it. I've hand compiled programs into machine code with no more than a pencil and a legal pad. I've edited photos by coloring them in, or by hand-cutting masks for use in a dark room. I've written term papers with a pen and ruled notebook paper. And I have both a 1st and 3rd gen iPad.
You can do all those things on an iPad, but it's a painful, slow, imprecise process which pales in comparison to even the most basic laptop (like my 11" Acer Timeline), and is only slightly less arduous than a root canal when compared to a fully featured computer (like my quad core i7 with a 30"+2x20" color corrected IPS monitors).
The GP is correct - you can't do any sort of real photo editing on an iPad. Or general drawing,drafting, or handwritten note-taking for any kind of advanced or technical class that can't be done better with a pencil and paper. IMHO, Jobs missed the boat on creative types by not putting a Wacom-style digitizer over the screen. Lightroom or Photoshop on such a beast would be very cool indeed. As it is, it's no better than a crayon, which is what the best stylus is. Yes, I can touch type on it, but get into anything that requires lots of numbers or symbols and you will either become one with the shift key or decide that it's faster just to wait to get back to the office and type on a real keyboard.
I like the iPad, and it's passable for content creation or editing for temporary or low-intensity products. It may still be as good or better than the Surface. But, on average, it's nowhere near high efficiency for technical or detailed artistic creation.
Well Bill, (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate to point it out to you, but you've not really made a PC that can be my tablet and or PC too either. You keep fucking failing. I know, I've spent hours and hours testing windows 8, just like I tested XP on a Q1 and 7 on the same Q1 before it.
The ARM move you made probably does have a place - but its got ZERO to do with running my 'PC' as a tablet. In fact I can't do any of that. The PC part doesn't even exist. As for your X86 tablet - oh sure, I can have my PC - but minus the start button. And minus anything to do with tablet - unless I accept Metro/Notro as my new PC life. Only 99% of everything PC I used or use is desktop based. I have no idea who you think you are talking to - Its not me.
And the real world information is rolling through the isles. The real benchmarks are closing in. Worse performance in use, worse gaming, worse multitasking, worse application compat, and continuing doese of screw me.
To be frank, by forcing this broken Notro paradigm down my through - I've never ever going to be less than hostile to your dumb sales pitch. Your new OS is a cut down 7 with some nice engineering changes in the normal method of win development - and to get them I am forced to use WinRT and this garbage UI (I won't - I'll re-engineer machinery not to - end of.) - and thats all she wrote according to you. It deserves to fail, and it deserves to supply the big pink slip to the people inside MS who ignored all the feedback from the userbase that said no.
Ballmer doesn't understand the point of tablets (Score:5, Insightful)
By this interview, Ballmer proves what I had suspected: that Microsoft doesn't understand why tablets are popular, and what tablets are for. And this failure to understand is why they are ruining Windows, by trying to make it a "universal" OS.
Tablets are not a substitute for a laptop or desktop PC, nor do most people want them to be. They are a more convenient and portable way of surfing the Web, listening to music, watching videos on YouTube or Netflix, playing simple games, doing Facebook, reading e-books, and so forth. They are, in short, content consumption devices. They aren't good at producing stuff, and aren't supposed to be. A tablet is not a "junior laptop" and when Microsoft tried to treat it as such with their previous attempts, they failed miserably. But nor is a desktop or laptop a scaled-up tablet; if it was, no one could ever get any work done.
Ballmer doesn't seem to understand that for the average home user, firing up MS Office is a rare use case, and one that is easily enough satisfied by a 6-year-old system running Windows XP that the buyer sees no reason to upgrade. As for businesses, they like things the way they are; many of them would still be running Windows 2000 if they were able to. Microsoft doesn't see that the fact that they would benefit by people spending more money is irrelevant; what matters is if the buyers see the benefit in spending more money. And when it does come time to spend, they have to demonstrate why their product is better than the competitor's. It's not enough any more just for them to show up.
Re:Track Record (Score:4, Insightful)
True, but he has a huge track record of saying shit that is not nor will ever be true. I still don't know why he is the CEO...
Re:Listen to th market not the CEO (Score:5, Insightful)
You give the average user far too much credit; there's a big difference between knowing what you want (and knowing why)... and thinking that you know what you want (when you really haven't a fucking clue).
Re:First impressions on Surface (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, it will be. Why do you think Apple wanted us all to ease into buying all our software on the App Store in OSX? It's not for OUR financial health...
Re:Download an app???? NO!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because you can not, does not mean the rest of us can not.
I use iPad for everything including writing papers....works just fine for what it is intended, and that is subjective to the user. In my use case, I am taking it when I am on a commute like the train, or on the go at classes. It's light and easy to use in closed quarters and when I'm back at my house I simply open the same notes on my laptop to continue. The right tool, in the right place at the right time.
So once again, just because you can not make it work....does not discount the rest of us who can.
Re:Apple has sold 100 million units (Score:5, Insightful)
Ballmer has his own reality distortion field just like Steve Jobs.
The difference is that nobody believes Ballmer's RDF while Jobs was able to get a lot of people to buy into his.
Re:Track Record (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There you go again Ballmer (Score:5, Insightful)
Sums it up nicely. Using a tablet for professional work is like using a minivan to move your furniture. Perhaps it does the job, but you'll always get things done faster and better with tools designed for the task.
Re:Well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Or because they want a product which isn't overly fiddly to use and which does what they want. For years, Microsoft over-promised, and under-delivered, which is why many of us started using Linux and other alternatives in the first place.
Since I was already using iTunes, it was a no-brainer for me. Everything was ready to go in about 5 minutes.
Define 'use'? I can do everything on a tablet that can be done on a smart phone (if you have a smart phone, you probably don't need a tablet -- for those of us who don't want/have smart phones, the tablet is a better choice due to screen size).
But when I travel, I get a lot of use out of my iPad -- movies on the plane, checking Gmail in the airport and hotel, Google voice calls to the wife, and video games to pass the time. Finding restaurants with Urban Spoon and the map applications come in handy as well. The last few times I travelled for business, I didn't use my laptop even once, but I used my iPad 3-4 hours daily.
It's also my eBook reader, and gets used in the living room when I need to quickly check something on the web. And, all of those Bluray disks I buy that have a digital copy can go onto it, so I can watch Avengers on an airplane or in a hotel room (on their TV if I bring the cable I have for that).
I wouldn't do my daily work on it, but a lot of things I do on a computer don't require that I be sitting at a desk and typing. For those things my tablet is fine, if not actually better (and probably would be true of any tablet).
When I go on vacation the only device I'll bring is my iPad -- because I can access all of my email accounts (including my corporate Outlook web stuff) and have ready access to the stuff that I need when I'm on vacation. If I can check my company email from the hammock in my mom's back yard, and then go back to reading my book (all without getting up), I call that a pretty useful thing.
Every time I see someone say "tablets don't have much use" I can only think that it should be qualified as "for you". I actually get quite a bit of use out of mine. Everybody I know with a tablet gets a fair bit of use out of it ... just not to do the same tasks they'd be doing on their work computer.
Hell, a friend of a friend is a professional photographer. Last year after he and his team had covered an event, he logged into his system, and kicked off the first few steps of his photo processing workflow -- all from poolside with a beer in his hand. In 5 minutes, he had initiated the automated stuff, and could relax for the rest of the day.
You may not be able to think of uses for one, and that's fine. But for many of us, it does cover a lot of things.
Re:Returning surface (Score:5, Insightful)
why do people think that "I didn't like it" is a valid reason to return something they've purchased? Even if it's part of the store's return policy and all
I'm going out on a limb here, but, "if it's part of the store's return policy," then, by definition, 'I didn't like it' is "a valid reason to return something they've purchased."
I would never use a return policy to test drive new toys. It really takes some warped sense of entitlement to have that attitude. It actually seems unethical to me to demand money back for a product that functions as advertised.
It seems unethical to me to not provide purchasers with a viable way of determining whether or not a product meets their needs. Advertising is just that. The proof is in the pudding.
Locking a laptop to a retail counter and then locking it into a self-serving demo mode doesn't tell me how heavy it really is, if it's going to fit in my briefcase, if the on-board serial ports are the 16550A UARTs I need to interface with the laser cutter in the lab (dating myself a bit here, but...), etc. And speaking as a former retail slave (Best Buy, Computer City, on-campus Apple sales rep), 99.95% of the retail sales people can't answer highly specific technical questions.
If there's no feasible way to determine if a product meets your needs (by trying it out in actual use case scenarios) before purchasing it, and if the store return policy expressly permits returning it after such a trial, it's absolutely ethical to return something you realized -- at the only point you could have so realized, i.e., after purchase -- does not meet your needs.
Q.E.D.
Re:Download an app???? NO!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
And it _does_ have note taking capability. I take notes all the time on mine (mostly with Nebulous). With dropbox I even share my note files between my phone, iPad 2, PC and Mac systems. I can also use Noteshelf (with a Jotz stylus) to do hand-written notes and drawings. Folks have to get out of the "it don't work fer me so it must not work for anybody" mindset. If the iPad was not a useful tool for both consumption and creation you would not have millions of repeat customers for it.