Geeks claim Windows 8 tablet will stop iPad plague!

Thursday 15 Sep 2011

Yesterday Microsoft showed off its schizophrenic new Windows 8 operating system running on a tablet and geeky commentators have apparently fallen in love with it. “‘Hello Windows 8, this is iPad. You win!’” tweeted one famous figure. Before you get carried away, realise the techno journalists are far from infallible even when they're almost unanimous - e.g. they also loved Windows Phone 7 but it tuned out to be disastrously unsuccessful. In fact, the techno journalist mob even called the iPad wrong, they didn't realise what a game changer it was until they saw how much their friends and relatives loved browsing the internet from sofas instead of desks.

Now Microsoft likes to do everything differently from Apple, so instead of keeping their ideas secret they handed out 5,000 free tablets to the crowd a full year before the expected launch. Also their presentation was run by Steven Sinofsky of Office Ribbon infamy, instead of Microsoft's King Steve Ballmer. The hardware came from Samsung, the leading player in Android devices.

"Why try and blend two different paradigms", Microsoft asked the crowd, "when you can give the world two completely different GUIs with two completely different programming languages all in the same product?!" "Brilliant thinking" said Paul Thurrott! Oh dear, listen my sad geeky friends, one day you are going to have to learn that less is sometimes more!

"Never underestimate your opposition" advised the wise sage in the art of war, but in Microsoft's case that means never underestimating how low they can go. Here are some of my favourite quotes from Sinofsky the Zombie:

(1) Apple's icon based GUI is dead, our much admired Windows Phone 7 tile based widget GUI is the future.

(2) Consumer's don't want a brand new OS, they want our beloved familiar backward compatible Windows.

(3) Consumers want full power tablets that can do anything laptops can do, not new low power and low complexity devices.

(4) Serious programs such as Photoshop must have ribbons and be written in serious programming languages such as c++ or c#, fun programs such as Angry Birds must be written in cross platform HTML 5 web applets.

(5) People are dying to run their new Metrosexual web apps side by side, all this stuff about Apple's new full screen philosophy being a simplifying liberating breath of fresh air is wrong.

(6) Microsoft came up with all these important realizations by honest pragmatic market research, not like those dangerous elitist Kool-Aid drinking Apple occultists who withdraw from the real world and do their work in secret mountain temples.

(7) Even though the finished product will do anything a PC can do, it won't get hot, won't need a fan, will last ten hours in continuous use, and won't loose power in standby mode. Of course the hardware we have given out today doesn't work that way, but in a years time you will see what we can do...

How hilarious is all that? So forget about Microsoft, the threat to the iPad comes from Android, and I am guessing that the people Apple risks loosing are the young kids who don't want a PC but find the iPad just too limiting, eg without a file system you can't even upload photos to Facebook. As an Apple shareholder I experimented by giving some iPads to friends who don't own PCs, but it turned into a nightmare of questions and complaints. Everything hinges on Apple making the iPad a PC replacement not just a bourgeoisie toy for browsing on the couch.

My guess is that Apple need to add a simple file manager and flash to the iOS5 iPad to ensure domination of the post PC world. Start off with something real simple if you like so I can upload photos and move stuff between walled gardens, it's not that hard, it's nothing to get religious about. Flash? The other day I couldn't play the Tom Tom video of their new iPad app from the Tom Tom web site because it doesn't support flash! Apple need to realise how stupid the rest of the world is, even the idealistic BBC hasn't made the HTML 5 jump yet. I know flash wmv and all these countless other web formats are crap, but so is life without them. Give me a tool that copes with 95% of it, you won't damage your reputation if you add a popup message saying "Adobe sucks, this will kill your battery and probably crash you browser". Also can you think about 'copy paste' please, sometimes I spend all day trying to copy little bits of text on web pages. I know it's getting better with releases, but sometimes simple little things hurt so much I start loosing faith in the whole paradigm shift. 

I guess I could sum it up like this: We have to live with a bit of painful imperfection. Engineers can sometime get too anal just as geeks can get too sloppy, we all have to keep flexible in different ways, so know thyself or fail! Steve, my friend, if the iPad is to replace PCs it can't leave us stranded with lots of fiddly little missing features like MacWrite back in 1984. You guys have to realise that replacing the PC is a much bigger game than writing a smart phone OS. It's not impossible but it is hard, come on Apple, this is like a religious war and you're the big hope for mankind, so get a move on!

P.S. Here is an interesting question to exercise your brain: what advice would you offer Samsung? Let's answer that question like a philosopher - we need to focus on the expert purpose not traditions or marketing hype. For example, Microsoft and Google love widgets, but my iPad is not the dashboard of my car where I need to simultaneously check speed, revs and temperature at a glance. Do you see widgets are frivolous? It's like the Japanese clothes iron with a digital plate temperature display, things like that may sell initially to geeks but eventually they disgust us. The iPad's killer feature is its sofa style of operation, if you keep that in mind you realise that physical size isn't the be all and end all of the iPad. I see lot's of people using their iPad in leather cases, don't get obsessed by trying to copy Apple's enviable and expensive external form. Indeed, in the ideal world we would probably have a slightly bigger screen but it would add to much to the cost. Another important thing we need is strength, we want to be able to drop this thing from time to time, it's no good building one of those nice looking but fragile Sony Laptops that constantly fall apart. Matching or beating Apple's long battery life goes without saying. The browser and the email need to be fully functional, a problem Apple is addressing in iOS5. What's the next biggest feature? Perhaps social apps, photo management, and then games. Apple have gone the understated route and removed all the external buttons, but look we can improve game play and general functionality by adding lots of buttons / game pads etc. Bring in the London design team and come up with a design that works with a bit more clutter. You can increase the case size a little to accommodate extra controls. As long as you don't cover it with writing and logos it can work. Have you seen a piano? You don't have to remove all the controls to make a thing beautiful! I don't play games on my iPad but a lot of people love them. Even for me, on my iPad I love the slider which locks my iPad in portrait mode, case controls are useful things and useful things are beautiful things if the emphasis is right. Don't be a slave to Apple's ideas, the word is a big place with lots of paths. Look at the way every competitor automatically copies Apple's idea of using only viciously expensive flash memory. Tiny hard drives these days can auto shut down when they are dropped, so if you combine a say 8GB flash with a 160GB micro drive you have a device which is much cheaper than the iPad and yet it can store all your stuff. These guys are such incredibly stupid zombies, they are struggling like hell to compete with the iPad on price, and the most expensive bit of the iPad is the flash memory, but it doesn't even occur to them to use a cheaper alternative! Besides, think about the whole idea of "PC Replacement", how can kids today really replace their PC with a 16-64GB device that doesn't even have a file manager? Apple are pushing iCloud, but people can't upload 100GB of music and 60GB of photos to the internet and view everything as a stream. I think Apple have been a drinking a bit too much of their own Californian Kool-Aid, 3G internet connections have 10GB monthly data limits and they're often very slow. Vanity Fair Magazine is a 350Mb download, that's just one issue of one magazine, the whole <=64GB hard drive concept just doesn't make sense to me, the only reason it works is because the iPad is still bourgeoisie toy for browsing on the couch, not actually a PC replacement. Yes Windows is horrible, yes we want a simpler OS, but that doesn't mean we want to live in a cloud, it just means we don't want a machine that drives us up the wall with problems. Apple have accused Samsung of slavishly copying their design, and they're right. If you can't come up with something different give up, don't damage the greater good by flogging second rate knock offs. If Samsung go the Sony / Microsoft way, slavishly designing for the market place using marketing managers who just add everyone else's ideas together, they will fail. Samsung has to find it's own inner Steve Jobs, it has to break away from convention and creatively focus on the philosophy of what it is trying to accomplish.