Microsoft: Just swallow this tablet ... the rest will take care of itself

The hardware...

Will get the tech heads perhaps interested. The rest of the world just wants something that works..

From this review, it seems you're extrapolating the possible tech wish of lovely hardware into a prediction that everyone will love it, despite the software really being a bit of a pain in the derriere..

That's not usually the way it works, alas. From all the 'normal people', to quote Avenue Q, I hang out with, they all say they just want something that works and doesn't get in the way. Good hardware spec, bad hardware spec, they'd not know the difference.

However, show them a graphical inconsistency, and they lose patience really quickly.

"but I soldiered on because the hardware was so pretty"

Really? When I switched to Apple for my personal computing at home it was solely for the OS as after my first brush with Vista I was determined never to touch another MS OS unless I was being paid to do so. It was the OS that I wanted, the hardware was an admittedly pleasant bonus but it didn't drive my decision.

"Microsoft actually writes fantastic software."

A troll if there ever was one. Care to make a reasoned argument out of it?

All I see is shoddy, scratch that, fantastically badly written, software that focuses more on fancy flashy sell-it-to-the-managers "features" than on function. And no thought at all spared to security for decades; all that thought went into finding creative new ways to shut out the competition.

If you see something else, please provide some reasoning.

"Microsoft has to make too many compromises with its customer base to move forward its software story with conviction."

So curious how apple was in pretty much the same situation, yet didn't need to compromise and stacked roaring success on top of roaring success. With devices that curiously lack interfaces the competition does provide, yet that doesn't seem to pose a problem for the "experience" of using the thing.

You might be right that this is what they're shooting for, but I am not quite so sure they'll manage to hit it, too. On that note, just what lessons did they learn from the roaring lack of uptake of "winpho"? Care to expound, Matt?

tripe

The hardware is old and clunky. It's DPI is even worse than the woeful iPad Mini.

You have it wrong.

" I'm just saying that software isn't the primary selling point for Apple's devices.

The device is."

No... the main selling point of Apple devices, is the Integration!

The fact that you can film something with you iPhone, open your iPad and edit it, then get home a show it to your kids without really having to "do" anything.

Integration is Apple's secret. It's how they go from selling an iPhone, to a iMac, to an iPad, to a timeCapsule to the same person. And it's all meant to work together, and it does, and it all works...the same.

Are we sure?

It looks very much to me that putting RT on a tablet means they're aiming not so much at the hardware or the software, but as acting as a controlling retail channel. That's where the money is. That and subscription models. If, for comparatively little effort, you can lock in customers to an ecosystem and take a cut of everything they do in it, you can mine the hardware/software dependence without ever having to do anything new. Very much like Apple did with the graphic design community and their frightfully expensive font libraries.

Ten years ago, that would have seemed laughably arrogant, and wouldn't have stood a chance in the retail environment. After the collapse of so many content empires, music stores and the DRM ruckus, expecting people to cede control over their own computers just so they could be more efficiently fleeced would have been as insane an idea as selling "thin clients" to consumers. Or 'push media', for that matter. Back then, computers were tools for enabling creativity and innovation as much as for flogging it. Linux was offering a genuinely open, in all senses, alternative to the proprietary restrictions of monopolists, and a new generation was growing up with computers, unfazed by complexity and jargon, who would engineer innovative solutions, turn data into knowledge and forge a bold, new, meritocratic economy.

It hasn't turned out like that, sadly. Instead, it's turned into a meretricious, ad-spattered, proprietary soup of electronic soma, served up via pointlessly expensive, and mostly useless, devices. Walk through any public space, and you'll see a huddled mass of shuffling humanoids, like an ADHD version of Second Life, tweeting gibberish to the void, waiting for some Shoreditch flack to rediscover the knowledge economy.

Perhaps I'm getting old, but if this is the future, I think I'd rather be dead.

It isn't the cloud its familiarity

W8 is there to seed the market with the Pane interface so MS can move into mobile. They won't lose much desktop market because of the W8 interface and once people are familiar with the design, they are more likely to pick up a windows phone, because its obvious that it will work with their computer, right?

MS need/want to get back to "windows is the only option" and that would be hard to do if they themselves introduced yet another interface in the phone market. The last thing MS want is a heterogeneous marketplace as that will suggest that Windows is not the only fruit and Other Things Are Possible. Things like ARM and Android and iOS follow each other into corporate IT and then comes Linux and other things which are Bad For Microsoft.

The desktop is a dream, I think people just haven't been able to understand how it's used by reading articles, mostly because people review it before using it more than an hour. They talk about it felt to initially transition to it, rather than talking about how they feel NOW.

Windows 8 Pro is many, many times better than Windows 7, which I'll admit was almost acceptable. Windows RT on the other hand is consumer grade weakness, but so are tablets at this point. Gotta figure people that hate Windows 8 Pro haven't tried it. Metro is kinda neat to play around with, but there isn't any good software yet.

I've never been interested in a tablet or smartphone before until Surface Pro was announced. It's a shame they couldn't launch it at the same time as Windows 8 RT. And it's a shame with the names of these things, probably causing confusion. 8 Pro is a full computer and 8 RT is so far, an experiment.