It's pretty clear HP tried to distance themselves from the Slate starting the day they bought Palm. They showed it at CES and then sat on it for months, then released apparently the same thing they had shown at CES.
I think that's a big mistake. While I love WebOS, I have even less desire to buy it on a Slate than I do iOS. I don't want my phone but bigger, I want my computer but smaller. My guess is the first real competitor to the iPad will be the one that lets you run actual Windows and somehow programmatically makes everything touch-friendly.
1) Rewrite explorer.exe to work on a slate. A big effort, but probably just on the scale of WP7 or iOS. This gives you a good high-level shell experience for doing things like finding files, launching apps, etc....
2) Make a great touch screen keyboard. Probably make a handful of them, so the user can try various kinds and make the default the one they like the most. Note, Windows handwriting recognition is already quite good.
3) Add a touch-friendly shell on IE9. The shell is already minimalist -- this is pretty incremental work.
4) Make touch-friendly versions of all the built-in Windows apps (notepad, wmp, control panel, etc...). This maybe a large work item, so use telemetry data to hit the 20 most popular apps first.
6) Get the top 100 apps and work with vendors on making them finger-friendly. Entice with money where necessary. Targets here would be Chrome, Firefox, Photoshop, iTunes, Zune, VLC, WinZip, Quicktime, TurboTax, Adobe Reader, Mathematica, etc... I suspect the conversion ratio won't be super high, but you'll move what you can.
7) Create a touch app store.
Now this won't be perfect, but I suspect it will be a pretty tremendous start, coupled with OakTrail. This probably would seriously cannibalize the netbook market. I'd probably even get one.
Really, a touch API for .NET would go a long way for promoting it in tech circles.
WPF 4.0 has touch support, and seems pretty full-featured as far as I can tell. The problem I have building .NET apps is that I don't know anyone with a Windows touch device. It's hard for me to want to add touch support, given I have no customers for it. Although if MS paid me for my time... :-)
Which reminds me of one more thing for the list... Win8Touch needs to be able to run WP7 Silverlight apps. The market needs to be seeded with touch apps in order for the tablet to take off. This was THE most important thing Apple did for the iPad (followed very closely by incredible battery life).
It's possible with the iPad. I'm thinking it's partially the right form-factor. I initially dismissed the iPad as junk, but after picking one up I was a little more convinced that it had a lot of value.
And heh, looks like Microsoft took a little bit of direction from cocoa touch in naming their classes "UIElement"
.NET apps would be a lot more valuable for in-house applications, although, Apple's 299/yr enterprise license takes a bit of air out of that.
Wow. I’m not sure how to put this without it coming off as a personal attack, but I really have to say it. Please be assured that I have no personal grudge against you; it’s not like I know you or anything.
Numerous tablets were made before the iPad. They were all completely unusable. They were all “designed” by people with your mindset.
If someone asked you to design the first sofa, you’d suggest bolting three kitchen chairs together and letting the client choose what type of bolt to use. The resulting “design” would be inevitably awful, because it isn’t designed at all – rather than examining the phase space of possible solutions, it examines what you happen to have lying around on the workbench.
Having no sense of design isn’t a great personal failing. I’m not much of a designer myself. Everyone’s bad at something – most things, in fact. Not realizing you don’t have it can be a problem, though.
Oddly though, what you criticize me for is exactly what the iPad is. It's taking iOS and scaling it to a tablet form-factor.
The key question is, what is missing from my suggestion? The internals of the iPad are basically a computer. Like literally, you can probably rip off the shell and put a Mac OS like shell on it. That's how Apple designed the iPhone too.
It's really simply an issue of the shell and the ecosystem. Note, MS didn't take this approach with all of the other tablets that existed. They did NOT change the shell nor attempt to change the ecosystem.
Now maybe you think Apple sucks at design too and the iPhone and the iPad are total failings. I think many would think otherwise.
Not being a bad designer isn't a failing. But being able to recognize that you're talking to someone who does understand design could be a problem. :-)
I know these devices have a similar form factor but I think most comparisons should stop there. The HP slate is something that could be moderately successful being sold to businesses with few consumer purchases. The iPad is wildly successful being sold to consumers with few business purchases.
It will be more interesting to see if there will be consumer demand for HP's real iPad rival, the Palmpad.
I just ran into a fellow passenger on a flight who works for a startup in the Bay Area that makes portal software for corporate boards of directors (to securely share info about the company).
After starting as a normal web-based app, they now have three full-time iPad app developers devoted to their iPad app -- because these board members love their iPads and demanded a version be created for it. They have so much demand from corporate boards that their sales team is struggling just to keep up with inbound orders.
An anecdote does not suffice for data, but if gray-haired corporate board members are so nuts about it, there must be some sort of significant business demand.
There was a story on the front page two days ago about how insecure the iPad is, and how it's threatening corporate IT with uptake.
A colleague's husband's department (same corp, different company for him) actually has a fleet of ~30 iPads. They're cheapish, easy to dev for if you have an in-house mac shop, and popular with the suits. Not to mention easy to use with the corporate intranet sites thanks to webkit.
Fun-fact: 1/3rd of german parliament members use the ipad every day. The number is increasing, since they found out its paid for by taxpayers because its a device useful for work. They also changed a law that previously forbid using electronic devices in the assembly hall. Im not making this up. Steve Jobs is a genius and the ipad has business users alright.
It's hard to imagine something that runs Windows 7 as an iPad rival. The iPad combines the tablet format with iPhone simplicity. Hint: you just can't rip the keyboard out of a Windows notebook and expect people love it.
22 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 51.9 ms ] threadI think that's a big mistake. While I love WebOS, I have even less desire to buy it on a Slate than I do iOS. I don't want my phone but bigger, I want my computer but smaller. My guess is the first real competitor to the iPad will be the one that lets you run actual Windows and somehow programmatically makes everything touch-friendly.
That sounds... difficult. :)
If it coulda worked, Steve would have done an OEM and slapped Axiotron with a lawsuit.
1) Rewrite explorer.exe to work on a slate. A big effort, but probably just on the scale of WP7 or iOS. This gives you a good high-level shell experience for doing things like finding files, launching apps, etc....
2) Make a great touch screen keyboard. Probably make a handful of them, so the user can try various kinds and make the default the one they like the most. Note, Windows handwriting recognition is already quite good.
3) Add a touch-friendly shell on IE9. The shell is already minimalist -- this is pretty incremental work.
4) Make touch-friendly versions of all the built-in Windows apps (notepad, wmp, control panel, etc...). This maybe a large work item, so use telemetry data to hit the 20 most popular apps first.
5) Make Office touch friendly. It's actually surprisingly touch friendly now.
6) Get the top 100 apps and work with vendors on making them finger-friendly. Entice with money where necessary. Targets here would be Chrome, Firefox, Photoshop, iTunes, Zune, VLC, WinZip, Quicktime, TurboTax, Adobe Reader, Mathematica, etc... I suspect the conversion ratio won't be super high, but you'll move what you can.
7) Create a touch app store.
Now this won't be perfect, but I suspect it will be a pretty tremendous start, coupled with OakTrail. This probably would seriously cannibalize the netbook market. I'd probably even get one.
And most of what you wrote is what Apple did with iOS, it's actually just Mac OS X with the GUI torn off completely.
Really, a touch API for .NET would go a long way for promoting it in tech circles. The problem is that the bosses are in love with iPads.
Mono for Android, maybe.
WPF 4.0 has touch support, and seems pretty full-featured as far as I can tell. The problem I have building .NET apps is that I don't know anyone with a Windows touch device. It's hard for me to want to add touch support, given I have no customers for it. Although if MS paid me for my time... :-)
Which reminds me of one more thing for the list... Win8Touch needs to be able to run WP7 Silverlight apps. The market needs to be seeded with touch apps in order for the tablet to take off. This was THE most important thing Apple did for the iPad (followed very closely by incredible battery life).
And heh, looks like Microsoft took a little bit of direction from cocoa touch in naming their classes "UIElement"
.NET apps would be a lot more valuable for in-house applications, although, Apple's 299/yr enterprise license takes a bit of air out of that.
Numerous tablets were made before the iPad. They were all completely unusable. They were all “designed” by people with your mindset.
If someone asked you to design the first sofa, you’d suggest bolting three kitchen chairs together and letting the client choose what type of bolt to use. The resulting “design” would be inevitably awful, because it isn’t designed at all – rather than examining the phase space of possible solutions, it examines what you happen to have lying around on the workbench.
Having no sense of design isn’t a great personal failing. I’m not much of a designer myself. Everyone’s bad at something – most things, in fact. Not realizing you don’t have it can be a problem, though.
The key question is, what is missing from my suggestion? The internals of the iPad are basically a computer. Like literally, you can probably rip off the shell and put a Mac OS like shell on it. That's how Apple designed the iPhone too.
It's really simply an issue of the shell and the ecosystem. Note, MS didn't take this approach with all of the other tablets that existed. They did NOT change the shell nor attempt to change the ecosystem.
Now maybe you think Apple sucks at design too and the iPhone and the iPad are total failings. I think many would think otherwise.
Not being a bad designer isn't a failing. But being able to recognize that you're talking to someone who does understand design could be a problem. :-)
Not sure why the Apple sites are so fixated on the Slate.
It will be more interesting to see if there will be consumer demand for HP's real iPad rival, the Palmpad.
I just ran into a fellow passenger on a flight who works for a startup in the Bay Area that makes portal software for corporate boards of directors (to securely share info about the company).
After starting as a normal web-based app, they now have three full-time iPad app developers devoted to their iPad app -- because these board members love their iPads and demanded a version be created for it. They have so much demand from corporate boards that their sales team is struggling just to keep up with inbound orders.
An anecdote does not suffice for data, but if gray-haired corporate board members are so nuts about it, there must be some sort of significant business demand.
A colleague's husband's department (same corp, different company for him) actually has a fleet of ~30 iPads. They're cheapish, easy to dev for if you have an in-house mac shop, and popular with the suits. Not to mention easy to use with the corporate intranet sites thanks to webkit.