Microsoft and Ballmer not getting the iPad • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft and Ballmer not getting the iPad

#71

Post by geon » Sun, Aug 01, 2010, 11:00 PM UTC

wazoox wrote: post #18

rbritton wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best thing Microsoft could do is to innovate and do something no one's done. Everything they've done of late is in markets where someone has already done very well in, and they've done such a half-assed job of it that it's a guaranteed fail. Think what you want of Apple, but their products have been things largely not done before. Microsoft is copying the wrong half -- the product ideas themselves -- they should…

> The best thing Microsoft could do is to innovate and do something no one's done. The last time they did so was when Allen and Gates decided there must be a market for BASIC on Altair and microcomputers in general. Maybe Traf-o-matic was an innovation, too. However none of their significant products afterwards was anything new : * common programming languages for different systems * MS-DOS, built from a borrowed clo…

The GUI was created by Xerox. The first commercial portable mp3 player I saw was a Rio, 3 years before the iPod.

Re: Microsoft and Ballmer not getting the iPad

#72

Post by code_duck » Mon, Aug 02, 2010, 2:43 PM UTC

felixmar wrote: post #34

extension wrote: post #28

The iPad is not a computer. The iPad is not a computer. Say it with me, Microsoft. Join in, half the tech industry. Nobody framed it better than Apple themselves at the iPad launch. On the big screen was an iPhone, a MacBook, and in between them, an iPad. Steve called it a new category, and that wasn't just marketing speak. It really is a new kind of gadget, designed to make you do things that you previously did not…

One thing that surprised me after using an iPad for a while is that the web is starting to feel old. I now see bloated web pages everywhere. Unnecessary widgets, links, icons, useless side columns, actual content making up a quarter of the screen. Information overload. I am now regularly imagining how a site i visit would be better as an iPad app. Applications like Flipboard have created new expectations how content…

A lot of websites are outdated and built with 2001 in mind, no doubt.

But please don't turn the web into a console game.

Re: Microsoft and Ballmer not getting the iPad

#73

Post by flatulent1 » Fri, Aug 06, 2010, 2:00 AM UTC

sprout wrote: post #30

dotcoma wrote: post #6

it doesn't come as a surprise, given that they didn't get neither the iPod nor the iPhone...

Actually, from the two people I know who actually owned a Zune (and from Jerry Holkins: http://www.penny-arcade.com/2009/5/15/ ), Microsoft did in fact 'get' the iPod, and outdid it in a lot of ways. Microsoft just has shitty marketing. But maybe that's what you meant.

>Microsoft did in fact 'get' the iPod, and outdid it in a lot of ways.

Do you own one? I've never met anyone that did. I see the Zune HD has a web browser... How does that experience compare with browsing on the iPod touch? How does battery life compare watching youtube video?

Re: Microsoft and Ballmer not getting the iPad

#74

Post by Tamerlin » Fri, Aug 06, 2010, 4:10 PM UTC

TotlolRon wrote: post #31

extension wrote: post #28

The iPad is not a computer. The iPad is not a computer. Say it with me, Microsoft. Join in, half the tech industry. Nobody framed it better than Apple themselves at the iPad launch. On the big screen was an iPhone, a MacBook, and in between them, an iPad. Steve called it a new category, and that wasn't just marketing speak. It really is a new kind of gadget, designed to make you do things that you previously did not…

The iPad IS a computer. It is at the time when the definition of a word changes that the greatest oppertunities present themselves. There is no iPad market, there is no tablet market - there is a computer market. This is what MS is up against... [Sent from my iPod touch]

No, it isn't -- it's by design not capable of running enough applications to be a standalone computer.

In terms of niches, it's more like the XTerms of yesteryear. The terminals weren't much for horsepower; they were basically UI's that allowed you to work more or less transparently with whatever machine you wanted to, like that Cray Y-MP or SP2 cluster in the data center next door, or the SGI Indigo down the hall.

Snip the wires, shrink it down, modernize the internals and put a slick visual UI on it, and you have an iPad. Well, conceptually, that is.

This is what the iPad was made to do, and IMO is one of the reasons that it's successful -- it isn't pretending to be something that it isn't.

Re: Microsoft and Ballmer not getting the iPad

#75

Post by Tamerlin » Fri, Aug 06, 2010, 4:17 PM UTC

junklight wrote: post #11

What I don't get is why a company like Microsoft - rich and no longer in the lead doesn't setup a couple of well funded skunk works companies. Drop the baggage (ie don't force them to use windows and allow a new culture to emerge) and give each one a target - touch computing or something else and let 'em go. Microsoft has all the pieces - money , good engineers, marketing etc. but it's not working. They have the fina…

It's actually worse -- MSFT has the skunkworks, but they keep ignoring the nifty new toys that come out of them.

It reminds me of IBM -- there was an amazing amount of very cool new stuff appearing out of the TJ Watson lab (when my parents were IBM'ers, I got to read their journals regularly). IBM brought very few of them to market, even when other companies did so with gusto (PDAs are an example -- IBM had working prototypes stuffed on a shelf somewhere long before Apple started even hyping the Newton).

And the defecutives didn't learn their lesson -- when their server market started suffering when the bubble burst, my mother started asking friends and colleagues about potential candidates for IBM tools and servers when she became a marketing exec there. I gave her a list of companies like PIXAR, Blue Sky Studios, Digital Domain (you see where this is going). 3 months later I went to Linux Expo with my mother and several of hear colleagues, all of whom wondered why IBM hadn't gone after those markets -- the people who gave my mother her mission stopped her from going after the companies I referred her to.

We were particularly impressed by their foolishness when we attended Carly Fiorina's keynote -- in which she listed nearly every company I'd suggested, some with video interviews, and making a big deal about how HP had provided them with Linux based solutions.