A lot of early netbook models ran Linux, but over the last couple of years, Windows has emerged as dominant in the netbook market as it has traditionally been in the desktop/laptop markets. Could the same thing happen in the tablet market, once the ARM version of Windows starts shipping?
No.
It’s fairly clear that touch-based computing just doesn’t work very well with desktop user interfaces. Microsoft, however, still seems to be pretty much out to lunch about the idea that they need to provide a more appropriate UI. They’ve been selling tablets for 10 years, and they’ve made no serious attempt at this.
Microsoft’s primary strength in the market, with Windows, is application compatibility. Anything that significantly disrupts that, like requiring developers to design new UI, or even possibly just requiring them to compile for and test on a different architecture (like ARM) severely undermines the one big thing going for Windows.
Particularly in this instance, where Windows/ARM tablets, by the time they actually make it to market, will be competing against established competitors. There are already 60,000 iPad apps. How many apps were there that were optimized specifically for Linux netbooks? Essentially none. They ran the same desktop apps as other Linux systems, which end users just don’t seem to find especially compelling relative to Windows-based offerings.
Additionally, it’s very unlikely Microsoft has the guts to do anything like requiring developers to create new user interfaces if they want their apps to run on a hypothetical Windows/ARM tablet. Now, the geek brigade might not see a problem with giving users a ‘choice’ to run apps with non-optimized interfaces, but the real-world consequence of such permissiveness will be lots of half-assed ports that destroy the platform’s user experience.
Even worse, Microsoft probably lacks sufficient internal coordination for a full-court tablet push, if such a push requires the redesign of major Microsoft products across multiple divisions. See here, for instance.
When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet.
OK, I assume Microsoft has gotten rid of that guy by now, but such problems appear endemic to Microsoft’s organizational culture, which is why you see Microsoft still chasing off in several different directions in the mobile space.
A Microsoft that was likely to be a serious competitor in the tablet space would have already announced a tablet operating system based on Windows Phone 7, and they’d have the confidence to back that system as their sole tablet platform. The Microsoft that exists in our world is still clinging to the notion of running desktop versions of Windows on tablets (despite a decade of market rejection — with this ARM announcement, it seems they’ve decided that was all Intel’s fault), and when it eventually does occur to them to do a tablet version of Windows Phone 7, they’re unlikely to have the level of commitment necessary to deliver the product they’d need to deliver to be relevant.
Of course if Ballmer goes, this whole assessment is right out the window. There are clearly a lot of talented people working for
Microsoft. Microsoft’s vast resources, under the right leadership, could put Microsoft back in the tablet/smartphone game pretty fast.
