See here.
Microsoft’s behavior here is entirely bizarre. They’ve been pushing desktop versions of Windows on tablets with absolutely no mass-market success for over a decade. Apple releases a tablet with a much more lightweight OS, with UI redesigned from the ground up for a touch device, and has instant mass market success.
And Microsoft’s announces that they’re taking this very seriously… and their response will be to keep pushing desktop versions of Windows on tablets, but… what? Hope that people notice this time because Apple got people paying attention to the tablet market?
Right, good luck with that. The reason people didn’t pay attention to those Windows tablets is because they sucked, and they’ll be perceived even more negatively now that there are better products on the market to compare them with.
Here’s how I see this going: some time in the next 18 months, Microsoft will finally come to terms with the fact that they’re barking up the wrong tree trying to stick a desktop version of Windows onto a tablet. They won’t actually abandon that approach, because internal corporate politics won’t let them and they lack the discipline to actually focus on things that matter. But they will announce an additional project to create a tablet versions of Windows Phone 7, which might even turn out to be a credible technical effort.
Only problem is, by the time that gets market, it’s going to be going up against the iPad, Android tablets, WebOS tablets, and the newly announced Blackberry tablet, some or all of which will be quite well established by then and will be on their second or third generation. And few or none of the value network effects Microsoft benefits from in the Windows market will do anything for them in the tablet market. So, basically, they’re screwed.
