How Microsoft and Apple see the Future of the Tablet Differently
Microsoft’s Surface announcement highlighted their radically different vision of how tablet will evolve than Apple’s.
With iOS Apple made a very distinct operating system specifically designed to be simpler for simplified mobile devices. It’s desktop operating system, OS X has remained distinct from iOS, although some features and concepts from iOS have been brought across to OS X.
Microsoft has taken a different approach. It has basically glued two operating systems together, the traditional Windows desktop and the new Metro interface. Metro has been designed from the ground up, like iOS, for mobile phones and tablets. Hence it is focused on touch input rather than mouse input.
How this may play out down the line is interesting too. Microsoft imagines a world where you use your tablet to do light …
Microsoft is Adapting to the New Realities of the Market by Aping Apple
Microsoft has decided to become Apple! Or Google – we’ll find out which. Yesterday, they announced that they would be directly building their own Windows 8 tablet called Surface.
Rather than just creating software for third party vendors to build their own hardware and promote the final product, Microsoft will do this themselves.
So will Microsoft become successful, like Apple, or crash and burn like Google did with its first Nexus phone?
It certainly makes sense for Microsoft to enter this market. Apple has shown it can be insanely profitable and that there are a lot of advantages from having a non-fragmented vertically-integrated solution. It means Microsoft …
Why Microsoft’s $85 Tablet Software May be Dumb, but not Fatal
Oh the outrage engendered this week by Microsoft’s rumoured $85 per tablet software tax. Many people consider it to be really, really stupid. Just look at Microsoft. They are no-where in the tablet market. Not even number four. Today they have no offering at all.
What should Microsoft be doing? Shooting for marketshare. This game is about building an ecosystem, and for that you need a large installed base. What price should Windows 8 be? $5. Five bucks. That’s it. Android is “free”, so Microsoft can charge almost nothing without having competition issues. It’s also a signal that Microsoft will charge for their OS, but in the future, when it’s successful. Microsoft and their partners will share the fruits of success.
But, it appears Microsoft has taken the …
Microsoft Invests $300 Million in the Nook
Microsoft and Barnes and Noble have announced that Microsoft will invest $300 million in the Nook and it will be spun off as a separate joint venture.
It may seem, just as Microsoft is on the cusp of releasing Windows 8, strange of them to invest in a rival platform that’s based on a forked version of Google’s Android platform. Aren’t they helping a competitor?
I see a few points here:
This is primarily about content. Supporting the Nook means gaining access to ebook content and controlling that access. It means Windows 8 tablet users will be able to read e-books without having to rely on Amazon.
Bolstering Nook also bolsters a competitor against Amazon; reducing if ever …
How Windows 8 Can Drive Windows Phone Sales
Will the Windows 8 release this Autumn/Fall impact the potential success of Windows Phone?
In the recent past, the smartphone that you chose had very little bearing on what computer you used. The two devices were completely independent.Then the iPhone, iPad and iCloud came along and completely changed that equation.
What Apple demonstrated was the utility of:
a. owning a consistent set of devices where applications purchased on your smartphone can also be used on your tablet.
d. the cloud to be able to synchronize and share data between applications on each device.
In a real life example, you may be using your smartphone to make a note or capture data, and then want to access or amend that data on your tablet or …
Where Nokia and Microsoft Went Wrong with the Lumia 900
2012 should be a big year for Windows Phone 7, it’s the year that new Nokia phones are released into the important US market and it’s the year that Windows for tablets, aka Windows 8 is launched.
Having a strong offering for Windows on tablets and Windows on a smartphone is crucial for Microsoft, because both devices will feed off of one another to create the Windows ecosystem. You don’t want to have a Windows tablet if you have an iPhone as you cannot share iCloud access and applications.
Hence the launch of Nokia devices with Windows Phone 7 is of crucial importance to Microsoft and Nokia. The launch is important because the phone hardware has to be at least competitive with where the rest of the market will be …
How iPad Screen Sizes will Change
A reader has recently asked for my take on whether Apple will release other iPads with screen sizes that are different from the current 9.7 inches; especially given the variations available on Android and soon to arrive Windows 8 tablets.
Different people have different use cases for their tablets, especially enterprise users. There are certainly different niches out that that would prefer different form factors, for example delivery services may prefer to have smaller format devices that are more portable. The PlayBook’s 7 inch may be better adapted to their needs than the iPad’s 9.7 inches.
So given this, is it likely that Apple will want to address these niches? I think it’s worthwhile first thinking about how Apple develops products. According to Jony Ive’s recent interview in the
