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Microsoft Surface


CVByrne

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The tablet pc has had many attempts at life over the years until Apple made one worth buying in the iPad. It's follow up the iPad 2 is still the best you can get (it's refresh this year is the same tablet with a better screen and camera)

Android has had a stab at joining the fray with Android 3.0 and the recent 4.0. But there tablets have failed to really breakthrough. Mainly because they are awful.

While the tablet remains so so enticing it still has huge limitations, the biggest being Apple aping. Apple essentially made a big iPhone, it used the same OS and same apps structure, it used iTunes etc. The result is a device that has been a huge hit, a hit to those who have room for another device that sits between phone and computer.

Google of course in it's android quest to take iOS and make it much better than Apples constraints and enforced limitations will let it. Simply followed where apple led. Making its Android phone operating system bigger to put it on some OEM tablets. The result is horrendous.

Apps while mostly useless and pointless on smartphones actually serve a purpose on a bigger screen. Apple has them Android tablets don't. Add to hardware that in general trys to undercut Apple and you have an as yet failed aping of Apple.

So is the tablet sector ever going to deliver something that can let people buy a device that can replace a pc and give the comfort browsing benefits of a tablet?

Yes, it's called Microsoft Surface. It's windows and windows phone in one depending on if you want a pc or a tablet.

Lets state the facts. Microsoft have 10 times the software talent than Google and Apple combined. It is they who own the pc market for all but the people who like having everything apple. Windows shits all over OSX in a trillion ways.

So it is Microsoft who are going to finally make the tablet sector work like we want it to. Free of Apples silly phone OS made big. It's time to get past the limited concepts the mind has got about tablets because of the iPad.

Not content with an OS, Microsoft has made a fantastic piece of hardware to showcase what they want the OS to do. They key is their keyboards, the one thing that we want and dont want on tablets.

The best bit of news is because they are stonkingly wealthy company they are going to subsidise the tablet and make a loss for as long as it takes to gain market share, like they did with the Xbox. So we're getting the opposite of Apple who update devices properly once every 2 years yet charge a fortune.

Microsoft to the rescue. Huzzah.

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You LINUX guys hate Microsoft, you wouldn't understand :winkold:

Microsoft Surface and upcoming Windows 8 looks awesome. Finally a tablet that can be useful. I love windows, I like the idea of a tablet. I hate a phone OS on a tablet. I want windows like most of the world.

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Well no, not really. I feel giving strong opinions usually gets more replies actually.

I've always wanted a tablet that is Windows based. I've always had a PC with Windows, I like windows. Android is great on phones, fails on tablets.

Windows Phone is just to make a change, Android has zip new to offer, every update from 2.2 has been of little to no importance really.

But C'mon everyone was wowed today by Microsoft Surface, nobody expected what we got.

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Well no, not really. I feel giving strong opinions usually gets more replies actually.

Do you not find it also means less people take you seriously?

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Kind of a habit, I have a way of posting things on VT. You see my posts on horse racing forums and they are worlds apart. But then there can win money if wise heads share their knowledge.

But you can tell when I'm being serious and half joking on here can't you?

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We have some guys here who use Ipads, and the microsoft tablet would probably be more suitable for what they really need to use them for. However they also use Iphones so I cannot see them being to keen to change.

I suppose if Microsoft can get their tablets in to businesses there is the chance that windows handsets might then be sold on the back of it.

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Lets state the facts. Microsoft have 10 times the software talent than Google and Apple combined.

A small part of me died when I read that; that utter drivel. I understand you might want to elaborate a little to enhance your yarn, but there's really no need to bullshit ...

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Windows ME, Internet bloody Explorer, Windows Vista, Microsoft Bob, that bloody paper clip. Perhaps Conor meant 10 percent, rather than 10 times. Symantec boast that their multi-billion pound company only exists because of the piss-poor quality of MS software. Perhaps they're just linux geeks too.

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Lets state the facts. Microsoft have 10 times the software talent than Google and Apple combined.

A small part of me died when I read that; that utter drivel. I understand you might want to elaborate a little to enhance your yarn, but there's really no need to bullshit ...

I've got a fairly decent viewpoint on the talent of Microsoft from my experience in the industry over the last 15 years, won't bore you with how.

Microsoft generally employ lots of graduates direct from Universities who have new qualifications in computer sciences but have no real world experience. They let them loose on projects and see what they bring in. The people I've worked with at Microsoft have generally been bright, good at reciting facts from a whitepaper, but completely green with real-world IT.

Google on the other hand, recruit through head-hunting. They identify specific people they want to target and sound them out. Whether they're actually good enough or not is then a different matter. I'm pretty good at what I do but unfortunately I wasn't good enough for Google. They skills you need to have just to be a system administrator is scary, and really ensures they only get the cream of the crop.

MS products such as the MSNLB, Windows Cluster, SQL Server etc. really show everything that is wrong with the MS skillset. They take concepts made in the greater IT world of Linux, Unix, Oracle etc and completely misinterpret them. The faults are completely obvious to anyone who hasn't just got a job in IT because they have an MCSE, but still happen because they employ the wrong people.

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Lets state the facts. Microsoft have 10 times the software talent than Google and Apple combined.

A small part of me died when I read that; that utter drivel. I understand you might want to elaborate a little to enhance your yarn, but there's really no need to bullshit ...

I'm pretty good at what I do but unfortunately I wasn't good enough for Google. They skills you need to have just to be a system administrator is scary, and really ensures they only get the cream of the crop.

So how do you find working for Microsoft ;)

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Did you get a tingle when the phone rang and it said Mountain View, Ca. ? :)

Relocating was something I was going to have to consider had I got through the initial stage. I fell down on Unix system calls.

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It was an email initially, and then a phone call from London.

They seem to have fallen into the stupid trap that "senior" is synonymous with "manager", which doesn't seem like them at all.

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Microsoft built up a wealth of the best minds in the 90s while google was just a brain fart and apple was a hopeless lost cause. Never mind still being the largest company in the world well into the last decade. There is abundant talent there which has been built up over the years. Years its rivals haven't had.

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But those "best minds" (admittedly amongst some good things) produced and launched Windows ME, Internet bloody explorer and Bob, which removes pretty much any merit from your claim. The fact that they were the largest company in the world in no way supports the argument that they are the best at anything. The two things are unrelated.

I'd go further and suggest much of Microsoft's demise has been caused by the fact that it's still run as independent business areas with little overview or control; this leads to the strangely mixed messages about open source and the demonstrable fact that they still can't produce secure code despite operating their "trustworthy computing" program since 2002. I suspect this also explains the success of the xbox division - most people don't link the brands because they are so separate.

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Lets state the facts. Microsoft have 10 times the software talent than Google and Apple combined.

A small part of me died when I read that; that utter drivel. I understand you might want to elaborate a little to enhance your yarn, but there's really no need to bullshit ...

I've got a fairly decent viewpoint on the talent of Microsoft from my experience in the industry over the last 15 years, won't bore you with how.

Microsoft generally employ lots of graduates direct from Universities who have new qualifications in computer sciences but have no real world experience. They let them loose on projects and see what they bring in. The people I've worked with at Microsoft have generally been bright, good at reciting facts from a whitepaper, but completely green with real-world IT.

Google on the other hand, recruit through head-hunting. They identify specific people they want to target and sound them out. Whether they're actually good enough or not is then a different matter. I'm pretty good at what I do but unfortunately I wasn't good enough for Google. They skills you need to have just to be a system administrator is scary, and really ensures they only get the cream of the crop.

MS products such as the MSNLB, Windows Cluster, SQL Server etc. really show everything that is wrong with the MS skillset. They take concepts made in the greater IT world of Linux, Unix, Oracle etc and completely misinterpret them. The faults are completely obvious to anyone who hasn't just got a job in IT because they have an MCSE, but still happen because they employ the wrong people.

I completely agree with your post here. I wasn't just slating Microsoft as a hater, just that their business model appears to be inherently flawed.

I'm an engineer. I have been since I left school in 1992. I did 3/4 of a poorly organised apprenticeship at Land Rover and left in 1999 for pastures greener. I have never worked towards a degree but have a HNC. This, combined with my wealth of experience in Automotive, Aerospace and more recently Shipbuilding has given me an insight, which, combined with my qualification, has helped my to progress innovatively in my career. I'm completely happy with my career at present and the progression that is available to me, although I get head hunted regularly.

My dad was a senior manufacturing engineering manager there until he retired. He would always take on the best person for a job, regardless of whether they had a degree of not. A fresh-faced graduate may bring more qualifications to the table but they occasionally do not have the required industry experience.

I have seen companies follow the path I believe Microsoft appear to be on in the past. Most recently Nokia and Kodak. Nokia rested on their laurels as the number one mobile phone manufacturer for too long while Apple, Samsung, HTC, Sony and others threw money at development. Although they had been a market leader for a number of years, the market has moved on without them. Yes, they may have only just been knocked off their pedestal by Samsung, but that signifies a landmark in the corporate directions of both companies. While Nokia still have reasonably good handsets, the longer they persist with developing unique operating systems the further they will detach themselves from their market.

The HP Touchpad was a fantastic example of this - a reasonable spec tablet but incompatible.

Kodak were a market leader for over 100 years; at one point taking 90% of global photographic film sales. Their problem was not developing their digital products early on in the digital photography revolution. Don't get me wrong, their point-and-shoot cameras are better than a lot of the cameras at the entry end of the market, but their target market has now been caught up and looks likely to be entirely swallowed by the mobile phone market. I have not seen a digital camera made by Kodak for years that would rival the Lumix TZ series or Nikon One. The market has closed in on them because of their failure to develop products.

MG Rover were in development of two projects (RDX60 & RDX80) at the point they became insolvent in 2005. These cars were as good as a match for their competitors equivalent models, but due to their lack of resources (and BMW investing next to nothing in their cars between 1994 and 2000) they were unable to finish the projects.

I am using a laptop running on Windows Vista. I like it, it does the job for me. But, I haven't used IE on this laptop other than to download Firefox. I then used Firefox later to download Chrome, from which I have never moved on. IE became unstable and bloated. The standard menu bars at the top of the screen usually include three search bars and can easily take over 30% of the screen. It's slow, unreliable and annoying to use. It's been that way for as long as I can remember. Prior to using this laptop I used Firefox on my PC, and before Firefox, Mozilla, and Netscape. I haven't tried IE9, but it would take a lot for me to abandon Chrome. Chrome meets my requirements.

And this is where I see the problem with Microsoft. Google have been charging along like a raging bull, picking their team specifically for what they bring to the table. In less than 14 years, they have overtaken Microsoft in terms of equity with just one third of the workforce.

Google are dynamic and innovative, and have a business model that would see them succeed over Microsoft in the future. They are unrelenting in development and they believe in an open market - something the commies at Apple would love to see destroyed.

I'll have a look at what Microsoft have to offer when it is released, but it will need to be good for me to subscribe.

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Paul Graham wrote this almost a decade ago, and I think it's the best explanation of Microsoft's downfall you could find

When you decide what infrastructure to use for a project, you're not just making a technical decision. You're also making a social decision, and this may be the more important of the two. For example, if your company wants to write some software, it might seem a prudent choice to write it in Java. But when you choose a language, you're also choosing a community. The programmers you'll be able to hire to work on a Java project won't be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python. And the quality of your hackers probably matters more than the language you choose. Though, frankly, the fact that good hackers prefer Python to Java should tell you something about the relative merits of those languages.

Business types prefer the most popular languages because they view languages as standards. They don't want to bet the company on Betamax. The thing about languages, though, is that they're not just standards. If you have to move bits over a network, by all means use TCP/IP. But a programming language isn't just a format. A programming language is a medium of expression.

I've read that Java has just overtaken Cobol as the most popular language. As a standard, you couldn't wish for more. But as a medium of expression, you could do a lot better. Of all the great programmers I can think of, I know of only one who would voluntarily program in Java. And of all the great programmers I can think of who don't work for Sun, on Java, I know of zero.

Great hackers also generally insist on using open source software. Not just because it's better, but because it gives them more control. Good hackers insist on control. This is part of what makes them good hackers: when something's broken, they need to fix it. You want them to feel this way about the software they're writing for you. You shouldn't be surprised when they feel the same way about the operating system.

A couple years ago a venture capitalist friend told me about a new startup he was involved with. It sounded promising. But the next time I talked to him, he said they'd decided to build their software on Windows NT, and had just hired a very experienced NT developer to be their chief technical officer. When I heard this, I thought, these guys are doomed. One, the CTO couldn't be a first rate hacker, because to become an eminent NT developer he would have had to use NT voluntarily, multiple times, and I couldn't imagine a great hacker doing that; and two, even if he was good, he'd have a hard time hiring anyone good to work for him if the project had to be built on NT.

After software, the most important tool to a hacker is probably his office. Big companies think the function of office space is to express rank. But hackers use their offices for more than that: they use their office as a place to think in. And if you're a technology company, their thoughts are your product. So making hackers work in a noisy, distracting environment is like having a paint factory where the air is full of soot.

The cartoon strip Dilbert has a lot to say about cubicles, and with good reason. All the hackers I know despise them. The mere prospect of being interrupted is enough to prevent hackers from working on hard problems. If you want to get real work done in an office with cubicles, you have two options: work at home, or come in early or late or on a weekend, when no one else is there. Don't companies realize this is a sign that something is broken? An office environment is supposed to be something that helps you work, not something you work despite.

Companies like Cisco are proud that everyone there has a cubicle, even the CEO. But they're not so advanced as they think; obviously they still view office space as a badge of rank. Note too that Cisco is famous for doing very little product development in house. They get new technology by buying the startups that created it-- where presumably the hackers did have somewhere quiet to work.

One big company that understands what hackers need is Microsoft. I once saw a recruiting ad for Microsoft with a big picture of a door. Work for us, the premise was, and we'll give you a place to work where you can actually get work done. And you know, Microsoft is remarkable among big companies in that they are able to develop software in house. Not well, perhaps, but well enough.

If companies want hackers to be productive, they should look at what they do at home. At home, hackers can arrange things themselves so they can get the most done. And when they work at home, hackers don't work in noisy, open spaces; they work in rooms with doors. They work in cosy, neighborhoody places with people around and somewhere to walk when they need to mull something over, instead of in glass boxes set in acres of parking lots. They have a sofa they can take a nap on when they feel tired, instead of sitting in a coma at their desk, pretending to work. There's no crew of people with vacuum cleaners that roars through every evening during the prime hacking hours. There are no meetings or, God forbid, corporate retreats or team-building exercises. And when you look at what they're doing on that computer, you'll find it reinforces what I said earlier about tools. They may have to use Java and Windows at work, but at home, where they can choose for themselves, you're more likely to find them using Perl and Linux.

It's pretty easy to say what kinds of problems are not interesting: those where instead of solving a few big, clear, problems, you have to solve a lot of nasty little ones. One of the worst kinds of projects is writing an interface to a piece of software that's full of bugs. Another is when you have to customize something for an individual client's complex and ill-defined needs. To hackers these kinds of projects are the death of a thousand cuts.

The distinguishing feature of nasty little problems is that you don't learn anything from them. Writing a compiler is interesting because it teaches you what a compiler is. But writing an interface to a buggy piece of software doesn't teach you anything, because the bugs are random. [3] So it's not just fastidiousness that makes good hackers avoid nasty little problems. It's more a question of self-preservation. Working on nasty little problems makes you stupid. Good hackers avoid it for the same reason models avoid cheeseburgers.

Of course some problems inherently have this character. And because of supply and demand, they pay especially well. So a company that found a way to get great hackers to work on tedious problems would be very successful. How would you do it?

One place this happens is in startups. At our startup we had Robert Morris working as a system administrator. That's like having the Rolling Stones play at a bar mitzvah. You can't hire that kind of talent. But people will do any amount of drudgery for companies of which they're the founders.

Bigger companies solve the problem by partitioning the company. They get smart people to work for them by establishing a separate R&D department where employees don't have to work directly on customers' nasty little problems. In this model, the research department functions like a mine. They produce new ideas; maybe the rest of the company will be able to use them.

You may not have to go to this extreme. Bottom-up programming suggests another way to partition the company: have the smart people work as toolmakers. If your company makes software to do x, have one group that builds tools for writing software of that type, and another that uses these tools to write the applications. This way you might be able to get smart people to write 99% of your code, but still keep them almost as insulated from users as they would be in a traditional research department. The toolmakers would have users, but they'd only be the company's own developers.

If Microsoft used this approach, their software wouldn't be so full of security holes, because the less smart people writing the actual applications wouldn't be doing low-level stuff like allocating memory. Instead of writing Word directly in C, they'd be plugging together big Lego blocks of Word-language. (Duplo, I believe, is the technical term.)

I think, though, that all other things being equal, a company that can attract great hackers will have a huge advantage. There are people who would disagree with this. When we were making the rounds of venture capital firms in the 1990s, several told us that software companies didn't win by writing great software, but through brand, and dominating channels, and doing the right deals.

They really seemed to believe this, and I think I know why. I think what a lot of VCs are looking for, at least unconsciously, is the next Microsoft. And of course if Microsoft is your model, you shouldn't be looking for companies that hope to win by writing great software. But VCs are mistaken to look for the next Microsoft, because no startup can be the next Microsoft unless some other company is prepared to bend over at just the right moment and be the next IBM.

It's a mistake to use Microsoft as a model, because their whole culture derives from that one lucky break. Microsoft is a bad data point. If you throw them out, you find that good products do tend to win in the market. What VCs should be looking for is the next Apple, or the next Google.

I think Bill Gates knows this. What worries him about Google is not the power of their brand, but the fact that they have better hackers.

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