When Steve Jobs died there was lots of chatter among management gurus regarding how his leadership style was unique and could not be replicated.
Wrong. Jobs’ leadership style — brilliant insights, deep involvement in the details, and lots of temperament — isn’t even uncommon. You’ll find it in many and possibly most of the great restaurants.
What Steve Jobs was was a chef, with his own unique style of haute cuisine. What made him unusual was his ability to scale it up. Maybe someone should compare him to Wolfgang Puck.
And, I guess, Steve Ballmer to Betty Crocker.
Anyway, I’m well into my third month using a Windows 8 tablet (how’s that for a segue?) and I can’t remember a single occasion when I wished I had my iPad instead.
Full disclosure: I’m a Dell guy (Dell Global Business Consulting; I don’t offer advice on Dell’s products, which is just as well — the product side has never asked for it). This isn’t an endorsement for Latitude 10 tablets (what I use). In particular, while I’ve never once wished I had my iPad with me instead (just having Windows Explorer instead of nothing is enough for me to prefer my Windows 8 tablet), I have on occasion wished the Latitude 10 had the iPad’s battery life — I figure the Latitude gets about 5 hours with constant business use.
Another wish: That Microsoft’s designers were more passionate about getting the details right, and that Steve Ballmer had some master chef in him.
In particular, when in desktop (aka Windows 7) mode, pinch and zoom should scale the whole display, instead of operating the slider control or equivalent. The single biggest irritant in the whole system is that on a tablet, the controls for desktop applications are teeny-tiny things, which you hope you hit dead-center with your finger.
If Steve Jobs’ Apple is a restaurant serving haute cuisine, Microsoft is more like, say, Chili’s — fast food with pretentions.
Another place the Windows 8 meal is edible but not delicious is inking.
OneNote with inking is simply fantastic. The best that can be said about any of the iPad ink-based note-taking apps is that the results are legible. OneNote with inking is like writing with pen on paper, only with multiple levels of organization … and very acceptable handwriting recognition besides.
But then, Microsoft had to go and be Microsoft again. Bring up Word, or start writing an email, and while you can ink, there’s no handwriting recognition. Yes, you can write into the handwriting-alternative keyboard, but that isn’t the same as just writing on the page and converting it to text when you’re ready.
Speaking of Microsoft being Microsoft: One of the cooler features built into the Windows 8 / Office 2013 / tablet combo is annotation. Bring up any MS Office document. Use your stylus to annotate it. It’s literally just like marking up a paper document with a pen.
I did this, marking up an agenda to make sure I didn’t forget anything. This converted a ~200KByte document to a ~2MByte document. That’s a bit much for just overlaying a page of scribbles onto a page of Office-formatted text. While in an age of dirt-cheap storage this isn’t all that big of a deal, it’s still a deal and indicative of general sloppiness … sort of like a chef whose solution to every flavor challenge is adding more salt.
Not really but no other food-oriented metaphor occurred to me.
One other point: Yes, as so many commentators have pointed out, the Windows 8 gesture system is less intuitive than its iOS counterpart. This tells you more about the commentators than the system. What most of them have missed is that the Windows 8 gesture system lets you do more stuff than you can in iOS. Doing more stuff means more gestures, which means more complexity (and learning).
This is my beef with most of the industry ragging on Windows 8.
Yes, the user interface matters. It matters a lot. It isn’t, however, the entire story. Read most iPad/Windows tablet comparisons and you’ll be hard pressed to find anything at all that isn’t about the user interface. Microsoft’s advertising gets this one exactly right: When the time comes to do actual work, Windows 8 tablets, warts and all, are what your users are going to want.
Not what you (assuming you represent IT) should impose on them. It’s what they’re going to want.
I know this because everyone who’s seen my tablet has said the same thing: “I wish my iPad did that.”
The Windows RT variant has proven VERY effective for certain uses here. We have complex commissioning documentation that is Excel based, and there is NO iOS compatible alternative to Excel that’s worth a darn. Having native Excel on a tablet that will run 10 hours is a big deal when you’re using it in the field.
Hi Bob,
As is my recent habit, I find myself wondering if you’re asking the right question.
Assuming everything you say about the usability of a Win8 tablet is true, then why is the product line floundering so badly in the marketplace? (Admittedly, my evidence for the use of the word “floundering” is somewhat anecdotal, but the sales numbers I see look lousy, and manufacturers have been bailing left and right on the product line.)
I think a better question may be related to how new product types penetrate the markets these days, and the differences in the approaches and expectations of Microsoft and everybody else.
So far MS has been trying to market their tablets as a consumer product, but consumers don’t seem to be buying. My initial opinion of the offerings was that the RT tablets were too compromised for their price point (the market seems to agree), and the Pro tablets too expensive period. They were not creating a category, they were trying to one up the competition, and they did not hit the right consumer buttons with the chosen approach. The results of the initial campaign appears to be very poor sales, even after heavy discounting. The marketing approach was recently changed, seemingly for the better, but also not without some embarrassing stumbles (see the Asus fiasco). I wouldn’t be hopeful yet. If my boss handed me a Win8 Pro, I’d use it, but I’m not going to buy one myself.
However, the consumer push is probably only part of the MS strategy. Microsoft still relies heavily on corporate upgrades for a big chunk of its revenue. MS would have known going in not to expect widespread corporate adoption of Win8 in 2013 (and probably not in 2014 either). They have learned to play a waiting game in the enterprise sector. That approach has worked for most prior versions of Windows. Win8 Pro tablets (sorry RT) would seem to be a logical coat tail rider for those expected future Win8 sales… if those sales occur. Corporate adoption of Win8 likely means that Win8 tablets get a significant and important market share. On the other hand, if the OS upgrade sales don’t materialize (see Vista) things probably get very bleak for the MS tablet line.
Apple and Android have obviously taken a very different approach, at least partially out of necessity since they don’t have a huge enterprise installed base. They hit the consumer markets hard. They have penetrated corporations from the executive suite down (at least to some degree). It’s given them a head start. Now we get to see how they use it.
Nobody’s asking me, but I think MS has an uphill climb to get Win8 into the enterprise. My guess is that most organizations will skip it. That doesn’t bode well for Win8 tablet sales. MS has shown that they can stumble and recover from this sort of thing before (Vista again, and the eventual success of the Xbox), but this time the entire market may reinvent itself while they try to adjust. Laptops may be dinosaurs sooner than anyone imagined. What happens if there’s no installed base to upgrade when the next version of Windows is ready?
Thanks for listening,
Derek
iPad: A compelling consumer device that can be made to do real work in some circumstances.
Windows hybrid tablet of today: a mediocre tablet with nearly all the capability of commodity Windows desktop. See all of the limitations discussed here. See for example, the Fujitsu Stylistic Q702 and the Lenovo Helix. Great machines, but a little more in the specs and a better tablet OS experience from Microsoft is needed.
Windows hybrid tablet of the near future: A decent tablet that’s still not as elegant as iPad, converting easily to a real Windows PC that can replace my laptop.
Where it will get really interesting: When I can get a Windows 8 hybrid tablet (tablet that snaps into a keyboard and turns into a laptop) with i5/i7, 4G broadband, 250GB SSD, 4GB or more RAM, great battery life, USB3 and Ethernet, etc., with incremental improvements to the Windows touch experience.
Then I have a replacement for both my iPad, my laptop, and maybe even my desktop. Manage/patch from the office, sync with my work files, use all the Office and Windows-compatible software, and heck, I even get Angry Birds! And access to the file system, external storage, an open competitive market for peripherals, etc.