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I have a new toy: A Dell Latitude 10 tablet running Windows 8. As I’m a Dell Guy now, I’m not going to review it: Conflict of interest, you know.

But there are limits to my self-restraint, and besides, I haven’t yet run across an unbiased comparison of iPads and any-brand Windows 8 tablets — certainly not any that concentrate on what KJR’s readers care about most: getting work done.

Summary first: Windows 8 tablets win. By a big margin.

The specifics:

Windows 8 loses a bit on fit and finish. Microsoft just can’t seem to polish everything to a shine. The iPad is far slicker and smoother.

Never mind the dual UI problem (the desktop plus the “Modern” interface — the one with the big tiles). It might be kludgey, but I don’t have a better idea for one system that spans smartphones, tablets, and full-size computers.

No, the problem is that Microsoft botched the desktop interface. Three examples:

Pinch and zoom isn’t included. Except when it is. Sometimes, pinch-and-zoom works, for example, to adjust the text size in Internet Explorer or an Office (2013) document. Sometimes it doesn’t, like when you’re looking at the main Outlook display, or want to make the Ribbon or some other controls bigger.

I’m sure the design decision was made by highly trained user-interface professionals. Speaking as a highly unsophisticated szhlub who has to make sense of it, occasional pinch-and-zoom is better than nothing, but still irritating.

Keyboard madness: On the desktop, bring up a form. Any form. Tap your finger into a field on the bottom half of your screen. Up pops the onscreen keyboard, just as it should, hiding the input field, just as it shouldn’t.

Windows don’t stay put. Go to the desktop. Open a few applications. Rotate the tablet (in tablet mode) to a vertical orientation. Now rotate it back to horizontal. Note how every window has changed size, proportions, and position.

C’mon, boys and girls. It’s annoying little details like these that pile up into a general sense of your ineptitude.

Nonetheless, Windows 8 tablets beat iPads for business use, because …

Office matters: Windows 8 tablets run Windows. More important, they run Windows applications. Like, for example, Office.

iOS apps have corrupted too many Word documents. For self-protection I only work with disposable copies anymore.

Then there’s what all of the various iOS Office-replacement apps do to PowerPoint presentations — garble all but the simplest slides.

Most travelers need to (at least) view and review PowerPoint presentations and Word documents. With a Windows 8 tablet they can, without ever scratching their heads, wondering what the original looked like.

Note-taking: With Office comes OneNote. If that doesn’t do it for you, you can license InfoSelect, which, in spite of recent challenges with quality assurance, is absolutely awesome for organizing all the bits and pieces of information you otherwise wouldn’t know what to do with. And for finding it when you need it. Both are far superior to anything you can run on an iPad.

Styli (styluses?): Here’s one place Windows 8 wins on cosmetics.

First, it just inks better. My on-screen handwriting and printing are actually better than their pen and paper counterparts, because Windows 8 inks to sub-pixel resolution. The iPad? Your fingertip.

Inking might not seem like a big deal when you’re sitting at a desk where you can type, but the thing is, you aren’t always sitting at a desk. When you’re holding a tablet in one hand, writing is a lot faster and easier than one-handed typing.

And if you’re thinking note-taking with a stylus is so last-century, here’s a point: You can’t take all the notes you need to take with a keyboard. Take a look at the figure and you’ll understand the limitations keyboards bring to the note-taking party.

Then comes the coup de grace: Handwriting recognition. You can hand-write your notes and then turn them into text, with spectacular accuracy.

And it’s built into the OS as a service, so any place you use the on-screen keyboard you can also use the stylus to write your entries. Again, not a big deal at a desk, but imagine the possibilities for people who work while moving around … you know, doctors, nurses, plumbers, people like that.

Opinion: If you want to haul around just one system that handles everything (except phone calls) a Windows 8 tablet is your best choice. It’s good enough for entertainment (watching Netflix, reading Kindle books and so on).

And when you have to get down to work, even with all the aggravations there’s really no contest.

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Hot on the heels of her breakthrough concept for Yahoo! … redesign the home page! … Marissa Mayer made headlines by eliminating telework as her next Big Idea. Best Buy quickly followed suit, leading opinionators from around the country to share their brilliant insights on the topic.

Just in case you’re the sort who requires a 😉 to identify sarcasm, I’m being sarcastic.

Most of these commentators know little or nothing about the subject. You can tell by how many of them talk about telework as if it’s something benevolent employers bestow on lucky employees.

It’s an interesting notion: When an employer gets the same benefits for lower costs, it’s benevolent. And all these years I’ve been using benevolent as a synonym for generous. Now that I know, I’ll reform the rest of my vocabulary too. From now on up means “toward the center of the earth,” dark means “the experience you get looking directly into the sun,” and outside means “working in a corporate cubicle.”

Suggestion: Maybe these opinionators should pay attention to what’s happened in successful turnarounds, rather than in turnarounds-in-progress.

At a minimum, they should have some knowledge about what is and isn’t working well within the halls of Yahoo! and Best Buy.

Me, I have no idea whether Mayer is right or wrong about what Yahoo! needs to do. I don’t have any idea whether Best Buy’s Results Oriented Work Environment (ROWE, and was that the best they could come up with?) was a success or a bust.

What I do know is that there’s nothing to be learned from these decisions. At least, not yet.

Here’s what we do know about telework (and forgive me for repeating myself):

  • Managing teleworkers calls for specific techniques and skills beyond what’s needed to manage employees face-to-face.
  • In particular, without managers who know how to lead remote employees, teleworkers risk becoming second-class corporate citizens.
  • Telework tends to be a better fit for responsibilities assigned to individual contributors than those assigned to teams.
  • When teleworkers are supposed to work as a team, they need support in the form of tools — especially web conferencing tools — techniques, and coaching.
  • Good employees perform better in a telework environment than they do in an office environment. Mediocre-to-poor employees perform worse in a telework environment than they do in an office environment.

Whatever else there is to be said about Marissa Mayer’s decision, she was right about one piece of the puzzle: Before they’re anything else, organizations are collections of relationships, and establishing and maintaining relationships is more difficult for teleworkers than for on-site employees. So if she sees a lot of friction and silos-of-one among employees at all levels at Yahoo!, there’s logic to her action.

And, whatever else there is to be said about her decision, she got one thing excruciatingly wrong (and lots of other commentators have talked about this one, so forgive me for piling on):

In its chapter on motivation, Leading IT identifies three outstanding ways to demotivate employees: Arrogance, disrespect, and unfairness.

When Mayer announced she was eliminating telework, it came out that at the same time she was building a nursery next to her office. That’s supposedly okay because she did it at her own expense.

To which, before getting back to the main point, may I just ask, and you fell for that?

Mayer is only building it at her own expense if she pays rent to Yahoo! every month at the going rates for the square footage her nursery occupies. Thus far I’ve yet to read that this is the case.

So back to the three demotivators. Arrogance? No, this decision wasn’t arrogant, whatever else it was. Disrespect? Not really. Mayer didn’t accuse teleworkers of slacking. She said she wants everyone face-to-face to provide the sparks of creativity that happen better that way.

But unfairness? Bingo. Anatole France put it nicely a long time ago: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

Even if Mayer allowed every employee to build out nurseries next to their cubicles, with Yahoo! providing the space, she still wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. Her enormous personal wealth and compensation see that.

But she doesn’t, so she’s just another example of privilege, which as Terry Pratchett pointed out in one of his fine Discworld books, literally means “private law.”

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