Technology – Page 62

Windows 8’s killer apps

Reading Windows 8 commentaries from my trade press colleagues is a lot like going to a movie and then reading the review in the next morning’s newspaper. I thought I’d enjoyed it … now I’m not so sure.

Continuing from last week, where, you’ll recall, the subject was that many employees would prefer Windows 8 tablets to their iPad and Android alternatives …

Windows 8 tablets have two killer apps for which there are no competitors on the iPad or Android. You might have heard of them. They’re called Excel and PowerPoint.

Word too, but I’ve given up arguing. I keep hearing that most users only care about text entry, bold, and italics. I don’t believe it, but if that’s all your users care about, and all the documents they receive to read make use of too, go ahead and give ’em Google Apps or Pages or QuickOffice or what-have-you. Or, better, give them better training so they make better use of the tool.

But Excel? Numbers-oriented travelers snort at the spreadsheets available for the iPad. They want real Excel, because serious numbers-oriented travelers need what real Excel has to offer. They use lots of its features. They don’t want to screw around figuring out what got lost when importing an Excel spreadsheet, or how to do what they need to do in the alternatives.

As for PowerPoint: If you travel, you probably use this. If you import a PowerPoint … any PowerPoint that does anything at all beyond displaying bullets and single jpeg images … whatever alternative you import it into will garble the slides. The garbling will range from irritating to I-wish-I-could-see-the-original-so-I-could-figure-out-the-message. But garbled they’ll be.

I guarantee it.

It’s like this: Stylus-enabled OneNote is the sizzle. Excel and PowerPoint are the steak. The user interface? That’s the paper plate they’re served on — good enough, hardly in keeping with the meal, but a really good steak on a paper plate beats something from Sizzler on fine china.

But enough about that. When the topic is Windows 8, tablets probably aren’t the real game. Sure, the sales figures for Windows 8 tablets look terrible. But there’s a difference between trend-spotting and strategy.

As an IT leader, you don’t choose technologies based on sales figures. You choose based on fit-to-function, and, in an age of consumerization and BYOD, on what high-clout business users want.

For the high-clouted, a laptop is standard kit. It’s your baseline spend. Hold that thought.

Now let’s talk about your tablet alternatives. You have two.

The first is a laptop plus a tablet. When at home, in the office, or traveling with laptop the clouted will mostly work on their laptops, using tablets for email (maybe) and entertainment when they don’t want to sit at a desk.

But for some trips they’ll want to leave their laptops behind. When they do, they’ll probably want Windows 8 tablets for the reasons outlined above and last week.

This is how I often travel, adding an external Bluetooth keyboard for when I have to get serious about typing. And for what it’s worth, propping up the tablet at a 30 to 45 degree angle makes the setup quite comfortable.

But alternative #2 is where the Windows 8 vs iOS game will play out, I think, and that’s to equip your laptop-enabled workforce with convertibles … devices that can serve as either a laptop or a tablet.

Yes, they’re spendier than regular laptops, but that’s the wrong comparison.

Remember, your baseline spend is now laptop plus tablet. Compared to what the two together would cost, convertibles start to look quite economical.

And, they cut down the number of gadgets and paraphernalia travelers need to haul around.

But, you now have to choose between a size big enough to be comfortable in laptop mode and small enough to be comfortable as a tablet.

There are always trade-offs. This is a big one in the convertibles space.

Oh … there is one more, and even though it doesn’t matter to you as steward of your company’s information technology portfolio (how’s that for a mouthful o’ buzzwords?) it does matter to you as someone who wants the whole program to succeed.

That’s the thoroughly pathetic Windows App Store, which has something like 37 titles available (I might be exaggerating).

Part of the fun of owning an iPad or Android tablet is browsing through their app stores, looking for software that looks entertaining or interesting.

Let me just tell you, that isn’t part of the fun of owning a Windows 8 tablet.

There are always trade-offs.

* * *

Full disclosure: I work for Dell, which is placing some of its bets in the convertibles space. But they didn’t ask me before doing so, and I didn’t ask them before forming the opinions expressed here.

Just how important is the user interface?

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.”