Friday, October 19, 2012

MS has not really figured it out

Jaime claims that MS has figured out how to provide one product from desktop to phone.

That's not completely correct, what MS did, was take Win7, and replace the Start menu with a tablet/phone appropriate UI. And as almost any commenter has pointed out, on keyboard/mouse hardware the Metro screen sucks.

Which is not surprising. Android land had a number of experiments into this direction too, and they were not overly successful:

  • Ubuntu has implemented Android support that would run natively as an experiment some time. Obviously phone/tablet apps sucked in a desktop environment.
  • A number of netbooks, e.g. the Toshiba AC100 used Android. They did not even manage niche status.
  • There are a number of niche products that make kind of sense, e.g. the Asus Transformers that offer a keyboard. These work well, and probably way better than Chrome books, but they are not meant to replace full computers.

So what MS managed is to mix up the UI for phones, tablets with the UI for desktops. If any of the above is an indication, that's a bad thing. OTOH, MS might get away with it, because the bad part of the equation is located on the desktop side, where MS still has monopoly level market share. Or not, considering that the huge commercial customers seem to be about to migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7, and it's by no measure a 100% thing that they'll follow to Windows 8 as well conditioned lemmings.

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