I dunno…maybe it’s because I’m looking at yet another 18+ inches of new snow I’ve got to shovel off my 100 ft driveway – bringing the total this year, at least in my CT neck of the woods to somewhere around 48 inches total since our first storm back on the day after Christmas…or maybe it’s because last night I heard my wife telling her brother over the phone that I was going to have to get a snow blower next year because I’m getting old…or maybe it’s because my normal 1.5 hour commuter train ride took over three hours yesterday heading back home from NYC following our latest snowstorm…but I’m feeling a bit curmudgeonly this morning.
What I’m feeling particularly curmudgeonly about at the moment is Microsoft’s tablet strategy. While I was on my commuter ride yesterday I spent some time reading through a variety of things, several of them from CNET and ZDNet, focusing on Microsoft’s new strategy to dominate tablet computing and beat the pants off iPad and its ilk. CNET/ZDNet got their hands on some very interesting Microsoft slides that detail how Microsoft views the tablet world and how they are planning to work with their partners on marketing and positioning their tablet strategy – these are well worth exploring. You can find the CNET story here, and the ZDNet story here. You can find the slide show here.
You should also read a VERY interesting blog post by someone named Richard Turner, a ten year veteran Microsoftee who left to build a startup. His post, Will Windows Phone 8 run the Windows Kernel?, looks at the notion that Microsoft may very well take WP7’s Metro UI, ditch the underlying WP7 OS, and use the Metro UI on top of the Windows 8 kernel. Turner suggests that the real argument to make is as follows, which I grabbed from a comment he made on the ZDNet post noted above:
Any chance we could stop referring to Windows Phone 7′s Metro UI as being ‘a better operating system than Windows for slate devices?’
It’s FAR more accurate to say that the Metro UI might be ‘a better user experience than desktop Windows for slate devices.’
The fact is that there’s a whole heck of a lot more to an OS than the UI. One might argue that the vast majority of an operating system exists outside of the UI/UXP.
Another example of why it’s important to differentiate the UI from the OS is that there’s a very real possibility that Microsoft will eventually replace the actual OS underneath WP’s Metro UI with a minimized version of Windows itself, allowing it to bring a whole host of features to their phone OS that are currently prohibitively expensive to port to WinCE.
Turner’s blog post takes it all a step further, and suggests that the above notion, coupled with Microsoft’s new planned support for ARM processors, and coupled with the idea that the Metro UI can be paired with the Windows 8 kernel, may very well prove to be the biggest thing that will happen in mobility over the next five years.
It’s all very interesting – Turner’s viewpoint in particular about the separation of UI and OS kernel, and the potential move to WP8 running the Windows 8 kernel some day is intellectually satisfying. It seems right to me – or at least it would seem right if we had the means to turn back time two years or so and Microsoft were actually delivering the technology today. I’ll come back to this.
It’s Deja Vu all Over Again
Fellow blogger Matt Torgersen just used that line in his own most recent blog post, but it is so dead on here I had to use it as well. In terms of how Microsoft intends to ‘win’ the tablet wars, once I went through the slides my first thought was: well, good God, haven’t we heard this exact tale before? It’s mind boggling to me that we are hearing the Zune story all over again – Microsoft is going to kill the iPad. It will own the tablet business because, as the slides demonstrate, it has the killer features in Windows 7 that all tablets will need – and that users want - and that the iPad won’t be able to match. Etc. etc. etc. Is it arrogance? Is it hubris? Is it a lack of humbleness?
Does Microsoft not know and understand that the Zune is a non-entity? Has it learned absolutely no lesson here that just because its field tests suggest that some set of users might like the beast being tested doesn’t mean that it will allow Microsoft to deliver a product that will sweep the nation and put its competitors six feet under? Does Microsoft not remember what Ballmer said about Android? (To paraphrase: All Google has is an Android press release…Windows Mobile sits on 20 million devices…Let me reference my blog post about what Ballmer said yet again - you can find it here.)
The problem Microsoft had/has with the Zune, the problem Microsoft is likely to find itself having with WP7 (especially if it only thinks about consumers and forgets about the enterprise), and the problem Microsoft has with tablets is all the same problem – it is following, it isn’t leading. Period. Followers are late to the game. Followers don’t have impact. Followers make lots of noise while the leaders continue to take market share. Followers are not able to shape their markets.
Having arrived (once again) at Microsoft following rather than leading, we can now circle back to Richard Turner’s WP8/ARM thoughts. How quickly can such a scenario pan out? The end of 2012? Sometime in 2013? Truly, all Microsoft has is a PowerPoint…Android has how many devices out there? How many apps in its store? Apple will have sold how many iPads by 2013?
WP8 – the Metro UI + the Windows 8 kernel + ARM…I like it, but without the time machine to bring it all into place today rather than two or more years down the road, I’m not seeing that Microsoft will successfully navigate the dance floor to a victory here.
Meanwhile, WP7 has a few problems of its own to overcome if it is to bridge the gap to the enterprise while WP8′s dev team cranks out the code over the next 18 months. But that’s for another blog post…maybe next week.
∞
Tags: Enterprise Mobility, Microsoft, Mobile Devices, Mobile Observatory, Tablets, Tony Rizzo, Windows Phone 7, WP7
