Microsoft conference attendees can all laugh at the poor iPad user bent over an obviously flawed form factor when they should be using one of those tablets with flip-around keyboards that have been out for 10 years running Windows.
And everyone at WWDC can laugh all the way to the bank every time Apple sells another million iPads.
The customers have spoken. Is denial really Ballmer's best option at this point?
Yes, when Android first launched it was very interesting to see Apple users use phrases like 100,000 apps in the app store and dominant market share, and how these have changed as they were overtaken.
Mac users were always defending the boutique, specialist, quality over quantity arguments on the desktop and then suddenly it was all a numbers game for a while there.
At a certain point the numbers no longer matter in an app store. My phone is a guitar tuner, one of five available. If my devices store had twice the apps, I don't think I'd benefit much.
"Mac users were always defending the boutique, specialist, quality over quantity arguments on the desktop and then suddenly it was all a numbers game for a while there.".
The truth is, that the kind of people who say things like that are the kind of people who look for opportunities to argue about that kind of stuff and your statement reads like you have a clear bias. That's not a very objective perspective to my mind.
I don't think so. If I was to claim that more people will buy Macs than PCs, then you could say "the customers have spoken" and that I was wrong. But I never claimed that.
Ballmer here is claiming that nobody wants the iPad form factor. That's just patently false and you only need to point to sales numbers to show that.
All I'm doing is to point out the implications of your reliance on current sales as a measure for future success and/or 'goodness of product' (whatever that means). If you try to mix and match your metrics (or tenses) without explanation then you are being roughly as (in)consistent ad Ballmer himself.
It would appear that it is correct or partially correct. I couldn't find data for the whole time, but as of the end of last year, OS X market share appears to have flattened and then gone both up and down from that point by a fairly small amount.
I love the flip-around tablet. It's better than a touch screen for almost any creative application because of the great input resolution. The only real negative is that it's expensive.
my buddy has a thinkpad x61 flip-around tablet, and it looks as usable as my thinkpad x60s non-tablet as a laptop, and it also looks like a reasonable tablet. (now, I'm not a tablet guy, so I can't evaluate how good a tablet is; the form factor is simply Not For Me. but my buddy likes it. he runs windows on the thing.)
Me, I carry a (non tablet) thinkpad x60s running Linux. it gets maybe 4 or 5 hours on the extended battery, and I carry one extended battery and two (half the charge) regular batteries. (I'm a big guy and the thinkpad x series is small, so the extra weight doesn't really bother me. It's still lighter than my girl's giant T series laptop w/ extended battery. That thing is heavy.) Also, the thing is cheap enough that I don't get too bothered at the idea of it getting destroyed.
Okay guys, I've got to come out with something here. I'm kind of a lurker on HN so I don't really say much...but I need to say something before I continue with my comment here: I really love Microsoft products.
The (fledgling) start up I'm working on is built on .NET. I'm a BizSpark member and my 9 to 5s have all been in .NET shops. My senior project in college was written on .NET which led me to contracting at Microsoft for a while while I finished my degree. And while I was there I was continually impressed by the quality of the people I interacted with and how dedicated and passionate they were to and about their technologies.
I can talk all day about what I like and what I don't like about specific technologies they put out but my comment today isn't on the quality of their products. It is on Steve Ballmer's atrocious presentation skills.
The way this man talks is like a marketeer in that doesn't really "get" technology and dances around the technical aspects with marketing speak and hand waving. He cannot afford to continue to deny that his competitors are beating the shit out of them in a number of markets that they oh-so-badly want to participate in but just cannot execute in for one reason or another. And beyond that, in 2010, when your CEO competition is Zuckerberg, Jobs, and Schmidt, you really really can't afford to not really get technology.
Microsoft if you're out there, if you're listening to me, please for the love of the gigantic, rich, strong community that surrounds your company and technologies, please PLEASE eject Steve Ballmer. He's been slowly sinking the ship for 10 years (yes, it is mostly his doing) and you can't keep this up.
Ballmer's incompetence is compounded when he talks shit. Its like The Emperor's New Clothes, except its been going on for so long that everyone knows hes not wearing invisible robes. All, apparently except for Bill G and the others on the board of directors that keep him gainfully employed.
Look, did this really go beyond a gentle ribbing? Ballmer is a big character, who is supposed to make these grand sweeping statements. I don't know how much we can draw from this.
He reminds me of a WWE character, I don't know why people take him so literally. I actually like his attitude, except he's playing for the wrong team...
No, they changed it because they had to. They sued the World Wildlife Fund for trademark infringement (they wanted wwf.org), and lost (World Wildlife Fund was older).
This reminds me of the reddit Q&A with the IE9 guys ... they (Microsoft) don't realize that they're no longer the ones defining where technology goes and as a result they'll keep missing the boat on the technological trends that are shaping the future.
Its going to be very satisfying to watch them eventually realize they've been left behind.
You shouldn't be. It's quite normal. If someone recorded and then transcribed normal conversation of your's (or anyone else's), you'd be appalled at it. I know I was when mine was recorded!
Someone once complimented Cary Grant by saying he wished he could be as witty and suave as Cary was on screen. Cary replied that he wished he could be, too.
There's a good reason why politicians carefully script and rehearse their remarks in advance, even the supposedly 'extemporaneous' ones.
Well compare it to the utterances from the "other Steve" (Jobs) who takes brevity to the point of terseness. Compare, for example his D8 interview with, well, anyone else's.
Ballmer is a disaster for Microsoft and living proof of why you should have a product guy (not a business wonk) in charge of a technology company.
[On competing with Google]
“We want to make better products then them. What I love about the marketplace is that we do our products, we tell people about them, and if they like them, we get to come to work tomorrow. It's not like that in enterprise... the people who make those decisions are sometimes confused.”
“We never saw ourselves in a platform war with MSFT, and maybe that's why we lost.”
[On tablets replacing laptops]
“I'm trying to think of a good analogy. When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.”
Did Jobs prepare those statements? Probably. Caching is the secret to articulacy. I think the human brain is just too damn slow to come up with really good things to say on the fly. You have to know about it, think about it, talk about it. Again and again. You have to know what people will ask you.
I think that even if you are a bad public speaker you can compensate with good preparation. You can fine tune and cache your answers. It’s hard work but it pays off.
I also think it's because Steve Jobs thinks about that kind of stuff all the time. It's something he's genuinely interested in.
If you ask me a difficult and deep question about a topic I think about all the time, I'll probably come up with a nice and concise answer.
I really think a good CEO is someone envisioning the future all the time. That's what makes the difference. Once you know where you should go, execution comes naturally.
Steve Jobs is both a salesman and CEO. He needs to think so much about what the company does that the answers come easy, he also is very curious and had read a lot.
I thought I was a bad writer(in other language, not English) until one day I won a contest,over 400people without effort, I just loved the topic so much words flew as a torrent, faster that I could write it down.
He(Steve) loves to be on the spotlight, and show them how fantastic is what they have done.
This is not really the same thing. Ballmer was answering a question from someone in the audience. The context and amount of preparation is certainly different. You would think he has some good clear prepared statements on a subject like the iPad and Microsoft's tablet offerings.
>My netbook has to be coaxed through the day with Wi-Fi switched off in order to get more than a few hours out of the battery; my 15″ laptop only goes 2-3 hours between charges (newer models may be better, but I can’t change laptops at the drop of a hat); meanwhile, I find the iPad easy enough to type on in landscape mode, it turns on/off instantly and, after 8 hours taking notes and tweeting yesterday, it still had an indicated battery charge of 55%.
Sounds like this guy's real problem is battery life (and, to a lesser extent, slow resume from sleep), not keyboard vs. no keyboard. The iPad gets 16 hours or whatever in part because it has a 9.7 inch screen compared to his laptops 15 inches or so. My netbook with a 10.5 inch screen gets 8 real hours of battery life.
So yes, keyboardlessness is good insofar as it enables you to have a tiny screen (since a tiny screen with a usable size keyboard would be awkward). But I only use my netbook 6 or less hours a day, so for me I easily trade the difference between 8 and 16 hours for a real keyboard. As battery life gets better, that will make sense for more people, unless keyboardless entry starts making big progress (which is possible). But even then, I'd still rather have a larger screen and $200.
That's no small thing. Not only does this change the usability of the machine tremendously, it has quite a big bearing on battery life. In fact, battery life is directly affected by how it is used.
The iPad can be used in a way which is fairly close to how one would use a notepad. You click the "sleep/standby" button and off you go. The netbook/laptop is a workstation and so wants to soak up all of your attention for some interval of time.
Also, I bet that that $200 advantage is going to disappear in short order.
I'm not saying it's a small thing. This isn't a netbook vs. iPad argument. I'm saying the resume-from-sleep speed has to do with good Apple engineering, not the keyboardless form factor (which is what the OP was defending).
You have a good point there. I think if someone could engineer a tablet with a good instant-flip-up keyboard form factor, then this would be a big hit. It would have to be as fast and easy to use as slide-out keyboards on current smartphones.
"I was also juggling a camera (on my Nokia phone), a voice recorder (on my iPhone) and taking notes/tweeting on the iPad whilst listening to Mr Ballmer."
That strikes me as a lot of redundancy. So, I see Balmer's point when he said, "I think we can make life a little simpler for people, if we do the right job."
Words are cheap. Everyone here knows it's about delivery. So all Ballmer needs to do now is execute. Personally, I don't think he has the ability. He's a sales' dude. A one-trick pony. A wealthy one-trick pony, but not a CEO or business leader.
Indeed, Balmer's use of the conditional, "if we do the right job," might signify he has made similar observations, and perhaps be taken as evidence that Balmer is not cut from the same cloth as some other CEO's.
I recently went from a 2007 MacBook to a Lenovo X201 with 9-cell battery, and it's worth pointing out that the much-improved battery life (3-5 hours -> maybe 6-9), lower weight (5.5 pounds to 3.5) and heat (uncomfortably warm -> barely noticeable) have made a huge difference in how I use it. Even the size difference, though not quite as dramatic, is very noticeable.
I used to really debate whether or not I needed my computer when I left the house, but now I tend to not think about it (3.5 pounds is pretty negligible, where 5.5 was verging on uncomfortable to shoulder), and I need to worry a lot less about preserving battery power than I used to. In that respect, I definitely see the argument for the iPad in his situation (though it's still apples to oranges), but if what he really wants is a long battery life and portability, there are pretty viable options out there that are still full-fledged computers.
I've felt the same way with my netbook. The older HP laptop I used to use was pokey, got about 1.5 hr. of battery life at best, heavy as lead, and hot enough to grill meat. Now I use a 10.1" netbook, weighs just under 1kg, only gets warm with heavy use, and lasts 8hr on battery (or more if you're just reading from Kindle for PC). It's definately changed how I think about mobile computing.
"Media Center is big and, when people say ‘hey, we could optimise more for clients’ I think what they generally mean is ‘Big Buttons’. Big Buttons that’s, I think, a codeword for Big Buttons and Media Center is Big Buttons not Little Buttons."
So wait... Will there be Big Buttons?
Aside from that, it feels like He's focusing on this one area of UX design. I hope this doesn't forecast an imbalance in the experience of the finished product.
It reminds me a little of Web 2.0:
"Web 2.0 is shiny and rounded, and when people say `shiny and rounded' they really mean `shiny and rounded buttons.'"
I think he's using "big buttons" as a shortcut for the difference between highly rich, detailed interfaces which present many options all at once, and more "simplified", more intuitive interfaces which present fewer options, but where more work has been done to ensure they're the options you really, really need.
At least, I hope he is. This is Ballmer, after all.
...touch applications which we will encourage people to write.
This seems like a very telling phrase. If they partner with someone to build a great tablet device, running a great Windows OS, they won't need to encourage development for it - the demand will be obvious.
Every time I read what comes out of Steve Ballmer's mouth I wonder if that guy has ever touched a computer. Microsoft's employees need to acquire some parrots and eye patches. It's mutiny time.
That's particularly sad. The guys missed a smartphone market, now they miss a tablet market while they are the ones that should make a decent and usable alternative.
There is some truth in his point about big buttons. The idea of using a traditional keyboard+mouse interface with software designed for fingers is actually pretty appealing, just because of the ease of use constraints on the software.
Actually, it just continues to show the naïveté at the top.
The article has him saying "Media Center is Big Buttons", as if media center could solve their problems. I want to give them points for trying, but really the needs of an interface that's ten feet away and controlled with a remote are vastly different than one at your fingertips. Yes, they both need to be bigger in certain ways. But the similarity mostly stops there.
I hate to keep dragging out the Steve Jobs quote, but I really can't think of a better way to put it. "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
Avoiding a simple question, not having an answer ready to questions easily forseen, speaking on the brink of uttering nonsense, making really bad jokes wrt a competitors product and its user.
I read a transcipt of Ballmers public speaking before and I was then also shocked by the poor quality of it.
And everyone at WWDC can laugh all the way to the bank every time Apple sells another million iPads.
The customers have spoken. Is denial really Ballmer's best option at this point?