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December 15
Microsoft Tablets

By the time the iPad shipped in 2010, I was a fairly heavy user of Microsoft OneNote on my notebook computer. When the iPad came out, I immediately wanted a good stylus for it, and every once in a while I still find myself buying a new stylus online or in stores, to see if anything has changed in the world of iPad styli. Unfortunately, it almost never gets better, and OneNote (which did eventually come out for the iPad) doesn't support drawing on that platform anyway.

In 2012, Microsoft shipped the Surface RT, I bought one on day one, and probably the biggest problem with it was that it didn't have a stylus or pen. When Microsoft shipped the Surface Pro in 2013, I didn't buy one immediately, but that machine came with a stylus that made it an obvious choice for heavy OneNote users who were previously buying convertible tablet notebooks such as the ThinkPad Lenovo X Tablet series.

Since then, Microsoft introduced the Surface 2 and Pro 2 and has since then replaced the Pro 2 with the Pro 3, which introduces a new form factor that's a little bit more like a legal pad and has some other improvements on the pen front.

Despite this, and the fact that Microsoft is building what is probably the best "tablet PC" on the market, it took two years for the Surface family to be profitable (though there are a few different reasons for that), and at the same time, Apple's announcing that they now sell more iPads than any given PC maker sells PCs in their entire computer lineup.

This has to burn for Microsoft. They've been trying to throw tablet and pen computing at the wall for almost twenty years, releasing products steadily along the way, and today Apple's first public release of a touch-centric computer from just four years ago now outsells every HP Windows computer. (They don't yet outsell the entire PC industry, however.)

The iPad is great. As I've mentioned loads of times since 2010, it's got the ability to be a really productive piece of hardware. Almost immediately after buying mine, I was using it as a word processor, and because it came out fairly late in the iOS game, it had applications that directly connected to Internet services (such as PlainText, which connects to Dropbox) and also started with the full iWork suite.

The iPad's two year head start on building up an ecosystem, and the fact that Apple built up an entirely new interface for it (based on what they'd already done with the iPhone) made it a unique type of computing that has ultimately proven to be popular. At around the same time, Android tablets started to show up and Android 3.0 was released in 2011 to address the special needs of tablets, and move them away from being "just scaled up phone interfaces."

By the time Windows 8 was announced in early 2012 and shipped in late 2012, both Android and iOS had some hardware revisions and fairly strong ecosystems based on different ideas and advantages. The Microsoft tablet hardware is very good, especially in its second and third generations, and the PC OEMs all have built various bits of tablet hardware. The biggest challenge with Windows 8, 8.1, and even 8.1 Update 1 with Bing, is that Microsoft seems to have failed to really create a developer following for the "Modern Interface." The biggest services and web sites (Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, that kind of thing) have applications on Windows 8, but it has failed to capture the kind of development that has led to such iPad applications as the iWork suite, Paper by 53, and all of Panic's applications.

Microsoft has done almost no first party development outside of what ships with the system and several games with the Xbox label on them, and to add an insult to the injury of the iPad's success at finding developers, Paper was developed by a team that was originally housed by Microsoft. Microsoft has more modern interface Windows 8 applications of their own design than Apple has iPad applications, but Apple's applications go further with iOS as a platform, and part of this is that Microsoft has more "things" such as the Microsoft Developer Video Library to turn into applications, where as Apple is using its other built-in applications such as Podcasts and iBooks to distribute that kind of information.

I call out Panic when I talk about iOS applications not because I ever suspected they'd develop a Windows application, but because every time they release a new application, I look at it and go "oh, I guess I have to buy this," which is a testament to the power of creating a novel user experience on a mobile device, as well as the power of being the first or simply the best to fulfill a certain need. Prompt was the third SSH client I bought for my iPad, and it was so much better than the others, I haven't regretted it. When they released Diet Coda, I picked it up because it's so interesting to see what a web site editing application on the iPad is like, and when they released Transmit, my heart leaped with joy at the ability to transfer files directly from the iPad to an SFTP server.

Some of this is changes in Apple's policies on security and application interaction on iOS itself, and some of it is third party developers coming up with new ways to use the device. Since the launch of the Surface, the marquee software events have been the launch of Outlook 2013, and the launch of OneNote MX, which is probably Microsoft's only real "productivity" application that has been designed specifically for the modern interface, and attempts to supplant or supplement a desktop application.

I don't think Windows RT is dead, but I do think Microsoft still has some first-party holes to fill on the platform, such as the ability to open ePUB files, and working a bit more with other developers, be they the big traditional software houses such as Adobe and Autodesk, or independent developers, to get more software on the modern interface.

Of course, one of the major differences between Apple and Microsoft, and possibly a reason we've seen relatively few first-party applications on the Windows modern interface, is that Apple has for much of its history been used to the idea that if they want something to exist for one of their platforms, they need to build it themselves, and secondarily, if they want better control over something that does exist, they may need to re-implement it or buy it. Microsoft, on the other hand, is used to being the provider of the platform on which others innovate, and the concept of e-mail servers other than Exchange running on Windows is completely familiar to them, along with word processors other than Word, and so on.

Another big difference, and this shows itself on the "desktop experience" side of things more than the tablet side of things, is that Mac OS is home to a thriving community of unique, natively developed software that takes specific advantage of Apple's APIs and interface guidelines. On the Windows side of things, there's Microsoft, the giant publishers, and then open source applications, very few of which were really created with Windows specifically in mind.

There have been a few attempts at porting or bringing some of those open source applications to the modern interface, VideoLAN Client and PuTTY in particular have made their appearances in the Windows Store. I think part of the question is how rewarding is it for the developers of applications on Microsoft's platforms to create mobile or modern interface experiences, either new or adapted from their existing applications. It would be unfair to say that there aren't any, because Autodesk has released Sketchbook Express for the Windows Store and Adobe has released Reader Touch as well. Sketchbook is interesting, but most Windows tablets don't offer a stylus or other specific hardware enhancements for arting, and the ones that do aren't necessarily unified, with nTrig and Wacom each using different driver and control systems. Adobe Reader Touch is neat, but I also suspect it's unpopular, if only because Microsoft pre-empted the need for it by including a fairly good PDF reader in Windows 8.

Although Microsoft has rapidly scaled Windows 8.1 to run well on tablet-class hardware with ultra-low voltage and wattage processors and in very low memory constraints, they're falling behind on the thing that on desktops tends to make Windows the obvious choice. What I think we'll see is either modern interface development pick up, people buying yearly Windows tablets as a way to get an Office365 subscription, or Microsoft using Windows 10 to finish their retreat back to the desktop. It will be sad, but it is a very real possibility.

It would be interesting to find out if a low-cost strategy for Windows 8 tablets would have panned out earlier on. Apple seems to have the market on "the best tablets" cornered, and with Android you can choose to spend anything between $70 and $700 on a tablet, whereas Windows 8 tablets that are any good at all have only recently fallen below $300 on a regular basis. Even with cheaper hardware, the main reason to buy a Windows tablet at this point is if you want something extremely inexpensive with a too-small screen on which to run an old copy of Microsoft Money, or if you want something (again, too small) on which to run Office. I think the best saving grace from this particular fate is the Surface Pro 3.

The Surface Pro 3 has been enjoying a fair amount of success. It has (well, Microsoft hasn't separated the Surface Pro 3 revenue out from the Surface 2 revenue sine the Pro 3's introduction, but from the heavy implication on their part we can presume that it was indeed the Surface Pro 3 that's responsible for this) pulled the Surface family into a profitable position and become a smashing success with reviewers. The tech press and user reviews alike almost universally agreed that Microsoft's generation over generation improvements make it a must-buy for people looking for a new mobile computer, willing to experiment with the form factor. The problem is that the Surface Pro 3 gets this success by almost completely reneging on the idea that it's even a "tablet," putting the device and Windows 8.1 squarely in the territory of "this is a very tiny battery-powered desktop computer that you use with wireless peripherals on a table." Every advertisement and stock photo of it shows it with a mouse, and most, if not all screenshots of it are of Adobe CC applications or AutoCAD running on the desktop.

Not that the market doesn't have room for something else, but I do vaguely wonder if there isn't a certain amount of Surface Pro 3 demand that's actually related to long pent up demand for a Microsoft-branded Windows computer of any sort, and the Surface Pro 3 is faster and larger enough to actually use it as a stand-in for a classic laptop or desktop computer. It's possible the key for Windows' and Microsoft's success in a world that's increasingly focusing on mobile devices, on the go experiences, and being as productive in different situations as possible, maybe this kind of premium device that can run desktop applications on a comfortable display with good performance is the key to Microsoft's particular success. It also helps that with the Surface Pro 3, Microsoft finally has what it has wanted the OEMs to build for twenty years now. The Surface Pro 3 is what Microsoft considers to be the ideal physical manifestation of several different modes of computing (including, in Windows 10, the command line), the biggest question is how they explain to customers that the pen is good for more than just circling things, and how they address the fact that the best and fastest tablet on the market isn't actually very good at being a tablet.

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