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Microsoft could win tablet war

Don't look now, but Windows 8 could be positioning for a tablet coup.

Jon Tullett
By Jon Tullett, Editor: News analysis
Johannesburg, 26 Jun 2013
Windows 8 tablets - hopeless also-rans or possible revolutionaries?
Windows 8 tablets - hopeless also-rans or possible revolutionaries?

In the last few months, I've had to rethink my position on Windows 8 and Microsoft's chances in the mobile space. I still think Windows 8 is badly flawed, and I still think Windows phones are destined for shipwreck on a small corporate island between the Android and Apple oceans, with only BlackBerry for company. But tablets? Well.

If you'd asked me six months ago to rate Windows 8's chances in the tablet market, I'd have scored it just below the proverbial snowball in hell. Microsoft had executed a spectacular series of missteps bringing it to market, and I thought (and still think) that Windows 8 RT is on life support and should really be put out of everyone's misery for its own good.

But Windows 8 Pro has surprised me with its potential. It still needs a miracle, but it might just have one up its sleeve. And not the sort of miracle that sees Microsoft achieve tablet success alongside its competitors. I'm talking about the sort of market miracle that sees Microsoft reinvent and then dominate the market, leaving Apple and Google scrambling.

The first stage in my conversion was the realisation that Microsoft, if it were to succeed at all, had to aim high. Very high. It had to out-Apple everyone. Apple, you'll remember, sprang from its sick-bed with the iPod, which taught it how to reinvent markets in its own image, setting the rules of the game and putting rivals at a permanent disadvantage. The iPod was a pretty poor music player, to be honest, but it got the form factor and the UX right and the marketing worked beautifully and the rest is history. iPhone? iPad? Same story - they were merely sequels following the iPod formula.

Android, meanwhile, got traction through Google-driven brute force, not smarts. It muscled its way to dominance in the smartphone space and could well do the same in tablets, but it didn't do it by outfoxing Apple. Although it has arguably leapfrogged iOS in some ways now, the steps to its current position in the sun were far from elegant.

Microsoft lacks a lot of its rivals' advantages. It isn't as nimble or sexy as Apple, it lacks the online ecosystem might of Google, and it is all-but irrelevant in mobile market share. If it's going to succeed, it has to rewrite the rules of the game. Not sell its own version of iPads, but redefine everything that a tablet should be, so that the iPads and Android devices become, in one stroke, the horse-and-buggy to Microsoft's Model-T.

Can Microsoft pull of a feat of such astonishing market-redefining mesmerism? I don't know, but I can see the road it could take to get there. I'll walk you down it, in two steps.

Think different

The mental leap Microsoft needs us to take is to stop viewing the tablet as a different type of device, but as a new type of PC. Not one that requires special apps - though it must accommodate those too - but one which supports your existing applications, workflow, and ecosystem. That includes the applications you bought licences for and don't want to write off, the legacy apps you'd love to ditch but just can't afford to right now, the IE6 Web apps, which seemed such a good idea at the time, but are a millstone around your neck now, and the home-grown Delphi GUIs, which no one remembers how to debug. Every organisation has them, and while we all long to ditch them and move on, the fact is that it takes time, and money, and integrating them into BYOD is a pain in the touchscreen, because nothing (short of remote desktop kludges) supports them.

But Windows 8 does. And it wants business users to see the well-kept walled gardens as nothing more than toys - nice place to take the kids, but you wouldn't want to work there. If enough people think that way, Microsoft has the opportunity to turn the tablet world on its head. Ubuntu could compete with that. iOS and Android couldn't.

Business users are consumers too, of course, and Windows has that mature ecosystem of entertainment and media applications, much of it free and/or open source. Want a great media player that works on your Windows tablet? Download VLC or XBMC. Games? Download Steam - oh look, all your PC purchases are available on your tablet, at no extra cost. This is looking promising.

But will enough people make that mental leap? Isn't the existing Apple/Android mindset too entrenched for that to happen? Well, I'll give you part two: my own experience, as an Android fanboy (I have multiple Android devices, dabble in Android development and am so deeply joined to Google's ecosystem we should have a pre-nup).

On the road to Damascus

I've been using a Windows tablet for a couple of days. We'll have a review up on ITWeb shortly, so I won't spoil the surprise by telling you which one. I don't like Windows 8 and the tablet isn't particularly powerful, so I expected to dislike it. But I don't. It's great, and here's why: I live in my browser, and I like PCs.

I use Google Chrome as my primary browser, but more importantly as my primary browser ecosystem. I use a number of apps and Google's central account sync to share settings and bookmarks between devices (you can achieve the same result with other browsers, of course - pick your ecosystem). But one discrepancy has consistently frustrated me: Chrome-on-Android is not Chrome-on-PC. Some data is shared, like bookmarks and history, but add-ons aren't, which means that products I use on my desktop are not available on my phone or tablet. And the lack of Java and impending demise of Flash on Android also means that a lot of sites are facing the same inconsistent limbo.

The mental leap Microsoft needs us to take is to stop viewing the tablet as a different type of device, but as a new type of PC.

Enter Windows 8. Chrome, installed on a Windows tablet, achieves what Android cannot - browser ubiquity between desktop and mobile device. Microsoft, in other words, has managed to give me a superior Google experience than Google itself can. I did not see that coming.

Windows 8 still gets in the way. This is not the place to enumerate its failings, but you know what I mean. Microsoft has promised that 8.1 will take some of the user feedback on board, which might help, but I don't think it'll really get better until the next full release at the earliest. From interface oddities, the problems extend all the way down the stack - a lot of the built-in apps are basically rubbish. You can add a Facebook account, which gives you a very nice view of timeline activity, but can't re-share posts, for example. It's like the developers got most of the way through building the apps, then got bored or were reassigned, leaving applications looking pretty, but incomplete.

And the app store doesn't have enough apps either, but that manages to be both irrelevant and completely crucial to my point. Irrelevant because I can't install the apps anyway - the app store started acting up from the moment I tried to install anything. But this is a full-blown Windows PC (just a very skinny one) so I don't need an app store, just an installer. The mental adjustment came when I remembered I could download the desktop counterparts instead. I may not have a native Windows 8 Evernote app, for example, but I do have the desktop client and the Chrome plugin, and that works just fine, thank you very much. (In fact, it's better - the desktop version offers word counts, the app version does not.) After a couple of attempts I just gave up on the app store. And so far I haven't minded.

Not that I use a lot of applications every day. Mostly I use Web services, because I like having data in the cloud, NSA notwithstanding. So the lack of a native app (or the inability of the app store to install it) usually doesn't matter much. Since the part that matters - the data - is all in the cloud, the interface isn't important.

In fact, I've found myself either bypassing Windows 8's limitations, or just ignoring them. It might as well be Windows XP with better tablet input and a nag screen. But my ecosystem, largely cloud- and browser-based, can ignore those limitations. And because I can ignore the OS, it's suddenly a tablet that behaves quite a lot like a PC when I want it to, but with enough tabletty goodness that I don't feel like I'm stuck in the 90s with a revolting folding laptop (thank you Apple for reinventing that).

More importantly, I work with a (Windows) PC a great deal. I value the ubiquity of data, but while I like the mobile app versions, I really like the uniformity of interface when I'm dealing with a tablet of similar size to my laptop screen. And as a Unix and now Linux user, I've spent years collecting utilities and tools which wrangle Windows into more productive shapes. All those tricks and tweaks work on my PC... and now on my tablet. My Android tablet is basically a swollen phone, and while I stubbornly still love it, it's not, to be honest, always a great transition.

It's not all roses in Redmond. This particular tablet is lacking in some important ways and Windows 8 really does annoy me. But then, so did the iPod (No FM! Small drive! Too expensive!) and look where that ended up. If Microsoft executes well (read "flawlessly") I'd give even odds that by the end of the year, I'll be using a Windows tablet alongside my Android phone (sorry Microsoft, I still think a phone miracle is too much to hope for). Some fancy footwork could see Apple and Google stunningly outflanked here.

Sorry to end on a sour note, but I'm not optimistic for Microsoft. The company made so many mistakes launching Windows 8 that at this stage, a strategic success of this magnitude is more likely to come about through luck than design. Like I said, it needs a miracle.

I still like the tablet, though.

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