Here we go again. Microsoft does love its defensive comparison charts, and it’s unveiled another, pitting the iPad against a range of Windows 8 tablets. As you might expect, it’s just a tiny bit biased and the slightest bit sneaky with some comparisons. For example, the iPad loses out in terms of display size, but, for some reason, resolution is never mentioned.

When comparing against the HP Envy, the iPad has a “$69 sold separately keyboard” —the horror! And, of course, that’s the only keyboard that works with the iPad. The end. But wait! When you compare against any of the other tablets, the keyboard comparison magically disappears! It’s almost like Microsoft doesn’t want to admit that keyboards aren’t in fact included by default with Windows 8 tablet devices!

Elsewhere, we have the usual blah blah blah about the iPad not having a million ports, not printing to “most printers” (despite AirPrint printers now being absurdly cheap and readily available), and not having Office. I’ve written about Office and Microsoft’s current direction with it before, and the new comparison chart helpfully notes:

The only consumer Office app the iPad can run is OneNote.

Perhaps Microsoft really is going to silo Office and make it a USP for its tablets, in which case, it’s going to look pretty stupid. (Teaching people Office isn’t ubiquitous is a really bad idea.) Alternatively, Office might eventually show up for iPad, at which point these comparisons will be moot, and Microsoft is going to look pretty stupid. It’s like the company’s surrounded by a sea of stupid, but rather than building a raft, it’s just drinking down the stupid.

Fortunately, Microsoft then has a minor brainwave and presents two comparisons about things that are genuinely useful. Multiple accounts are something the iPad doesn’t allow (Apple would rather you buy separate devices for you, each member of your family and, preferably, even for your pets), and it really should, at least for ‘guests’ or to provide parents with more control over what children can access. And then there’s “seeing two apps at once”, which I’m sure is something at least some iPad power users would love.

Unfortunately, Microsoft then saw fit to release the toe-curlingly embarrassing Windows 8: Less talking, more doing advert. It ‘hilariously’ has Siri saying what the iPad can’t do, and I’m sure someone important at Microsoft was thinking how great the advert was. After all, it shows how the iPad doesn’t have live tiles, “can only do one thing at a time”, can’t do PowerPoint, and then ends with

Should we just play Chopsticks?

Oooh, burn!

The teeny tiny snag is, it’s easy to spin most of that in another direction:

• Man, that Windows 8 thing is a huge, noisy, garbled mess on the start screen, compared to the clean nature of iOS!
• Hang on, the iPad can speak to you? That sounds pretty great! Hey, why’s the Windows tablet silent?
• Microsoft’s proprietary formats are a really bad idea, aren’t they? Still, I bet there are some alternate Office-compatible apps for iPad, right?
• Hey, that piano app looks great. What, it’s GarageBand and costs only five bucks? Man, I’d love that. So where’s the Windows 8 version? Oh. *buys iPad*

In short, then: Microsoft says Windows 8 is amazing because it’s noisier, has split-screen and can run PowerPoint, but it can’t speak, and if you’re into music, you’re not ‘doing’—you’re just some kind of idiot who should really be making a presentation on a cheap piece of tablet hardware.

That’s Apple told.

Back in 2012, I interviewed for .net magazine a chap by the name of Dalton Caldwell. He was a man with a plan, with the aim to create a realtime feed platform that would become “what Twitter could have been”.

Now, I like ‘Twitter the service’ an awful lot, but ‘Twitter the company’ makes me edgy. It’s very developer hostile when it comes to clients, and it’s also well on its way to becoming a platform for pushing advertising. I very much hope it doesn’t become the mess that Facebook is these days, but Twitter’s customers are increasingly businesses, not you, the user.

Caldwell’s App.Net takes a different stance. Although in a sense broadly similar to Twitter (you post, follow, repost, ‘star’, and so on), it’s based around paid tiers of membership (one for developers, and one for everyone else). This means the users are the customers, and it also keeps out spam. (Say ‘iPad’ on Twitter at your peril; say it on App.Net whenever you like. Hell, say it often, just because you can—until people start asking if you’ve been hollowed out and replaced by an Apple advertising robot.) It’s also, in my experience, resulted in a quieter but clearly content and happy community.

There’s also a free tier, which at the time of writing requires an invite from a paying member, and that also has some limitations, such as the number of people you can follow. Possibly because I’m a journalist a reasonable number of people follow, but probably more likely because I in my press photo look a bit like Seth MacFarlane, App.Net have given me a pile of invites to the service. So if you’d like to join me on App.Net, get your free invitation here, while stocks last.

If you’d like to know more about the service, read Matt Gemmell’s excellent post, which explores account discovery and the clients available for a range of platforms.

Time’s Ben Bajarin writes: Apple Vs. Google Vs. Microsoft: One Platform Will Not Rule Them All. His idea isn’t new, but it’s something that oddly few pundits understand or at least bring themselves to write about: that Microsoft’s domination in the PC market was an anomaly and won’t necessarily be repeated in the so-called post-PC market.

The narrative we so often see—presumably in part due to the page views it results in—is that Android is winning in smartphones and Apple is winning in tablets. Also, Android will soon win in the latter market, too; Apple will eventually be snuffed out entirely—and Microsoft has already missed its shot. No-one else has a chance.

Not only does this argument ignore the fact Apple’s quite happy taking much of the PC industry’s profits, despite its relatively tiny market-share (and could therefore likely do the same in mobile), but it avoids any discussion regarding why Microsoft rose to almost complete dominance in the 1990s PC market, and why that doesn’t look likely to happen again.

Bajarin explains about the past and present, stating that the PC market was then small and dominated by corporates, but now consumer markets are the real prize, and those markets can sustain many players; indeed, they often thrive on competition. He mentions fast-food chains, car manufacturers and companies that make soft drinks. Pause for only a second and you will be able to think of technology industries with similarly strong competition: televisions, for example. We don’t talk about Sony or Samsung eventually winning the ‘television war’, so why do so many do so when it comes to smartphones and tablets?

There’s also an important point Bajarin omits that explains why one player is unlikely to win these wars: interoperability. In the early 1980s, computing was diverse and siloed, but the genius of Microsoft was to be an essential player in ushering in a ‘standard’ platform, still effectively siloed. The web obliterated that, and we now increasingly rely on interoperable services. I can use Twitter on my Mac and iPhone, but friends can use it on their PCs, Android devices, Windows Phones, BlackBerry devices, Firefox OS phones, and, if they’re feeling particularly oddball, their C64s. Of course, platforms still have unique advantages that draw people in, but ensuring you have access to something that’s a ‘standard’ isn’t really one of them.

Via Ian Betteridge on App.net.

Charles Arthur at the Guardian reports on Bill Gates making the kind of prediction tech journos just love: that iPad and Android tablet users will switch to PC tablets. Arthur’s article on a CNBC interview with Gates showcases a kind of bizarre ‘head in the sand’ stance from the Microsoft co-founder, who comes across like he doesn’t get why people like tablets.

Gates […] said Windows 8 is part of a blurring of the distinction between the PC and the tablet.

Because focus is bad. What everyone really wants is a toaster fridge!

But he also thinks that many users of iPads – and, by extension, Android tablets – are frustrated because “they can’t type,

This is true. I can’t type on my iPad, unless of course I use the on-screen keyboard (which kids seem worryingly proficient at using, despite there being no tactile feedback), or a Bluetooth keyboard, or one of about a billion iPad keyboard covers (such as the Logitech Ultrathin).

they can’t create documents,

Again, a good point, assuming you never turn your iPad (or Android tablet) on and never install any apps.

they don’t have Office there

Mm. And whose fault is that? Still, nice to see Office once again being equated with the only way to do any work. Clearly, there are no other types of app. (It’s probably also helpful at this point if everyone just forgets entirely that Apple reworked its own word processing, spreadsheet and presentation apps for iOS, and that various other companies have created free and commercial Office-compatible apps for iOS and Android.)

That, he implies, means it’s only a matter of time before Surface and other PC-tablet hybrids grab that market.

People are getting really tired of iPads and Android tablets. I guess that explains why they keep buying so many of them.

Marco Arment’s sold read-it-later service Instapaper to Betaworks. My first responses to this were “good for him,” swiftly followed by “I hope Betaworks don’t mess this up,” along with mulling over an investigation of Pocket. (I like both Instapaper and Pocket, but had largely stuck with Instapaper because I, where possible, support indies.)

For some reason, Chris Taylor over at Mashable had a massive bitch in his coverage of the sale, subtitled “why the big fuss?”

It really is an astonishing piece of… well, I want to say journalism, but it reads more like something you’d find on the Daily Mail website and turn your nose up at. Right away, the piece makes Taylor’s seeming distaste for Instapaper very clear:

Do you use Instapaper? No, me neither. But the $3.99 app, which lets you save stuff to read later when outside a wifi or 3G zone, has a small and highly devoted following. Which is why a small segment of Twitter went nuts at the news Thursday that Instapaper was being bought by Betaworks

Why the aggression? Why the not-so-subtle sneering at people who use and love an app? Why the immediate disconnect with the article’s own title, which asked “why the fuss?” and then noted the app’s “devoted following”? I would ask Taylor, but he’s probably busy making giant Instapaper logos that he can kick the shit out of in a murderous rage.

Arment has been spending an increasing amount of time on another project. He’s founder and editorial director of an online paid magazine devoted to mid-length features, brashly titled The Magazine. His enthusiasm for Instapaper appears to have been waning for some time. Reviews of the lastest version in the iTunes store suggest it got buggy and crashed a lot. [sic]

I read the reviews for the latest version (although not the lastest version, because I’m not sure what that means) on the US and UK stores. Oddly, the UK store reviews are generally people wanting to high-five Arment, or grumbling that Instapaper’s not Pocket. A few people were complaining about crashes. On the US store, there are admittedly quite a few people complaining about app stability, although many more going down the high-five route.

I’ve not witnessed any such problems myself (which, given my usual tech halos of doom is perhaps some kind of technology karma), but to argue this is down to Arment lacking enthusiasm is pretty low, not least because Taylor also quotes Arment as stating Instapaper

has simply grown far beyond what one person can do

Classy.

For good measure, there’s also a smattering of inaccuracy:

Two years ago, Apple stepped onto Instapaper’s turf in a major way by adding a “reading list” feature to its Safari app on iPhone and iPad. The reading list allowed users to save pages to read them later, rendering the paid iPhone app Instapaper largely irrelevant.

As anyone who’s used Reading List will know, although it has some similarities with Instapaper (and other read-it-later services), it’s a very different beast. In downloading entire web pages (design and all), it’s a hell of a lot slower, for one, and it also doesn’t just rip out the content from a page and give you that, using your preferred fonts and other settings. I don’t know anyone who checked out Reading List and stopped using Instapaper, Pocket or Readability.

Still, at least Taylor stopped there. Oh no, my mistake:

But Betaworks is building a reputation for turning around aggregation products thought to be lost causes, judging by the reception for the new Digg.

That’s my emphasis, there: Instapaper: thought to be a lost cause! That really needs the caveat “by Chris Taylor, who’s inexplicably angry about Instapaper, perhaps because he imagined it travelled back in time and gave him a massive wedgie in the playground, while yelling MARCO ARMENT IS YOUR GOD, PUNY FUTURE HACK”.

That is the only explanation.