Bill Gates frustrated at the limitations of Microsoft, lashes out at the iPad
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.
Do we need to upgrade Bill Gates? Or just switch him off and on again?
Because that is just crazy. I don’t have sales figures to hand but iPads are selling by the shed load while the worldwide Windows 8 tablet user group could probably meet in a shed…
I don’t think “toaster fridge” is an apt analogy for a tablet-PC hybrid. After all, a toaster and a fridge do two different, almost opposite things. One preserves food by cooling it, the other bakes it by heating it. Clearly, it makes little sense to try to combine these two things.
A tablet and a PC, on the other hand, do the same things in a different form factor. Both play games, have web browsers, run apps, show movies, and so on. Both have screens and require some sort of text input and pointing input. Both fulfil the same kinds of needs in their owners’ lives.
Tablets are better at some things, and PCs are better at others. But generally, they do the same things. It’s not clear to me that Gates isn’t right on a fundamental level: iPads would be better if they were a bit more PC-like. For example, iPads clearly need a better way of moving data and documents between individual apps.
I don’t think Windows 8 does a particularly good job at splitting the difference. But then again, this is Microsoft’s first attempt at it. Presumably, it’ll only take two more attempts for them to do an acceptable job 🙂
Of course, Apple won’t stand still, either.
I’ll also note one other thing: Apple’s original launch lineup for the iPad included Pages and Numbers. Apple probably expected a lot of people to use iPads for these kinds of PC-like productivity tasks. It seems that, at least for now, iPad usage is quite different from what Apple originally thought. But I don’t think this is because people don’t want to use their iPads to write letters. I think it’s because the iPad (as it exists right now) is a poor tool for this kind of task, compared to a desktop PC.
“It seems that, at least for now, iPad usage is quite different from what Apple originally thought.”
My reading is that Apple had no idea what the iPad would be, but that it wanted to present it as more than a mere consumption platform, hence releasing iWork apps as a pointer to developers regarding what’s possible. I see people increasingly making do with tablets for all kinds of tasks they’d have previously used a PC for, and, more interestingly, others using them for quite advanced work (music production, vector and bitmap artwork, schoolwork). Gates seems obsessed with the notion that without Office, no-one can survive, and without a ‘full’ PC OS available, a tablet isn’t good enough.
I’d say iOS has some serious shortcomings, not least in the abysmal manner in which it deals with documents (app silos are one thing, but you should be able to send a document to another app and have that send it back post-edit, and Apple should be smart enough to make this work), but I remain unconvinced welding a desktop OS to a tablet is the way to go.
I don’t think that’s Microsoft’s problem. After all, iOS’s code is a branched Mac OS X, too. And nobody seems to be complaining that Windows Phone 8 is technically based on Microsoft’s desktop OS. Anyway, wouldn’t it be nice if you could use a mouse on your iPad when it is sitting on your desk and you’re typing with a Bluetooth keyboard?
Microsoft’s problem is that they have hundreds of millions of existing customers who react really badly to any visible change that Microsoft makes. So instead of coming up with a great UI that works on desktops and tablets, they come up with a half-assed one, and by the way, if you click on that blue icon there, you’re back on your familiar desktop, but without the Start button, and now apps can either run on the desktop or they can run in the other environment, and also, there are two versions of IE, one for each environment, we hope everybody is happy now.
So I think Microsoft’s problem isn’t that they’re attempting to create an OS that runs on desktops and tablets. I think their problem is that they’re too afraid of their existing customers, who, in turn, are very afraid of any kind of change. Microsoft’s problem is that they’re trying to appease their existing customers too much.
I think Microsoft also wanted to have its cake and eat it, and was petrified of the prospect of moving any users to a new platform. iOS is branched from OS X, and although the two share certain concepts, they aren’t that similar from a user standpoint. One can fairly easily port between the two, but the UX will be dreadful without considerable work.
Microsoft’s response has been a hodge-podge, presumably in part to try to say “hey, this is a bit like an iPad, but you can also run the normal version of Office you love” (for a given value of ‘love’). I wonder whether Microsoft would have been better off following a similar path to Apple, moving Metro to tablets really rapidly and creating a great touch-based platform that has apps that work well with existing PC ones but that aren’t identical.
Perhaps I’m being naïve in thinking that could have worked—as you say, Microsoft has many customers scared of change—but “here’s a great system that works nicely with what you have” seems a better bet than screaming that the iPad is rubbish when people are flocking to it, and gradually teaching people Office isn’t always necessary.
Looking back, I realize that my “iOS is based on OS X” argument was a poor argument, poorly made.
I have one other thought, though:
Going in one direction, this is plainly true. Mac apps would not work well on an iPad. But the other direction might be less clear-cut. Mac apps are becoming more iOS-like, the OS itself is adopting ideas from iOS — and it’s generally for the better.
Mac OS X is confusing to most people. It should be simplified. Window management should be easier, the hierarchical file system should not be how people manage their documents, on-screen elements like buttons, text, and menus in general are way too small (they’ve gradually become smaller as screen resolution has increased), applications tend to hide features inside deep hierarchical menus and dozens of palettes, and so on.
(All of this applies to Windows, too.)
It’s not just that the iPad should behave a bit more like a Mac, it’s also that the Mac should behave a lot more like an iPad, and Mac apps should behave more like iOS apps.
Whether the two can meet somewhere in the middle remains to be seen, but I think it’s probable. One could imagine how an application like, say, Sparrow would work on a variety of different devices, subtly adapting itself to screen size and input method.