Microsoft's Approach To Battling the iPad In the Workplace 249
An anonymous reader writes "Even though Microsoft's public stance, when asked about the impact of Apple's slate is 'iPad? What iPad?', the Redmondians are preparing the company's partners for battle in 2011. Microsoft is making available to its reseller partners marketing collateral to help them defend against the iPad's encroachment into the enterprise market. I had a chance to check out a PowerPoint dated December 2010 on 'Microsoft Commercial Slate PCs' that the company is offering to its partners to help them explain Microsoft's slate strategy to business users." Besides the iPad, there are also the raft of tablets (available and upcoming) running Android, and Blackberry's QNX tablet that Microsoft will have to sell past.
I'm sure it will be as successful as the W7 Phone (Score:5, Insightful)
MS stock has been flatlining the past decade. Ballmer is a dog, chasing another car/successful_product instead of innovating on their own.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Oh, Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
I know you employ some brilliant, passionate, rock star developers. You could probably crush your competitors, if only you didn't move so conservatively at a slug's pace. Trim some of that management, get rid of the red tape, and use your devs!
Re:one problem: (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's approach to battling the iPad is the same as it was for battling the iPod and the iPhone - show up a day late and a dollar short, with an inferior product, and then attempt to leverage what assets they have in terms of vendor lock-in to pry their way in.
Oh well - some more of those lame "to the cloud" ad buys should help. (not)
Tech predictions = futile (Score:5, Insightful)
It may not be the best OS of the bunch, but the fact of the matter is that it will run on a whole host of hardware.
Which means very little by itself. Linux runs on lots of hardware but isn't remotely dominating the operating system market. There is more to it than that. It needs to run on the hardware people want and run the software people want and have a critical mass of users of those devices. Pulling all that off is no mean feat. Possible you will be right but you shouldn't be so certain.
Apple and RIM have lost in this respect, because there will be very little choice.
You are presuming two things. One, that people will care about choice in hardware. The iPod is a great example of a device that has dominated its market despite a multitude of alternative hardware choices available. Choice in hardware might not matter much at all. Two, that Apple & RIM need a monopoly to be successful. The iPhone is wildly profitable and popular and Apple is making a fortune even though there are plenty of other choices out there. The iPhone does not dominate the market the way the iPod does but you'd have a hard time arguing it isn't a successful product. Apple's strategy is a bit of a high wire act and they could easily screw it up but they've shown every reason to think they might succeed.
WebOS and Android will take the market because soon enough someone will be running it on a toaster.
My wife was just telling me the other day, "Why isn't our toaster web enabled? Isn't it about time someone did that?" [/sarcasm]
Re:I'm sure it will be as successful as the W7 Pho (Score:5, Insightful)
It has a presence, yes... but doing "just fine"? The iPhone and Androids each have more units in the channel than WP7 has in-channel and activated *combined*. This is in spite of the fact that WinMo (in various incarnations) have been for sale for (almost) a decade.
I don't know about you, but if I had a product that was universally panned for nearly a decade, and my latest, greatest attempt at rectifying that issue was met with a universal "meh"? I wouldn't exactly call it "doing just fine".
Re:I'm sure it will be as successful as the W7 Pho (Score:4, Insightful)
Their big selling point has always been Outlook/Exchange compatibility. Actually, that might well be the only real selling point they've ever had. The latest incarnation is an attempt to make their products "cool" so they would appeal to people who don't care about Outlook (read: people who purchase phones for themselves rather than receive them from their employer), and to catch up a bit on some of the corner business uses they didn't think of but could implement easily (including some which don't need implementing, as they can be done from anything with an Internet connection)
Anyway, I suspect that the enterprise slate market is Microsoft's for the taking once they deliver a working product. They're the only ones who can really do Outlook/Exchange integration, not to mention the rest of Office. I don't pretend to understand why so many people have such tremendous hard-ons for MS Office (I think that there are perfectly functional free and Free alternatives which are just as good at anything that isn't best done on far more intensive software anyway...), but the fact remains that few corporations are willing or able to just ditch it altogether, and unless your product is compatible it's unlikely to make much headway.
Re:Android will win on the tablet (Score:5, Insightful)
That is ridiculous. Lots of hardware doesn't matter. We're talking about a screen and a bezel you hold, with a generic ARM and flash storage and Wi-Fi/3G. Why would you need to switch from IPad for hardware reasons? They are the acknowledged design leader and also the price leader, just as in iPods, and they have the most hardware accessories and custom cases.
Everything happens in the software on a tablet. Having native C apps, desktop class PC apps, is a billion times more important than a variety of hardware that all runs the same small set of Java applets that only do Web-class functionality. Nobody but Apple has native C apps on ARM, and nobody has full-size apps except Apple.
We are talking about corporate here. iOS has deployment and security features that Android lacks. It has Xcode rapid development tools that Android lacks. Corporations can deploy their own apps wirelessly. Their users already know the iOS interface. Even if the users know Android 2, the tablet version 3 is different.
What you have to do is resist saying "Android" and tell me why I'm supposed to pay $799 for a Motorola iPad clone with 32GB and mini Java applets and no installed base and not even available yet when iPad 3G 32GB is $729 and has a full-range of native C apps and 17 million installed base and an upgraded version likely to ship before Motorola?
If you look at music players, it is 75% Apple, 10% Samsung, 15% everybody else. How does that relate to your theory that more hardware choices leads to dominating market share? The non-Apple 25% has hundreds of devices. Apple sells more iPod nano than that whole 25%. iPad is the "iPod PC" the components are very similar and you buy native C apps instead of music. So what has changed from the music player market that users are going to prefer Motorola this time?