Microsoft

The cost of Microsoft’s decision to abandon Intel on the Surface 2

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This article gave me a new perspective on the Surface 2. The author does a side-by-side comparison against the Asus T100, which runs Windows 8.1, something the Surface 2 cannot.

Over the past week, I’ve had the fortune to play with both Microsoft’s Surface 2 and the Asus T100 Transformer Book. These are very similar devices — convertible laptops with detachable keyboards — except for one big and fundamentally life-altering difference: Where the Surface 2 is powered by Nvidia’s ARM-based Tegra 4 SoC, the Transformer Book has Intel’s x86 Bay Trail under the hood. As a result, while the Surface 2 runs Windows RT, the T100 runs full Windows 8.1. Yes, every program and game that you use on your Windows desktop PC also works on the T100. Steam works on the T100. Team Fortress 2 works on the T100. Photoshop works (surprisingly well!) on the T100.

A common selling point of the Surface 2 vs the iPad is the fact that you can have the desktop experience on the go, as opposed to the desktop/tablet model the Microsoft marketing folks assail. This is a bit of a crack in that facade.

Microsoft’s Frank Shaw calls out Apple and the Reality Distortion Field

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I feel compelled to add to John Gruber’s take on Frank Shaw’s blog post. I think John is being too charitable.

Frank starts with some twisty little prose, criticizing Apple for giving away iWork with all new iOS devices:

Surface and Surface 2 both include Office, the world’s most popular, most powerful productivity software for free and are priced below both the iPad 2 and iPad Air respectively. Making Apple’s decision to build the price of their less popular and less powerful iWork into their tablets not a very big (or very good) deal.

I am not a fan of snark, and this was snarky. Frank didn’t say, “throw in the iWork apps for free”, which is what happened. Instead, he implies that Apple raised the price of the iPad so that us hapless customers have no choice but to pay for something we don’t want. That might be considered true if the price of the iPad went up, even one penny. But the iPad Air added a bunch of new features, found a way to slim down significantly, and kept the price the same. Oh, and, we’ll throw in our productivity apps, too.

There was no decision to build the price into their tablets. That’s just snark.

And so it’s not surprising that we see other folks now talking about how much “work” you can get done on their devices. Adding watered down productivity apps. Bolting on aftermarket input devices. All in an effort to convince people that their entertainment devices are really work machines.

In that spirit, Apple announced yesterday that they were dropping their fees on their “iWork” suite of apps. Now, since iWork has never gotten much traction, and was already priced like an afterthought, it’s hardly that surprising or significant a move. And it doesn’t change the fact that it’s much harder to get work done on a device that lacks precision input and a desktop for true side-by-side multitasking.

Really Frank? How many tablets in the world have Word on them? How many have Pages? I would wager that any iPad productivity app will have more “traction” than any comparable Surface app.

And I use my iPad every single day, all without a single bolted on aftermarket input device, just the ones I was born with.

As to precision, I would love to see a side by side comparison of the iPad and Surface touch precision. I can’t imagine the Surface even coming close. Yeesh.

Microsoft’s $7.2 billion Nokia bet not luring apps

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Uh-oh.

Consider Tommy Palm and Jeff Smith. Palm, who oversees development at smartphone-game maker King.com, and Smith, who runs music-application maker Smule Inc., have long avoided building apps for devices using Microsoft’s Windows Phone software. Closer ties with Nokia haven’t swayed them. Both say even after the acquisition closes, Microsoft still won’t have enough users to make it worth the time and money.

You could see this coming a mile away, but still, uh-oh.

Reinventing Microsoft

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Big days of change are clearly ahead for Microsoft. The Board of Directors has some big decisions to make as the largest activist investors are applying pressure to see their particular agenda enacted.

The main issue is that Ballmer himself is leaving Microsoft in the next 12 months — he offered a tearful goodbye to employees at last week’s annual companywide meeting — and finding a new CEO to execute such a dramatic shift in the company’s strategy while maintaining its existing 16 billion-dollar businesses will be no easy task.

That task has been made substantially more difficult in recent days by activist investors — reports surfaced last week that a group made up of “three of the top 20 investors” was pushing for Ford CEO Alan Mulally to take over the top spot, and yesterday news leaked that Microsoft’s board was seriously considering him. At the same time, “three of the top 20 investors” were also credited yesterday with pushing to remove Bill Gates from the Microsoft board, which he currently chairs. That would include his removal from the CEO search committee, which is presumably moving forward on the Mulally recommendation at the same time. None of that feels particularly suited to a smooth transition.

Every time I hear someone complaining about Apple’s lack of innovation or pending doom or the crime of having too much cash, I just think about Microsoft, Dell, and Blackberry and thank heavens for Tim Cook and the rest of the team.

Ballmer’s last stand

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Steve Ballmer took the stage last night for his final annual employees meeting.

He departed to the strains of Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” the song played at Microsoft’s first employee meeting in 1983, followed by “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” from the finale of “Dirty Dancing,” getting a standing ovation from the 13,000 or so Microsoft full-time employees in attendance.

“We have unbelievable potential in front of us, we have an unbelievable destiny,” said a visibly moved Ballmer, reusing a quote from the 1983 meeting. “Only our company and a handful of others are poised to write the future,” he continued. “We’re going to think big, we’re going to bet big.”

That’s just so Ballmer. I find his popularity mystifying. Watching the end of an era.