Rumor: Microsoft showing Windows 8 Tablet UI at AllThingsD

[TheSideshow]

The company will demonstrate Windows Phone 7.5 tomorrow (May 24th), and is now expected to reveal the secret tablet UI of Windows 8 next week at the D: All Things Digital conference where the head of Windows and Windows Live Steven Sinofsky will be presenting.

Winrumors suggests that Windows 8 for tablets may be released much earlier than Desktop Windows 8, which should allow Microsoft to get into the game much sooner than the normal desktop OS cycle would normally allow.

The Windows 8 tablet UI is expected to be heavily inspired by Windows Phone 7, with heavy usage of the Metro paradigm.


http://microsoft-news.com/windows-8-tablet-ui-to-be-demonstrated-next-week-at-allthingsd-conference/

 

[KingCrimson]

MSFT would have been amiss if they didn't address a tablet version of WP7 soon. Obviously they are on the ball. I think they finally have the architecture in place with lots of re-usable model components that they can re-skin to whatever their needs are.

 

[roadbloc]

Obviously they are on the ball.

Debatable I'm afraid. If they were on the ball, they wouldn't be playing catchup now. However, the direction they are going at the moment looks promising to say the least.

 

[*LTD*]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 4_2 like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C134b Safari/6533.18.5)

MSFT would have been amiss if they didn't address a tablet version of WP7 soon. Obviously they are on the ball. I think they finally have the architecture in place with lots of re-usable model components that they can re-skin to whatever their needs are.

They're on the ball? With what? A lackluster smartphone attempt that hardly anyone cares about, or a Windows tablet running an OS that hardly anyone cares about released over a year late?

An important component of success is actually *selling* your product. All they have at the moment are very low WP7 sales, and the hope against hope that consumers will still care sometime in 2012, when Android and iOS products are full-steam ahead.

What is particularly amusing is that the Nokia announcement essentially took all the wind out of MS' entire WP7 strategy. Everything until the Nokia WP7 rollout (if it'll ever happen) is a stopgap measure to staunch the share bleed. But Mango will fix everything! They promise! All it takes to magically open consumers' eyes is an update. Nothing more. Right.

There isn't even a firm deadline for a 2012 rollout. We don't even know for certain whether it's spring or summer or what.

You can add ligntsaber functionality into Mango and you'll still end up with a lemon. It won't make any difference. Because MS employed their classic strategy - the Zune strategy - to the one market which will never accommodate it. And we're already seeing the fallout.

Now they're re-branding Zune into . . . wait for it . . . Windows Live Zune. Yeah, you read that right. Are you glad to see nothing at all has changed at MS?

But what did you expect? That MS will somehow arrive late and change everything against an established, developed, wildly successful Apple product? Really?? Especially when the *other* commodity vendor (Google) took MS' seat months ago?

http://www.neowin.net/news/rumour-zune-services-to-be-split-up-and-rebranded

If MS were "on the ball", they would have done what Apple did over the past decade. But that's impossible. Because Ballmer can't even begin to understand the kind of culture and corporate mindset required to be that kind of innovator.

 

[TheSideshow]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 4_2 like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C134b Safari/6533.18.5)
Of topic post by *LTD*

Can you stay on topic?

All you ever do is post strawman fallacies in every thread. Only fools fall for it.

 

[roadbloc]

...

Can you not post anything without praising Apple an bashing anyone who isn't?

 

[*LTD*]

Can you stay on topic?

All you ever do is post strawman fallacies in every thread. Only fools fall for it.

Use WP7, Windows 8 Zune tablet (or whatever they'll call it) and Zune interchangeably. It's the same strategy at play.

 

[Rodimus Prime]

Can you stay on topic?

All you ever do is post strawman fallacies in every thread. Only fools fall for it.

I say just report him for trolling. It was pretty nice after the mods put him in Time out for a while for trollings. He behaved pretty well for a while but it is starting to look like he is going back to his old ways.. that or do not respond to him.

 

[KingCrimson]

What I'm a bit confused about is there going to be a different code-base for Windows 8 Tablet vs Windows 8 Desktop? Or is it a different UI layer over the same OS? That will be key for quality & robustness over time.

 

[*LTD*]

I say just report him for trolling.

Except it isn't trolling.

I'm talking about market realities here and highlighting what is very, very wrong at MS. The interesting thing is, is that what's going on at MS isn't actually exclusive to MS. It's endemic to the industry at large. There's either a substantial lack of innovation, or there's a substantial failure to market innovation correctly. Sometimes you get both.

As for MS showing a Windows 8 tablet UI in the current market situation, what is the point? What is the point in showing it, when they should have debuted a decent tablet variation *months ago.* This is MS, right? The biggest R&D budget. Why does it take forever for this dinosaur to move?? What's the holdup? If they can't or won't be first (a problem), can they at least not be ridiculously late (much bigger problem)? This tendency to let others run away with the game is absolutely destructive. This isn't the PC market of the 80s. We already have the major players quite entrenched early on. Smartphones aren't curiosities or novelties where not every household has one and the field is wide open. There's some room to move in the tablet market, but Apple's already established as #1 with a product that is absolutely fantastic and enjoying unheard-of demand. We're already establishing the top list of players and the more any late entrant waits - the more they delay - the more difficult it will be to sell consumers on their platform. Especially when it isn't absolutely differentiated and game-changing. I'm talking about pulling off a June 2007. A total sea-change. Good luck.

Quite frankly, the concept that someone like MS - a perpetual late-comer with a product that's just "good enough" (which is *never* good enough) can enter this market at this stage with a proprietary, undifferentiated product at perhaps a lower price (or even worse, the same or higher) and somehow seriously impact a high-value, highly-differentiated product that's adored by consumers is absolutely delusional. There's just not enough there to draw the crowds.

 

[Liquorpuki]

If MS wants to compete with Apple, they should bring back the Courier.

Right now it seems like all the iPad clones are just competing with each other for leftovers while Apple is in some other universe.

 

[*LTD*]

If MS wants to compete with Apple, they should bring back the Courier.

It was just a concept video. That's all it ever was. HOWEVER, what we saw in that video was very, very cool. And a release of that device, around that time, would have been excellent timing.

 

[Liquorpuki]

It was just a concept video. That's all it ever was. HOWEVER, what we saw in that video was very, very cool. And a release of that device, around that time, would have been excellent timing.

I could still see a need for something like that nowadays, especially in the business world.

But companies lack foresight so that thing is dead.

 

[TheSideshow]

It was just a concept video. That's all it ever was. HOWEVER, what we saw in that video was very, very cool. And a release of that device, around that time, would have been excellent timing.

I agree it was only a concept, but those gestures and such are going to end up in Microsoft products eventually. Probably a few are going to come in Office 15/Windows 8.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

What I'm a bit confused about is there going to be a different code-base for Windows 8 Tablet vs Windows 8 Desktop? Or is it a different UI layer over the same OS? That will be key for quality & robustness over time.

They worked on WinMin for Windows Vista, and further progressed with WinMin for Windows 7, which was, basically, re-writing the Windows kernel to remove all backwards dependancies (eg a low level task requiring a higher level task to run).

If they finished this, then it's just a matter of selecting which components they want to include in the build, and hitting the "build" button. So yes I would assume the UI would just be a different UI over the same code base, but the code base is customized (although shared) per flavor of Windows.

 

[AppleScruff1]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 4_2 like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C134b Safari/6533.18.5)



They're on the ball? With what? A lackluster smartphone attempt that hardly anyone cares about, or a Windows tablet running an OS that hardly anyone cares about released over a year late?

An important component of success is actually *selling* your product. All they have at the moment are very low WP7 sales, and the hope against hope that consumers will still care sometime in 2012, when Android and iOS products are full-steam ahead.

What is particularly amusing is that the Nokia announcement essentially took all the wind out of MS' entire WP7 strategy. Everything until the Nokia WP7 rollout (if it'll ever happen) is a stopgap measure to staunch the share bleed. But Mango will fix everything! They promise! All it takes to magically open consumers' eyes is an update. Nothing more. Right.

There isn't even a firm deadline for a 2012 rollout. We don't even know for certain whether it's spring or summer or what.

You can add ligntsaber functionality into Mango and you'll still end up with a lemon. It won't make any difference. Because MS employed their classic strategy - the Zune strategy - to the one market which will never accommodate it. And we're already seeing the fallout.

Now they're re-branding Zune into . . . wait for it . . . Windows Live Zune. Yeah, you read that right. Are you glad to see nothing at all has changed at MS?

But what did you expect? That MS will somehow arrive late and change everything against an established, developed, wildly successful Apple product? Really?? Especially when the *other* commodity vendor (Google) took MS' seat months ago?

http://www.neowin.net/news/rumour-zune-services-to-be-split-up-and-rebranded

If MS were "on the ball", they would have done what Apple did over the past decade. But that's impossible. Because Ballmer can't even begin to understand the kind of culture and corporate mindset required to be that kind of innovator.

But are you on the ball? If Apple were on the ball, they'd have 90% of the pc market today.

 

[maflynn]

MSFT would have been amiss if they didn't address a tablet version of WP7 soon. Obviously they are on the ball. I think they finally have the architecture in place with lots of re-usable model components that they can re-skin to whatever their needs are.

I'm not quite sold on whether they're on the ball in terms of tablets. Using a full blown desktop OS for a tablet hasn't worked yet and they've tried for years. What we need to see (as consumers) is how windows 8 has been architected for tablets. Will win8 sport a more touch friendly UI? Will it jettison some of the APIs/services that are needed for desktops but not tablets, etc?

 

[*LTD*]

But are you on the ball? If Apple were on the ball, they'd have 90% of the pc market today.

Apple's penalty for losing the PC war in the 1990s is that they're now the most profitable PC maker in the world. Mac sales growth has outpaced the industry for 20 consecutive quarters. As a result, the OS X software market is incredibly vibrant and experiencing explosive growth.

Closed licensing of OS X was the right decision - no question, both for ensuring a superior user experience and for keeping OS X out of the hands of cheap box-assemblers. Both are related, of course.

In light of Apple's transition to mobile and the development of iOS (which is now spreading to Macs with Lion), Apple has in fact won the PC war by fighting an entirely different set of battles.

 

[OllyW]

Can you not post anything without praising Apple an bashing anyone who isn't?

What a dumb question.

 

[Steve121178]

Apple has in fact won the PC war by fighting an entirely different set of battles.

This guy is a complete clownshoe

 

[*LTD*]

Can you not post anything without praising Apple an bashing anyone who isn't?

Because there is something behind every piece of news: implications, trends, underlying issues. Each news update about a topic continues to speak to these underlying issues.

I don't tend to divorce bullet-point descriptions of new features, for example, from their wider context.

Someone tells us about MS showing a Windows 8 UI, and then stops right there. I continue to move forward with it and situate it within the current market circumstances, what MS has done before, why they're showing it off *now* as opposed to why they didn't before, and what this means for the market over the next few months.

Don't just report a UI showcase by MS. Put it into perspective.

 

[Huntn]

They're on the ball? With what?

Within the last year they opened a Microsoft Store right across the hall from the Apple Store in the Mall of America, Bloomington, Mn. It's called "catch me if you can". It's 3 times as big, but the Apple Store seems to have 3 times as many customers in it, always.

 

[Steve121178]

Within the last year they opened a Microsoft Store right across the hall from the Apple Store in the Mall of America, Bloomington, Mn. It's called "catch me if you can". It's 3 times as big, but the Apple Store seems to have 3 times as many customers in it, always.

Microsoft is primarily a software company. People can just buy and download what they want instead of going to a physical store.

 

[maflynn]

Microsoft is primarily a software company. People can just buy and download what they want instead of going to a physical store.

That and Microsoft's offerings are available through more distribution channels.

Apple had to go the retail route because the number of authorized apple resellers were shrinking and few other retail outlets were carrying apple products.

In MS's case its questionable why they're going this route as they risk impacting their business partners and they may not recoup the start up costs.

for instance, I can buy Office for Mac family pack from MS for 150 or I can buy it from amazon for 124. Which do you think I'm going to buy it from.

 

[AppleScruff1]

This guy is a complete clownshoe

Clownshoe isn't the word for it. If Jobs stops quick, he'll break his nose.