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by deveac 4936 days ago
>Ballmer had been frustrated by Sinofsky before. Microsoft partners apparently had a reference design for tablet hardware ready in time for Windows 7. Sources tell us that Sinofsky refused to add support for it in Windows 7. Whether it would have been successful is hard to gauge, but it would have put Microsoft in the tablet market several years earlier, and possibly around the same time as Apple’s original iPad.

I would love to just catch a quick glimpse of the Universe in which this is NOT 100% Ballmer's fault. It must truly be full of fascinating things to see.
1 comments
Zigurd 4936 days ago
This is a bit of revisionism. Windows tablets, and tablet support in Windows, have been around since Windows XP. It was unsuccessful every time it was tried.

Saying "no" to tablet support was, in light of Microsoft's experience with tablets, the right thing to do.

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kabdib 4936 days ago
Yeah, but all the tablets were crappy. They weren't what a tablet needed to be to succeed, which unfortunately really means "ditch a lot of Windows." At MS this is heresy and is not tolerated.

Xbox managed to ship a non-Windows-based product because they were nearly completely isolated during the product's inception. (Yes, the Xbox kernel is largely Win2000, but with a LOT of stuff ripped out).

I don't know how WinCE succeeded at all. Microsoft would have been better off if it hadn't, and something better had come along. Lordy, what a pile...

In summary: At MS, you are either (a) Windows, and shipping something probably inappropriate for your users, or (b) playing a political game where users come second, or (c) isolating yourself from the rest of the company, if you can swing it.

MS needs to fix it's "Windows everywhere" mindset.

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deveac 4935 days ago
>Saying "no" to tablet support was, in light of Microsoft's experience with tablets, the right thing to do.

The point is that the failure of MS to bring a viable tablet to market cannot be painted as any single exec's fault over Ballmer. I was responding to the article's accusation of Ballmer's frustration at being told no (fair or not, I can't say). The bottom line is that the buck stopped with Ballmer, and if he was frustrated at being told "no", then even if "no" was the correct business decision at the time, the reason it was is the fault of Ballmer.

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