Soft Arts

In which our hero gives up and embarks on a total rant

2002-2008

Microsoft tries to get traction with the tablet PC, and never really scores a solid hit.

Apple works quietly on a tablet of their own, releasing a spinoff product called ‘iPhone’ in 2007.

2009

Buzz about Apple’s upcoming tablet computer comes to a head. Research targets “iSlate” as a likely product name. Hand-made mock ups showing what the tablet might look like begin cropping up all over the internet. People familiar with Apple’s track record predict yet another amazing game changer. Finally, the excitement rises to a fever pitch on December 23rd when Apple announces a special media event scheduled for late January. Gene Munster, Piper Jaffray’s Senior Analyst, predicts a 75% chance that the long-awaited Apple tablet will be announced at the event.

2010

January 6th: Ballmer Tries to Shit in the Punch Bowl

Like a leering fratboy announcing that he has just returned from roofie-ing and anally violating your significant other, Steve Ballmer appears at the CES keynote to announce an Microsoft/HP tablet collaborative effort known as the Slate.

It’s very hard to interpret this as anything other than an unbelievably boorish dick move: the timing and choice of name were almost certainly chosen to steal Apple’s thunder. Even before it happened, the New York Times expressed concern over the announcement, saying “It could be one of Steve Ballmer’s riskiest trade-show moves in years…the last thing Mr. Ballmer wants to hold up is a me-too device.”

Life goes on

All the Slate announcement does is give Ballmer a chance to show his idiocy: the iPad ships, blasting past all predicted sales records, HP acquires Palm, announcing that the Slate will run a variant of WebOS instead of Windows, and Microsoft’s Kin is pulled after only 48 days on the market due to abysmal sales.

The present: Ballmer responds with more idiocy

Ballmer, finally, has acknowledged that Apple has handed Microsoft their collective asses on a decorative platter, but is blindly pushing forward with his only strategy: Windows is their answer to everything.

Apple has done an interesting job. They’ve sold more than I’d like them to sell. We think about that. So it’s our job to say, we have got to make things happen. Just like we made things happen with netbooks, we have to do that with Slates.

This means that the new plan is to keep making substandard shit and throw more money at hardware vendors and marketing companies. Unfortunately, Ballmer’s plan does not actually involve settling down for the long haul and making something good:

We’re coming full guns. The operating system is called Windows.

This is the kind of brash flag waving that ruined the Kin (management insisted that it had to run a Windows operating system and ended up saddling it with Windows CE).

They shoot horses, don’t they?

After almost 10 years of dicking around with tablet PCs on their own, Microsoft has been cut down by the iPad in a single, swift, practiced stroke. Microsoft’s mobile efforts are fucked. They do not understand Apple, they are only just beginning to really understand how fucked they are, and they are not changing their strategy for dealing with them.

Charitable individuals might consider this to be madness, but historical evidence points to stupidity as the real culprit. My advice to Microsoft’s board of directors: do not let Ballmer speak publicly on behalf of the company any further and, ideally, force him to step down as CEO as soon as possible.