Bill Gates: iPad is OK, but what Apple really needs is a SURFACE
Still has his old knack for branding
Bill Gates foresees a future without PCs or tablets - where there are only "Surface-like devices" - he told PBS chat show host Charlie Rose last night.
Evangelising about the new Microsoft tablet – Surface – Gates sketched out his vision for a world where everyone is using the Surface, saying that the device which promises to combine the PC's value as a creative tool with the tablet's strengths as a consumption device, will "change the rules".
In the future, there will only be one
Quizzed as to whether the Surface would cannibalise the market for the PCs - he said that it was possible people would no longer even think about PCs after the Surface comes out:
Whatever you call Surface, they will want to have it. We'll call it a Windows device. When you have two device categories and merge them together, there's always the question of which name survives. Because the PC has been the super-seller ... it has a keyboard and a breadth of rich inputs.. maybe we'll call them PCs.
Or maybe we need a new term: maybe we'll just called them 'Surface-like devices'.
Gates also talked about his "lost tablet" in the interview – the touch screen device he rejected because it had no keyboard when Microsoft's engineers presented it to him in 1998 – and attributed Steve Jobs's success with the iPad to passing a certain critical mass.
You can have something that is almost good enough, that is forgotten for all time, but you can have something that just crosses that threshold, even though it came later and goes gigantic.
But he did admit that iPads were good:
He did some things better than I did. His timing, the engineering work, the package that was put together. The tablets we had done before weren't as thin, weren't as attractive as what came along.
Prodded over whether Apple would have to play catch-up with Microsoft once the Surface goes live, Gates was a little circumspect.
I think it's premature to act like that's been decided in the marketplace. I certainly think that's a strong possibility and my bias is that yes, this is a seminal event of taking the best of the two worlds.
It's a wonderful thing and I can't wait till it's shipping.
Gates also spoke about the drive to succeed, saying that it takes a type of fanaticism to build an Apple, a Microsoft or Facebook.
It's when you work day and night and don't worry about the possibility of failure. Every setback is just a reason to work a little bit harder and you really know what you're trying to achieve.
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COMMENTS
Slate?
I seem to remember a sweaty gibbon leaping round telling us the same about slates:
Change "slate" for "surface" and you've pretty much got a ready made statement:
"You'll see new slates with Windows on them. You'll see them this Christmas," he told an audience of students, staff and journalists at the London School of Economics.
"Certainly we have done work around the tablet as both a productivity device and a consumption device," he said.
Re: Mmmm...
What's wrong with that?
Anyway tally-ho, I'm just off to the shops in my 'Carriage-like-device'.
You have to laugh..........
Its sad to see someone who had such an impact on the world with the software his company produced (even if a lot of it was bought in and improved) doing his best to sale something that is too late, will be too expensive compared to the opposition and doesn't have the wow factor of the ipad for many consumers.
Now Google have bought Quickoffice I forsee it being updated and included in a future update to Android ICS and Jelly Bean.
Who will want to spend maybe 3 times as much for a windows machine when then can get a nice Android one that will do everything they want out the box without having the bloatware that is windows Office.
As too the surface replacing the PC, I'll have some of what he's smoking please
Re: Does anyone care what Bill thinks anymore?
>> Now, I know if it wasn't MS it would have been someone else,
Who?
The PC market of the late seventies and early eighties was fractured in a dozen different ways. Incompatible hardware. Incompatible software.
The two unifying forces were MBASIC (and other Microsoft programming languages) cross-platform --- and in the business world CP/M.
What Microsoft delivered to IBM was a serviceable 16 bit CP/M clone. The Holy Grail for every hacker who wanted an entry into the 16 bit sweepstakes.
MSDOS at retail was $50. 1/5 the price of CP/M-86, It broke the tightly woven bond between OEM hardware and OEM software that is Apple's model to this day,
The MSDOS PC was a viable commercial product before the cloning of the IBM PC BIOS.
The modular design of the IBM PC and PC compatible meant that the tech would advance rapidly and that incremental upgrades of your system would be both attractive and affordable.
He's trying real hard to sell something that is still on fantasy island.
