Bill Gates is wrong

Written by

From my latest column on Techpinions:

By trying to combine what people do on their PC with what they want to do on a tablet, Microsoft feels it is offering the best of both worlds.The problem with that, as I’ve said before, is that people interact differently with a tablet than they do a computer. So, in reality, you don’t get the best of both worlds, but rather a mishmash of each.



  • ttop

    “that people interact differently with a PC than they do a computer” should be “…differently with a tablet…”

  • Mistergreengenes

    I love how 80′s Bill and 90′s Ballmer think they have discovered something Apple hasn’t thought of. This idea of a “hybrid” was mulled and tossed 5 years ago by Apple. Can’t wait to see this unfold…maybe MS should buy RIM and build a Blackberry into this also..if I was a shareholder I’d be demanding a new CEO.

  • Lukas

    My dad’s number one problem with his iPad: no fully functional, 100% compatible version of Office. His number two problem: no easy way to do some simple crops on a bunch of pictures he took, zip them, attach them to a message along with the doc file of his article, and send everything to his paper’s editor.

    He’d love a Surface: it’s a tablet, but when he has to do actual work, it’s also a fully functional PC.

    I think Microsoft is on to something. I’m pretty sure my dad’s iPad will soon be replaced with a Windows 8 tablet.

    • http://twitter.com/Moeskido Moeskido

      “Actual work” for his use case.

    • Box of Cotton Swabs

      Snapseed does great on-the-fly image cropping and editing on iOS.

  • http://twitter.com/GrumpusNation James Baker

    “people interact differently with a tablet than they do a computer” should be “than they do a less-mobile computer”.

    And really, you missed the awesome demonstration of Office on Surface? How smoothly they crunched those numbers in Excel? Marked up that Word Doc? It was—oh, right…