When the build conference keynote's over, watch the recording. I think the killer feature will be having every device you pick up be tailored to you. When you hand it to your wife, it's tailored to her... just by signing in with a Windows Live ID instead of a local user/password. Your contacts, e-mail, calendar, photos, files, apps, desktop, bookmarks, individual app settings -- it will all be there on whatever device you pick up, whether it's a tablet, a phone, a desktop PC, your work PC. Windows 8 uses Microsoft's cloud to bust through firewalls on every end to connect every device you touch.
That's my biggest complaint about the iPad: I can't fully share my ipad with my girlfriend since it is tied to my email accounts, contacts, calendar etc. It makes sense that a phone is tied to one person, but this iOS limitation is annoying -- especially when traveling.
If this really proved to be a differentiating feature, would it really take Apple more than a month or two to provide user switching? They already have it in OSX.
the status quo may not stay the status quo for long... especially with people slowly admitting that, at least for moms and grandmas, tablets may be much more in line with their needs.
Paul Graham was even just on stage talking about how Microsoft likely doesn't see how bad its going to get for them...
PG stays in his wonderland where Microsoft is no longer relevant. He said that a few years ago already. Microsoft still made billions of dollars selling windows in those years.
Same is the case with the surveys above. Everybody wanted to buy an iphone until android came along...
The interesting thing is that consumer surveys still show more people want to buy iPhones. But they walk out of stores with considerably more Android phones than iPhones.
Can you really imagine an average consumer being impressed that a tablet, identical in almost every way to the Android next to it, is running Windows? If not, it's really time to rethink Windows' dominant consumer marketshare.
No, but I can imagine an average consumer being happy that the device can run the copy of Home Landscape Architect 3D Pro Plus 2007 that they bought a few years back, work with their old Quicken data, and play that copy of Hoyle Card Games they have lying around.
People have accumulated stuff that runs on their PCs. Most people who buy iPads keep around their computer to do at least a few things, even if they don't use it very much. The sales pitch on a Win 8 tablet is that it docks to your desk, replaces your PC for everything, and you can still pick it up and carry it everywhere like an iPad.
can run the copy of Home Landscape Architect 3D Pro Plus 2007
I'll be impressed if they can pull that off and still make it so I can carry it around like an iPad.
What I fear, however, is that they'll make this a hybrid that fails in both scenarios: not powerful enough to handle "3D PRo Plus 2007", yet too power hungry to let my wife watch 5 episodes of Desperate Housewives back to back.
Until I see production hardware, I'm on the fence.
I'd be impressed if their copy of Home Landscape Architect 3D Pro Plus 2007 was even remotely usable with a touch interface it wasn't designed to support.
If they pull this off, it will be dream come true. All will then boil down to 2 device that you carry, your windows phone and a protable awesome tablet cum pc.
I think it will. Now show me a PC with that spec with the form factor and battery life - i.e. usage pattern - of an iPad. Your ARM tablet wont be able to run legacy software. Your x86 tablet wont have 12 hours of battery life and be thin and cool (in both senses of the word).
As a user it's a tradeoff. May be the x86 tablet won't have 12 hours battery life while still being as thin as the iPad but maybe I can trade a few hours of battery life or a few mm of thickness to get my legacy quicken app running on my tablet. What is cool is that as an end user I will have a choice to go either way.
Processors are getting better with each passing day. I don't think we are too far off from seeing x86 on a thin PC still getting a good battery life.
When you try to everything you end up doing nothing well. Zero percent of legacy Windows software was designed with touch in mind. The fact that Windows 8 will try and probably fail at letting people run this kind of software on a tablet shows me that the writing is on the wall.
When you try to everything you end up doing nothing well.
That's weird... PCs (Mac, Linux, Windows, etc...) have done this for the past 20+ years and a pretty good job of it.
Everyone loves to talk about the demise of the PC, but virtually everyone who has seen the ultrabooks has told me they want one. The only ones who don't are those that say, "Well I already have a MacBook Air". So, sure the Apple 5% may not continue down the PC path, but I think we're looking at a PC rennaisance. And in large part due to Apple.
Except we've already tried that. With pretty much every tablet that was ever made before the iPad. How many times are people going to go "but wait, mine is... a whole computer!" before they realize consumers don't want this? The reason the iPad won was because it wasn't a computer. It was a device, an appliance.
The google ecosystem is headed the same way. Chrome + Android + Amazon MP3 gives me all that stuff anywhere I log in (including windows / mac / linux workstations). I assume Google Music will do the same, which would put all those services under one roof and one login.
I think it is more than iCloud. it is making your profile, your personalization and your content roaming. In case of iCloud, it is only the content if i am not wrong.
MobileMe has been doing settings and contact and such for a while now. It's buggy, mind you, but all of that functionality is going to iCloud.
You buy a new iPhone, login to iCloud, and it pulls all your settings over, configures your mail client, calendar, installs your apps, and downloads your music. You add a contact on your phone, it goes to your MacBook and iPad, etc.
