Yostivanich

The mes­sage was clear: Microsoft still doesn’t under­stand why its Tablet PC con­cept has repeat­edly bombed over the best part of a decade. Apple sold more iPads in its first three months of avail­abil­ity than PC ven­dors sold Tablet PCs in the whole of last year; in fact, the num­ber of iPads sold in that period is likely to eclipse the num­ber of Tablet PCs sold both last year and this. But still the com­pany is per­se­ver­ing: stick a reg­u­lar PC oper­at­ing sys­tem on a lap­top, give it a touch­screen, and then take away the key­board and pixel-perfect point­ing device. Ballmer even reit­er­ated the company’s posi­tion: slates are just another PC form factor.

via Ars Tech­nica – Ballmer (and Microsoft) still doesn’t get the iPad. Yet another in the long story of why Apple wins in this mar­ket and Microsoft fails. The iPad isn’t just a com­puter scaled down. It’s not a scaled down ver­sion of Mac OSX either. The iPhone runs a fla­vor of Mac OSX that has been cus­tomized to fit the hard­ware. The iPad is more of a scaled up ver­sion of this rather than a scaled down ver­sion of the full Snow Leop­ard. This lends two things:

1. Touch works beau­ti­fully since touch is a first class inter­face on the iPhone.
2. Doing one thing at a time is already per­fected, great for an over­all slower and smaller machine than a nor­mal lap­top (ie. closer to a net­book or slate as Steve Ballmer calls them).