My brother Layne stirs up the MID vs UMPC debate.
A couple of points: There are Tablet PC and UMPC evangelists at Microsoft. They just appear to be spread out. I think that happened naturally as more and more people within Microsoft adopted Tablet for their own use. But more so, there are some key people that believe just as strongly today about the Tablet PC as they ever have, such as Bert Keeley. There are many others.
Now in terms of Intel, I agree with commenter Chuck, Intel has been focusing on "downgraded" processors in large part to conserve power. Processor speeds have been going the wrong way for us Vista folks. If I understand the verbiage correctly from Intel's Developer Forum (IDF) there will be faster processors down the road, but for now I'm not sure if Vista runs on the current generation. I'm a bit confused. Intel is promoting Ubuntu on these platforms and it looks to me like Vista may be "supported" later. I can't quite tell. My guess is that XP would work fine, so I'm unsure why Intel didn't show that. Either way, it's going to take more than a few months to get Ubuntu up to mobile speed. I bet the same thing could be done to XP and would be a better overall product. How hard it is to bring in a new shell and fix a handful of overly large dialogs? I can guess why Microsoft wouldn't be for this, but in light of the MID (sub-UMPC) market going Linux (courtesy of Intel) I don't see that Microsoft has a choice. Windows CE isn't going to cut it and Embedded isn't either. These need to be full OS's. That's the beauty. That's the innovation. Of course, if Microsoft doesn't want to play along, I guess Intel had no other choice but to go with Linux.
Finally, Microsoft marketing takes a hit quite a bit of the time. They've tried, but the effort has been mediocre at best. I think it had a lot to do with marketing timing--not just marketing. When the Tablets first came out the hardware channel was changing significantly. The reseller channel lagged and was crippled by direct sales from the OEMs. And the OEMs had little insensitive to sell a niche product. Sure they would if the market pulled it through, but that wasn't going to happen with all of the negative online commentary that occurred in large part not because of the Tablet per se, but the transition to notebooks. Centrino helped and now notebooks are more accepted and the Tablet would do much better today if it were released. I'm convinced if Tablet PCs were launched today you wouldn't see endless Slashdot or Digg commentary about how heavy they are, how overpriced for its size, how the battery life is too short---because ALL of these issues impact ALL notebooks. People understand the issues better. Now that being said, most Tablets and UMPCs are still overpriced to me, but that's just me.
Oh, and one more thing, I do shed a tear each time I see an iPod Nano commercial on TV. That could have been a Tablet PC or UMPC commercial.


Incremental Blogger