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Mary-Jo Foley
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Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?

By | December 13, 2010, 3:37pm PST

Summary: The New York Times is reporting that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may show off some new slates and tablets from various PC partners at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2011 in January.

The New York Times is reporting that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may show off some new slates and tablets from various PC partners at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2011 in January.

Sounds like CES 2010 revisited, doesn’t it? Last year, the centerpiece of Ballmer’s keynote was an HP slate prototype (that ultimately emerged as a very different looking HP Slate 500 product aimed at business users).

Ballmer has said a lot about Windows slates this year, none of which seems to have impressed Wall Street or many consumers. He said slates are job number one at Microsoft and also said to expect the first “real” Windows-based iPad competitors to arrive some time in 2011, after Intel ships its Oak Trail processors. The Times says that new slates from Samsung and Dell may get some stage time. (Rumors of a Samsung Windows 7 slate were circulating in March of this year.)

The New York Times story throws one new tidbit into the mix, claiming that Ballmer might even show off a tablet running Windows 8 during his keynote.

As we know from a leaked slide deck from April 2010, Microsoft is making sure that Windows 8 will run well on slates.

But it’s very early days for Windows 8, which is not expected by many to be released until 2013. Microsoft still has not yet finished its internal Milestone 2 (M2) build, according to my sources. (That is expected to be completed by January or February, I hear.) Then there will be an M3 build (with coding to begin in late February) , and — some say — a public beta by Fall 2011. (PDC 2011, maybe?) In short, Windows 8 is not yet approaching the finish line. Or even the beta starting line.

The Windows team has been striving to maintain as much secrecy as possible about Windows 8. So a showing as early as January 2011 would be uncharacteristic and surprising. But it also might silence some of the continued criticism of Microsoft’s lack of a true answer to the iPad. So maybe the Windows team will be asked to break the mold… Still, I have to say if Microsoft does show off Windows 8 in January, I will be very surprised….

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Topics

Slate, CES 2011, Apple iPad, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft Corp., Times, Windows Team, Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Mary Jo has covered the tech industry for more than 25 years for a variety of publications and Web sites, and is a frequent guest on radio, TV and podcasts, speaking about all things Microsoft-related. She is the author of Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft plans to stay relevant in the post-Gates era (John Wiley & Sons, 2008).

Disclosure

Mary-Jo Foley

Freelance journalist/blogger Mary Jo Foley has nothing to disclose. WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). I do not own Microsoft stock or stock in any of its partners or competitors. I have no business ventures that are sponsored by/funded by Microsoft or any of its partners or competitors.

Biography

Mary-Jo Foley

Mary Jo Foley has covered the tech industry for 25 years for a variety of publications, including ZDNet, eWeek and Baseline. She has kept close tabs on Microsoft strategy, products and technologies for the past 10 years. In the late 1990s, she penned the award-winning "At The Evil Empire" column for ZDNet, and more recently the Microsoft Watch blog for Ziff Davis.

Got a tip? Send her an email with your rants, rumors, tips and tattles. Confidentiality guaranteed.

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RE: Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?
makrekdw59-24353623777168557025066799335354 10th Nov
cnnldb,good post!
View in thread
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They can do it.
Cylon Centurion 13th Dec 2010
If they can make something as powerful as Windows with the MetroUI, they have a winner.
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Fix yer typo dude...
i8thecat 13th Dec 2010
@Cylon Centurion 0005

You spelled it wrong... It's not spelled w-i-n-n-e-r...
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Right, it spelled
John Zern 14th Dec 2010
c-h-a-m-p-i-o-n, or s-u-c-c-e-s-s, or ....
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It's more like Intel showing off new ATOM
LBiege 13th Dec 2010
How well Win7Pad works out depends on the performance of new ATOM chips only.
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Window is not very powerful, but, it IS bloated. The problem is with the
DonnieBoy 13th Dec 2010
bloat, you need more processing power, more memory, and that makes Windows 7 based tablets more expensive and heavier, hotter, less battery life. Why do you think that iPad is so popular?
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A good portion of the iPad's popularity
Michael Alan Goff 13th Dec 2010
comes from Apple. If Microsoft were to release something like the iPad, you would hate it.
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That's not even good FUD anymore. Windows is not bloated, nor does it need
Johnny Vegas 13th Dec 2010
more processing power, nor memory. It will not make tablets more expensive, nor heavier, nor hotter. And it has much better power management than ios or android.

As far as the ipad being popular, that's because apple has effectively mastered marketing their products as hip to those shallow enough to value that above all else.
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RE: Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?
timiteh 14th Dec 2010
@goff256 and @Johnny Vegas
I perfectly agree with both of you that iPad ,and even iPhone to some extent, is popular because it is from Apple.
If it was from any other company people would find that it was too closed and too limited, but as it come from Apple people find that it is the 8th marvel of the world, go figure.
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FUD and you know it.
Cylon Centurion 14th Dec 2010
@DonnieBoy

"Window is not very powerful, but, it IS bloated. The problem is with the
bloat, you need more processing power, more memory, and that makes Windows 7 based tablets more expensive and heavier, hotter, less battery life. Why do you think that iPad is so popular? "

Tell that to the billions that own Win7 netbooks. They work just fine.
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Guys, extra processing power and memory costs. It sucks more energy causing
DonnieBoy Updated - 14th Dec 2010
more heat, need for a bigger battery, making the device heavier and hotter, and unless you put a really big battery making it even heavier, less battery life. Also, it requires at a minimum Atom, and say what you want, the mips per watt is much lower than for Arm and costs MORE. Oh, and you have to pay a Windows 7 licence!!!! All of this combined makes it more expensive. A triple whammy.
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Centurion, what do you expect from
John Zern 14th Dec 2010
@DonnieBoy, Android tablets were supposed to be the final death blow to MS, instead they just stick with as they did XBox, Kinect, Sharepoint, and take it to market.

His hopes of Google's world domination shattered, his google colored glasses fading.... happy
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What world are you living on Donnie?
Cylon Centurion 14th Dec 2010
"Guys, extra processing power and memory costs. It sucks more energy causing
more heat, need for a bigger battery, making the device heavier and hotter, and unless you put a really big battery making it even heavier, less battery life. Also, it requires at a minimum Atom, and say what you want, the mips per watt is much lower than for Arm and costs MORE. Oh, and you have to pay a Windows 7 licence!!!! All of this combined makes it more expensive. A triple whammy. "


Seriously, where have you been for like the past 10 years? Since when have laptops become more heavy, and hotter? Same with netbooks and slates? I didn't know they were heavy.
Those same machines can easily fit 2 GB's of RAM into them and Windows 7 is perfectly capable of running on an Atom.
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RE: Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?
PollyProteus 14th Dec 2010
@Cylon and John - You won't be changing Donnieboy's closed mind. He's so ABM that it's almost comical if it weren't so annoying. You should stop feeding the troll. Really. happy
  • Flagged
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Polly . . .
JLHenry 14th Dec 2010
I think they're just poking the monkey with a stick to see how mad he gets . . . .
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RE: Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?
Pete "athynz" Athens 14th Dec 2010
@DonnieBoy I'm calling bullsh1t on this:

Guys, extra processing power and memory costs. It sucks more energy causing
more heat, need for a bigger battery, making the device heavier and hotter, and unless you put a really big battery making it even heavier, less battery life. Also, it requires at a minimum Atom, and say what you want, the mips per watt is much lower than for Arm and costs MORE. Oh, and you have to pay a Windows 7 licence!!!! All of this combined makes it more expensive. A triple whammy.

And this is part of that reason:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/chrome-os-will-the-real-potential-user-please-stand-up/8204

If you read through the article you come to this close to the end: "...But if the first shipping Chromebooks are priced anywhere near $500 when they hit in mid-2011 $500 bucks?!?!? I can get a Win7 netbook (and yes, paying for that Win 7 license) with similar specs for less than that - for an OS that is supposed to be FREE. Where are the cost savings for a Google OS netbook that requires me to store my data in their cloud (and be subject to them spying on it - Google's privacy track record is not that impressive) vs a Win 7 netbook that gives me the choice to use a cloud service or local storage.
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Pitch a new sale, shill
search & destroy Updated - 14th Dec 2010
Tell that to the billions that own Win7 netbooks. They work just fine.

Gee, last I heard the iPad was eating into netbook sales. Go figure.

http://www.tuaw.com/2010/12/06/is-the-ipad-hurting-netbook-sales/

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/the-ipad-is-cannibalizing-netbook-sales/10231

Now how come Gavriella Schuster (general manager for Windows product management) can admit that and you can't?

Hmm?
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Sorry Guys...
cosuna Updated - 17th Dec 2010
@goff256, @Johnny Vegas, et al...

This is no longer FUD or apple fanboyism or whatever. What Apple did was just hit a sweet spot that other manufacturers have failed to even come close to.

The reason is crystal clear (Jobs even acknowledged it at All Things D).

They had a patient turtle like ascent, contrasting to the Windows Vista unsuccessful sprint.

First creating the iPod and the iTunes store. Then they created the iPhone and the App Store. Then they released the MacBooks and the all new battery. Finally they created a cheap, powerful ARM chip which they could mass produce and include in every 'i' device they wanted.

The problem really isn't Windows at all. To say that it's "bloated" is a lie. Heavy lifting was made on Windows 7 to allow the Windows Vista kernel to return to the sub 1Gb space. Lots of services were turned off, and even the whole kernel project was splitted to remove bloat [aka the MiniWin project]. But with that said, Windows is still a mouse and keyboard OS. Touch is more an after thought and the kernel lacks the real-time extensions to allow near instant app launch (a feature that Apple first tested with Front Row, which MS could have copied with Media Center but didn't or couldn't). Also the OS is fully Display PostScript/PDF rendered. This means *ALL* apps can benefit from "Retina" displays (300 dpi screens in lay terms) not just WPF/Silverlight apps (as is the case with Metro UI).

So ironically, guys, Microsoft is not in the driver seat anymore with slates, but rather running outside trying to keep pace. iPad 2 can stir the waters even more by having a higher resolution screen, 1Gb integrated RAM and even a HDMI or displayport dock extension and all MS OEM will scramble again to catch up.

Am sorry to tell you, but don't think Ballmer can show anything that won't get dumped at the end like the HP Slate 500 (not by the users but by the OEMs, who were bribed to show "upcoming products")
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RE: Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?
Pete "athynz" Athens 13th Dec 2010
@Cylon Centurion 0005 The Metro UI is really not that impressive - I was not very impressed when I used it at my local AT&T store... I do hope that MS does come up with a decent transition to a tablet-based device - the iPad needs competition and Android just is not there yet.
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They would adapt it
Cylon Centurion 14th Dec 2010
@athynz

I agree that the tiles wouldn't look so good on the bigger screen, but if you do a quick search, there are plenty of appealing mock-ups that would show what a possible Metro tablet would look like.
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Windows 7 Tablet Edition
archangel9999 14th Dec 2010
@Cylon Centurion 0005 - W7TE will likely be on these slates at CES - Win7 with tablet focused UI replacing taskbar interface
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Lessons still unlearned
Falkirk 13th Dec 2010
The key lesson that the iPad taught us was that for a tablet to work, the OS had to be touch based and designed specifically for the tablet for factor. When I read that "Microsoft is making sure that Windows 8 will run well on slates" I know that Microsoft has, once again, missed this key lesson.

By holding so tenaciously to its past, Microsoft is all but insuring that has no future.
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You got that right
Economister 13th Dec 2010
@Falkirk

Can MS make W8 run well on a tablet? Yes

Will it be an iPad (or Android tablet) competitor ? No chance

You can't stick a V8 in Fiesta and hope to sell it as a family economy car. It is just a lousy fit.
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RE: Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?
i8thecat 13th Dec 2010
@Falkirk

I think that was a typo as well...

MJ wrote, "As we know from a leaked slide deck from April 2010, Microsoft is making sure that Windows 8 will run well on slates."

But what I think she meant to type was...

As we know from a leaked slate deck from April 2010, Microsoft is making sure that Windows 8 will run well on slides."

Cus thats the real MS product... Rumors and empty promises designed to keep nerds distracted... PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE SUCESSFUL COMPANY BEHIND THE CUPERTINO CURTAIN!!! Hey Look over there, something shiny!!!

In all seriousness, Microsoft has amazing powers of duplication..er... I mean observation... Well both actually.
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Yep, it virtually guarantees that Windows tablets will be heavier, hotter,
DonnieBoy 13th Dec 2010
less battery life. And, of course more expensive for something people do not want in a tablet.
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RE: Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?
bvonr@... 14th Dec 2010
@DonnieBoy @DonnieBoy I agree they can be slightly heavier as my HP tm2 convertible is about 5lbs BUT it cost only $50 CDN more than a 64G iPad $799 to $749. My battery lasts 8-9 hours running Win7 x64 with 4G of ram and a 500G HDD. It has been sitting on my desk in hibernation for 3 days and still has 72% left on the battery ( I haven't needed it for that period ) Definitely NOT hot.
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RE: Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?
dave95. 13th Dec 2010
@Falkirk

"Microsoft is making sure that Windows 8 will run well on slates"

Their continued effort to shoehorn Windows on slates/tablets reminds me of their stubborn efforts with Windows mobile 6.X...

Time to break free from the past MS and start anew again.
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Shoehorn?
John Zern 14th Dec 2010
If the tablet has netbook spec and Windows runs fine on netbooks, how is it "shoehorning" it into a tablet.

You have to understand that physical size is irrelavent here, that the size of the computer doesn't mean there's less space inside for software.
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RE: Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?
dave95. Updated - 14th Dec 2010
@John Zern

It's all in the form factor John. The slate form factor lends itself to be more suited for consumption and light computing first (as the iPad is proving). Instead they were pushed out as what was essentially a laptop/netbook with the keyboard chopped-off. Running full blown Windows, some requiring fans for cooling, and dismal battery life. As a result, they were expensive. Microsoft and OEMs had it ass backwards for a whole decade. So yes shoehorn as in Windows just doesn't fit that form factor.

The average consumer buying iPads are not thinking about running photoshop, or Autocad, or thinking about typing up a novel.
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RE: Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?
PollyProteus Updated - 14th Dec 2010
@dave95. - You're right, the average iPad consumer isn't interested in using a computer, they're interested in watching movies, browsing the web and reading ebooks, which the iPad is perfectly suited for... well, almost. It's just a bit too awkward for extended holding (it needs a stand or some such prop) and doesn't do well in bright sunlight in the ebook reading department, but other than that, it's perfect for distracting people from the real world, distracting them from getting real computing work done.

For me the iPad wouldn't cut it because I do all of the above, so need a real computer with a keyboard and large amounts of storage.
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RE: Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?
dave95. 14th Dec 2010
@PollyProteus

Times they are changing. It's not that iPad users are not interested in using a "real" computer. What I suspect will happen more and more is iPad users (and future Android, Playbook tablet/slate users if they get those right) will discover that 90% of their traditional computing needs can be met by this very device. And what is that 90 percent of their computing needs today? Consumption. This is why the iPad is selling well today, it does the 90 percent very very well. No fans, no dismal battery life, no bulky clunker hardware, and no full OS bloat.

And in the enterprise, the iPad seem to be enhancing workflow and customer relations rather than distracting people.
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RE: Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?
Eduardo_z 16th Dec 2010
@dave95.
"Microsoft is making sure that Windows 8 will run well on slates"

If they are working to make touch work on W8, it must be because it doesn't work well on W7, and so we can expect the Microsoft slates for 2011 will be rather poor, at least in this respect.
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And they will have to re-code the entire OS and all the Apps.
i8thecat 23rd Dec 2010
Windows is designed for a mice, keyboards, ginormous screens, tons of ram, and a very powerful processors. In order for Windows 8 to run well on a tablet, the entire OS as well as all the apps will have to be re-coded for touch and then stripped down and optimized for a tablet... In other words... Windows 8 will be a tablet OS or a PC OS, it can't be both. And we all know how Microsoft does when it comes to making a "lite" or "mobile" version of an OS. So I don't ever expect Windows of any flavor to succeed on a tablet.
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Wow thats just all wrong. First touch is not part of the os in ios or
Johnny Vegas 13th Dec 2010
or android or windows. Second there's nothing in ios or android or windows that designed "specifically for the tablet form factor". Nor is there such a thing as a tablet form factor. There are multi-touch ux shells. They could run on any underlying os, on any screen size and resoultion. There will probably be "tablets" over the next couple years everywhere from 4" to 17", with 2-256G of RAM, with 1 to 64 cores, with 3G to LTE to wifi to wimax. There is nothing about windows that makes it any less well suited to running these "form factors" than ios or android or chrome. Windows can run very very well on devices across the spectrum from todays smartphone to servers with a thousand cores.
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RE: Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?
Djblois 14th Dec 2010
@Falkirk You are Missing the point.

Microsoft is Making Windows 8 touch based. The best system would be a Windows PC that when it is in Laptop mode that it is optimized for keyboard and mouse but when it is in Slate mode then it will be optimized for Touch and Pen. This will be the way Windows 8 probably will be.
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RE: Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?
PollyProteus 14th Dec 2010
@Djblois - Touch focused, not touch based.
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RE: Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?
cosuna Updated - 17th Dec 2010
@Falkirk : agreed.

Most posters miss the point that Microsoft had 20+ years in the Pen Computing/Tablet PC/Slate segment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_for_Pen_Computing

and has never made a dent on the public perception that Pen Computers were niche market players. When the iPhone opened the multitouch scene, they jumped wagon and said that Windows 7 will support Multi Touch. If you are a developer, you know that they grafted the API into 7. It's nice, but it isn't Cocoa Touch. Lotsa API's are missing, including accelerometers and compass (magnetometer), which complement the experience.

There's also the problem of app containment. Under iPad, all apps come from a common source. If your machine gets tampered, all you do is reimage the system and all apps load automatically. Imagine trying to fix a broken Windows installation without mouse or keyboard. This also makes a side note that you need some kind of mouse and keyboard circuitry (and that can't be bluetooth since we are assuming a broken machine) which adds complexity to the motherboard.

Last but not least. iOS has a common tree with MacOS X, but discards what it does not need. No need for backward compatibility API and conflicting UIs (Win32, WinForms, WPF and Silverlight). All this stuff "kills" the seamlessness and essentially pushes a product off the sweet spot.
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RE: Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?
james347 13th Dec 2010
Yeah, sure...*sigh*.
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RE: Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?
seangreyhanson 13th Dec 2010
A Windows 8 on an iPad? This I have to wait... or nahh... I wonder what Windows 8 has to offer.

http://myinternettvsoftware.com
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In a world with the iPad who needs a slate?
MSFTWorshipper 13th Dec 2010
really perfection already achieved, no need for 2nd rate.
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Perfect?
Michael Alan Goff 13th Dec 2010
The iPad is good, but everything can be improved on.
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Not me!
James Quinn 13th Dec 2010
@goff256
i'm just that good:P

Pagan jim
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Heh
Michael Alan Goff 14th Dec 2010
You are pretty awesome :P
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Windows 8? iPad competition won't be coming till Windows 8 huh?
James Quinn 13th Dec 2010
When is Windows 8 due? When are these slates due? MS does realize that neither Apple nor Android/Chrome will be sitting still waiting for MS right?

Pagan jim
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RE: Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?
cyberslammer2 13th Dec 2010
@James Quinn Windows 8 is "slated" for 2012.

Fail.
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Looking at how little progress apples made from the original iphone to
Johnny Vegas 13th Dec 2010
iphone4 or how little progress androids made from 0.x to 2.3 I don't think they need to worry too much. It doesn't look like it'll be more than another 2 major releases until WP has everything they have and much more. So it's very likely that the same will be true for tablets...
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RE: Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?
cyberslammer2 13th Dec 2010
Too little too late. How can Ballmer stand there and act like a tablet device with a point and click interface is going to honestly compete with the iPad? Either Ballmer is delusional, stupid or a combination of both.
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But then again, he's there
John Zern 14th Dec 2010
and you're here. Tells me he's a little smarter then you when it comes to tablets and business in general.
Is he the best CEO ever? Hardly. Still I'll take his predictions over yours. wink
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RE: Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?
search & destroy 14th Dec 2010
Hardly. Still I'll take his predictions over yours.

Well why not. He's your boss.

lol...
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"Either Ballmer is delusional, stupid or a combination of both"...
SonofaSailor 15th Dec 2010
@cyberslammer2

Pot, meet Kettle.
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RE: Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?
Pete "athynz" Athens 13th Dec 2010
I'll believe it when I see it - thus far the iPad has no true competitors... the closest one is a device that is smaller, more expensive, and is tied to a cellular carrier to communicate (no wifi) which makes it even that much more expensive. The iPad is not perfect and even with a weekend long hands on experience with one it is not something I'll buy anytime soon but the "competition" right now is underwhelming.
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RE: Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES?
makrekdw59-24353623777168557025066799335354 10th Nov
cnnldb,good post!

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