9/10/2015

WhytheiPadProisterriblenewsforMicrosoftVox

Why the iPad Pro is terrible news

for Microsoft
Updated by Timothy B. Lee on September 9, 2015, 7:20 p.m. ET

tim@vox.com

Micro so ft has be e n trying to make table ts that w o rk like PC s fo r mo re than a de cade .

Ro n Wurze r/Ge tty Image s

The first version of the iOS software that powers the iPhone
and iPad, released in 2007, had radically less functionality than
conventional PCs. It couldn't run third-party software, couldn't
multitask, and didn't even offer a cut-and-paste feature.
But over the last eight years, iPhones and iPads have grown
more and more capable, narrowing the gap with PCs. On
Wednesday, Apple took two more big steps in this direction.
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The Cupertino company announced a new iPad Pro with a

laptop-size screen, a stylus, and the ability to run two apps side
by side. Apple also introduced "3D Touch," which allows iPhone
users to do a new kind of "hard press" gesture that works a lot
like right-clicking on a PC.
Microsoft participated in the iPad Pro presentation,
demonstrating how well Microsoft Office works on the new,
business-oriented tablet. But while selling more Office 365
subscriptions to iPad users would be good news for Microsoft,
the incursion of Apple mobile devices into PC territory is an
ominous sign for the Redmond software giant.
History is full of examples where simple, disruptive technologies
like smartphones gradually cannibalize the markets of more
complex established technologies like the PC. And the result is
almost always a disaster for the incumbents.

Disruptive technologies start at the bottom and

move up

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A Bethlehem Steel plant in 1999. (Tom Mihalek/Getty)

In the 1960s, the steel industry was dominated by huge,

complex integrated steel mills. These mills faced competition
from new minimills, which processed scrap steel in small
batches. Initially, the larger mills weren't too worried about the
minimills, which could make steel more cheaply than
conventional mills but could only produce rebar, the lowestquality and least profitable type of steel.
Clayton Christensen, the scholar who developed the concept
of disruptive innovation two decades ago, has written (

http://www.hbs.edu/socialenterprise/pdf/TheInnovatorsSolutionC
about what happened next. Over time, the minimills figured out
how to produce steel of higher and higher quality, while
maintaining their cost advantages over the traditional mills. By
2001, competition from minimills had driven a leading
traditional steel producer, Bethlehem Steel, into bankruptcy.

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Something similar happened in the PC industry. The first PCs in

the 1970s were comically underpowered compared with
mainframes and minicomputers that were already on the
market. But over time, they became more and more
sophisticated. Eventually they not only created new markets
for desktop and laptop computing, they also began to invade
the server market, traditional strongholds of more complex and
expensive computers.
Today, huge internet companies like Google and Facebook run
their sites using commodity servers that are little different,
technically speaking, from the PCs people have on their desks
at home. Meanwhile, most of the companies that built those
pre-PC computers with names like DEC, Wang Laboratories,
and Apollo Computer have long since gone out of business or
been absorbed into PC companies.
A more recent example can be seen in the news business.
BuzzFeed, for example, began its life producing the rebar of
online content cat GIFs and quizzes. People (including me)
laughed when they hired the respected journalist Ben Smith to
lead BuzzFeed's news operation. But over time, BuzzFeed has
moved "upmarket," producing serious journalism and even hiring
an investigative reporting team.

Early smartphones were a lot less capable than PCs

and that was a good thing
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Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his successor, Steve Ballmer. (Jeff Chistensen/Getty )

Three decades after the PC disrupted the computer business,

the PC itself is being disrupted by smartphones and tablets.
When Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, Microsoft CEO

Steve Ballmer laughed (

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U),
saying that "it doesn't appeal to business customers because it
doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email
machine."
But of course the joke was on Ballmer: The really big market for
smartphones wasn't business users wanting to check their
email and edit spreadsheets it was ordinary consumers who
wanted to chat with their friends, share photos, and
(eventually) hail a ride. And for these users, the simplicity and
elegance of the iPhone interface was actually an advantage.

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Beginning in 2008, Google copied Apple's approach with its

Android smartphone platform, dispensing with the keyboard
and other PC-oriented features. The iPhone and Android
quickly became the dominant mobile computing platforms,
leaving Windows and BlackBerry-based phones with keyboards
in the dust.

Slimming down Windows hasn't worked

Meanwhile, Microsoft had spent the previous decade trying to
cram all of the functionality of a Windows PC into a pocket-size
device. Microsoft's early mobile OS, introduced in 1996 with
the unfortunate abbreviation of WinCE, even had a tiny and
extremely awkward start menu (

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mikehall/archive/2007/07/26/addingapplications-to-the-windows-ce-start-menu.aspx).
Once it became clear that the iPhone and iPad were hits,
Microsoft got better at developing mobile-first user interfaces,
but the company's PC legacy continued to haunt it.
Windows applications are designed for a keyboard and mouse,
not a multi-touch display. When Microsoft's developers tried to
convert them to tablet format, the results tended to be a lot
worse than the native apps that were appearing on iPhones and
Android devices.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's attempts to foist more tablet-y features
on its PC customers with Windows 8 generated a backlash,
forcing Microsoft to backtrack somewhat (

http://www.vox.com/2014/9/30/6874825/microsoftneeds-to-decide-if-windows-is-for-pcs-or-tablets)
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with Windows 10. Like the manufacturers that dominated the

market before the arrival of PCs or newspapers too addicted
to lucrative print ad revenues to shift their focus to the web
Microsoft is a captive to its still-lucrative but stagnant
customer base.

Apple's mobile devices are becoming more like PCs

Apple has taken a different approach. When it created the iPad,
it made the crucial decision to make it a scaled-up iPhone
rather than a scaled-down Mac. It had no menu bar, no
windows, and no user-accessible file system. Users got the
same simple, uncluttered interface they loved on the iPhone,
but on a bigger screen.

APPLE'S SCALED-UP IPHONES HAVE BEEN A

LOT MORE POPULAR THAN MICROSOFT'S
SCALED-DOWN PCS
At the same time, Apple and Google has gradually been
making its mobile platform more capable. It added cut-andpaste, an app store, and better support for corporate email and
calendar systems. Google developed a notification center to
help users manage the flow of messages a feature Apple
quickly copied. Android vendors also introduced "note" tablets
that are designed to be used with a stylus.
Apple's scaled-up iPhones have been a lot more popular than
Microsoft's scaled-down PCs. And on Wednesday, Apple took
two more steps into PC territory with the iPad Pro and the 3D
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Touch capabilities of the iPhone.

The mobile revolution is bad news for Microsoft

It's too early to say if these innovations will be successful. It's
possible the market for business-oriented tablets just isn't that
big, and that people don't want to learn still more gestures for
their smartphones. But Apple's strategy of scaling up
smartphone software has a better chance of success than
Microsoft's traditional strategy of trying to scale down PC
software.
If you start with a simple interface and add an additional option
like force-clicking beginning users can simply ignore it, and
the software should still work fine. It's much harder to start
with a complex software like one that assumes the user has a
keyboard and two-button mouse and make it work well in a
simpler interface.
In the long run, this means that Microsoft's desktop PC
business may wind up like Bethlehem Steel and Wang
Laboratories: Mobile platforms could become more and more
capable, cannibalizing demand for Windows-based PCs. Tabletbased computers are unlikely to totally replace PCs after all,
there are still some mainframe computers around. But history is
not on Microsoft's side.

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