Microsoft’s Tablet PC is Shit

by James

So, Steve Balmer from Microsoft gave a talk recently about a new “slate PC” from Microsoft. Can you sense my joy?

The best parts of this talk are Balmer’s pauses as he struggles to find the right word to describe the tablet (“slate PC”, “slate TV”, “product”, “PC”). Here’s a tip: if you — the head of a multi-national software and hardware company — don’t know what to call your product, then something is very wrong.

Here’s a transcript of the BBC’s video of Balmer’s talk. Forgive my cynicism: I have no love for Microsoft.

The new form factors that are coming this year are in what we would call “slate PCs”

No, Steve, they’re in what you call “slate PCs” and everyone else would call “tablet PCs”.

Here are three different slate TV form factors

Wait, they’re TVs now? Have you taken your pills…?

We’re talking about something that’s almost as portable as a phone, and as powerful as a PC running Windows 7.

So that’s three times the size of a phone, and not very powerful.

Maybe I’ll just drill down a little bit on this example from Hewlett Packard. This is a sort of a prototype of a coming HP slate PC that’ll be here later this year…

Oh, yes, please: drill down. Sigh. A “sort of a prototype” of an as-yet unreleased upcoming product that will be here sometime “later” in the next twelve months. Wow, that’s exciting.

It’s a beautiful little…product

The pause says it all.

This great little…PC, which will be available later this year, I think many customers are going to be very excited about.

I’d like to meet these “many” customers. Have they taken their pills?

I’m running the Kindle software for PC – as you can see, I can flip through the book using the touch experience, I can experience the book in full colour…

The touch experience. Because that’s the best phrase to describe touch screen technology. When I use my iPhone, I’m always saying to friends, “you know what I really love about this phone? The touch experience.” (The book, by the way, is in black and white.)

…and I can of course go and buy and download more content from Amazon right from within this application.

Woohoo! Content!!! We all love content. Except we call it “books” or “music”.

Great speech Steve. I know the other Steve is going to be really worried ;)