My Response To John Gruber On His Views On Windows 8

When I was reading different views and opinions on Windows 8 across the web, this one caught my attention. Because I disagree with many of the author’s views and I just decided to write on that.

John Gruber starts his post by quoting Paul Thurrott’s tweet on Windows 8,

“Hello, Windows 8? This is iPad. You win.”

He doubts that will happen in the future and went on to add that,

One of the implications of Microsoft’s everything-except-phones-in-one-OS strategy for Windows 8 is that it could utterly fail as an iPad competitor, but still be a successful OS. I’m imagining here in this paragraph a scenario where Windows 8 proves to be good and popular for traditional desktop and notebook PCs — where by “good” let’s say we mean “better than Windows 7” — but doesn’t gain any traction at all in the tablet market.

So first he says Windows 8 won’t gain any traction in tablet market. BTW, What is the tablet market he means? Microsoft never said we are going to compete with iPad as tablet, in fact Microsoft never used the word tablet in its whole Windows 8 Keynote at BUILD yesterday. Windows 8 based devices are no compromise PC’s that run on variety of form factors. If he is going to compare iPad with Windows 8, I consider it as his madness.

He made some comments on hardware,

But the OS reportedly isn’t coming out for at least a year. The demo tablet hardware from Samsung they’re showing it on (and giving to Build attendees) is a Core i5 Intel-based PC replete with a fan.

Microsoft clearly said its a developer preview PC and not a consumer device. They designed it specifically for Windows developers so that they can use for development. If they are running full blown Core i5 Intel-based chip, of course they need a fan. But that doesn’t affect your device experience much. What do you get in reply to having a fan and a Corei5 ship?

1) Full blown Windows PC running millions of apps.

2) Windows Development Environment that includes Visual Studio, Expression blend, etc,

3) Multimonitor support.

4) Stylus based input and much more.

Can iPad do any of the above?? I can debug my Windows 8 app and test my app without any other device. Can iPad do it?

Windows 8 devices which are ARM based similar in functionality to iPad are coming next year. On ARM based PC’s he commented,

How will Windows 8 run on such hardware? When will they actually ship? How many as-yet-unannounced iPad 3s will Apple have sold by the time the first Windows 8 tablet hits stores? (Not to mention the many tens of millions of iPad 2s Apple will sell in just the next quarter alone.)

Microsoft repeatedly said Windows 8 experience will be same across all the device architectures. Why is he mentioning the iPad sales numbers now? How is it related to Windows 8 experience? Anyway, even if Apple sells 100 million iPad’s before Microsoft starts selling Windows 8 next year, Microsoft will catch up to that number in one single quarter for sure.

Again he compared Apple’s approach on unveiling a product and Microsoft’s approach. He just said some crap and concluded that he doesn’t know which approach is superior.

My reply to him,

Microsoft has thousands of partners who build stuff from accessories, apps to Windows 8 hardware. They have the largest partner ecosystem in the world. When you have such high stakes involved, you need to share information about your product well in advance whereas in Apple’s case they do both their hardware and software. Apple can share the information to public whenever they needed. There is no point in comparing both these approaches.

Then the final three paragraphs is the reason why I decided to post on his views, here is the final paragraph from his blog,

First he says predicting success a year in advance against a “technically outstanding and phenomenally popular product like the iPad.”. I disagree completely, What makes iPad technically outstanding ?? Seriously nothing. iPad is phenomenally popular ?? I bet not more than 200 million users have seen iPad in real. C’mon, If selling some 30 million devices in a year  is phenomenally popular, then what about Windows based PC’s which are selling hundreds of millions  each year? If Paul should not/cannot predict that Windows 8 out selling iPads next year, how can Gruber predict iPad will sells millions of them next year? What if Samsung stops iPad sales for patent case? LOL..

Again the last three lines of him,

To me, what these Windows writers are doing is like a baseball writer who today has started writing about what might happen in next season’s playoffs, because the team he follows is doing so poorly this season. We’ve got “is good today” against “might be good in a year”. The actually good versus the potentially good.

Everybody knows that Apple fan boys and followers are more biased than any other fan boys and followers. Predicting a nice working product to work well in market is much better than acting like dumbs when watching Steve Job’s presentations. One such incident comes to my mind, in the recent Apple’s presentation on iCloud Steve Jobs just said Calender events sync coming to iOS via iCloud. You add an entry in a device, it will appear in all other devices. The crowd went to applaud this feature and lots of ooh..aahh moments. Even in twitter, Michael Gartenberg an Industry analyst at Gartner, Technology columnist, Speaker and Blogger also an Apple fan just said calender sync is something like revolutionary. C’mon, haven’t you all used calender syncing before that works across devices?? I’ve been using it for years. This is not the only case, there are lots of others. They used to follow whatever Apple’s marketing team tells/preaches them, Calling almost everything as magical, revolutionary.. Apple bloggers should come out of their reality distortion field and then make some comments.

Oh wait, Why am I talking about a minority community when I have more than billion users in my community. Lets Enjoy Windows across devices.