Aashu's Blog

I picked this up in the comments section of a blog about tablets…

I always love to read how Microsoft is late to the Tablet market or late to the Smartphone market.

My first tablet came with Windows 98 but I ran it with Windows 2000, it was a fujitsu stylistic 3500 (“ran” should be changed to “runs”, it is still in my office and my young sone uses it for flash games).. it’s a 10 inch screen with multipressure stylus and wifi. My next main-use tablet was my NEC VersaLite, 10 inch screen running XP 2003… just a tad thicker than my iPad (about the same thickness as the thickest part of my XOOM) weighs about a pound, has wifi and a 20gb drive which I replaced with an ssd a few years back and that gave it a 4 hour lifetime without compromise. Oh, but newcomers follow the Jobs mantra and say that a stylus tablet is stupid… that is because the have not experienced using a stylus for handwriting recognition. MS had it working amazingly well in XP, it got perfect in Vista (Vista was like Win95, revolutionary and needing some scaleback to make it obvious to regular folks… which 7 has done well). But if you really don’t like styluses, take my two little Fujitsu P series guys: a P1520 that came with XPPro and my P1620 that came with Vista.. now both are happily running Windows 7 pro… 7″ touchscreens and very nice palm regection on the 1620 so it swaps between stylus and fingertip smoothly. My current main machine is a 1440×900 resolution 2.4ghz 4gb ram Fuji T4220… it shipped with Vista32 but it’s been Windows7 64 for the past year with never a glitch (and I code – CODE and compile, not script) 8 hours a day so mine are not just playtime internet browsing machines.

My first “smartphone” was Winmo 6.0 and that old baby had a full “App Store” of amazing apps from handango… including it being a full wifi host for free, tethering with a wire was also just built in… years before the iPhone had it, actually years before there was an iPhone.

The key point is that a way of looking at it is that Microsoft was first to the party… but many consumers came late… and by the time the ideas of a tablet or hand-computer trickled down to the masses MS had figured that consumers just didn’t get it.

You can call me fanboy but I started on mini mainframes then many years ago I ran multiple Mac studios, I poured the ‘Microsoft is evil’ fruit punches widely.. I switched to IBM OSes then back to Mac, Microsoft was evil. Then one day in November 1995 I noticed that Redmond was not evil after all, they were commonly ahead of the curves (Old timers may recall – and those under 30 need to be told – Win95 assumed that everyone had a fast always on internet connections, Win98 scaled it back to reality and regular people were happy).

But Jobs did his trick (after nearly bankrupting Apple and needing the 125 million dollar investment from Redmond to make payroll) and history has been rewritten, and articles like this just continue the party line. Even though the care proposition is, frankly, untrue.