The Microsoft Courier Tablet: It Would Have Sucked

The Microsoft Courier Tablet has built up an almost legendary reputation as the product that could have beaten the iPad if only those old dolts Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates had gotten out of the way. Cnet recently published the backstory on this product and apparently the folks promoting this tablet, J Allard, the father of the Xbox, and Robbie Bach, who headed the now defunct consumer division, went from unsung tragic heroes to, using Steve Jobs’ favorite term, bozos as the result of this story.

According to the retelling of what actually happened, Steve and Bill, having watched this same group crater the Zune, weren’t willing to have another high cost failure any time soon and killed the Courier in favor of the Windows 8 Tablet. They were right and they were wrong.

Core Apps and Hardware

In reading the account of how the Courier was presented, it looks like Allard and Bach were working off the same playbook that the Research in Motion marketing team was working from when they created the Blackberry Playbook. We now know two things we didn’t know back then: We know that people like to use their iPads while in front of the TV and in bed, and that they like to use them for email. We also know, because we saw the Playbook ravaged (and not in a good way) by reviewers for not having email,  which this is a critical application for this product class. We also now know that tablets are used for content consumption and that the current technology isn’t strong enough for creation tasks.

The Courier was presented as a creation product that didn’t do email that would be used to create unique content. I agree that, eventually, tablets will be used as creation tools, but they just don’t have the headroom yet to do it and by the time they get that headroom, Microsoft will have a Windows 8 port ready to go on one.

Moving to hardware, twin screens are a massive power suck and that means that you would have to basically double the battery over a single screen product. This would have likely taken the resulting product to close to twice the iPad’s weight and while two screens would seem better for reading, the extra weight would have made the product a bad reading choice given that many of us think the iPad, when compared to the lighter Kindle, is already too heavy to be a strong reader.

In short, had this product been released as it was pitched, it would have been butchered by reviewers and that is before we get to the price point which, given those two displays, would have likely exceeded the iPad. It would have been another Zune.

Time to Market is Important

However, having something in market before Apple defined the market like they did with MP3 players would have been a wise move and now that Apple owns the tablet market, it is looking a lot like the iPod market and it is much more difficult to penetrate. Clearly, the Android products weren’t able to step up very well, but allowing Apple and Google to lock Microsoft out of a light PC segment was unwise.

The iPad has set the requirements for a tablet for weight, battery life, and application selection and, rather than entering this market as a leader, Microsoft will now enter the market like they did with the Zune as a distant follower. More importantly, the iPad has now been highlighted in several CIO meetings I’ve attended as the biggest disruption in business this year and it is bringing with it not only approval for Macs, but approval for Android products as well. By missing this wave, Microsoft went from being invulnerable on the enterprise desktop to the legacy vendor. It is pretty much where IBM was when Microsoft kicked their monitors off similar desktops two decades ago.

They’ve pretty much assured that owning 95% of the desktop will soon become a distant memory.

One Half of the Right Decision

There are far more ex-dominant vendors than dominant ones and this is generally because the dominant vendor missed the next wave. IBM was massively dominant before PCs and UNIX servers but, while they remain large, they aren’t the dominant player in technology anymore. Past companies that dominated markets like RCA and Palm aren’t even around anymore and even AT&T isn’t the same AT&T that was once broken up.

The Zune was the wrong product at the right time, and there is a danger that the Windows 8 tablet will be the right product at the wrong time. At some point, if Microsoft wants to return to earlier glory it will have to get both sides of this right.

Rob Enderle in Business on November 03