Why the iPad is popular and Windows ‘tablets’ are not

It’s amazing how stubbornly people will cling to the past, no matter what evidence is right in front of them. Case in point: the newest Microsoft Surface Pro “tablet,” for which orders will start being taken next month. This time, it has a big screen — with a 12-inch diagonal measurement and an old-school 4:3 aspect ratio — and it’s slimmer than the previous models. But it’s not really a tablet the way the world uses that term.

Microsoft doesn’t get what a tablet is, and neither do some IT shops. Of course, users know exactly what a tablet is: an iPad or one of the Android clones of it. Microsoft is under new, fresher-thinking leadership, so I’m hoping someone in Redmond reads this and gets off the dead-end tablet track it’s on.

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The iPad is four years old this year, and in its short life it has taken the world by storm, creating a new class of computing device that has sold well over 200 million units. Everyone is trying to copy it, with many Android tablets and a bunch of Windows tablets all trying to ride the iPad’s coattails. Never mind that the iPad itself seems to be running out of gas, and it’s unclear whether Apple can refill the tank.

The real issue here isn’t the iPad at all. It’s the concept of a Windows tablet. Microsoft has been pushing this notion for a decade, long before anyone ever even heard of an iPad. There were tablets running Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Now they run Windows 8. Even a touch interface isn’t new to the Microsoft tablet world; remember the push for Windows 7 touchscreen tablets neary five years ago? I do, and it wasn’t pretty. Today, they run Windows 8 instead and look sleeker.

In other words, the so-called Windows tablet has been a failed concept from the get-go. It would fail today even if there were no iPad.

The biggest problem is Windows. The operating system and its applications are designed to use a keyboard and a mouse at a foundational level. You simply need those devices. Microsoft knows that, of course, which is why it has often bundled pens with its tablets as mouse surrogates and why it has more recently offered the Type Cover snap-on keyboard, an accessory that’s optional only in name.

What those accessories leave you with, of course, is a laptop. All Microsoft has done is deconstruct the laptop into several pieces you have to reassemble to work properly. No wonder hardly anyone buys Microsoft’s Surface tablets or similar efforts from Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, and so on. People just buy laptops. If they need light weight and a thin design, they get an Ultrabook; if they need all that and long battery life and durability, they get a MacBook Air.

Windows 8 was supposed to be what changed the requirement for a Windows tablet to really be a laptop in disguise. But Windows 8 is loathed nearly universally, and the tablet doesn’t have the native Metro apps people actually need. Sure, it can run Windows 7 apps such as Office and Photoshop, but then it needs to be a laptop, which of course leads people to get a laptop.

By contrast, the iPad and its Android clones don’t try to be laptops. Apple made darned sure the iPad couldn’t be a laptop, in fact. You can’t use a mouse with it, and you don’t get a file system. Sure, you can use a physical keyboard, but that’s useful only when you’re in stenography mode, such as when taking meeting minutes. iOS and its apps force you to engage with the screen constantly, so using the keyboard becomes an interruption of the natural user interface. There also are no legacy OS X apps available for the iPad, so there’s no temptation to treat the iPad as a Mac.

All this was intentional so that the iPad couldn’t be perverted into — or confused with — a MacBook. That also means Apple has a greater chance to sell you both an iPad and a Mac, whereas Microsoft and its hardware partners keep trying to tell you that their tablets can function as both, when it’s clear they can’t.

Apple’s strategy meant the iPad and its developers had to find their own value proposition and stand on their own feet. That ensured the iPad remained its own entity.

You don’t have to want to use an iPad to understand that key reality: An iPad only wants to be an iPad, but a Windows tablet really wants to be a laptop.

Microsoft — at least part of it — understands this reality. Its Office for iPad is what Windows tablets should be running, but Microsoft so far is unwilling to threaten its lucrative Windows Office business to do that. (Office for iPad requires an Office 365 subscription, making it a supplement to the “real” Office, not a cannibalizing replacement.)

And remember the Surface RT, the thin tablet that didn’t run Windows 7 apps? That was Microsoft’s real iPad clone, but the lack of adoption of its Metro app environment by developers and Microsoft’s lack of basic security capabilities meant the device was useless in business, its core target. It pretended to be like an iPad, but it did less and was less secure. Of course no one bought it.

Microsoft seems to have abandoned Windows RT. It won’t say that, but then again it doesn’t say anything at all anymore about RT. In fact, the failure of RT seems only to have pushed Microsoft further into the strategy of creating tablets that really want to be laptops. Microsoft even promotes the pricey Surface Pro 3 that way, hoping that by labeling it as an “enterprise” product enough change-averse IT people will force it on users. Ha!

Instead of making Windows RT work and seeding the market with compelling native apps, as Apple had to do with iOS in the early days, Microsoft is pushing Windows tablets even further into laptop territory. That’s why the Surface Pro 3 will be as irrelevant as every other previous Windows tablet — and why, when people think of tablets, they’ll be thinking of the iPad.

This article, “Why the iPad is popular and Windows ‘tablets’ are not,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com.