Windows 8 tablets will replace laptops — by being laptops

Last week’s Advice Line explained why tablets won’t replace PCs any time soon. It created quite a stir, with one camp in agreement, a second pointing out that early PCs lacked a lot, too, and a third complaining I was ignoring Windows 8, which will address just about every tablet limitation I listed.

I agree with all three camps.

Regarding the first, “agrees with me” and “right” are synonyms. Those who agreed with me that tablets won’t replace PCs are on the side of truth, justice, and the American way.

As for the other two camps, they’re both right too, and they’re compatible with each other, as well as with the first camp. Yes, early PCs were limited, and yes, Windows 8 addresses most tablet limitations I listed. Dig a bit deeper into the implications of each camp’s position and you’ll find a lot of guidance for how next-gen IT should be thinking about tablet technology.

Like today’s tablets, early PCs were limited

I agree with those who pointed out that early PCs were limited. They didn’t replace mainframe or midrange computers. They were, for the most part, used as adjunct devices that provided capabilities different from what anyone could do on a mainframe or midrange system — for example, electronic spreadsheets, personal databases, presentations, and so on. The parallel with the current crop of tablets is obvious.

There’s another, less obvious parallel: In the early days of client/server computing, software developers learned to layer their applications. The best of these ran the presentation layer on the PC, made business logic portable so that it could run on either the server or desktop to optimize performance, and kept the data and data management layers on the server side.

In a way, that’s still how it’s done. Pure display-with-HTML/execute-everything-on-the-server user interfaces never caught on because of a tricky technical challenge: They were awful.

We all forgot that we had sneeringly referred to desktop-based processing as “fat clients” and decided that “rich clients” (the exact same thing) were fine and dandy. I guess the difference is that programming a feature-loaded presentation layer that runs on the desktop OS is fat, while programming a feature-loaded presentation layer that runs in the browser is rich.

Now we have tablets, and just about everyone has figured out that the user experience of accessing functionality through a browser is inferior to accessing the same functionality through a custom app that runs on the tablet OS. We’ve reinvented client/server computing. I wonder what we’ll decide to call it this time.

Windows 8 will address tablet limitations

Those who raised their hands in favor of Windows 8 are also right. Windows 8 provides just about every bit of the functionality — other than the missing screen real estate — I listed as tablet limitations last week, along with other shortcomings I’ve mentioned from time to time.

In many cases, Windows 8 devices will address these limitations by being laptops, not tablets. Rather, they’ll blur the line that separates laptops and tablets to the point that a gadget is a laptop when you’ve attached a keyboard and mouse, and a tablet when you haven’t.

There’s nothing wrong with this and quite a lot that’s right about it — which is to say, when taking the view from 50,000 feet, the Windows 8 approach looks just about perfect. But Microsoft’s problem is a problem in-house IT faces every day, too: the Edison Ratio.

Getting the view from 50,000 feet right is cheap and easy. All it takes is a few PowerPoint slides and you’re done.

The Edison Ratio, though, states that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration — you have to sweat the details. When it’s in-house IT, those details are made up of the dozens or hundreds of exceptions business applications have to deal with, each of which requires as much effort to analyze and code as the two or three cases that take care of the bulk of the work being automated.

When it’s Microsoft, the details are in the overall design: how appealing it is and how easy it is to figure out, which is determined by dozens of little details few of us will notice unless they’re done wrong, at which point we’ll notice how annoyed we are. Many of the details aren’t just matters of design. They’re in the small things: how smoothly windows move, how cleanly fonts render, how quickly applications open, how often you have to reboot instead of going into standby mode, and how fast the machine boots when you do.

With Windows, we’ve always understood we were working with an OS that seemed like a Macintosh without the sandpaper and varnish needed to polish it up. Windows systems did what they had to do and were a lot less expensive, but jeez, it sure would be nice if they were just smoother. That all happened at a time when PCs were mostly a business technology that expanded its range into our homes.

Now, the flow has reversed. Technology is consumerized, and with tablets, our expectations for fit and finish have been set by the iPad. Microsoft’s old habits of providing all the functionality we want and more, but in ways that are frequently obscure and hard to decode, and clunky when you’ve figured them out, aren’t something tablet users are likely to accept.

Yes, IT can decide to standardize on Windows 8 tablets. Architecturally, it will be the optimal decision, as it simplifies and streamlines the architecture, making it easier to manage.

IT will have the authority to do this and will be able to marshall all of the usual business benefits to make its case. For all the good it will do — if employees hate the suckers, they’ll insist on iPads anyway.

When they do, IT will end up looking like King Canute, who had the authority to command the tide not to come in, for all the good it did him.