Making a virtue out of necessity
It's impossible to gauge the level of anger and frustration Steve Ballmer feels on a daily basis, watching the tablet market boom with him a mere bystander, but it must be considerable.
Microsoft has been pushing the concept of not just tablets, but the whole post-PC world since 2002. Now he has to watch as arch-enemy Steve Jobs claims the post-PC concept as his own, and scoffs at the gall of anyone else trying to get into his private party.
A report from Bloomberg today put the icing on the cake of Microsoft's tablet humiliation. According to inside sources, Microsoft might have a special tablet edition of Windows available sometime in the middle of next year. Much like Windows Phone 7, this OS will enter a market in which its competitors have a considerable head-start. It will also appear a full decade after Bill Gates first announced the tablet.
There's no mention of Windows 8 in the story, however, which seems odd since most of the leaks so far have pointed towards Windows 8 being optimised for tablets, thus making two distinct OSs unlikely. The announcement at CES that future Windows will support ARM adds to the sense of one OS for both PCs and ARM-based tablets.
Bloomberg called in some analysts to point out the obvious - that Microsoft will be late to the tablet party. We can only hope and assume that Microsoft will make a virtue out of necessity, as it did with WP7, and take as long as it needs to produce something truly different. If it does, it might even get Stephen Fry to praise it.
