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Companies will want this too. It allows them to issue a cheap piece of equipment to their employees and set it up as a true slave device. Whats a few hundred bucks added to the cost of a hire?

This is where I see it having the biggest impact. I'll probably make quite a bit of money from this type of use as well.

that's a good post NoHype.

This isn't a ploy by Microsoft to gain traction in the market that Apple has already conquered, this is very clearly a move by Microsoft to stunt Apple's incremental growth into the enterprise space.

The iPad has massive inroads into the home/media/consumption buyer market and is only just recently starting to make inroads into the enterprise market. Microsoft's move is not so much to trump Apple but to stunt their growth. They've got a good shot at doing so if they pull this off.

This Microsoft move (announcing a finished HW + SW product) is yet another signal that the Wintel Empire is fallen.

I picked up an Asus eeepad slider a few months ago, and it's an almost complete laptop replacement. Full keyboard, MicroSD slot, USB port (mouse, thumbdrive), HDMI out, and runs all the Android apps - all in a tablet. Just received the Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) update 2 weeks ago. Works like a dream. The only thing MS might have over this is the inclusion of Office.

I can do almost everything on this device that I can from my desktop PC, including systems administration for my ISP business.

Like others were saying, the enterprise software capability of the Android vs Microsoft world is vastly different.

Caveat: I haven't tried any ICS (4.0) images yet

VPN was the big hold-back. That and Google ****ed up ActiveSync (EA) integration for a long time. The EA is fixed in 2.2+, but the VPN was still a bitch. On my XOOM (3.0) I still can't connect to our corporate VPN.

That said, when I'm on the wifi network, it works flawlessly with everything I have to do (which is mostly web-based off-premises apps). I think the platform wars are definitely going to start again, but you're absolutely right - Microsoft has the lockin for easy deployment here. Most places are already invested heavily in MSFT. They're the safe bet for a lot of IT folks.

But if they don't get the apps - they're screwed. CRM has a great iPad/iOS app. I don't think Office is going to give them the edge here. I think they still need to get their day one App Store filled with stuff that Apple already has locked up. SalesForce, Dropbox, etc.

FWIW, and I'm looking at this whole thing from the perspective of a software developer with 30 years of experience across way too many platforms, if the "Pro" version has enough guts to be even remotely usable as a desktop replacement for moderate use that's often a touch too aggressive for an iGadget, Apple may well be in trouble in the tablet space.

I have a full-bore desktop-replacement laptop (An Asus G74, with a Sandy Bridge quad-core, 16GB of RAM and 1.5TB of storage, along with a dedicated Geforce 560M graphics card with its own 2GB of memory) that I use for development and video editing. It cost me two grand, weighs 15 pounds when I stuff it along with everything it requires into one bag, and only has a few hours of battery life since it's not intended to run as a full-powered machine offline. If I can just do basic codeslinging from my couch without having to drag out the beast, and do it for less than a thousand bucks, I'd snatch one up in a heartbeat.

Since the word is that MS will be including some flavor of Office (presumably 365) along with the "pro" version, they'll cut Apple off at the knees in the enterprise space since so much of the work world relies on Office.

Oh, as an aside, Windows 8 sucks. The Metro interface basically obscures access to in-depth controls and options, and makes even simple tasks like turning the machine off safely more of a chore than it should be. On a tablet it may well be better but on a PC I immediately jump to the desktop and forgo the Microsoft Tiles Of Uselessness™.

This move may be genius on MS' part - only time will tell.

Nohype: "I realize that Gen and every other IT gearhead out there will never ever ever part with your hard drives. But customers don't want this. They simply don't know how to do all the small daily processes that keep your systems running smoothly. And they're willing to store their data on a server in Moses Lake in order to get that ecosystem functionality."

That will last as long as it takes for the "cloud" to lose their data, steal their data or charges them for access to it. That and us gearheads constantly telling people how stupid it is to rely on any type of cloud service for data, especially anything you wish to keep private.

I agree with Nohype here. What the enterprise and the small business want is a mobile device that can do sharepoint natively.

Sadly, I own a windows laptop that I use for my astronomy addiction. Yet even I, owner of 4 MCSEs in Windows technologies, will not casual browse the internet with it. Only known sites, only known software and their respective updates, no searching on google, and no contact with my financial information, and nobody has the password to it but me; i.e. nobody else on the planet permitted to use it. No trust in the platform.

That being said, without having the reliability of my apple infrastructure at home, I wouldnt be interested in going back to windows. Been almost three years since I ditched the windows stuff for the apple stuff and I have had to "fix it" all of once, and that was my fault because I forgot to change back the DNS server address bound to my NIC after testing some code I wrote. My data is safe, my backup works flawlessly, yes, it restores just fine, and I am not constantly having to be the computer teacher at home.

as for the cloud, most people who are seriously using it in a business environment already are paying for it. Whats dangerous about the cloud as usual goes back to the buyer, who examines solely price rather than SLA and infrastructure when it comes to cloud storage and application hosting. If you buy cloud services from a shoestring shop or an overseas shop, you probably deserve what you get. I honestly cant see data loss risk when you are buying Microsoft Azure, Google Apps, Office365,, or the Salesforce.com app though. If a large provider like that ever suffered mass data loss, their business would basically be destroyed literally overnight. The SANs that power the storage at that kind of provider space provide near instant replication of everything at the transaction level across machines and datacenters geographically.

As to risk of data confiscation by authorities, I cannot speak to that risk - although I do know that companies outside the US are extremely leery of hosting their stuff with cloud providers and CDN providers based in the US because of the Patriot Act.the risk is that even with the company's business being legit, a stupid employee abusing the storage say storing copyrighted music or video, or an employee even typing something extremely stupid in an email, could shut a business down.

If they get the hardware up to mid-range notebook replacement specs (dual core @ 2.5 GHz or higher, at least 4 GB of RAM, etc.) and include Office (backwardly compatible and installed, not web-based) their app store will fill itself. Most users out there will want one to replace the old and ugly notebook (if they have one) or the desktop they can't lug along with them...which they'll eventually cease using entirely. Add to that a decent unified web-based experience (storage, productivity, entertainment, etc.) and MSFT dominates tablets in 5 years. Landfills everywhere will overflow with iPads.

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. . . include Office (backwardly compatible and installed, not web-based) . . .

I think that'd take a miracle.

The retail price of Office is in the same range as what this entire notebook is likely to sell for. I think they would be cutting their own throats with that strategy, no matter how many units they sell. Consider the fallout of*****ing off computer users who have to pay an arm and a leg for Office if they essentially give a full-featured (i.e., non-crippled) version away for free with a notebook.

I'd expect a crippled version of Office to be included and an option to upgrade to a full-featured version upon payment of a lot of extra bucks.

MS Office 2010 Professional can be had for $190...and you KNOW they wouldn't charge themselves full retail price to include it on these tablets.

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q....

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Sadly, I own a windows laptop that I use for my astronomy addiction. Yet even I, owner of 4 MCSEs in Windows technologies, will not casual browse the internet with it. Only known sites, only known software and their respective updates, no searching on google, and no contact with my financial information, and nobody has the password to it but me; i.e. nobody else on the planet permitted to use it. No trust in the platform.

That being said, without having the reliability of my apple infrastructure at home, I wouldnt be interested in going back to windows. Been almost three years since I ditched the windows stuff for the apple stuff and I have had to "fix it" all of once. My data is safe, my backup works flawlessly, yes, it restores just fine, and I am not constantly having to be the computer teacher at home.

I think this all falls back on the competency of the user/admin. I use Microsoft OS's for about 75% of the stuff I do at home and have zero problems with it, but that's only because I lock it down pretty well. I don't think you should trust any platform, treat everything like it has AIDS. Build acceptable layers of security and know where your weak spots are.

I can understand what you're doing if you don't want non-geeks/muggles to bother you all the time for assistance.

Rjazz wrote..

MS Office 2010 Professional can be had for $190 . . .

You may be right, then - I wasn't aware what the street price was. I based my "same range as what this entire notebook is likely to sell for" comment on the price that our IT dep't billed to my project's budget per copy: $400 or so for the Mac version (special discounted multiple copy price, too, and no, that did not include any "S/W support" charges from them).

What I find most interesting is how different all 3 platforms are. With iOS, you get the most robust and stable system with airplay, iCloud, tight integration between hardware and a gazillion apps.

With Android you get a completely free market with the ability to customize nearly anything.

And now with Microsoft you are getting a third platform with its own unique features.

Instead of everyone ripping each other off, we have variety which I think is a very good thing. I hope all three succeed and find a stable market and prices for everything come down longer term.

The WP8 announcement today sounds interesting, particularly from a dev point-of-view. Ability to target apps at Windows 8, WRT and WP8 devices with very little code modifications... MS is also moving the WP platform into the enterprise with BitLocker support, LOB apps, device management, etc. Sounds like MS is finally getting serious about synergy btween phone, tablet and desktop interoperability.

(Disclaimer: I must be the only one here with a Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone, but I love it -- my 13-yo daughter loves it even more, she wants to ditch her iPhone for one)

I downloaded/installed Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 yesterday and today. I've been studying all the tutorials and whatnot that Microsoft has available so far. I'm a bit more impressed with Visual Studio now. It's definitely more polished than it used to be.

Several bastards that they attempted to offer in Visual Studio in the past appear to work more fluidly and with some real polish now. Things like Entity (Linq), asynchronous operations, and <%# %> expressions seem fully integrated now and not half-assed includes in Visual Studio. I was never completely happy with how those worked before at all.

I can see these being very useful in Metro app development. I still wouldn't use that crap for huge systems where speed matters, but these appear to be perfect for generating simple apps quickly.