Microsft - we strive to be second in both timing and quality.
We guarantee it.
There is no way they can make any money selling it at $199. At least Google and Amazon can go with the Razor vs Blades theory...sell the tablet around cost simply to get people tied into to Amazon or Google selling the content for the device.
But Microsoft doesn’t have that.
RE: we strive to be second in both timing and quality.
I don’t know...
Microsoft has most often been second in almost everything, and then go on to crush the competition.
Count them...
* Lotus came out with the spreadsheet — LOTUS 1-2-3, Microsoft crushes them with Excel, the most dominant spreadsheet product on the planet.
* Ashton-Tate came out with Dbase II and then Dbase III and IV for the PC. Microsoft then came out with Access and later, SQL Server and crushed almost all competition on the Windows market for databases.
* Remember Word Perfect? Microsoft crushed them with WORD. Anybody still using WordPerfect today?
* Then came Microsoft Office, which killed everyone of the above products.
* Remember the PC networking company Novell with their Netware product? Microsoft came out later with their own networking product. Where is Netware today?
* The XBOX came later than the Nintendo products and is now one of the most dominant game consoles in the industry.
* As a software developer, I can count the number of Integrated Development Environments (IDE) for C, C++, etc.
Borland, Symantec and Gupta ( later Centura) had excellent products. Even PowerBuilder was hot for several years.
Microsoft Crushed them with Visual Basic and later Visual Studio.
Of course, Microsoft had her duds too — Windows 95, Windows ME, Windows Vista.... but then, they also had huge success that overshadowed their mistakes — Windows XP, Windows 7.
Then there are the uber duds that Microsoft practically gave up on .... ZUNE for one could not compete with Apples’ iTunes.
Internet Explorer came in second too (Netscape was the dominant browser then). But IE, once the dominant browser is being overtaken by Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
It remains to be seen whether Windows 8 will succeed or fail. But I wouldn’t count them out yet.