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“The problem with that thinking is that Microsoft was in the tablet game. “

Yeah..running on the older power hungry, battery consuming, thicker form factor Intel chips. Read the article again. Not great for tablets.
These new Intel chips can hang with the best ARM chips in terms of power consumption. Plus there is an ARM version of Windows 8 as well.

“Many of the same people making the decisions when Microsoft pissed away their tablet and smartphone markets are the very same people still making decisions”

The XBOX 360(apart from the initial RROD issues, which still didn't stop sales) has been very successful, and has been the top selling video game console in this country for over a year(regularly besting the Wii and PS3), not to mention the superb XBOX Live, which is simply unmatched in terms of online play/features for video game consoles.

Yeah..running on the older power hungry, battery consuming, thicker form factor Intel chips. Read the article again. Not great for tablets.

Doesn't matter whether the hardware was good or not, the point was that Microsoft owned that market and they pissed it away. They owned the tablet market in 1991 when Windows for Pen Computing came out. They owned the tablet market a decade later when Windows XP Tablet PC Edition came out in 2002. Whether they didn't lean on Intel hard enough to make better chips or they weren't willing to invest in hardware or hardware makers to make a better tablet is a moot issue.

You can't get much more of a headstart than 15 years in the computer industry, yet Microsoft somehow gave a market that they owned for 15+ years away. It wasn't like they didn't have the resources or experience - by the time the iPad came out, Microsoft had nearly 20 years of experience with tablet/touch computing, and they had nearly 20 years of Windows running on non-x86 hardware or running in embedded environments. They dropped the ball, plain and simple.

The XBOX 360(apart from the initial RROD issues, which still didn't stop sales) has been very successful, and has been the top selling video game console in this country for over a year(regularly besting the Wii and PS3), not to mention the superb XBOX Live, which is simply unmatched in terms of online play/features for video game consoles.

It would be sad if the Xbox is Microsoft's biggest current success, but maybe the people running the Xbox division should have been moved up the ladder since they were able to effectively bring software and hardware together and they sound like product guys, unlike Ballmer.

I read what Ballmer has said, and he just has no clue about why Apple has done so well, and why Android was beating out Windows on smartphones. He's a sales guy through and through, and that's not somebody you want running a company like Microsoft. You need a Bill Gates who is going to have a heavy interest in the product itself from start to finish.