Microsoft Surface Tablet Has Potential to be Embraced by Physicians

MedPageToday ^ | June 20, 2012 | Iltifat Husain

[SmokingJoe]

It should not be a surprise that physcians are not fans of Microsoft products -- namely Windows and Internet Explorer. Much of this hatred is due to hospital enterprise solutions still using outdated versions of Internet Explorer. Ask a physician friend to fill you in if you need a better idea. On a personal note, I had been dreading the forthcoming Microsoft tablet because I know Microsoft products make hospital health IT departments salivate.

We commented last year how many hospital IT departments cite physicians using the iPad at work as their biggest headache. I knew as soon as Microsoft launched a tablet, hospitals would gravitate towards the product, no matter if it was good or not -- because of "legendary" Microsoft enterprise solutions.

I was set to start the countdown to purgatory -- when I would be forced to use a Microsoft tablet in the hospital wards.

But after reading about the event, and looking at videos and pictures of the Surface, I felt an odd emotion -- excitement. Microsoft has actually laid the framework to a compelling device.

In an odd turn of events, their lack of hardware expertise has actually benefited them in the post-PC era. Whereas Apple has to make sure it differentiates its hardware product lines, Microsoft does not. Apple has to make sure users purchase a tablet and a laptop, doing this by limiting the scope and functionality of iOS, along with hardware limitations; Microsoft doesn't care. The company is more than willing to include a robust OS (Windows 8) with included HDMI and USB ports.

All these features have enabled Microsoft to bring a unique device to the market, one that truly defines the post-PC era.

There are five reasons why doctors might actually embrace the Microsoft tablet

[GBA]

My primary care physician office staff in a large medical group actually carry around full-size laptops.

That's how they do it where I live, but that's better than some of the other offices.

I took the CD with my MRI results to the specialist for his opinion. He had to leave the room with my CD to check it out. The computer screen in the room we were in was frozen during the XP boot.

[af_vet_rr]

Microsoft should stop pretending, and quit playing in personal devices. They SHOULD go after the BUISNESS MARKET and improve their whole business offerings, making them easier to use and more sticky. They could take on for example web servers where they have < 5% of the market.

They can't ignore personal devices, because of how many executives carry those things. When an executive carries it, it's going to trickle down the ladder, officially or unofficially.

Microsoft more than anybody knows how important these markets are - at one point they pretty much owned the smartphone market, for nearly 20 years they did own the tablet market - people forget that Microsoft rolled out their first tablet OS back in 1991. Microsoft knows that these devices are what's driving Apple's success, are what's getting Apple into the business space, and are what's helping to drive Mac sales. Macs may not account for many desktops and laptops, but there does come a point where they start to eat heavily into Microsoft's profits.

Microsoft has not only pissed away their smartphone and tablet markets, but they've watched the PC makers flop around on competing with Apple. This is probably the smartest thing Microsoft has done lately, but they still have a sales guy running the company when they need a product guy like Bill Gates.

[vox_freedom]

Question: how do you clean the keyboard in surgical environment?

[BunnySlippers]

*

[SmokingJoe]

it’s gonna be a tough, tough road when you follow the other guy after he’s introduced his 3rd gen product, and the samsungs of the world have ultracheap tablets at basically < 200$.

Samsung didn't have too much of a problem overtaking Apple in smartphone sales, with their Androids, even though Androids launched after the iPhones. Come to think of it, Apple overtook RIM and Nokia(Symbian), even though the latter two were long established and had most of the smart phone market share before Apple came in. Nothing is permanent n the technology world.

“Microsoft should stop pretending, and quit playing in personal devices”

Umm..the XBOX 360 has been the top selling video game console n America for 17 straight months. That is a “personal device” too, and a consumer electronics product to boot.

“They SHOULD go after the BUISNESS MARKET and improve their whole business offerings, making them easier to use and more sticky. “

Microsoft OWNS the business market, with by far the biggest market share in corporate servers(by units), email servers etc, not to mention Windows domination of the corporate desktop.

“They could take on for example web servers where they have < 5% of the market.””

Umm..no.
Last figures I have for Windows web server is 13.6%:
http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/microsoft-web-server-market-share-decreases-despite-windows-8-beta-release

[antiRepublicrat]

I design powerful business solutions using Excel and VBA.

No ill wishes to you, but I wish Microsoft would finally put a fork in that product. PowerShell has displaced it for administrative scripts, and it's about time Microsoft deprecates it in favor of C# for all other applications. And I say this from the position of being an expert in VB myself.

[antiRepublicrat]

There’s an error in the iPad specs. It has an A5X processor, double the GPU power of the A5.

The reason the thickness is about the same is that display. It required much more battery volume and the display is thicker. The iPad dropped 4mm thickness going to 2nd gen, then gained almost another mm to fit that 3rd gen display.

The Tegra 3 chipset is pretty good. The graphics aren’t quite as good as that in the iPad, but most of that extra power in the iPad goes to drive the higher resolution display. The Tegra does have double the CPU cores though. It makes me wonder why Microsoft hasn’t published battery life claims yet.

I also wonder that a 3rd gen iPad without the retina display would look like. Probably even thinner, with a 15 hour battery life. Honestly, if you don’t care about that display (but wow is it amazing), the iPad 3 makes a lot of compromises vs. the competition.

[antiRepublicrat]

The one thing they all agree on is that the software they are forced to use is awful.

Custom-written or niche small-market software is often that way. It's built by people who know the problem, and that's it. Geeks for geeks. These programming teams rarely have a user interface expert on board or even bother to do usability studies. I have seen some very stupid UI mistakes in this kind of app.

[antiRepublicrat]

Microsoft should stop pretending, and quit playing in personal devices.

Microsoft has a history of making good hardware that sells well. They had the first ergonomic mouse, with the first scroll wheel, and they had the first successful optical mouse. The Zune was their first real failure, and that was actually pretty good hardware (Toshiba, actually), the problem being it was a just a copycat of the market-dominating iPod.

Monkey boy so much wants to be cool

I do agree that monkey boy is the biggest problem Microsoft has. A lot of talented people work there, but there's no vision. There's a good reason for the old quote from Apple's bad days, "Microsoft can't afford for Apple to go under; they'd lose their R&D department."

[Swordmaker]

Question: how do you clean the keyboard in surgical environment?

Usually you sanitary bag it... before surgery. Then throw away the bag. New bag for next surgery.

[FatherofFive]

No ill wishes to you, but I wish Microsoft would finally put a fork in that product.

How can you say that? I give companies SAP like functionality for $150,000 instead of $5,000,000.

I don't think you understand the power of the VBA.

But technical folks like the complexity of technology. Job security.

[antiRepublicrat]

How can you say that? I give companies SAP like functionality for $150,000 instead of $5,000,000.

Because the language sucks.

I don't think you understand the power of the VBA.

I fully understand the language, which is why I know it sucks. It's old and antiquated, no matter how much they tack on it to keep it alive. You can use C# to access Office objects too. Try that and you'll thank yourself, especially if you ever do any array or list handling (which, if you work with Excel, you probably do); generics lists are especially sweet. You'll probably get much better performance too.

But technical folks like the complexity of technology. Job security.

It's the same tool, Visual Studio. It's the same application suite, Office. You just choose C# application instead of VB application when you create your project. Then enjoy the world of a newer object-oriented-from-scratch language vs. an anachronism from the early 90s.

[FatherofFive]

Just to be clear - you keep referring to VB. I am referring to VBA. VB is Visual Basic. VBA is Visual Basic for Applications. These are not the same.

VBA remains a very powerful language.

[antiRepublicrat]

VBA is Visual Basic for Applications. These are not the same.

The key words being "Visual Basic." VBA is just a crippled version of VB integrated into Office and tuned to work with it. Therefore, it still contains all of the evils of VB (same language, even uses the same DLL). Microsoft actually tried to deprecate this language, but the hordes of people who didn't want to learn a modern language and complained about the installed base won. Well, sort of won, they're still using VB, which is punishment in itself.