Microsoft: The iPad is “Humorous”
It's an understatement to say that Apple's iPad generated a lot of chatter when it was announced on Wednesday; the scuttlebutt actually slowed down the Internet. Even Microsoft couldn't help but weigh in, criticizing the iPad for being a “locked down device.”
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's Wednesday iPad unveiling landed with enough force that Microsoft itself felt obliged to respond within days, dismissing the device as "humorous" and a "locked down" product — an unusually direct jab from a company whose own touch strategy was still under wraps. The critique writes Microsoft into a familiar role: defender of general-purpose computing against a walled garden, even as anti-DRM activists make much the same argument about the iPad extending content restrictions to a new class of computers.
The timing matters because Redmond has nothing comparable to show yet — though CFO Peter Klein has confirmed a new version of Windows Mobile will debut at Mobile World Congress — and the trade press is already asking whether Windows needs reworking to fend off Apple. Steve Jobs, meanwhile, is projecting confidence that international iPad data deals will be locked up by June or July, and early developers like former Facebook iPhone engineer Joe Hewitt are publicly enthusiastic, leaving Microsoft's mockery sounding more like a counterpunch than a consensus.
First-order effects
- Microsoft's public attack frames its coming mobile and slate efforts as the "open" alternative, raising the bar for what it must actually ship — starting with the Windows Mobile refresh Klein has confirmed for Mobile World Congress.
- Apple gets free competitive validation of the iPad's importance: when the world's dominant software company mocks it two days after launch, the device is being treated as a platform threat, not a toy.
Second-order effects
- Carrier negotiations become a front line: Jobs's claim that international data deals will be secured by mid-2010 pressures operators worldwide to pick sides on 3G terms before any rival slate exists.
- Developers now face an explicit positioning choice between a locked-down but lucrative App Store model and the general-purpose PC ecosystem Microsoft is defending, splitting attention and marketing budgets ahead of competing hardware.
Third-order effects
- If the closed-device model sells, the debate Microsoft and DRM critics have opened — whether appliances should replace general-purpose computers for mainstream consumption — becomes the defining policy and design fight of the next computing cycle.
- Microsoft risks a structural bind: attacking lock-in rhetorically while its own response depends on matching Apple's integrated hardware-software-control approach, which is what made the iPad coherent in the first place.
The trend: The post-iPad computing market is opening with a closed-platform-versus-open-PC fight, in which incumbent software vendors attack Apple's walled garden while racing to build controlled devices of their own.