As I stated before, I think Microsoft just got shut out of the tablet space. They have no offering of their own and even if speculation is true and MS is still cooking something, they better get it to market quickly since they are already a million units behind Apple. In 60 days (if that long) they will be another million units behind. Apple has OS 4.0 getting ready to come out and a new iPhone version. By that time we will be heading into the Christmas shopping season and back to school shopping. iPads, iPod Touches and iPhones will be flying off the shelves. By the end of the year there could be 4-6 million iPads in the wild with no MS offering to counteract it. If MS does come out with a tablet they are going find themselves in a serious deficit right off the bat!

And that doesn’t take into HP getting their tablet out the door before MS and stealing their thunder. Or perhaps even a tablet or Netbook from Google.

Ballmer mocked Netbooks as well as Google’s way of handling multiple OS platforms. Seems now more than ever he is eating those words. Major players are jumping on the mobile wagon and MS is still trying to find a place to hitch their wagon.

Windows is too big and bulky to be a device OS. Microsoft always wants to do too much and put in too many flashy lights to try and grab people’s attention. The OS should be tiny, but then they should offer all sorts of addons through their App Store. Microsoft doesn’t seem to understand that. They need to get out of the one size fits all model and write the OS specific to a device.

If you read the article there are comments about how the mobile game is just beginning. I don’t believe that for a second. The mobile game has been in play for years on the Apple side. Maybe the "Windows" or "MS" mobile game is just getting started, but for others they are seasoned players and clearly understand the rules.

I think MS is clearly confused about their place in the tablet world.

A window closes on Microsoft

HP was very blunt on where it goes from here, saying it plans on "doubling down on webOS," meaning we could very well be looking at a webOS-based tablet in the near future.

Do you get the feeling Microsoft has been left holding the bag here? They have a tablet OS nobody wants. The tablet market is going to keep growing and Microsoft is going to be on the outside looking in.

Ouch!

If Dell gives MS the snub and chooses Google for their tablets then Microsoft will be totally locked out of the market.

Rumor: Hewlett-Packard Kills Microsoft Tablet Project (Slate)

So how funny is this, on the day that Apple is releasing their iPad 3G model, both the Courier and the Slate are dead and delayed products. Can you say huge sales day for Apple? There is no way they could have planned this better!

Microsoft dropping the ball and dropping the project really shouldn’t come as big news. Microsoft has been mismanaging touch technology and tablets since 2000. They were completely alone in the Tablet PC market yet couldn’t get anyone to come on board. Try as they might no tablet like device produced or controlled by Microsoft ever took the market by storm. Even Surface, their latest foray into this realm is hardly noticeable in the marketplace.

So what to do now? Microsoft’s best bet is to align with HP and make the Slate the best damn tablet the market has ever seen. Considering HP has just snapped up Palm, this is a grand opportunity for Microsoft to improve the Blackberry, let HP handle the hardware and produce a new series of phones and tablets that have stellar integration with Microsoft products and hardware that is cheap and reliable. Tablets and phones that allow you to run more fully featured versions of Office, Exchange, OneNote, etc would be a huge win for Microsoft, Power Users and Corporate customers.

For the consumer market, Microsoft needs to align with Dell to power their tablets. Dell is a trusted name and they know hardware. Microsoft would do well to write the OS to Dell’s hardware specs so that it can be incredibly small and overwhelmingly fast.

And Microsoft needs to stick with these two platforms and that’s it. Stop making a one size fits all tablet OS. They need to control the hardware and optimize Windows for that hardware. If they take the same approach as Apple they can make an incredibly powerful and extremely efficient device that will be less prone to errors and crashes.

But the window of opportunity is closing fast. Each day Microsoft and everyone else waits is several thousand more iPads in the hands of users. In order to have a device available for Christmas and not get completely shut out of the tablet market they need to have something on the shelves by October which means they need a fully functioning device ready for viewers by July which means they have 2 months to get their act together.

Can Microsoft, HP and Dell pull it all together in two months to even have a chance at being a part of the tablet market? And notice I didn’t say lead or be dominant. Microsoft won’t be a dominant player in the tablet space. Considering they’re giving Apple a free 6 month head start and a lead of several hundred thousand units they’re going to be playing catch up right out of the gate. And the device can’t be mediocre, it has to be amazing and beat the iPad in every category otherwise it will simply be glossed over. And even if they do make a whiz-bang device, there is still version 2 of the iPad on the horizon. Let’s not forget that MS still needs to build all the app store infrastructure and make it work flawlessy and convince developers to port games and utilities over to their device as well as convince them they won’t just disappear out of the market (again) in the next year.

A long road ahead to be sure.

I’ve been working with two different apps to control this problem since I find it horrifically annoying to not have a taskbar on the second monitor, forcing me to roll the mouse all the way back to the primary just to open an app.

Two apps that I like are Ultramon by RealtimeSoft and DisplayFusion by BinaryFortress. In many ways they’re similar, expect when it comes to price. Ultramon is $40, while DisplayFusion is only $25.

But how do they work?

Basically they each allow you to add a taskbar for each monitor. Additionally, you can set a different wallpaper for each screen. As another must have, they add a button in the titlebar that lets you move the application window to another monitor without having to change the window size and drag. Again, these are all functions that should have been included in Windows 7 at the very least.

So how do they compare?

Ultramon was the first app I started working with, and it works very well, but it’s development cycle seems a little less than predictable. It’s a simple install and let’s you change the wallpaper and move apps between monitors with ease. If you have more than two monitors it allows you to choose the destination from a right click on the Taskbar. It’s very good, the but the price is rather high for the feature set that you get.

DisplayFusion supports adding more buttons to the title bar to move windows around. It also has more options when it comes to wallpaper, such as randomizing and rotating images. It can also load images from Flickr.

There is really only one thing I don’t like about DisplayFusion, I use Windowblinds which many times will change the size of the min, max and close buttons. There is no way to move the title bar buttons over so they don’t overlap the Windows buttons. Ultramon does have this feature.

When all is said and done it comes down to price. Ultramon is just too expensive. It works well and should give you everything you need, but you can get that same power for almost half price in DisplayFusion.

Since Windows doesn’t provide this functionality at least you have two decent alternatives.

Right now we’re already seeing a huge increase in browser functionality. You upload pictures to sites like Webshots, Flickr and Facebook through the browser, create blog entries with plugins like Scribefire, transfer files with FireFTP, check email at Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo and others, watch movies at Hulu and Netflix and if Flash and HTML 5 continue their development even games like Quake and dozens of titles from Popcap can be played inside a browser.

An extensible browser will have more value than an OS that takes 13GB of space just to get running. Currently, Firefox supports the best model with the proliferation of extensions that can be loaded. And, those same plugins will work regardless of whether you’re on Windows or Linux. The number of plugins available for Firefox dwarfs what’s available for IE. Even Chrome has more plugins available. As we move to a more web centric mentality there will be little need for a preposterously large base operating system. Do you really want to wait for a minute or two while you machine boots up or comes out of sleep mode and reloads everything into memory?

I fully expect that within the next year or so we’ll see full applications running inside of the browser using Flash, Silverlight, HTML 5 and plugins. Developers are making utilities right now that extend the power of Firefox and that will continue as the browser exposes more features. And as Flash and Silverlight develop we won’t be limited to simple games, but more full fledged applications.

Windows will also continue to lose dominance and importance and more games switch over to console platforms. Case in point, even Microsoft is no longer a game publisher for PC games and has even shuttered some of the biggest titles they had – Flight Simulator, Age of Empires and Rise of Nations just to name a few.

DirectX 10 didn’t do much to keep games on the PC either. There’s only a handful of games that are written specifically for it and most game developers have stated they plan to keep writing for DirectX 9.

Microsoft itself is pulling users away from Windows with Xbox 360. They are betting the ranch on Project Natal, which if successful will move even more users off Windows. Further, with the addition of streaming media, Twitter updates and other social media integration the need for a PC and thus Windows will continue to erode.

The other cash cow for Microsoft has been Office which I believe peaked in feature set in 2003 and now offers little reason for continual upgrades. Blog tools, social network apps, and online editors have all chipped away at the need for Office, certainly for Word which is the major reason people buy Office. Even those online comment forms highlight your spelling mistakes.

Word contains thousands of features no one will ever see, let alone use. Excel probably still has features to offer to niche groups, but overall it has exceeded the capacity of most users. In the grand scheme of things, why upgrade? What do these new versions of Office offer? And if they don’t offer new features, the need and want to upgrade to a new OS to support them diminishes quickly. Remember the launch of Windows 95 with Office 95 and again with Windows 2000 and Office 2000? WinXP and Office XP? Funny, it didn’t happen with the ill-fated Vista or the follow up cousin, Win 7.

Sure there is a surge in lemmings upgrading to Windows 7, but considering just how bad Vista was and the low expectations people have it’s really not that surprising. Plus, how many people actually went out and bought it off the shelves versus buying a new machine? Yes, they had a lot of pre-orders and the sales have been steady, but will most users be so quick to upgrade to Windows 8? I don’t believe they will. The hype and excitement over the Apple tablet more than proves people are looking for smaller, faster devices that get them on the web. It also says the functionality is the most important factor, not the OS.

The timing of Windows 7 was probably right, but with so many alternatives coming out and the push to do more on the web, the next version of Windows will probably have a hard time gaining acceptance. I’ve been using Windows 7 for a couple of months now and dislike it immensely. It’s not the upgrade I was hoping for and I have no intention of spending money for the same old crap next time around.