Microsoft plans to fire back at Apple Tablet by doing the same old thing

Information Week is running a story about Microsoft’s plans to fire back at Apple’s impending Tablet release. Describing tablets as “the PC industry’s hot new category for 2010″, the article suggests that Microsoft will work with its partners to release more Windows-enabled tablet devices over the coming months.

In my opinion, the problem with this strategy is that it is nothing new. Microsoft has tried to make Windows-enabled tablet computers popular for the past 10 years and they have never caught on. As I’ve stated before, the problem is that a desktop user interface does not translate well to a tablet form factor – whether we’re talking Windows, OS X or Linux. When Apple releases their Tablet on Wednesday, I’ll eat my socks if it runs a standard OS X user interface (I do reserve the right to use as much ketchup as I want).

Desktop user interfaces are designed for keyboards and mice. Period. Once you put a desktop UI on a tablet you have to accommodate the lack of a keyboard – so you slap a virtual keyboard on screen, or maybe a text input panel with handwriting recognition. But then you run into problems with the applications themselves – some of which don’t like working with the virtual keyboard, demand more screen real estate, or have tiny menus that are difficult to navigate with touch input. I know this from personal experience – I have a Viliv X70 tablet here running both XP and Windows 7, and it is far from a joy to use.

If Microsoft really wants to compete with the Apple Tablet, they need to do exactly what Apple is rumored to have done – build a touch-enabled operating system for a new class of devices and make it easy for application developers to write apps targeted to that platform. Anything else is just a hack.