Apple released their iPad today and lead with this claim:

There are more than enough bloggers looking to give their opinions on the topic, so I will avoid that morass.  I want to reserve final judgment until I play with it, but I did come away feeling like this scene from History of the World was more appropriate.

The rumor mills and speculation are running at fever pitch.  I really should have predicted that 2010 would be the year of the tablet.  With bloggers falling all over themselves trying to get the scoop on the Apple table, it seems that the bloggers are trying to call a tablet from Microsoft to be announced tonight, though Mary Jo says “I don’t think so.”  With all that in mind, I was trying to figure out how to explain the world of tech in which we live.

Any unannounced, but speculated on, Apple product lives at the intersection of Impossible, Inspiring and In-Demand.  People may scoff at the notion of “in-demand” being applied to a table, but Bing tells me that there are 22.5 million results for Apple Tablet.

Mini-MSFT is back, with a post about Microsoft turning The Corner.  It’s interesting to contrast his point of view with that of MG Siegler over at ParisLemon.  Given my own perception of  Valley bias on the part of Siegler (he is one of the new voices of Techcrunch after all), it’s great to see that we’re making progress which is being met with receptivity and not suspicion.  Further, everyone is focused on the most important beneficiaries – customers.

I have to admit, since returning to the company a little over a year ago, I have had this sense that things are looking up.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s no shortage of frustrations for me, but that’s to be expected when you come from a tiny company where you were the founder and CEO to a large company where you a cog in a wheel.

With the new fiscal year, I have a new role and a new team, and I plan on making liberal use of my training and experiences in constrained resource environments to do some things that will harken back to the mojo days of the late 90s and IE/Netscape goodness.

I know I posted a joke leaked screenshot of Chrome OS, and many people found it funny, but I firmly believe that this pre-announcement was the absolute dumbest thing that Google could have done.  First, they are starting to show a trend of pre-announcing products, with ever increasing time between announce and availability.  You could see this with Java support in App Engine, but then Wave, and now Chrome.  What are they thinking?  FUD worked 10 years ago, but not anymore.

Second, operating systems are our thing.  We have *YEARS* of experience building and delivering operating systems to market.  If it we so simple as to slap a pretty face on a Linux distro, someone would  have taken us out a long time ago.  There’s a long road of tattered carcasses that have tried to be “the next great OS.”  I use a Macbook at home for personal work, and enjoy OS X, and generally regard it as a great operating system.  Even with the Apple Fan Boy magic, they are marginally high single digit market share.  Ouch.

Third, and this is the important one, Google has given us a rally cry.  Whereas you could make the case that legions within the company felt that Ballmer’s quest to topple Google in search was Quixotic at best, no one, and I mean no one, comes into our house and pushes us around.  Expect to see the company galvanize around this new encroachment.  Expect a wave of pride, and something akin to, dare I say, nationalism, sweep through the company.  To pre-announce a thing a scant few months before Win7 goes out the door is going to bite them in the rear.  Win7 hasn’t had a bad review yet, and people are very excited to get it.  I have been running it on all my personal and work machines (other than the Macbook) for months, and it’s awesome.

We’ve rounded the corner, for sure.  We’ve rounded it and rejoined the race.  We were off in the woods for a while, but we’re back in the race and have a lot of power in the engine.  The next few years are going to be incredible.  I’m excited to work at the company, but more excited as a consumer who is going to benefit from Google, Apple and Microsoft all going at it hammer and tongs for phones, search and operating systems.

UPDATE: Looks like the original post is top spot at Techmeme…this week is going to be interesting.  That’s all I can say out loud.

Apple, I used to love you.  I love my Macbook.  I am on record as saying that the iPod Touch is the finest piece of technology that I have ever owned.  It has changed my life.  You make great products.  Why do you have to lie to me and the rest of the population?  I used to think the smarmy ads were a novelty, but now they just annoy me.  You used to be creative, and now you are just an outright liar.

Look, if you really have to resort to such tactics to sell your product, you may have to rethink your offering.  When netbooks roared into the scene, you mocked and dismissed them.  That’s fine.  Retain your superior price point and premium products.  However, don’t effing lie.  Your Macbooks have small screens too.  Your memory prices are insane.  Stop lying.

Most importantly, your computers crash.  It doesn’t have as widely a known name like blue screen of death, but it’s just the same.  Any Mac owner has seen the kernel panic screen.  This screen comes without any warning, and you are completely hosed.  Further, it comes at unpredictable times.  Stop lying about your reliability.  I haven’t seen a blue screen of death in a very long time.  Not once in the year I was running Vista, and not once since I have started running Windows 7.  I regularly see kernel panics on my personal Macbooks.  And stop with the “no viruses’” thing.  That’s like bankrupt bank claiming that they are awesome because they never got robbed by Jesse James.  Unfortunately, he went where the money was.  So you must be making the claim that no one uses your computers (thus making them an unappealing target for viruses).  Well done.

Word of advice to Apple.  Please get back to showing me why your products are awesome.  You iPhone ads are great for specifically that purpose.  These “I’m a Mac” ads are completely disingenuous and it’s time to move on.

Everyone seems to be all over this netbook meme that’s been floating around for a while.  When I first played with a netbook, it was an Asus 9” Eee PC.  I have to admit, I didn’t get it at first.  The machine that I was given to borrow over a few days was running Windows XP.  It had a very small keyboard.  Do I have large hands?  No.  (You know what they say about guys with small hands right?  They still can’t type on netbooks.)  I just found the keyboard very difficult to acclimate to for even basic tasks.

I returned the netbook, and a couple of months later was treated to another loaner.  This time it was the Lenovo S10.  Ahhhh, now we’re talking.  The keyboard was still very frustrating, and while “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” turned out something closer to “tje qujkfs bokraskdj fokse sfdl; sdlkt” I did eventually get used to the keyboard (we’re talking a few hours of use) and can now touch type on it no problem.

My issue with the netbook was that it’s effing slow.  Don’t listen to what anyone tells you.  It’s slow. The Atom processor is slow.  The memory (even with 2GB) didn’t feel sufficient.  The graphics were painful, and when loading web pages, which have a habit of stressing your graphics if there are any flash pieces or AJAX-y stuff going on, things seemed to bog down.  This was all on XP.

Given that I work at Microsoft, it may be a bit out of school to say this, but there was no way I was going to put Vista on this thing.  The machine was having enough of a time getting out of bed, there was no need to strap weights to its belt.  However, working at Microsoft as I do, I was able to put the beta build of Windows 7 on this little baby.  Build 7000.

I am happy to say that I have been running the netbook since beta started and have had no problems.  It’s not fast, and I feel bad for you if you bring your netbook up on the network from sleeping and Outlook is open and tries to synch.  Guh!  The 600px screen height is maddening, and you really don’t want to be doing anything other than light web browsing, typing email or editing docs.  OneNote is fantastic on this computer.  You have to minimize the Office 2007 ribbon (right click on it to do this) to really have anything reasonable in the way of screen real estate.  Don’t think that you are going to do any modeling on Excel.  The keyboard and screen make this hard.  Very hard.

So that’s a long preamble to bring me to the main point of this post.  Keir Thomas over at PC World has written an article suggesting that the uptake on Linux on the netbook is a complicated issue.  No it’s not.  Linux on the desktop sucks.  Period.  Thomas would love to pull a rope a dope and suggest that since Windows has a lead in the mind of the consumer, and they are already comfortable with Windows that they are willing to forgive the problems presented by a netbook out of box experience, whereas with Linux they are not.  This is wrong for a couple of reasons.

First, if the computer really is a tool, then the software shouldn’t matter.  In reality, it does.  The computer is a workbench, and you need the software tools to get things done.  The hardware is not the tool.  The operating system and associated software is.  The Linux community doesn’t make it easy to on-board.  It sucks to be you if you have to go online and ask questions about getting started with Linux.  The haters will rain insults down on you, or, as the author suggested, give you answers that are simply overly complicated.  That’s the Linux community in a nutshell.  This is not how the 95% of computer users who aren’t nerds like us want to interact with a computer.

Second, the hardware for the XP and Linux experience is the same.  So you can’t say the the awkwardness of the hardware is only applicable to Linux because their onboard experience sucks so bad.  No, the keyboard is just as small for everyone.  In fact, I would argue that because the Windows customers know what to expect out of the software, the awkwardness of the hardware would be more pronounced.

Third, is the XP factor.  Windows 7 is to Windows XP as web20 is to birthday cake candles.  That’s my Chewbacca defense coming through.  I’m making light of this a little bit, but let’s be clear.  Windows 7 looks absolutely nothing like Windows XP, and to even the most nerdiest of nerds (i.e. me) it took some time to get comfortable with the new cockpit.  You cannot buy a netbook with Windows 7, but many people are putting the beta on these machines.  It sings baby.  Windows 7 on the netbook, with the ecosystem of software available for it, will create a fantastic computing tool.

Fourth, the Apple factor.  I know you can hackintosh your way into running OS X on the Dell minis.  The Microsoft haters love to say what a great OS Apple has.  I use it at home on a personal laptop.  It’s nice.  I won’t argue with that.  I will argue that if Windows sucked so bad, why aren’t more people putting OS X on their netbooks?  You can do it.  It’s not terribly difficult.  The hardware issues would be the same as the Win and Linux users.  Windows can’t suck that bad, can it?

People use Windows because they know how to use it, there’s tons of software for it, and you can get done what you need done.  Was Vista a stinker?  Yes, the first version was pretty bad.  The SP1 version is a huge step up.  Windows 7, however, is amazing.  I’m running it on all my machines now, and except for some of the expected issues running non-beta internal builds, I haven’t had one problem.

If Google were right, and the Web was the platform, then people could get by running netbooks using only Linux with Firefox.  Unfortunately for Google, things aren’t that simple, and won’t be.  In fact, I am going to go out on a limb here and say that the Twitter guys are demonstrating the power of the Microsoft championed “Software Plus Services.”  Yes, you can access Twitter from the web, but the APIs have enabled many third party software pieces that run on phones, PCs, and other end points.  You need software to really make Twitter sing (tweet?).

Software is an amazing thing.  You have more power in your cell phone than was used in the command modules that put all the men that have ever walked on the moon.  Think about that for a moment.  Software on those end points (phones, PCs, netbooks, etc) make them special.  The hardware is your workbench, and software is your toolset.