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Why the iPad Pro is terrible news

for MicrosoftUpdated by Timothy B. Lee on September 9, 2015, 7:20 p.m. ET 

tim@vox.com

Microsoft has be en trying to make tablets that work like PCs for more than a decade.

Ron Wurzer/Getty Images

The first version of the iOS software that powers the iPhone

and iPad, released in 2007, had radically less functionality thanconventional PCs. It couldn't run third-party software, couldn't

multitask, and didn't even offer a cut-and-paste feature.

But over the last eight years, iPhones and iPads have grown

more and more capable, narrowing the gap with PCs. On

Wednesday, Apple took two more big steps in this direction.

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The Cupertino company announced a new iPad Pro with a

laptop-size screen, a stylus, and the ability to run two apps side

by side. Apple also introduced "3D Touch," which allows iPhone

users to do a new kind of "hard press" gesture that works a lot

like right-clicking on a PC.

Microsoft participated in the iPad Pro presentation,

demonstrating how well Microsoft Office works on the new,

business-oriented tablet. But while selling more Office 365

subscriptions to iPad users would be good news for Microsoft,

the incursion of Apple mobile devices into PC territory is an

ominous sign for the Redmond software giant.

History is full of examples where simple, disruptive technologies

— like smartphones — gradually cannibalize the markets of more

complex established technologies like the PC. And the result is

almost always a disaster for the incumbents.

Disruptive technologies start at the bottom andmove up

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A Bethlehe m Stee l plant in 1999. (Tom Mihalek/Getty)

In the 1960s, the steel industry was dominated by huge,

complex integrated steel mills. These mills faced competition

from new minimills, which processed scrap steel in small

batches. Initially, the larger mills weren't too worried about the

minimills, which could make steel more cheaply thanconventional mills but could only produce rebar, the lowest-

quality and least profitable type of steel.

Clayton Christensen, the scholar who developed the concept

of disruptive innovation two decades ago, has written (

http://www.hbs.edu/socialenterprise/pdf/TheInnovato

about what happened next. Over time, the minimills figured out

how to produce steel of higher and higher quality, while

maintaining their cost advantages over the traditional mills. By

2001, competition from minimills had driven a leading

traditional steel producer, Bethlehem Steel, into bankruptcy.

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Something similar happened in the PC industry. The first PCs in

the 1970s were comically underpowered compared with

mainframes and minicomputers that were already on the

market. But over time, they became more and more

sophisticated. Eventually they not only created new markets

for desktop and laptop computing, they also began to invade

the server market, traditional strongholds of more complex and

expensive computers.

Today, huge internet companies like Google and Facebook run

their sites using commodity servers that are little different,

technically speaking, from the PCs people have on their desks

at home. Meanwhile, most of the companies that built those

pre-PC computers — with names like DEC, Wang Laboratories,

and Apollo Computer — have long since gone out of business or

been absorbed into PC companies.

A more recent example can be seen in the news business.

BuzzFeed, for example, began its life producing the rebar ofonline content — cat GIFs and quizzes. People (including me)

laughed when they hired the respected journalist Ben Smith to

lead BuzzFeed's news operation. But over time, BuzzFeed has

moved "upmarket," producing serious journalism and even hiring

an investigative reporting team.

Early smartphones were a lot less capable than PCs— and that was a good thing

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Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his success or, Steve Ball mer. (Jeff Chistense n/Getty )

Three decades after the PC disrupted the computer business,

the PC itself is being disrupted by smartphones and tablets.

When Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, Microsoft CEO

Steve Ballmer laughed (

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U),

saying that "it doesn't appeal to business customers because it

doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email

machine."

But of course the joke was on Ballmer: The really big market for

smartphones wasn't business users wanting to check their

email and edit spreadsheets — it was ordinary consumers who

wanted to chat with their friends, share photos, and

(eventually) hail a ride. And for these users, the simplicity and

elegance of the iPhone interface was actually an advantage.

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Beginning in 2008, Google copied Apple's approach with its

Android smartphone platform, dispensing with the keyboard

and other PC-oriented features. The iPhone and Android

quickly became the dominant mobile computing platforms,

leaving Windows and BlackBerry-based phones with keyboards

in the dust.

Slimming down Windows hasn't worked

Meanwhile, Microsoft had spent the previous decade trying to

cram all of the functionality of a Windows PC into a pocket-size

device. Microsoft's early mobile OS, introduced in 1996 with

the unfortunate abbreviation of WinCE, even had a tiny andextremely awkward start menu (

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mikehall/archive/2007/07/2

applications-to-the-windows-ce-start-menu.aspx) .

Once it became clear that the iPhone and iPad were hits,

Microsoft got better at developing mobile-first user interfaces,

but the company's PC legacy continued to haunt it.

Windows applications are designed for a keyboard and mouse,

not a multi-touch display. When Microsoft's developers tried to

convert them to tablet format, the results tended to be a lot

worse than the native apps that were appearing on iPhones and

Android devices.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's attempts to foist more tablet-y features

on its PC customers with Windows 8 generated a backlash,

forcing Microsoft to backtrack somewhat (

http://www.vox.com/2014/9/30/6874825/microsoft-

needs-to-decide-if-windows-is-for-pcs-or-tablets)

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with Windows 10. Like the manufacturers that dominated the

market before the arrival of PCs — or newspapers too addicted

to lucrative print ad revenues to shift their focus to the web —

Microsoft is a captive to its still-lucrative but stagnant

customer base.

Apple's mobile devices are becoming more like PCs

Apple has taken a different approach. When it created the iPad,

it made the crucial decision to make it a scaled-up iPhone

rather than a scaled-down Mac. It had no menu bar, no

windows, and no user-accessible file system. Users got the

same simple, uncluttered interface they loved on the iPhone,but on a bigger screen.

 APPLE'S SCALED-UP IPHONES HAVE BEEN A

LOT MORE POPULAR THAN MICROSOFT'S

SCALED-DOWN PCS

At the same time, Apple — and Google — has gradually been

making its mobile platform more capable. It added cut-and-

paste, an app store, and better support for corporate email and

calendar systems. Google developed a notification center to

help users manage the flow of messages — a feature Apple

quickly copied. Android vendors also introduced "note" tablets

that are designed to be used with a stylus.

Apple's scaled-up iPhones have been a lot more popular than

Microsoft's scaled-down PCs. And on Wednesday, Apple took

two more steps into PC territory with the iPad Pro and the 3D

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Touch capabilities of the iPhone.

The mobile revolution is bad news for Microsoft

It's too early to say if these innovations will be successful. It's

possible the market for business-oriented tablets just isn't that

big, and that people don't want to learn still more gestures for

their smartphones. But Apple's strategy of scaling up

smartphone software has a better chance of success than

Microsoft's traditional strategy of trying to scale down PC

software.

If you start with a simple interface and add an additional option— like force-clicking — beginning users can simply ignore it, and

the software should still work fine. It's much harder to start

with a complex software — like one that assumes the user has a

keyboard and two-button mouse — and make it work well in a

simpler interface.

In the long run, this means that Microsoft's desktop PC

business may wind up like Bethlehem Steel and Wang

Laboratories: Mobile platforms could become more and more

capable, cannibalizing demand for Windows-based PCs. Tablet-

based computers are unlikely to totally replace PCs — after all,

there are still some mainframe computers around. But history is

not on Microsoft's side.

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