If you really want, I’ll give you my view on baseball. I’ve never played it, watched it once, read a book about it and I may have seen Field of Dreams.
Watching Gruber (who I love reading) try and understand corporate clients, is like me writing on baseball.
“There’s a kernel of wisdom here, which is that the Office 15 apps should be the best selling point in favor of Windows 8 tablets versus the iPad, for those buying tablets for use as a secondary or even tertiary computing device in a job that’s already dependent upon Microsoft Office. When I travel, I see gobs of corporate businesspeople using iPads; with a real version of Office, many of those people may well be using Windows 8 tablets a year from now. It’s a genuinely compelling hook.”
Daring Fireball Linked List: Paul Thurrott Giveth Common Sense, Paul Thurrott Taketh Away.
What I think that Gruber and Thurrott both misunderstand is actually why things are like they are.
Two words… “Installed base”.
The reason that people are still wandering around with corporate PCs is that they don’t have the choice. Lotus Notes still has a double digit market share for email, Windows XP is still deployed massively and SAP is everywhere.
People can’t just drop their PCs for iPads because the apps aren’t there and won’t be for years.
However, Thurrott is equally mistaken. I know of nobody that’s actually waiting for an Office version that runs on tablets. They’re waiting for a version of Offices that works, or even better something else.
Spend a day in an Office and you’ll understand how much people hate this stuff.
