Yet that's exactly what Apple does every time they release a new product and they're successful. People snap up iPads left and right and drone on about how great they are while complaining about all the stuff they can't do with it. Meanwhile Microsoft releases products that solve all those issues and they scoff.
Again, Apple manages to make it work because
they're Apple, and Apple has spent decades crafting a user culture that
wants to be coddled and told what they want and given shiny new crib toys to play with. Microsoft
hasn't, they don't have that user culture, and they haven't even spent any time trying to craft one; they've just released products nobody wants and then demanded that customers adapt their expectations to fit what's being sold instead of trying to adapt what they sell to fit what customers want. And they're getting rightfully excoriated for it.
They actually are, considering that most iPhone and iPad users are syncing their devices up to Windows computers.
The thing is that
nobody buys Windows because they want an iPad. If they did
they would buy an iPad. And yes, many of them
do buy iPads - which means
they already have iPads, and absolutely nobody was giving any indication that they wanted their PC to
also be an iPad, or that they wanted an iPad that was made by Microsoft instead of Apple. Which is why next to
nobody has reacted to this by saying "you got your iPad in my PC! TWO GREAT TASTES THAT TASTE GREAT TOGETHER!!!" Sometimes I eat tuna fish. Sometimes I eat chocolate. This does
not mean that I'm looking for a happy medium between the two.
Windows 8 and the Surface tablets was Microsoft's attempt to give the customer what he asked for by listening to the complaints people had about competing products. Surface Pro rectifies all the complaints people had about other tablets. It's actually a pretty nice product, problem is people say they want one thing but turn around and grab something else. RT is kind of lame, but hey, people said they wanted ARM.
Microsoft's biggest mistake was in trying to give people what they thought they wanted. The latest XBox is a testament to that mentality. How many times have you hear folks bitching about all the crap shoved under their TV and the pile of remotes they have to juggle? So they've created the ultimate in your face, one super ultra mega box to rule them all and dominate your living room with an iron fist. Cameras and mics to monitor your ass 24/7 and apps to manage your fantasy football teams...
This is complete nonsense.
Nobody wanted desktop Windows to be a tablet OS. Very few people even wanted a Microsoft-branded tablet. Windows 8 is entirely Microsoft's baby; it's their attempt to do a cargo-cult copy of the iPad, because they saw how much money Apple was raking in with those suckers. This is obvious when you look at the Windows Store - they want developers to just
give them a cut of their sales for no other reason than because developers have settled for letting Apple do that to them. This is
not about what Windows users want; it's about what
Microsoft wants.
And that's even
more true for the XBone. Every single thing about that was a middle finger to gamers and a self-service to Microsoft - requiring the Kinect, which nobody wanted, so that it would look like less of a failure (and net another $100 per unit,) locking down the used-games market so that Microsoft and their publisher friends could help themselves to the majority of used-game revenue at the cost of screwing over gamers and retailers alike, requiring always-online because...who the hell even knows, presumably they think it's some way to combat piracy? That was
entirely about exploiting customers to serve their own interests. Sony basically had E3 handed to them on a silver platter because the
only thing they had to do was make an announcement saying "hey, guys,
we're not planning on actively screwing you over" and they automatically looked like the good guys.
Microsoft is continually banging their head against the wall with this attitude, expecting their customer base to adapt itself to what it is that
Microsoft wants to be doing, rather than offering customers what
they want and winning hearts and dollars thereby. It's not a mutually-beneficial customer/business relationship - it's a predatory one, and surprisingly enough it turns out that people don't
like being preyed upon.
