> If I were Microsoft, I would hold my ground. You mean to justify such kind...

sauravc · on May 11, 2012

No, it means owning the browsing/battery life experience e2e.

Geez! When it comes to issues about Apple or Microsoft (or Ruby), it seems a number of people on HN lack the ability to think objectively. It's quite sad really. It's like watching Republicans and Democrats fight in Congress, or North Carolina banning gay marriage, or Muslims and Christians fighting over God knows what. All these things stem from the inability to put oneself in the other side's shoes. Extremism sucks. Apple isn't 100% evil or saintly and neither is Microsoft.

chj · on May 12, 2012

The question is, do you really think that MS can always outdo Mozilla in "browsing/battery" experience?

They are controlling browser for a reason, but not a good reason to rule other players out.

As a platform provider, Apple/Microsoft choose not to provide the full computational power to software developers. All the more reason developers should go to Android.

sauravc · on May 12, 2012

That's a good point, but I don't think it's the question. Let's start by putting yourself in Microsoft's shoes... and by making the silly assumption that Apple's lock down of iOS is acceptable (suspending reality for a moment).

Write a piece of software for internal use. Now write a piece of software with public API's that will be available to every developer on the planet and will have to be supported for a decade.

You might find that opening up your code for global use may be easy, but it's more often the exception. But there's no denying it will push your ship date out further.

Given MS is so far behind in the ARM-based computing category, it's ludicrous to apply anti-trust restrictions on them. I wouldn't want that to happen to any company, including the ones I hate.

I probably won't ever use one of these Windows 8 tablets, given I have 4 iPads lying around the apartment and prefer Ubuntu on my laptops. But I'd still like to see as many awesome tablet choices on the shelves as possible. Microsoft is putting in a great deal of effort into making a quality product. It's already behind by several years. Let's see what they can do.