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Comment by gamble | Hacker News Reader

> A new survey by the Boston Consulting Group found that more than 40 percent of current tablet users in the United States want a tablet that runs Windows. That number jumps to 53 percent when non-tablet owners are included. The reason: familiarity with Windows, which still runs nearly 90 percent of all PCs sold.

Here, in a nutshell, is why Steve Jobs was right when he said that it wasn't the customer's job to know what they want. Not many people have the balls to risk cannibalizing their own product and launch a product that their marketeers are convinced the public doesn't want.

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Not to be pedantic, but Henry Ford figured that out long before SJ was a twinkle in the valley's eye.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

To be fair, Jobs himself acknowledged this. Still, Ford made cars. What was interesting about Jobs taking that stance is that he was in a position to do something about it in tech, upending a lot of established dogma. And making a lot of money in the process.

I always hate this quote. You should always ask people what they want, you just shouldn't literally deliver what they ask for when you can do much better.

It helps by reframing the question. Instead of asking people what they want, ask them what kinds of problems are they having with their existing solution. Often, they will tell you solutions, and you'll need to work backwards a bit till you discover what their pain points are.

Once you thoroughly understand the problems they're having, you have a much better shot at crafting a great solution.

The current situation is more analogous to car owners preferring a different kind of horse. Or even people not owning any vehicles still preferring a new kind of horse rather than a car even after cars came out.

From http://allthingsd.com/20111005/nevermind-the-iphone-5-wheres...

But the BCG study isn’t an anomaly. Forrester conducted a poll earlier this year and got the same message, with an even starker gap between Microsoft and everyone else: “Only 9% of consumers considering buying a tablet actively prefer an Android tablet — compared with 16% who prefer iOS and 46% who prefer Windows.”

When I wrote about it back in August, I found this so puzzling that I got Forrester researcher Sarah Rotman Epps on the phone to confirm that this wasn’t some weird typo. Nope, she told me.

And it’s sort of common sense: “When we survey consumers, it becomes very clear that Windows is still a very popular brand,” she said. Apple has sold tens of millions of iPads, but Microsoft has sold more than 400 million Windows 7 devices.

I think your second analogy is spot on. I'm curious to know what kind of tablet people are envisioning when they answer these questions: an iPad-style device running Windows or a better-designed version of a convertible notebook? I honestly can't believe that nearly half of the ready-to-buy-a-tablet market is holding off for Metro.

46% of consumers preferring Windows = 46% of consumers who are clueless to what a tablet really is.

I've had a touchscreen LCD hooked up to my Windows 7 machine for about a year and a half. Beyond scrolling through web pages it is unusable. The Windows UI is designed for a keyboard and mouse. Now take this 22" touch screen I have and bring it down to 7". Good luck doing anything.

Obviously Microsoft's answer to this is the new Metro overlay (or whatever they are calling it for Windows 8.) If consumers are swiping through two different versions with a Windows 8 tablet, and one of them is barely usable on a touch screen, its going to flop.

I use Windows on my iPad -- by remoting in to my desktops. The only app that I have found usable is LogMeIn because of how the mouse cursor is controlled. Its not a pleasant experience but I can get minor work done at able 1/4th speed or less. You can't release a device that does that out of the box and put your brand on it.

Microsoft appears at a loss on how to move from the keyboard & mouse world to the touchscreen & voice one. Windows has tons of software for it, none of which was designed for touchscreen & voice world. I never have used this phrase before, but Microsoft is trying to have their cake and eat it too. Instead they will get nothing.

You are trying to use something not designed for touch and suggesting they suck at touch.

Have you tried a windows phone 7? I am a mobile dev who has worked on wp7, android, and iPhone. I personally use an iPhone, but I found wp7 to be much nicer than Android and pretty well designed.

You didn't read the original article. The story is about microsoft not wanting to fork Windows. They want Windows 8 to work on desktops, and tablets. From the demo videos I saw, Windows 8 switch back and forth between a usable touchscreen UI and the traditional keyboard & mouse UI. That is having your cake and eating it too. And its going to piss consumers off when they think they can use Excel on their new Windows Tablet and instead get an experience akin to picking cactus nettles out of your face.

How does that means Jobs is right? If anything, it seems a significant percentage of current tablet users are not satisfied with their tablets(80% of which are iPads?) and want something with a bit more power.

Maybe they would have been happier with an iPad that was more powerful like the Windows 8 dev preview tablet? We will know when those come out.

Windows tablets have been available in a variety of forms for around twenty years. Without exception, they've all been failures in the marketplace.

People like the idea of a Windows tablet much more than the reality. Real products have to make compromises, like sacrificing performance or battery life to run legacy applications designed for PCs, and there's no magical way to make interfaces designed for a mouse and keyboard suitable for touch input without changing them completely.

I'm forced to use a windows xp tablet at work. Made by Philips. It's so bad it hurts, and every so often you see the cursor appear that is under your finger when you hit a button. It's buggy and hideous. Used once it could put you off Microsoft for life.

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