I read with interest this commentary about Microsoft/Intel ceding the Tablet marketplace to Apple.  I'm not sure that that is intentionally true, but I think that Apple is going to be a very hard nosed competitor in the table device space.  Will Apple be successful in the tablet space?  I don't know, but I know that there is a lesson to be learned here, and that is the general purpose vs. task specific.  Both Microsoft and Intel have been successful in the marketplace with general purpose solutions.  Intel put out the x86 architecture.  It has been a wildly successful CPU because it was better at many of the tasks that single purpose CPUs  tried to do before it.  Microsoft with Windows has been very successful because Windows can be tailored to solve a number of problems that customers have.  Microsoft and Intel have been wildly successful in part due to the attention to solving a set of general problems.

Unfortunately, this general purpose success has left certain scenarios not solved.  An operating system that is good for the desktop doesn't necessarily work well in a mobile device.  A CPU that works well on the desktop doesn't necessarily perform well in scenarios where power utilization is important, multi-media processing, or any number of specific situations.  The problem that I see Intel and Microsoft having is that they want to take their existing success in general purpose computing and attempt to shoehorn that into a problem.  Look at Windows Mobile in comparison with the Apple iPhone.  The iPhone tries to solve the problem of phone, web content, and multi-media all in one product.  Apple has opened the platform some to allow for third-parties to write applications that run on the platform, but it is hard to argue that the iPhone is a general purpose device.  Now, look at the marketing of Windows Mobile.  The WinMo story is that it can do everything a desktop can do, but in a mobile platform.  There are a number of things wrong with this story.  When was the last time you needed to change an Excel spreadsheet or make edits on a Word document?  Now, what about Intel? There are a large number of features and functions that a desktop needs that mobile devices don't necessarily need.  The result seems to be that Intel's chips, even Atom, and chipsets use too much power for mobile devices.

Why can't these two great companies see this?  They are happy with their success. Project managers, VPs, Senior VPs, Presidents, Board of Directors, and Chairmen of the Board use words like "Strategic Direction" and other terms.  Unfortunately, the foot soldiers, engineers and software developers, are asked to build a product from the tools that they already have.  In the case of Microsoft and Intel, this is the Windows API and the x86 CPU.  now, the marketplace is a funny thing.  Clearly, MS and Intel could be successful with some subset of the Win and x86 APIs, but I doubt that they are able to figure out what subsets of their products are suitable for the mobile or tablet marketplaces.  Someone in a position of authority has probably decided that the best subset of their product is 100% of their product.  Personally, I would probably have made the same decision, but I would argue that the marketplace has already decided that the general purpose approach has not been successful.

For Microsoft to be successful in this mobile/tablet marketplace, they need to figure out and produce a version of the Windows API that will fit these marketplaces   For Intel to be successful, they need to produce a power efficient cpu (and system) that will fit into the mobile/table marketplace.