Claiming premature victory

Paul Thurrott declares victory for Microsoft over Apple after the unveiling of Windows 8. Not so fast says John Gruber. [Link]

Thurrott saw this demo and thinks, “This is so much better than the iPad, game over.” (And it’s not like Thurrott is alone.) If I were on the Microsoft/Windows beat, I’d look at this and think, “My god, the iPad has been out for 18 months, the second generation is so popular that Apple has only recently been able to keep them in stock, and Microsoft is still an entire year away from releasing its first competing product. Who cares if it runs fast on high-power high-performance PC hardware, why can’t we see it on low-power mobile hardware?”


It’s one thing to look at today’s Windows-8-on-a-tablet and say that it has a lot of potential. It’s another thing altogether to look at it and declare victory.


Show me something real, I say. Look at Amazon. Everyone knows they’re building a tablet. What have they said, though? Nothing. What have they shown? Nothing. When will they say something? When it’s done. What will they show? Something real.


To me, what these Windows writers are doing is like a baseball writer who today has started writing about what might happen in next season’s playoffs, because the team he follows is doing so poorly this season. We’ve got “is good today” against “might be good in a year”. The actually good versus the potentially good.