Quick quiz: Who developed a smartphone operating system first -- Apple or Microsoft? Of the two, who released a tablet first?
In both cases, it was Microsoft, and the race wasn't even close. TheMicrosoft Tablet PC was announced in 2001, and tablets built to its specifications were released in 2002, eight years before the iPad first appeared. That same year, Microsoft Pocket PC 2002 was developed for smartphones. (It later became Windows Mobile, and now is Windows Phone.) Apple got around to building its first smartphone, the iPhone, five years later, in 2007.
Apple has long been portrayed as the technology world's leading innovator, coming up with visionary ideas well before anyone else and creating entire product categories from scratch. Microsoft has been thought of as an unimaginative plodder, waiting for others to develop innovations, and then coming in with brute force and cornering the market with big marketing budgets and smart business moves.
In fact, though, Microsoft has been out front on a number of occasions. It's not that it can't innovate. It's that it doesn't do a good job of turning innovations into market-changing products.
Take the Tablet PC. At the time, it was certainly innovative. But Microsoft never figured out how to make a marketable product out of it, largely because the company thought about it as a traditional computer in a different form factor -- essentially a tablet-based Windows PC. In a press release at the time, Microsoft described it this way: "The size of a legal notepad and half the weight of most of today's laptop PCs, the Tablet PC is a full-powered, full-featured PC." Full-priced, too, typically costing $2,000. It wasn't until Apple rethought what a tablet should be -- less expensive, app-driven and primarily for consuming content rather than creating it -- that the tablet market took off.
As for Pocket PC/Windows Mobile,