This is fucking moronic. Which makes sense, because this is the fucking Microsoft moron who turned desktop Windows into a touch-centric interface — including the server version, which makes absolutely no sense at all. This dude is without a clue and no one should listen to him about anything. He is a full goddamn idiot. I hate this dud(e) almost as much as I hate Mozilla.

The problem is that tablets and phones are consumption devices. They will be hard-pressed to ever be more than that. Having lived through a few of these transitions, what Sinofsky is missing (other than a brain) here is that tablets and phones remove capabilities without adding anything. With a mouse *and* a keyboard, the keyboard was still there. Capabilities were added. Nothing was removed. Tablets and phones by definition remove capabilities and are less powerful by dint of this.

The maximum precision you can attain on a touch screen jabbing at it with a finger is about a 1/4 of an inch if you are very, very precise. On a real system designed for work, I can obtain pixel-level precision. (And that’s just one example of many.)

Don’t get me wrong. Tablets are great for some things. Casual consumption. Light work. Sending a quick email. Drawing, arguably. But for actual production of anything, no. Never will be. For the casual user they are great. They are nothing but guardrails with very little practical use. This is perfect for the people (about 60% of computer users) who can’t find their start menu even after using a Windows machine for two decades.

This dude is conflating two very different use cases is part of the problem: people who need to do work and people who are playing with some light work thrown in. These aren’t the same people.

I agree with Sinofsky that 80-90% can get by on a tablet because most people do very little.

But those aren’t all the people who use computers, and that’s what he’s missing.