To meet the challenge posed by Apple’s iPad in Enterprise, Microsoft is unleashing its most powerful weapon in the company’s vast corporate arsenal: The dreaded PowerPoint presentation. The company has put together a slideshow presentation for its partners in the Enterprise space that lays out its strategy for beating Apple’s tablet device in Microsoft’s corporate game.
Apple’s iPad has found surprising traction in the corporate space, with 80% of the Fortune 100 working with the device for internal use in one way or another. Considering Apple’s traditional lack of success in the Enterprise space, the iPad’s success has been surprising to many.
Microsoft, arguably one of the most successful Enterprise companies in the history of modern business, isn’t taking that affront lying down, even though the company hasn’t yet released a true iPad competitor. While Big Redmond started the tablet category a decade ago, Windows tablet devices are still operating on the stylus-input method that the market never truly embraced.
All of which means that the company has to try and slow the iPad down in Enterprise by reframing corporate opinions around the capabilities and features of existing Windows tablet devices, and that’s where this slideshow comes in.
ZDNet published 10 slides from the presentation, including the two below, that show how Microsoft is looking to reshape the tablet landscape in business. In the elegant and beautiful slide below, for instance, Microsoft reveals what it has found regarding customer opinion of the iPad.
It’s easy to use and lasts forever, but it’s hard for IT to lock it down
The short version is that the iPad is a content consumption device, not a device adept at content creation (note the good qualities the company has identified, too). Microsoft also believes the lack of IT management and control features inherent in the iPad are soft spot for it to attack.
How to address these issues? Let’s try another equally elegant slide that positions Windows 7 tablets as being good for both content creation and consumption, in part because of the multitude of input methods one can use on such devices.
Microsoft, changing the world one PowerPoint slide at a time
You can see all 10 slides on ZDNet’s site.