TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Patrick Rhone:

Like the curtain finally falling from the Wizard of Oz to find just a small, frail, man pretending to be far more powerful and relevant than he really was. Microsoft’s biggest miss was allowing the world to finally see the truth behind the big lie — they were not needed to get real work done. Or anything done, really.

It’s insightful as to why Microsoft is so insistent that tablets are really just PCs, too. If tablets are a new kind of device, one where people have moved on from requiring Microsoft Office to do work, Microsoft is in a very, very bad position. Effectively, they’re in the same position as any other competitor to Apple and Google: an outsider trying to get in to the mobile game.

But if tablets are PCs, then tablets will run Windows, and on Windows-running computers, Office is required to do do any work of value—which makes Microsoft an instant front-runner. If tablets are just PCs, Microsoft has the platform advantage—just look at the number of Windows PCs in use and the number of people who have grown up using Windows.

For Microsoft, tablets have to be PCs, because the other scenario is just too painful to contemplate. This is a fine example of how a wildly successful business can create institutional blindness to new realities. Because a dramatic shift in computing is inconvenient for Microsoft, and would require dramatic change in their business, they end up ignoring market events until they are just too big to ignore. And at that point, it’s usually too late.

Microsoft ignored the iPhone, and now they’re a minority player in mobile phones. They ignored the iPad for a much shorter time, but enough for Apple to sell tens of millions of them—and their response has been to insist that it’s not a new device, but just a different PC form-factor.