14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft and its OEM partners are yet to provide customers with the Windows 7 Slates to rival Apple’s iPad, although promises from the company indicated that such Tablet PCs were made before the end of 2010. But iPad rival devices powered by Windows 7 are indeed closer than ever, with such examples as the ASUS EP121 Slate already available for pre-order.
And Microsoft is giving its partners “weapons” to fight the increasing adoption of Apple’s iPad, according to Mary-Jo Foley who published a PowerPoint documents titled “Microsoft Commercial Slate PCs.”
With more and more end users embracing iPads, it was only a matter of time before the device would make its way into enterprise environments.
Microsoft is of course, well aware of this, and is instructing partners to advertise Windows 7 Slates as the best option for corporate customers.
In the document provided by the Redmond company, a series of questions are asked about the iPad such as, how do you secure corporate IP? How do you demonstrate compliance to auditors? How do you provide remote assistance?
The software giant is revealing that Windows 7 Tablet PCs have a number of advantages compared to the iPad, especially for corporate customers in areas such as security, manageability, choice in hardware, enterprise application and device support, collaboration, offline usage, support and integration.
At the same time, Microsoft does acknowledge that there are a few points which make iPad devices attractive to users such as the intuitive interface, long battery life and the optimization of the form factor and software for data consumption.
At the same time, the company emphasizes that the iPad allows only for a poor level of data creation, and that it is limited in terms of manageability, security, hardware and support.
The three slides below (more here) offer Microsoft’s perspective over Windows 7 slates vs. iPad.
