Huge difference between Apple and Microsoft: How they introduce new products

Microsoft showed off more of Windows 8 today — specifically, a very early version of its tablet interface, running on developer hardware. (The real thing won’t ship for a year or so.)

It’s a good example of how differently Microsoft and Apple introduce new products. John Gruber has a good description at Daring Fireball:

It’s all in the future. All potential, nothing actual. Think about how different Apple’s and Microsoft’s approaches are. Apple unveiled the iPad to the public only when it was a completely finished product, two months before it hit stores. The demo units we in the press had access to that day were exactly like the mass-produced iPads that shipped to customers two months later. Can you imagine Apple doing with the iPad what Microsoft is doing with Windows 8? Say, showing a prototype iPad at WWDC in June 2009, running on MacBook Pro-caliber Intel hardware? Letting the public and the press play with the OS in half-finished alpha state on prototype hardware? Impossible even to imagine.

Related: Amazingly, Microsoft might not miss the boat on tablets