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Microsoft Making Internet Appliance Chips
M$ Mole writes: "According to CNN, Microsoft is now developing their own chips for WebTV and other new internet appliances. The article is lacking in terms of technical details of the chips, but does bring up a good question of: What does this do to the Wintel relationship?" The idea of Microsoft making chips will raise a lot of eyebrows ceiling high, but it sounds like a fairly modest endeavor thus far, not MS jumping into the ring with AMD, Motorola, Intel, or even with the smaller X86 makers. As M$ Mole and the article say, it's about chips for appliances -- for now.
A:Nope. Tried that.
Q:Can we out market Palm?
A:Nope. Tried that.
Q:Can we lock in users on the apps level?
A:Nope. Tried that.
Q:Can we lock in users on the OS level?
A:Nope Tried that.
Q:Can we lock in users on the hardware level?
A:I guess so. We have nothing to loose.
Q:How about giving the customer a better product?
A:Blank stare . . . [laughter]
About four years ago the Soft tried to make a revolutionary graphics leap forward with the Talisman chip. It was actually a pretty cool design. And like this new chip, Talisman could "take it to the next level", something MS felt it needed to do to make Windows a competitive game platform. It failed for a number of reasons. One of them was the complexity level was higher than any of their fab partners were used to dealing with. Another was that other graphics chip manufacturers became scared to talk to them -- they didn't really want to support Talisman, but felt they needed to get Direct3D support for their chips, and Direct3D and Talisman capabilities were getting intertwined inside MS. The result was a giant mess, and it was finally dropped. My point is that MS doesn't have a very good track record with this sort of thing. Not predicting doom, but I see some similarities between the two.
I am Jack's writable stack pointer.
Made from 99.9% recycled Intel
Well, maybe not, but in accordence with standard embrace, extend, extinguish philosiphy, I would have to say yes.
But my question is (aside from perhaps the stereo and tv) why does anything in my house besides my computer need to be networked? I don't need web access on my toaster, blender, microwave, refridgerator, washer, or dryer. If you can wire up my sink to automatically rinse the dishes and put them in the dishwasher for me, while having my Mindstorm's clear off the table I just ate from, then *maybe* and only maybe, will I feel that its necessary to have my appliances networked.
soon i'll be surfing the web from my toilet paper spindle