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Transmeta Needs Microsoft
An anonymous reader writes "Faced with dwindling sales, it looks like Transmeta
needs Microsoft's new tablet PC to survive." Or, if not Microsoft, some company who can spark the long-overdue tablet-computing revolution.
Transmeta took the risk in having a very specialized chip--that is...it's very low power but not as fast as others
Actually, they took a different risk. They never thought the performance would suck as much as it does. They thought they could take a very wide core and implement software emulation such that it would be faster than pure hardware solutions by making the software "smarter".
They failed.
Which is really not surprising. It's exactly the same delusion that makes people still think that "compilers are so smart nowadays that they can easily create better assembly code that humans" when that is and always has been patently untrue. People always underestimate the complexity of optimization.
We will never have optimizers as good as humans until we solve the "great question" of human AI. They go hand in hand, but people just don't want to accept that.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
...just might be the perfect playground for Transmeta. Enough said, you speculate the rest :)
The tablet form factor is very usefull for people working in a stand-up position: nurses, repair people, etc..
For all the other use, a laptop or a desktop is better.
You can type better(less error) and faster with a keyboard than with writing with a pen, even with the best handwriting recognition software of tomorrow.
The PC industry is desesperately trying to find new ways to sell more PC, so they came up with the tablet PC, but let's not be fooled by the hype..
Some vendors are very clever: they put both a keyboard and a "tactile" screen into their tabletPC so you can have both input mode.
But I think that the early "normal" users after realising that there using 99% of the time the keyboard instead of the pen will think that they are using these tablet PC as some kind of overpriced laptop and will come back to laptop..
....maybe it's not in the cards?
The posts in the thread already mention that the Carusoe is a niche chip- from what I've seen, it's gone horrifically under-utilized: a chip that could hypothetically be a power pc, mips, sparc, etceteras is nothing other than a super-low power x86?
A tablet PC might be fine for some people- If the input is pressure sensitive, it would be great for the graphics field- but these really don't seem to be much more than big PDAs or totally integrated, one-piece laptops.
What, exactly, is a tablet good for that a PDA or laptop *isn't* ? I need quick access to photoshop and apache practically everywhere I go (freelance web designer with a powerbook)- a PDA is useless for me, and the tablets I've seen don't run my OS of choice or seem to do anything I might need.
Someone clue me- what market are tablets actually *aimed* at? A laptop is perfect for my needs, and a PDA works great for many people I know.
If people don't need a thing, or can't find a use for it, then the only people that are going to buy the device are gadget hounds- which, in all honesty, don't seem like enough of a market segment to keep a niche industry like this afloat.
Intel can afford to sell chips less expensively than it normally would in order to gain a foothold in a given market--and it has proven its willingness to engage in price wars.
...
This is the crux of the article, predatory pricing: airline seats, xboxs, OSs, etc. Sell the low-margin product at a loss to sell 5 high-grossing products for an AVERAGE price greater than your competitor. Even if the tablet PCs are a hit, they'll get squeezed when Intel wants that market share. So one foot in the grave at this point
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
From the very beginning Transmeta did not have a clear market strategy. They grabbed some attention at the time, mostly because of their hidden development and braveness to face Intel. Linus was another marketing trick (quite successful). But to survive in the market a clear business strategy is a must, not just a "nice to have". They tried to use (and open?) a new market niche - the low-power mobile devices, that was not existing. The chance was little and it mostly did not succeed. The company is however popular in Japan, which had always had a market for ultra-little things. So things fall now in place - it is very hard to use a new market segment, where there is none. (Anyone Iridium phones?) The Japan-s are known to value the small things and are ready to pay real cash for the same functionality, just smaller. It is in their culture, so Transmeta was just doomed to succeed there.
Nuff said, mod me now
I don't think performance sucks as much as Intel may want you to believe. Take a look at this for some benchmarks.
And you have to consider that all tablet with Pentium III will run at a lower speed when they are on battery.
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I was really interested in getting a Sony Picturebook. This was about 4-5 months ago, when the latest ones had not yet hit the United States. I asked a client of mine, who is Japanese, to get me pricing. He obliged, but only after warning me about the Transmeta processor. "It doesn't work well when you try to run multiple applications," he said. "Everyone says it's slow."
I asked him who had told him that. He said it was the Sony rep at the store where he bought his Vaio. Uh-oh.
I knew a Transmeta 867MHz processor wouldn't perform as well as an Intel 867MHz processor, but I did some digging and was shocked to figure out how much slower it really is. Check out these benchmarks from Tom's Hardware. The Transmeta 600MHz processor got stomped by a "vintage" PII/366MHz notebook. That's terrible.
To me, small size and battery life rank higher on my list than pure performance. Still, the Transmeta processors run so slowly that the only way I could justify buying one is if they had 5+ hours of battery life. But they don't -- the PictureBook is only advertising 2.5 hours of battery life. Compare this to the (admittedly larger) 3.7-pound IBM X30, where Walter Mossberg put one through the grinder and got 3 hours and 29 minutes of battery life. IBM is claiming 5+ hours in BatteryMark for the same laptop.
Transmeta did one thing, and that was to get Intel turned on to the fact that consumers want good battery life in notebooks. I think the quote from the article puts it best: "Intel's focus on battery life happened because Transmeta pressured them into it... forced them to do something different. The good news is you've got a giant to acknowledge you but the bad news is you've woken the giant."
Right now, the giant is still stomping Transmeta, and I doubt that tablet PCs will really put Transmeta back in the running. Whatever Transmeta can come up with, Intel has proven that they can match. Transmeta might make initial inroads, just like they did on subnotebooks, but eventually Intel will again wake up, and this time I don't think Transmeta will survive.
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Oh man, look at this history of Quicken. Microsoft tried damn hard to kill Quicken. Damn hard. In fact, they were going to just give and buy out Quicken, but the DOJ blocked the buyout.
Yup, in MS' zest to kill Netscape they let Quicken have an icon on the Active Desktop. They also got Quicken to force the installation of IE along side Quicken.
Do they want to kill them or do they like them?
If they really wanted to kill Quicken, they would bundle Money-Lite with the OS and if they really wanted to kill Quicken, they wouldn't have given them a spot on the Active Desktop years ago.
I think they like Quicken
1. benefiting from Microsoft isn't actually a bad issue. After all, if it wasn't for M$ we wouldn't have such cheap PCs, nor Linux installed on them. This may seem a weak point, but I think that it could help to simplify the issue. The real point, now, is that Microsoft is in such a position that they can force Transmeta not to support Linux on their CPU.
2. Maybe Transmeta should have waited few more years, and jump out with a brand new processor when all other Bigs would be "forced" to build Palladium- CPUs.
Just few thoughts.
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Someone clue me- what market are tablets actually *aimed* at? A laptop is perfect for my needs, and a PDA works great for many people I know.
Actually, there are a number of markets where ideally a tablet PC would be perfect for. Markets like medicine, the remote sensing industry, or even the university student market. However, I have yet to see a tablet that actually works. I could go on for some time, but a small assortment of complaints include: There is not enough resistance in the way the pen moves over the surface, tablet PC's I have worked with to date do not include pressure sensitivity, and the rendering engine leaves much to be desired along with the navigability of the user interface and the connectivity technology also has not been up to snuff.
Now, all that said, the technology exists to remedy all of these faults. I personally would like to see Apple create a tablet with a cut down version of OS X with it's Quartz/.pdf rendering engine, Bluetooth, and 802.11. Apple is probably the only company around that can actually show folks how to make the tablet concept work and actually did point the way to the current tablets with the Newton some years ago.
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Transmeta doesn't necessarily need Microsoft to succeed, but they do need some device that will sell millions of units. Right now their best bet is Microsoft's tablet PC. Microsoft is the only player that seems likely to spec a Crusoe in a device and then spend the advertising money that it will take to sell the darn thing.
So far devices that require a low power x86 compatible chip have been few and far between, and when such a chip has been necessary AMD and Intel have had chips that were competitive.
It works just fine here on my ProGear from SonicBlue. I'll be rebulding the OS and window manager sometime soon so that I have more applications.
We doan need no steenkin' Microsoft.
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Reasonable prices definitely being the "operative word"! I was looking at Transmeta systems a few months ago and the prices were way out of line. I would have been paying more than a competing Intel- or AMD-based system and getting much less performance. What the hell! Sure Transmeta's per unit costs are probably higher since they're a smaller shop, but I'm sorry, I don't buy based on feeling sorry for a company's problems. I have a budget, too.