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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.
The best tablets, came from Sumeria.
If you get an error, type "OVERRIDE" or "SECURITY OVERRIDE" and then try the optimize command again.
And if Transmeta makes the chips, then that is double cool.
I personally don't care WHO makes the damn things, as long as someone makes them, and gets them out there for reasonable prices!
Supply and demand....but where's the demand?
They're so far behing on mfg technology that they're screwed. AMD or Intel can take a .13 micron part, underclock it, under-volt it and spank em silly (while getting many more chips per wafer).
Holy crap! If you hadn't pointed that out we never would have realized it.
and I pronounce "Microsoft" "Microsoft".
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Fueling the frenzy was one of its lead software engineers, Linus Torvalds, who was already famous for developing the core of the Linux operating system
Linus was one of the lead software engineers for this company, and yet it needs Microsoft to keep it from flopping? Perhaps MS can do the hardware and Linus the software, which might actually make a good product.
What we need is linux open-sourceness with Microsoft marketing
Transmeta to create "profit morphing" technology to turn an unprofitable business plan into to a profitable one.
They will roll out newly patented "micro profit opcodes" to soak up Microsoft money at the molecular level.
If your business model needs MS, then you're already done.
Yeah, because NO ONE has EVER made a lot of money hitching themselves to the Windows platform... (*cough*Quicken, Visio, Norton, McAfee, Innumerable Games, etc, etc, etc*cough)
Sheesh, dude, get a clue. Microsoft is dominant exactly BECAUSE they make it easy for people to develop for the platform and make lots of money. Review the history of OS/2 to see what happens when you rape the developers.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
That headline is a misnomer. Microsoft is not the only company producing operating system software that could run a tablet PC. Transmeta needs Microsoft? The article didn't say that-- it said Transmeta needs customers.
Transmeta should have realized a long time ago that they couldn't break into the laptop market (which is where they seem to have been trying to go). What Intel doesn't monopolize, AMD jumps on with greater resources than Transmeta could hope for (Hammer notwithstanding).
The MS Tablet PC could be the best thing to happen to Transmeta. MS isn't exactly happy with the major box brands offering *nix, and inside rumours say debate over whether security should be hardware or software have put a good dent in MS/Intel relations. By going Transmeta, MS can get a good price on a suitable processor (not megapowered like the portable P4's, but perfect for the job), which means more tablets running MS software, they get a bigger say in the design of the tablet, and the poke Intel in the ass and say "Don't push your luck, big guy, we don't need you as much as you want to believe."
And in the end, the result is just as good for open source on the tablet platform, because cheap tablets with a big company behind them will get a strong push into the marketplace, give OpenSource developers a reason to write for the tablet.
I say, Go Transmeta!
(hey, wasn't that a catchphrase from an 80's kids show?)
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
I wonder if that has much to do with the US way of life - we see almost exact same trend in automobile and home appliance industries. People in the States like to drive muscle cars, SUVs, full sized cars, who guzzle gas like crazy. In Europe, the trend is reverse, smaller, more economic cars running on electricity or natural gas and well esablished. Here in the US, they all seem to be either developing very slow or even failing.
Same thing with the dryers and washers. Europe in Japan goes for making them more energy efficient and smaller (due to space constraints, mainly), where here in the US we dont see much of a move away from the full sized washers.
Because of that, I would think the quoted statement could very true.
...consumers are deciding they don't really need or want tablet PC's. Just a thought.
It hurts when I pee.
Would it be that hard to NOT use M$?
Yes, it would. They need a product that is going to sell hundreds of thousands of units, or even millions of units to make production worthwhile. There's no Linux based product that's even remotely close to that.
...just might be the perfect playground for Transmeta. Enough said, you speculate the rest :)
"If your business model needs MS, then you're already done."
Tell that to Gateway and Dell.
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"
Some people seems to miss the point. Transmeta doesn't need Microsoft for it's OS or software, but for it's marketing powers. Microsoft and Bill Gates are in the process of creating a new buzzword; tablet-pc.
Transmeta is a relatively small, backbone company and cannot market its products properly this is why they need Microsoft, not because of their <flame>marvellous</flame> operating system. As a slightly on-topic sidenote it seems that though Microsoft used to be about making programs they've shifted towards being about marketing and should anyone ever put them out of the software business I guess they could start making commercials.
Look a monkey!
The only resin Quicken exists is b/c MS lets them exist.
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.
Don't you think they would just bundle Money with the OS if they wanted to stomp out Quicken?
Sure, if they wanted to screw themselves in the process. The point isn't to destroy Quicken, the point is to maximize profit. And giving away "Money for nothing" (heh) doesn't maximize profit. It's hard to start selling something again after you give it away.
If you think MS plays nice-nice for the benefit of the other company, then think again.
Microsoft is smart enough to realize that the biggest advantage they have is their range of applications. That's why they treat their developers so well.
On top of that, I think MS now owns Viso.
That's called being a successful Windows developer. If only I could create product that Microsoft would want to pay 100s of millions of dollars for. :)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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 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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We Americans (when exactly did the residents of Canada, Central America, and South America yield that moniker to the residents of the United States? I must have missed it) consume so much of the world's resources and gleefully create such a disproportionate amount of waste that the people whose nations are now our toilets are more than willing to fly airplanes into us.
SUVs exist solely to circumvent fuel emissions legislation. The original Nintendo Entertainment System was a fraction of the size everywhere else in the world as it was in the U.S. -- United States consumers didn't like the small one, so Nintendo threw it into a big gray box, and it sold like gangbusters. And, while we're talking about silicon(e), How many tit jobs do you see while walking the streets of Paris? Milan? Tokyo? Lisbon?
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah -- Transmeta. I have no clue why Transmeta's stuff didn't really fly in the states. Someone should do an expensive study.
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
Put the gun down! I was only kidding!
So in the near future we can look forward to Linus holding a presentation with the image of Bill Gates looming behind him, ala Apple.
Lets call it "Big Brother Part Deux"
- Not making a small, widely available motherboard that hobbiests and integrators could just go out and buy. VIA came out with this and there's a whole small scene (mini-itx.com, et al) playing with it. This market could have been Transmetas, but they only recently put out a motherboard for developers that costs ~$600.
.13u production issues. This cost them *a lot* of momentum.
- Switching from IBM to TSMC before the latter worked out their
So with tablets we're getting a bulkier PDA (which is therefore not so handy for PDA uses), yet crippled in functionality when compared to a standard laptop, and certainly nowhere near as useful for all-around home and business use as a desktop computer.
Sure, tablets will be handy for vertical market uses. In fact, anyone who works in the shipping industry can tell you that these things have been around for years in more specialized roles. You could even argue that the Newton 2000 was a scaled-down tablet. Too big to be a good PDA, too small to offer much outside of vertical markets.
The PC industry is desperate for something, anything, that can drive sales. So they're dressing up an old notion and calling it "innovation". Think about it. Corporate IT departments won't buy them when they've already invested in laptops. Kids won't want them, because they want game power. Ma and Pa Kettle won't want them because they don't want to write emails in longhand. It's just not gonna fly as a mass-market product.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I'm writing to share a tragic little story.
My compnay has a processor that my friends and I are trying to market. One night, I was tallying up sales on it, when all of a sudden I went berserk, we were losing money, money, money. All of it. And it was a good design! I had...........
My name is Linus Torvald, and I made a deal with the devil.
The number of humans that can outcode GCC is vanishingly small, and even smaller when you have to do keep track of all sorts of parallel dependencies and such. If I had to guess, I would say their problem is that they don't have the necessary capital to do the software development they would need to make this idea really fly. This seems like more of a research project than a business plan, maybe if they enlisted more support from the community by openning things up GPL style, it might have a chance.
If you are going to make chips, you should concentrate your investment on designing and making the chips, not the software. I'm sure they could do another design cycle in more modern fab technology and get much more speed (or lower power if that is the priority).
Also, my impression is that they aren't sharing a lot of board level IP either. There are lots of applications that are getting StrongArm and other low power processors that would be an ideal market for them, but these are all small companies without a lot of bucks to risk with new designs. OTOH, if you give them a basic design that uses your chips, and sell cheap prototyping parts and support gear, your going to get a lot more inquiries. Would this be enough to turn it around for them? I don't know, but would you bet your company on Billy G. deciding to endorse tablets? Even if they are successful, the danger is that Intel can swoop in and steal the market. You're much better off staying small and concentrating on the emerging niches. Specifically, the embedded market where Linux is already a good fit and doing well.
Too bad, though, it was a good idea, but the timing was bad. They still have some investment money that hasn't been spent, but it would be difficult to change direction now.
Yeah, because NO ONE has EVER made a lot of money hitching themselves to the Windows platform... (*cough*Quicken, Visio, Norton, McAfee, Innumerable Games, etc, etc, etc*cough)
Look at your list.
Quicken is the only company that has ever competed with MS and won.
If you don't directly compete with ms then they will let you live.
If not, you will die. Example: IBM (in software), Borland, Corel (compare success before and after they purchased WP), WP, Novell, Quarterdeck, Harvard Graphics, Lotus, and the rest.
You seem to be under the ludicrous impression that being purchased by Microsoft for outlandish amounts of money is a bad thing...
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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.
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
My wife did a course on Unix at UC-Berkeley. AOL, PC, MS Office were required for that course. This is the success story of AOL-Intel-MS which managed to sell themselves to a Unix student at UCB. Transmeta is just not big enough to sell themselves in a crowded market all by itself. Linux will not help them. They will need Microsoft support (who else can help them in x86 market). Most likely, even MS will not help them. They will exploit Transmeta to force Intel and AMD to come up with low-cost technology for tablet-pc that they won't to push through consumer's throat.
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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That being said, the idea that the "tablet revolution" is long overdue is complete BS. I haven't seen so much hype in at least five years when by now we were all suppose to be using thin client java terminals, and all content would use "push technology." Tablets are going to be great for specialized industrial applications but they are not going to replace laptops. People who think otherwise are the same people who think the Segway will be replacing the bicycle in five years.
I'd say if it was overdue then there is actually a need/desire for tablet PC's ??? I can't say as I've ever encountered it or someone who could point out a burning need that could not easily be fulfilled with the existing technology, ie a laptop or pda. It is the same problem that the PC market is seeing, why upgrade ?? beyond a couple of games, a 600 Mhz cpu does everything just fine. Until the new 'killer app' arrives and needs massive cpu power things are not going anywhere fast. CPU's far outpace the rest of the architecture now. While the geek factor might drive some sales, it certainly isn't going to make the industry retool at enormousn cost for VERY LIMITED BENEFIT.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
And efficient low voltage CPU means nothing if you monitor and HD eat a high share of your batteries. The agregate "power saving" of using a crusoe instead of a low die underclocked pentium is negligible.
If any other company could deliver a really low power display, and a really low power bus/memory then things would be completely different.
If a miracle happens and very low power displays and storage is achived, transmeta could make a real difference. The bad thing is that in this case, probably a low power pentium could also deliver what the consumer wants (ie: if you can have your tablet on for 2 days with pantium and 4 with a crusoe, both good be prety usefull. Who needs the 2 extra days).
They are doomed, they should focus on teaming with whoever is trying to lower power consumption of the other devices, and focus on the flexibility of the crusoe in the meantime.
unfinished: (adj.)
Except for a few limited fields, tablet PC's are really not ideal. They are well suited to any field where you need some portability, and expect to be doing more data viewing than entry. The field that is most obviously well suited to this is the medical field. There you have X-rays, tests, etc, that can all be loaded from a central server and you only need to make small annotations. You need some portability, but not much.
The problem is that not many fields really fit that bill. You usually want either total portability or very limited portability (thus making the laptop or PDA a good choice). Furthermore you sacrifice a lot of your ability to do data entry on a tablet PC with only a limited gain in portability. A well designed PDA is actually far superior for data entry because I can use a thumb keyboard and enter data quickly. A tablet requires one hand to hold the thing, and then the other to do data entry.
I've used them and I've found that, for the most part, they are solving a problem that I've never had. I suspect that it's a problem very few people have, so except in a few niche fields tablets aren't going to be a big thing. So buhbye transmeta.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Back in the late 90's that was how business was done and MS were not alone in it - there were other companies out there. As for commenting on companies who directly compete with MS going broke i would have to point out that Lotus managed it on their own - with no upgrades to a wheezing product they stuck users with 123 or office choices for too long and then brought out a buggy and unstable SmartSuite product which lost them most of the customer base they had remaining.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Tablets will only be successful in vertical markets. Sure, they may sell some at first because of the GeeWhiz factor, but writing on the screen is simply less efficient than typing. If Transmeta and/or Microsoft is/are pinning their futures on tablets, then a rough future it/they will have.
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.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Apple has the eye candy, but they don't have the basic research into voice, handwriting recognition and other UI topics that others (such as Microsoft) have spent millions on over the years.
Excuse me?!!? Is this a troll? Well, I guess I will bite. Despite Microsofts spending over the years, they STILL have not come to where Apple has been for years. I submit that I used voice recognition back in MacOS 8.1 including the ability for scripting of voice recognition. As far as handwriting recognition, I have a Newton 120 that had much better handwriting recognition than the latest Microsoft Tablet PC prototype that I played with two weeks ago. And I got the Newton 120 back in 1994!
You appear to be buying into Microsoft's marketing dis-information by allowing them to lead you to believe that all the money they spend on R&D makes them true innovators. Did you know that marketing $$'s come out of the Microsoft R&D budget?
Like it or not, if you look at innovation in the personal computing market, Apple has introduced most of the real advances. True they did not invent everything, but they were the first computer company with the balls to integrate many of these technologies. Lets go back to the CD-ROM. Apple was the first computer company to install CD-ROM drives in PC's and paid the price by getting sued by Apple records for their trouble. Do you remember installing big programs like Office before the CD? How about plug and play computing? You only have to look at the NUBUS protocol that eliminated all of the futzing about with DIP switches and such to get say a video card to work in your computer. How about Firewire? USB? The GUI? Drag and Drop software installation? Built in networking? Built in color for the video? Multiple monitor support? I could go on and on here, but I think you get the idea.
As a microsoft shareholder, I am not happy with the way they are doing their accounting and I believe that they are using a large amount of R&D expenditures as tax write offs rather than performing real R&D. Furthermore, this is a company with $40 billion in the bank and they STILL have yet to pay a dividend.
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What they needed then and need now is a comprehensive, grass-roots developer support program and to get humble quick about the power and performance.
It's a nifty freaking technology, and it was a LOT of fun to play with. Did you realize that the Crusoe during the launch party was the fastest native picojava bytecode processor in the world? Did you realize that had they exposed an interface to CMS (code morphing software), that someone out there could have written a PowerPC personality for it, allowing it to run both x86 and PPC apps at the same time? Can you imagine what else you could do with access to this incredibly powerful, real-time, back-end compiler? Did you realize that you could decode, issue and retire two integer ops and an MMX or fp op on every cycle, the same decode rate as a modern Athlon and a faster decode rate than the P4? Did you realize that all the tech is in place to allow you to download CMS upgrades that vastly improve performance? Did you know they have a perf monitoring tool that puts vtune to shame? Did you know that using gdb connected as a cross-debugger, you can hit "ctrl-C" in an NMI handler or anywhere else and get a complete dump of the internal processor state, including numerous perf statistics?
Tip of the iceburg for the current core, and their next generation architecture (TM8x00) is SO MUCH COOLER. Like hella-cool with chocolate sauce.
But you probably didn't know any of this because they don't think developers are their #1 customers. Someone there needs to watch Ballmer do his developer dance.
Crusoe's are cool. Transmeta was cool, too. Working there was like working down the hall from about a dozen John Carmacks. You could walk into any one of these offices and be blown away by what they were working on. They were crossing real-time translation and optimization bridges that Intel won't be getting to in years but will eventually have to face.
Microsoft learned long ago how important developers were. That should have been the main market to chase. Crusoe wasn't ready for the masses, not by a long shot. The performance is catching up with a vengeance with every new core, but they made so many promises and IPO'd on so much hype, that they entered the classic promise debt trap that so many dot-coms fell into, and their lofty marketing plan claiming that benchmarks are "wrong" (please!) and that it offers this brilliant power savings are just goofy.
Had they remained lean, not staffed up to 400+ people from the 150ish they had when I joined, and stayed quiet, humble, and in the service of developers until developers helped propel them to mass marketability, they would not be the laughing stock they are today.
Yes, they hoped to be faster than "native" x86 based computers by morphing to VLIW, but what they didn't realize was that there would be a terrible price in instruction bandwidth. They ended up with a lemon, made lemonade, then added red food coloring and called it wine.
If they exposed an API to CMS, I think they would be truly impressed by the tricks that independent developers could come up with to compress their own instruction stream to make the compression ratio competetive with x86 code footprint.
Do you realize that's really the main performance problem with Crusoe? The instruction bandwidth! On average, x86 instructions, because they're variable width and byte granularity, are 6X smaller than the average Crusoe instruction, which is made up of two or four 32-bit atoms in the current architecture.
OK, that's too darn bad, but it's the youngest surviving newcomer to the x86 market, and this is a solvable problem, and "with many eyeballs, all problems become shallow," once said a bright chap who ought to put his foot down and say it again.
Tablets: I made the demos that ran on tablets for their shows and IPO roadshow. They're cute, fun, no market for them yet, but again, something to get in the hands of developers so that they can make killer apps to create a market for tablets.