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Cheap Solid State Computers Could Kill Microsoft
Eh-Wire writes "This is an interesting point made by a Clayton Hallmark on IndyMedia out of Argentina. He predicts that cheap Asian computing appliances with an Open Source Operating System on a chip will be the ultimate MS killer. References to the US$220 Mobilis out of India suggest the begining of newer, more powerful, and cheaper things to come. Mr. Hallmark also points to the success of the Wal-Mart cheap PC as proof the end is near for proprietory software. Overall an in interesting and thought provoking read."
The end of M$ has been foretold ever so often, more often than I would care to remember. But nothing has happened as of yet, that would pose a significant threat to them. Before you go about how xyz could kill M$ - just ponder for a moment, how much cash M$ has in their pockets - they are not immediately threatened by anything - and they HAVE the kind of money to sit out minor glitches and/or buy them the neccessary time to re-adjust (or just throw humongous amounts of money at the problem to overcome it). And even if someone goes for the cheap PC option, as long as large companies aren't switching over to these devices, I guess the PC will remain a strong seller (just think about all the parents buying PCs for their kids to play with - while knowing they have a machine they can also do their regular work on)...
... "could" have ended the MS monopoly - when they were released, they were faster than PCs, and cheaper; and you could get good software for them, too - still, they didn't make it because they never became widely accepted in the commercial market.
The likes of Atari ST / Amiga /
M$ is not going to be "killed" any time soon - the most realistic chance there is, is that they will eventually be (financially) ground down far enough for them to no longer be able to react quickly enough to save their own hide. But that is most likely still quite a few years away - and it depends on there being enough serious outside threats.
Also, it would be more important to engage them on more fronts - if they are only in a skirmish with google over the search engine, their income will more than pay for that. If there were more (and different) fresh new competitors to emerge in different markets where M$ is a player (or sees that the market is too important for them to neglect), that could hurt them - but a single issue (the early browser wars; search engines now; cheaper computing platforms in the future) most likely won't be enough.
(And - no - the "new browser wars" I won't even count as a secondary issue - M$ already has the expertise to deal with that - it will cost them money, but it isn't something new they have to worry about - they need to be challenged on new frontiers - just look how long it took for them to catch up with netscape in the first place; and I would be prepared to bet that google is going to last for a few years yet, before M$ can kill them off - it will still be a while since M$ still need to build up a good deal more expertise in this market.
Certainly noy THE wal-mart cheap PC we're all thinking of? Because I don't recall it being much of a success.
Wouldn't cheap solid state computers be a little blunt and heavy? Surely an axe would do the job better? No software needed either.
Since you are reading this on a computer, you are a slave to MS and you should care. /sarcasm/ Yes, I care deeply.
(switches screens on Linux system)
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
All the *-Killers have been extremely successful so far, right? No one is buying iPods anymore, right?
No?
Next story,then.
Hmmmm? the idea of OS in a ROM on the computer sounds dodgy. I mean in that it forced you to always use the operating system that comes with the computer.
If that becomes common practice then it can turn around and bite us
What if microsoft do the same. Windows in ROM with some patches coming through software. It would force your machine to always only ever use windows.
Once it's legislated that you can't mess with your hardware, it means you then have to use windows.
I think Microsoft's xbox DRM to make sure no other operating system runs easily on the hardware is an entryway into this system.
And I don't like the sound of it
I hear the argument against the demise of Microsoft, but consider Microsoft's own history; a free OS on an 'open source' hardware platform. This time, instead of CPM/DOS on the S100/IBM PC, it will be Unix (Linux) on a PC.
But it's the follow-on to this miniaturized platform that will prove interesting. The volumes will help drive the price way down and with a PC that cheap, imbedding this Microsoft killer in toasters and lawn mowers without having to pay the Microsoft tax will have a chance to happen.
Best regards.
The death of Microsoft will come, there is little question about that. The only problem is that they will fight it, and not just go down. The browser wars will be decided shortly after IE7 comes out (more importantly: if a major security flaw is found), the console wars will be won when Nintendo realise there is a different market now days, sony will keep them out for at least another generation to come... the OS wars could be won by these computers, but its more likely to come when *nix becomes a computer that is more compatable with windows (i know the problem is the other way around, but thats not the general perception). Basically, in most areas, Microsoft has two things going for them: lock-u-in style formats, and the perception that it just works (if it doesnt work, of course its another companies fault). As more and more governments (slowly) get turned to open source for security, more and more companies are going to need programs that can read more then MSOffice documents. These computers (I would assume) are another big step to getting rid of the "MS Office files by default" mindset that 90% of the world is in right now. Once that is gone, it will be only a matter of time before the giant is killed and order will return to the force... er computing industry
Am I the only one who thinks a solid state computer would be more than a bit ironic? In many ways it would be a return to the 'archaic' and 'old fashioned' games machines like the Atari 2600/7200. . .
Another irony is that such a computer could be a lot like a cyberpunk-style 'deck' with plenty of slots for ROM (excuse me, flash-memory) slots.
Cheers,
Coward 321-124
Microsoft primary market is U.S. and Europe. For other countries, it doesn't really matter. So I guess it could have impact of Microsoft chances of growh in certain region, but not in overall.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Yeah, linux will kill MS, cheap computers will kill MS, your dog will kill MS ...
Every few months there is someone predicting the demise of Microsoft. What do all these people have in common? They've all been 100% wrong, 100% of the time. I mean, we're talking about a company that could run at a loss for years and not bat an eye.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Nothing new, since I've seen efforts for years to open source the BIOS, which is basically an incomplete os.
those cheap "electronic" computers cant begin to play counter-strike: source, and untill they do i'll stick with my "Wintel" machine
i have a roll of electrical tape.
It seems that while we are debating various MS killer technologies, MS has itself identified the most likely cause of the weakening of its desktop dominance. Mobile Phones and devices. MS has been late in entering the sector (reminds me of the internet), but then the OS has caught up, or surpassed the others in most areas. The new Windows CE 5.0 is pretty solid.
... yeah and gaming console.
If we analyze the submission, the main reasons why people would switch to solid state devices would be
1. Price
2. You don't need a PC to send mails and make documents
3. Compactness and looks better
4. Easier to use
But if these are the factors, wouldn't mobile devices be way way easier than these computing appliances? And guess what, MS has an even better chance at capturing the market than anything else with XBox 360, which is now a multimedia + entertainment + communication
The reasons why people would use PCs would be
1. Powerful machine (For games, multimedia, programming etc etc)
2. Developers, Power users
3. Upgradeability
4. and most importantly, they prefer a PC for some reason.
By the way, about the $220 Mobilis, I don't see it as any different from the Simputer (which was yet another Slashdot favorite, and also from India) but failed to make any waves. IAAI, and I have not seen a Simputer, except at a trade show.
Life is just a conviction.
... or something like that.
This article has been posted to loads of IMC sites, for example the UK:
l
/.ing...)
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/05/311774.htm
(The UK site has a few mirrors so perhaps it won't fall over with a
The Crimes:
A) ALL CAPS (almost) ALL THE TIME
B) Flameworthy headline reminiscent of a Babelfish treatment: (BIG NEWS ON USA MICROSOFT: Slavery to It Is Ending
C) No real news in what follows the "Big News" headline.
D) Anti-Microsoft tied to anti-Americanism without even a thin veil of sophistication:
Why not say: "BIG NEWS: THE WORLD WILL CHANGE FROM BASE. WE ARE NOTHING -- Let Us Be Everything?"
E) OS HISTORY -- GROWING LIKE TOPSY
F) Okay, now let me get this right: all US corporations, including Sun (praised and damned in the same rant) are evil, or can be evil, but Walmart is good?
G) Mentioning that Car Lots have a 108-day supply of SUVs. I don't even know where to begin with that.
I mean, I hate M$ as much as the next guy, but that is the nuttiest troll of an article I've seen in a while.
Slashdot is becoming the #1 lame site on the internet when it comes to everything containing the word "Microsoft". Can't you stop posting all that Anti-Microsoft crap? We all know that this is always pure wrong speculation. We don't care if some poor countries make Linux-ready computers, that won't kill Microsoft. It's like saying Internet Explorer is dying cause 10% of the people (the geek ones) are using Firefox. And don't forget that Microsoft is NOT Windows. Windows is just one of their 2 biggest products (the other one being Microsoft Office). So even if people would start switching to something else massively (that will never happen anyway), Microsoft wouldn't die. Never forget all these workers that use Microsoft Office everyday. They will never switch to OO.org (even v2). Mainly because it's not ready for wide use and because these people are too dumb to learn how to use softwares themselves: they need training ($$$). Anyway, in real life, most people fully agree that Windows is much easier to use than Linux. Linux is NOT ready for desktop usage. So why people would switch? Money? no, too much trouble. Even the vast majority of the Free Software people are still using Windows (you don't believe me? goto sf.net and take a look at the TOP Downloads. Alot of Windows-only projects). So stop dreaming kids, It won't happen.
From TFA: "...has its OS on chips -- where, by the way, viruses can't get to them..."
Why would this stop a virus? Answer: It wouldn't.
BTW, he doesn't tout the success of the Walmart PC, he just notes it's existance. Who said it's successful?
The author misses the point a bit. MicroSoft is getting into the embedded devices, as much as they can. Just check out this. MicroSoft can and is responding to the threat of cheap appliance hardware, by making sure their stuff winds up on those boxes. I'm horrified that so many phones/PDAs are running windows.
Microsoft made the jump from the 8-bit processors (don't even remember their numbers) to 64-bit processors. If they can move into embedded/Risc stuff, we're stuck with them for the next few decades.
That being said, the big threat to MicroSoft is from stuff like this and this -- these are threats that attack microsoft's franchise, but the only way they can compete is to play by the rules of the other guys: start giving away cheap computers that run Windows (and "just work" -- yeah, right, Billy! Hahahaha!), or start giving away web services that undercut their income-generating software. They have very low odds in these contests, considering that it does not fit with their "play to their strength" strategy to date (obligatory Borg reference).
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
What? A PC with it's entire OS in ROM?
They tried that in the Commodore 64. And back then, the entire kernel (all 8K of it) was in ROM. Actually a bastardized version of MS-BASIC wound up with it's own ROM as well in that system.
It was fun to crash C64 BASIC with PRINT""+-0
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
you mean like... no tubes anymore?
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
Give me a solid state PC WITHOUT harddisk (now that should drop the price a little). Give it some flash for local settings. Hook it up to the net and use GMAIL, a webversion of Picasa, and let me use some of those 2 Gbytes to store wordprocessor documents. It would be good enough for my mother, and no virus/worm/spyware on earth would be able to get to it. Hell, it wouldn't need a firewall or AV. Combine it with a flatscreen which I can also use as TV. How much would that cost?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Cheap throwaway computers are at least as likely to be sold by Microsoft as anyone else, probably more likely.
As for the "end" of proprietary software, not likely. What most people would really like to see is the end of software, proprietary or not. Most people don't want to install new software. From their rather logical perspective, software is as much a part of the machine they bought as the hard drive.
I really think most people would be quite happy to buy a computer that never needed new software at all, including updates.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Why so often the discussions about who/what will be the MS killer? Surprisingly, these stories always somehow assume that MS will stand completely still in progress/development until this holy grail hits the market.
Does it really matter anyway? Do we want microsoft gone? Let's say there is no microsoft anymore from this very day on. Does the industry improve? Try not to respond emotionally, but think about it.
I suggest taking stories in Indymedia with a grain of salt. All the stories I've seen on those sites this far are extremely anti-capitalistic, anti-authoritarian and generally very elitistic (in the way that suggests people writing and reading the stories consider themselves the vanguard of neo-socialistic revolution, which elevates them above the laws and the society). When truth is subordinated to the service of dogma in this scale, reality tends to be a bystander.
This is a little like people who'll say China is catching up on America. They're correct, it sure is. In about 50 years they will have caught up.
If microsoft topples, it wont be because of free software - maybe aided but not because. Probably a company like Apple will take the lead over anyone else. They have a superior product, the benefits of open source, an appropriate business model.
I could go on but my dinner is ready... sorry!
microsoft ...
well they could you know
it's difficult to market a very cheap computer when there is a $30 to $80 Microsoft tax per machine.
It's in the nature of things that electronics approaches zero cost over time (I've got a $5 calculator that has more features than the $100 one I bought five years ago.) MS can't follow hardware down in price without affecting profits.
MS won't die, not during most of our lifetimes anyway, they are far far too big and have too much money. They will simply lose a *load* of money before changing what they do to fit in with the new market conditions, a bit like IBM. They'll lose their monopoly and dominant position and will have to compete like the rest of us.
The only way they would die is if they refused to move with the times, and the shareholders won't allow that.
Deleted
Steve Ballsmer
heh, snigger..
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
And it is a relatively niche device anyway. The Mobilis devices are far more general purpose mainstream devices, the developers are starting to get their marketing right.
It's a powerful proposition at the prices they are suggesting. If it's retailing at $220 (£120) it's about 1/3 to 1/2 the price of anything similar here in the UK.
Deleted
[Rant]
My old Toshiba MSX (1.0) booted within seconds. Loading 64Kb of word processing software from tape took a little longer; but you could stick in ROM cartridges and be playing instantly at a blazing 3.5Mhz.
So a PC look a like that gets me working after just pressing the "ON" button and doesn't have a dumb "SHUT DOWN" sequence (power off should be good enough) gets my money.
At the moment I just never turn a PC off anymore so that I have the ability to do things when I want them without having enough waiting time to boil a kettle of water.
[/Rant]
The network effect with embedded systems is relatively minor, they are generally fairly custom systems with fixed applications. So MS getting involved in embedded systems doesn't bother me much. There's also fairly competent and fierce competition in those markets and Linux is there too.
I think you're right about Google, they are going to change the face of the IT industry. Think Arkwright, think Ford. The software and hardware costs have dropped to the point that Google scale IT systems become the economic solution.
Deleted
The latest innovation guru is Clayton Christensen. He has studied several industries to try to find out why market dominant companies fail. He found that they usually succumb to 'disruptive' technology. A smaller competitor enters a small unimportant part of the market and slowly takes over because the larger company is stuck with an inappropriate 'value network'. Open source is such a disruptive technology.
See: The Innovator's Dilemma, Cristensen, Clayton.
anyone who thinks otherwise is behind naive. until we live in the Star Trek Era where we're one entire planet and not individual countries it ain't gonna happen. so lay off the blunts and the group meditations.
are cheap low power displays that can fold up, such as electronic paper, etc. that we've all been told about. If you look at the simputer and all the other desktop PC replacements that are touted as the 3rd world's answer to computing they either use a TFT/LCD screen or a big bulky monitor.
If you could have a device the size of a text book that could fold open and be used as a computer that wasn't expensive (so no sony vaio's) and didn't draw a lot of power (so it could be charged cheaply via solar power) then you've moved a long way towards universal computer access.
The actual operating system these machine will use is irrelevant. Yes they will probably be an open source OS available, but that's not stopping the likes of IBM, MS, Sun, Apple, Sony, Palm, Symbian, etc. making an OS for such a device and it shouldn't either.
march of the appliance.
/. readers capable of a cogent, concise explanation, without reference materials.
Computer as appliance will eventually lead to, as it has with all appliances, a huge reduction in both specialized workers and people who become motivated to understand how a thing works.
How many people these days understand how NTSC color encoding works while retaining compatibility with black and white sets? I suspect there are fewer than three
How many know how to rebraid the end of aworn buggy whip?
When understanding is no longer necessary, people, for the most part and even if capable, don't bother. The result? Perhaps a slowdown in software innovation. Perhaps an increase in other pursuits where understanding is required to get anything interesting done.
b
The opportunities are endless. They could put it into a waterproof box and let it run the fuel injection system in a low cost automobile -- made in India, of course. And with a little screen, they could combine it with a GPS receiver to make a "portable map" for fishermen and hikers. And maybe it could include a calendar and address book (all open source) and call it a "personal digital assistant". And games -- good gosh, the games it could play. Does Nintendo know about this?
MS would just buy them.
Most people do not remember the days that there used to be computers desiged for home use, the likes of Sinclair, Amiga, ST and so forth. In the 80's they used to be the majority of the computers produced. But they failed to compete with price and development with PC clone makers. Now we are in the situation that we have computers designed solely for accountants and managers where the software is actually completely divorced in terms of design from the hardware, in short the mess that everyone knows that is microsoft. Only brave survivor is Apple (they should own something as they invented the personal computer) but they are for media and high end home users, not aimed at mass marked (I am an OSX user by the way).
So why should the mass market, the home users, use systems designed solely for accountants and managers that were retrofitted for home use? What we need is a computer that have been desiged from ground up for home use with hardware closely designed with software. In short a mass market Apple. Linux could be and has been shown to be the operating system for this dream as it is inexpensive, well supported and customzable as it has been shown in cunsumer products as some DVD players and TiVO style boxes.
Hope we have real home computers comming back soon, has been a while.
I like how the writer prophesies about the day computer production is not done in the US... COMING SOON!
And how any "using a computer" is "a slave to MS".
I knew there was a reason IndyMedia had to stay Indy.
I'm desperately looking for something like an argument in your post, but all I see is:
Hasn't happened yet, so it won't happen in the future.
Which isn't an argument and isn't even logical.
The business cases are full of companies with difficult to change their minds when time changes, some examples are IBM and Cray. The question is if Microsoft can detach from his original idea of one PC in each home (with windows operating system only!) to a more strategic one.
Like in board games Microsoft needs to sacrifice some pieces and try to win the match changing to another strategy.
This whole article is a troll and has obviously been written by someone who does not remember the
Apple II, Commodore 64, and has never owned any of the more recent "cheap" computers with embedded OSs. Palm pilots anyone, Pocket PCs.
The idea that a $200 computer could kill Microsft is laughable, it's like saying my "Blackberry" will take out Microsoft because it has a free embedded OS. The only thing to get from this article is that the writer is obviously very young as he doesn't remember the past when PCs where big bucks and a C64-C128 cost about $200, had built in sound and was faster. I am disgusted that this article made it to the front page of slashdot but because the author proclaims embedded linux will kill Microsoft.
Indymedia has also been predicting the death of capitalism for years and their prediction was not exactly correct :)
Nice guys but not surely the most objective source of information or future previsions
M$ is looking at new business models including free hardware and subscription based software. They are also pushing for XBOX360 to get them into home entertainment apart from the numerous devices WMA runs on. Embedded Windows is all over the spectrum as well. The delay in longhorn allows them to try out the new computing models.
Like them or hate them, the borg is here to stay.
This text appears to be a 'wake-up call' for Joe Sixpack and the Stereotypical family (Mary, Andrew, John, Katherine and Paul Stereotypical). It's at indymedia.org, so is really a wake-up call to the activists and libertarians who don't realise that the gadgets you use are another arena to which activism can be applied.
The writer describes a home computer appliance that simply does what a home user might want, without the need for proprietry and non-free intellectual property, home use devices that work like washing machines and fridges. That would require a limitation to be set upon the features available to such a system -- which the system designers would balk at, using such flexible general-purpose hardware -- and the system cut down to that level.
However, the home appliance market has moved to a cyclical model where we replace anything that's slightly defective with the newest model. This applies to computer hardware too, with each family's notebook or desktop computer is usable by most people but also sufficiently gadget-like that people would rather have a newer/prettier model than maintain it properly.
I think it's been tried before: WebTV stuff; personal tablets; VHS-tape sized ultra-portables, with the problem that, in the majority of cases, the hardware wasn't ready. Now we have hardware approaching the complexity required, but I would question the need for such things. U.S. computer consumption works in one way, but the developing nations will work in a different way, because of differing economic considerations and pressures.
An ultra-reliable rock-solid device for schools in African states, China or India would find a market among the untapped beginners markets wherever it was sold if it met the needs of those people. I doubt that the OSS devlopment people will provide one unless someone launches a project to do so; Ubuntu may be a step in the right direction but its hardware requirements (including default use of Gnome 2.10) are perhaps too great for this device.
... just like yugos killed the western auto industry. so long as the western consumer is interested in paying top dollar for 'premium' goods (be it cars or 'puters), cheap-ass chinese computers will have almost no effect on m$' dominance.
and that took- oh--- 500? years!
so, we can keep predicting it's failure, and actually feel warm and fuzzy knowing that it will be right, in 2495
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I think another good example of destructive technology is the introduction of hybrid drive vehicles with good gas mileage.
All these technologies seem to be converging really quickly just at the moment.
Joe public is faced with computers that are just too hard to maintain except for specialists. By moving all these issues of data management, backup, version control, virus prevention etc. to big clusters of servers out of sight, the opportunity exists to produce computers that exceed the Mac in ease of use. And perhaps the answer to Linux on the desktop is that the servers will run Linux and the end user will no longer even have to have the minimal clue about what an operating system is, any more than he knows what processor runs the engine management in his car.
Sure, people will produce plug in appliances to do home movie editing, and specialised games machine will continue to develop. But, think about it. Microsoft grew because the smaller, cheaper PC supplanted the mini. Google's opportunity is to provide services to the smaller, cheaper thing that supplants the PC.
Oh, and predictions of the future are always wrong.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
I'm an admin for a large national law firm in the US. I must say that really what is going to kill Microsoft is Windoes XP and Server 2003. These OSes are so much better than previous ones from Microsoft that I see no reason to upgrade in the remotely foreseaable future. Software assurance? Forget it. I.E. becomes a problem again? Use Mozilla. MS stops "supporting" them? Big deal. We plan to use these OSes ad infinitum. Now I suspect that most of corporate america is thinking the same thing. So where's the future revenue coming from? That's why MS is moving into Antivirus. They'll move into other enterprise areas also. I'd say they're in for a rough ride. Especially considering their multifront battles with Sony and Google and Linux. I don't wish them good luck.
Their latest OS is two years overdue. They've cut off or pre-released pretty much everything that was new in the OS (WinFS/Avalon got killed, Indigo got pre-released, nobody wants/cares about Palladium, anyway. Xbox 360 has backwards compatibility--if you're willing to buy all those old Xbox games all over again. The graphics, so far don't look to be a huge step forward, and it's running in the overpriced range at near $400 (fuck that, I'm not buying one; hell I gotta ps2, I never bothered with the first Xbox). Yeah, they got cash reserves. Maybe with the latest of flops this company is hinging on, they'll boot Bill and Steve for some people with some goddamned business intelligence. Listen to your damn customers, don't make crap, stop being stupid. That's the guide plan for the Microsoft.
The fact that the cited article is on the indymedia website pretty much guarantees it's wrong. In almost every area of their reporting, Indymedia favors propaganda and the tarbrush over clear analysis.
Here's a great line from the article:
Beware of the US spies at the USAID and beware Microsoft's so-called "Local Economic Development Program for Software," which is insurgent in Brazil and Jordan.
connecting "US spies at USAID" and "Microsoft" is classic tarbrushing. It really pisses me off.
Yes, cheap computers are going to kill microsoft.
It is going to kill off their business software devision, hardware devision, PC games, console, web, portables, etc etc.
Microsoft isn't just PC software, they are everywhere, yes if microsoft suddenly lost all the revenue they had coming in from their PC software devision it would hurt them, but not kill them.
TruePunk | Games
anybody who actually thinks that a little cheap computer could end microsoft is a big idiot. while maybe it could in asia, here in america cost isnt a factor anymore. computers are cheap enough, you can get a computer with windows for about $300.
people use windows because it plays all their games, runs all their programs, and many people don't see another option. all the geeks and OSS zealots here are worse than Macheads, they still don't realize that doing things with linux and unix based systems is still too hard for a typical user. at least Macheads know that Macs are easy to use. Even if Linux had any real games, installing graphics drivers is nearly impossible. Why pay $200 for a system that's hard to use when I can get a windows box for $300 or a Mac for $500 and both of those systems have better compatibility and more programs and easier use. plus, windows is still faster than linux.
of course that's not to deny the fact that windows security is awful, but I'm on windows for my personal use and with a good firewall, antispyware, and antivirus software i have never had problems.
all this adds up to the fact that this little computer from asia is not going to do a load of crap.
Its called the XBox 360. It'll be as powerful as a computer, use standard productivity apps, and be able to connect to peripherals like digital cameras. and its gonna be $350.
This article reminded me of "Behold a Pale Horse" by William Cooper.
"It's a conspiracy, I say!!! A conspiracy!!! Doom!! Doom!! DOOM!!"
Famous computer visionary Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab is developing and promoting a $100 laptop with proposed specifications including a 500-MHz processor, 1 GB of memory, an XVGA display, and free Linux. He envisions 200,000,000 million of them being distributed to countries like China in two years.
..
...
That's 200.000 billion. With about 1 billion people currently living in China, that's 200.000 laptops each. Allowing for you know, like, supply and demand to kick in, that will level out to about 30.000 laptops to each of 6 billion people on earth.
Now, I can't decide: should the joke be about the inherent need of IPv6 or (ooh) a beowolf cluster of these? Sweeeet
And who will shell out the $20 million billion these things will cost?
Ah, the joy of an extra factor 10^6 here and there
While somewhat true, basically bullshit.
Yes very few people know how NTSC renders colour, but its unimportant for people to know as long as it works. Innovation has not stopped. There is a vast difference (improvement) in CRT/display technology despite the fact that fewer people know how the darn technology works.
Beware of the US spies at the USAID? Give me a fucking break. The article read like a poorly written communist manifesto. It was old, hackneyed, and had no basis in either science or reason.
It is very simple you got a hold on 95% of the market. Over 95% of all application run on windows. It has been like this for over a decade. What Linux and Apple and anyone else you gets in can expect is that Microsost will drop to about 33% at best leaving 25% for #2 15% for #3 5% for #4 and the rest of the 20% will be spread out. Just think about the people still using Amigas today, or people who will not give up their BEOS until they pry their computers from their cold dead hands. And There will still be people running OS 2 and there are still people who still like there DOS prompt. And most of these guys were considered dead OS even when they were in business. Sure the imbedded systems could put a cut and Microsoft will not be it former glory just a new age IBM. I would stop plotting on making a Microsoft Killer but an application that that you feel that people want. If they like it they will use it. If they don't they probably will not. The only way to make people want to switch off Windows is to show them the options and not force. them. Yes some people after seeing the glories of Linux or Apple will go back to Windows, and a lot will, Wait a while have them take a look at it again in the future see if it fits their needs again, remind them that this stuff changes over time, and many of the faults in the old versions are not in the new versions.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
They may not stay in the OS business for PCs, but that business is going to die anyway. We are not in a static market, technology is moving fast. The time of the $2000 home computer is over. The margins are fading. As with all technology, once it becomes ubiquitous and monopoly strangleholds are broken, it's value drops to zero.
Microsoft made it's billions there already. It will enter your wallet from another direction soon enough, you can bet on it. With the type of cash they have, they can command R&D budgets that are the envy of nations. Discounting their capabilities is a serious strategic error.
You don't have to like them. In fact, they are most definitely capatilistic parasites. But they are rich and they are smart. You will probably buy more from them in your lifetime and you will probably, for a time, even like it.
That is the way of things. Get used to it.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
The success of the Walmart PC is irrelevant. I'd guess the vast majority of those merely end up with a pirated MS OS anyway.
:-o
Wow these captchas are getting bad. I can barely read this one.
I think, therefore I am. I think?
Man...that article was worse that your average slashdot troll. Hardly "interesting and thought provoking."
Um, NO. The first model of computer was indeed sold with 4K, but TRSDOS absolutely required 16K minimum, and even then it was barely usable (you had 5K left for BASIC). Try "16K minimum, 32K recommended". And CP/M needed more to be useful because it didn't have 12K ROM BASIC like the TRS-80.
Also, he forgot to add "128M minimum, 512M recommended" for OS X. OS X is a dog (though usable) with 256M. 384M might be enough, but at that point you might as well go for 512M. It'll boot with 64M, though. What he fails to point out is that the later OSen provide many more features (which take up more memory), and application memory requirements go up with time, too. And I'd still rather have a six-year-old Mac than this toy on my desktop, though as a PDA it might be interesting.
Indymedia is the fanfiction.net of journalism, but at least this is clearly a blog rant, not an attempt at journalism. I think he's basically right in that these things could put a dent into the generic PC marketplace, not just Microsoft, but anyone who wants games or multimedia isn't going to be satsified. And it's not like Microsoft is completely ignoring this space... what do you think the Xbox 360 is all about? It's this low-end consumer space, only they're starting from the multimedia/games end of the low-end space, which is the harder problem anyhow.
I don't hear much about Indians being gamers, you know. The Koreans wouldn't be satisfied with a toy like this, that's for sure.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
You can buy USB and NAS (network atached) disk drives. Simialrly for other devices. MS helps seal their fate with support for Terminal Server serices. So, in the future - your "terminal" will be a simple device that runs a browser, a web mail client, and maybe a few (JAVA?) simple programs. This could be a tablet, a CE or JAVA machine, or whatever. (Playstation IV, anyone?). It also runs a variant of Terminal Services CLient, to talk to real computers.
For serious computing - intensive games, animation, etc., the CPU is just a box. How simple can hardware get if the only IO necessary, Whether it's sound, video, storage, VOIP, communications, is Ethernet and USB/Firewire?? A box with just a bunch of connectors (drive optional, DVD optional - use USB external...) could probably be mass-produced for $100 or less, with more power than today's top-of-the-line desktop. (Think miniMac). Who's going to pay $100 for the OS on a $50 computer?
Your display could be the terminal, the DVI-attached widescreen HDTV in the livingroom, your VOIP Wifi celluar phone. (Heck the latter could be your audio output too, and the VOIP server maybe reads and speaks your Email.)
The defining and dominating feature of this computing environment is not the OS - it's the interoperability standards. And once established, they are very difficult to hijack. As long as your device talks to the others, nobody cares if it runs Windows ZP ("zippy"), Tiger, BEOS, or Linux. If anyone tries to "stake a claim" to a chunk of the pie, with proprietary protocols or patents, someone in a foreign country will develop an alternative that is free.
Then where will Billy be?
...M$ will not survive Bill Gates or Steve Ballmers death... we just need to sit down & wait...
Sorry guys... the greatest software company of all times has a single point of failure... in management... this will be real fun to see... and I will see it... I'm several years younger than they are...
I believe Xbox was a pre-emtive strike against such low end boxes:
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http://www.charlesjo.com/newsletterissue?newslett
Charles Jo
Don't be; MS is losing the embedded market. Check out this picture of the current market:p g
http://linuxdevices.com/files/article056/vdc_28.j
Linux is at 25% and growing. All of the Windows versions together give 24%, and not one of them on their own tops 10%. This is down from a total of a 33% marketshare from 5 years ago.
So Linux already is the Market Leader in the embedded space. And if it keeps growing like it has, MS will just have a fraction of the sales. Sort of like how VxWorks has gone from a 35% to a 12% marketshare over the past 5 years.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
I can see solid state computers putting a dent in Microsoft's market share, but I don't see a wide acceptance of the technology until solid state storage catches up to everything else. (HOW expensive is a moderately small IDE flash "hard" drive?) The guy writing the article comes off as a bit of a fanatic. He seems to think that it will end the "reign" of commercial software, but honestly, that's never going to happen. How do you think the software developers feed themselves?
I dislike MS like the next guy, but this sounds too much like just another vaporware pipe dream. The site of the maker, http://www.ncoretech.com/ has tons of press clippings and a brochure, but nothing on availability. The Indymedia article, full of conspiracy tripe totally and rant-mode language, does not sound like respectable information, either. Call me again when the thingo is really here.
you could use the fuse patchset (apparently in upstream by 2.6.12) with ftpfs, setup an ftp account and keep /home mounted to the ftp site.
Ouch. How will that interact with a pipe that's limited to 5 KBytes/s down and 2 KBytes/s up? Or how will you afford to move to a geographic area that has cable or DSL available?
Kill Microsoft!! Yeah Wal-Mart!!!
how's that again?
not everything is a science experiment!
Since you are reading this on a computer, you are a slave to MS and you should care."
What's most annoys the rest of the world about Americans? We talk down to them. What does this diatribe do in almost every paragraph? Talk down.
Whether or not the writer's American, he wrote this in a way that almost guarantees most readers in the world will be annoyed by it rather than persuaded. It's so much more exaggeratedly worse than anything Microsoft says that we should wonder if Microsoft somehow is behind this, since it makes them, by comparison, look so good.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Yes, and various other prediction in history were 100% wrong -- until the actual event happened. Then they were suddenly transformed into accurate predictions.
It's that 'never changing' conventional wisdom that causes so many surprises to look so obvious in retrospect once the shift happens.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Does not mean you cant run something else.
Look at people running linux/bsd on a PS2 for a current example.
Hell, on my old Atari ST with its OS in ROM, I ran mint from harddrive..
Just being in rom doesnt prevent diddly..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
...more often than even Apple is these days.
*** For a better tommorow, change your life today ***
...it is about the software that runs on it.
Microsoft does not dominate the OS market because the OS is more secure than Linux, faster than Linux, or *better* in any other way that Linux. Microsoft dominates because of Microsoft Office. Of course, their tendrils would never rest in just that one place, but that IS the core of the company.
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I've not made my point clear. Innovation becomes driven by corporate policy rather than public curiousity.
If you've got a company like AT&T sponsoring Bell Labs, society does not suffer. As for TeeVee, yes, there is plenty of corporate driven advancement, but the cross pollination of ideas that comes from knowing how a wide variety of things work, IMO, is suffering because of career driven specialization. Appliance PeeCees may result in a huge incease in users but there will be no corresponding increase in innovators.
such a device would almost certianly use GNU/linux. It can be cut down to virtually nothing in size, and is already network centric. Based on what your describing, the value is in the hardware, If I were looking to build such a device, I would use commodity software to keep things simple.
why not volunteer to leverage the vast catalogue, support and knowledge as opposed to paying for something?
>Cheap Solid State Computers Could Kill Microsoft
Well there's *could* as in "Yes, it's theortically possible," and then there's *could* as in "Not a chance in hell." I figure this is the latter.
All you have to do is look at the history of a another behemoth of a corporation that failed to recognize what was happening in the market, and paid dearly...IBM. Microsoft is not beyond this kind of reality. As a corporation, it may have a lot of cash on hand, and a lot of assets, but it also has a HUGE infrastructure to support.
The Microsoft war room is already buzzing with a strategy to buy out (assimilate) smaller countries and effectively mismanage their creative output. With any luck (my luck), we'll be stuck with Windows long past the invention of a perpetual machine.
That means they operate like Foxnews, and the New York Times , and the Washington Post, and CBS News and ....
you get the idea.
If I had a dollar for every time I've heard someone predict the death of Microsoft, I could buy the entire company myself. Anyone who thinks Microsoft is in any way hurting or in danger needs to quit sniffing so much PC dust.
The only company I can think of who has redefined themselves more than Microsoft is IBM, and they both come out smelling like roses every time.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Damn it! you mean it will last for another 270 years??
I dont think its inmortal, but your "British Empire" association seems pretty accurate, right now, Microsoft is one of the companies ruling the advancements on technology (maybe not with innovation, but they have the Holy Cow (TM)), as such, they have the power to bend it to whats better for them.
For example buying third world politicians to implement abusive plans as the one going on in Argentina, called MiPC (in English, MyPC, yes, as the icon on the windows desktop) where the siglas come from "Mi Primera Computadora" (My First Computer), where you get a total 'no-future' crap PC (128mb ram, celeron 1.8ghz, 40gb, 15 inch monitor) for about 700 dolars (loaded with WinXP and some other crappy MS soft as Works). Ohh but wait, you can pay it in 40 little monthly fees, that is, almost 4 years with a computer made to be obsolete at the end of the current one (or maybe the last one). This way, they are assuring a base of around 400.000 (expected) users, which by other means, would NEVER bought a Genuine Windows (TM). i think thats assuring a good user base...
no sig
Could someone tell me where I can get one of these new cheap solid state computers? I keep looking around for them in Computer Shopper and whatnot and they only sell ones with vacuum tubes. I mean, why else would they need these fancy big cooling fans and heat sinks? No wonder a cpu takes up a significant fraction of your desk these days! It's a crime, really. People need to get with it and embrace the future.
People who post articles in Slashdot ought to take themselves less seriously. Come to think of it, the people who run Slashdot ought to take themselves less seriously, too. Do you think Brittany Spears considers himself to be an "artist"?
Apple did it with some Macs (so they were forever tied to the exact MacOS version they shipped with). Tandy did it with some PCs (so they were forever tied to DOS3.2). The embedded market is essentially OS in ROM. It's hardly new!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
It plays a high-frequency (I don't remember the frequency, but it's high enough not to disturb the black and white sets) sine wave on top of the luminance signal, and phase-shifts it to indicate hue. What a hack.
Tired of free iPod sigs? Subscribe to my blacklist
Anything reported on Indymedia has the potential to be hilarious. That's assuming it isn't totally, pathetically stupid. Which most of it is.
/.
Sort of like most comments on
He assumes that Windows has a high variable cost (that is, a high cost of manufacturing per unit sold, as an automobile does). It does not. The only variable cost associated with distributing Windows via OEM channels is the cost of the CD and packaging, and even there, Microsoft doesn't have to mass produce those. Dell has for a long time produced their own Windows CD's, so the variable cost to Microsoft could be the cost of a single CD Master.
The fixed cost of Windows is fairly high, as I'm sure hundreds of millions have gone into its development. However, the fixed cost is easily recovered through volume sales. If I write a shareware program, and my investment of time is ~$1,000, and 1,000 people pay me a dollar to register it, I've recovered my fixed costs; everything else is gravy.
If there is an emerging market of sub-$200 PC's, Microsoft can easily drop the price of Windows to penetrate it. A sub-$200 PC market is likely to be pretty hot, so sales volume would be high, and fixed costs would be easily recovered.
The reason Microsoft charges as much as they do for Windows is because they can. If Linux ever took 20% marketshare or more, I think you'd be surprised how far and how fast the price of Windows would drop.
Look at it this way; Apple probably puts just as much effort into developing Mac OS X as Microsoft puts into Windows. Mac OS X sells for $116, and they only have less than 5% marketshare of PC's. Microsoft has 90% marketshare of PC's, and sells Windows XP Professional for $309. And the ONLY reason MS sells Windows XP Home is to justify the higher price point of Windows XP Professional. XP Home is probably MORE expensive to develop than XP Professional, because Home is simply a version of Professional that's been hobbled.
Crap... I *do* know how to rebraid the end of a worn buggy whip. I think I better go find my time machine and go back to the 1880s, where I belong!
Seriously, you have a good point, but you don't take it far enough. Q: What happens when it is no longer necessary to understand something to use it? A: MORE people use it, because the entry threshold is lower.
And those interested in "innovation" move on to whatever is the next bleeding edge.
On a related note, 10 years ago PC user groups were full of enthusiastic kids, eager to stick their hands into new technology. Now, PC user groups are almost entirely retired folks' out for a social evening while they get a little help with their email. The kids have moved on, because PCs are no longer new and exciting.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I THINK I agree with you, but I'm not REALLY sure what you are suggesting. If you are simply saying MS isn't untouchable, then obviously that is true. I'd argue there never has been and never will be a company which is untouchable.
If you are saying however, that MS's cash reserves are dangerously low (because of huge infrastructure) then I'd strongly disagree. I really don't know how or why you would think that. MS makes WAY more money then they can spend and even with zero growth (or significant negative performance) are in no immediate danger of not being able to cover all expenses just from revenue let alone the huge cash reserves. When people here speculate about effect on MS if stock prices were to collaps (though there is no reason to suspect they would), they seem to think that MS loses tons of money when the stock goes down. This of course is not true. The main dangers of lower stock price are shareholders demanding new management and the company being taken over (another company being able to purchase controlling interest because of low stock price). The biggest financial effect of lower stock price is if a company has high debt or needs more financing (neither of which apply to MS). Yes, it is always bad for a company to have its stock price fall, but its not as financially damaging as some here seem to believe. Here is an explaination.
One other thing worth mentioning about your comparison of IBM and MS. While the situation of IBM when it took its hit, may look similar to MS today on the surface it really isn't THAT similar. Yes, they are both big tech companies, but that is where the substantial similarities end. You must remember at the time IBM was largely a hardware fabrication company. Yes, they did software (hadn't REALLY gotten big in "servies" yet), but the hardware was the back-bone of the company. When looking at company financials this is a HUGE difference. Hardware fabrication is hugely capital intensive. The plants, the equipement, etc cost huge sums. While it is true these are assets the times in which tech changes means these assets depreciate VERY fast and need to be replaced with newer (and normally more expensive) equipment. This model requires much more cash on hand and any change in revenue can have a huge impact. IBM was hit by the tidalwave of cheap PCs and couldn't recoup all teh capital costs associated with the hardware. This lead them into a bit of debt and was causing problems. However, they were big enough to weather the storm, readjust, and come out a very strong company. The point being MS's and IBM's (at the time) underlying financials were VERY different at least in the amount of expense just to keep the company running and the rate of depreciation for those expenditures.
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
>>In the UK it is already legislated that you can't mess with your hardware
/.
What law states that exactly?
What hardware specifically?
But of course, you're talking out of your arse and thererfore guaranteed to get an 'interesting' mod with these morons on
"Microsoft is not beyond this kind of reality. As a corporation, it may have a lot of cash on hand, and a lot of assets, but it also has a HUGE infrastructure to support."
So much for the argument about digital goods being easy to produce...and hence "borrow".
Microsoft's solution to the embeded open-source internet/computer thing the author hadn't realized. Think about it for a minute. Microsoft is in business for a reason. Put your idealistic ideas in your pocket and sit on it.
does anyone really care if they have 50B, 500B, or 5T - as long as they can't control computing? all we have to do is drive the price for commodity software near zero - which we are in the process of doing with F/OSS - and MS will become powerless in that market.
as far as i'm concerned, MS can continue to be successful - by changing their focus from commodity software to something else: become an investment house, enter the game console market, develop vertical-market applications, whatever - as long as they aren't able to control the software i use on a daily basis, or its marketplace.
i should note that MS is apparently doing the latter already - they're being pushed further up the application stack into accounting, CRM, etc. now. currently, it seems their plan is to dominate those markets and make them proprietary, running on their proprietary OS/server/applications stack. but F/OSS will chase them there too, eventually. and before that, they will have competition from companies developing competing applications on top of F/OSS platforms, who don't have the added expense of developing proprietary layers beneath their applications.
i think that commodity software has become a tarpit for MS. i don't care if they sink or get out, but it's going to have to be one or the other. that makes me happy.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
I THINK I agree with you, but I'm not REALLY sure what you are suggesting. If you are simply saying MS isn't untouchable, then obviously that is true. I'd argue there never has been and never will be a company which is untouchable.
Yes, this is what I am suggesting. Granted, it's exactly a prophetic statement, but I see so many comments that seem to suggest that Micorosoft is beyond the reach of normal market forces.
You must remember at the time IBM was largely a hardware fabrication company. Yes, they did software (hadn't REALLY gotten big in "servies" yet), but the hardware was the back-bone of the company. When looking at company financials this is a HUGE difference. Hardware fabrication is hugely capital intensive.
My understanding is that IBM was a "one-stop-shop"- hardware, software, and support. The only thing the customer had to do was write a check each month, and for whatever sum that was, they'd get the mainframe and the engineers to run it. I can't say with certainty, but I'm willing to bet that a signicant chunk of revenue was derived from these services. IBM didn't actually "sell" harware until the early 1980s.
Weren't the first Mac's done this way? I wonder why they got away from it?
Put Knoppix or Slax on a CF card, install on a mini ITX Board (or eventually a nano). The result is a machine with all the functionality necessary for day to day functionality. Get the price down just a bit and you have bubble pack PC which is an impulse buy . While servers will still be needed a complementary linux solution will be better any way.
If you look at the history of statements of Ballmer, Gates you will realize that they never have thought MS is untouchable. They see it as a constant war. You should try reading Gates's books sometime. Very enlightening.
He gave some rough calculations about how it would become cheaper than an ordinary pc, and the biggest cost reduction was the display, which he thinks can be brought down to $30 (presumably by electronic ink). FYI. Anyway they're planning to make enough for 1 per student. Millions not trillions though.
What was quite interesting is an anecdote about how he was interviewing a candidate to run the company. The candidate was apparently turned down because he immediately talked about creating more expensive "pro" versions, which is just what Negroponte does not want to have. He says he wants a single full powered machine, and he wants to be able to make it continually cheaper instead of continually rising in cost. For whatever you want to say about the project, you have to admit this is a massive change from the way U.S. industry and M$ in particular work to bloat everything so you never have enough power.
For example, I was really happy with my Apple II running PIE (Programmer's Interactive Editor).. it had lots of control key combinations and a great feature which would jump you to recent cursor positions by hitting the 0 key. I also loved writing newspaper stories on the dedicated word processor at high school think it was a Wang (vertical green screen, 8" floppies). I think I'd really enjoy having that program on my linux laptop and do without OOo if I can. (The point being not to flame but that you don't really need bloatware, and anyway the laptop is a 1GHz machine!).
It is a different definition of what you need, and anyway the need is to get more connectivity as well as hardware out to the developing world and assist with solving social problems there. Raising educational levels and using these pcs to communicate better is a good start.
OK, a bit of hyperbole here, but not by far. If you cherry-pick the killer apps, and market the devices properly, only geeks will care about the fact that the underlying machine is a general-purpose computer.
If these consumer devices have an office suite, web browser and media player, most users aren't going to stray from those applications. The afformentioned apps are all commoditized by OS/FS to some degree. Once they are fully commoditized, nobody will care about the operating system or the applications, as long as the *data* can be exchanged with all other systems.
This is neither bad nor good for OS/FS. It's bad for people who develop the software because it means their job is done and they need to find a new one. Only maintenance programmers will be needed, and fewer and fewer of them.
In the end, it will be like arguments over FM vs. AM and what kind of amplifier circuit your radio uses. All those questions are answered, and you don't see too many ads for "analog radio engineer" do you? In other words, all the battles over software that seem so important now will be nothing more than academic when theh software is fully commoditized. Whether or not its proprietary won't matter, because software will all be the same anyway.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
IBM/Microsoft DOS was based on CPM, an open source/free OS
Gary Kildall must be spinning in his grave right now. CP/M was a PROPRIETARY operating system by Digital Research. Maybe there is an open or public domain incarnation today, but it was very much proprietary when DR still extisted. The STANDARDS were open in that the BDOS calls were pubically available, and CP/M variants ran on multiple platforms (8080, 8085, Z80, 8086, 68000) and CP/M machines were usually open architecture S100 machines. You could definitely not obtain a copy of CP/M legally for free nor could you see the source code without a special agreement and extra cost.
The BIOS for the IBM PC was also open
ummm...no it wasn't. Even the BIOS calls weren't 100% fully published. Phoenix and Compaq developed a compatible BIOS against the wished of IBM (it was the one and only part of the original PC that wasn't an off-the-shelf component in a design a small group of hoppyists could easily replicate). The way it went was like this: a group of people disassembled the IBM bios and wrote a detailed specification of all the entry and exit points of all the calls and what effect they had on the system. Then a separate group of developers at different company (Phoenix) who had sworn a legal oath that they had never examined an IBM PC used that specification to create the first IBM compatible BIOS.
It wasn't really Microsoft or IBM that created the advantage of which you speak at all--they merely took good advantage of "open architecture" and the co-operative efforts of others. When it comes to the creation of the industry, others did all the work and IBM and MS used their marketing savvy to take maximum advantage and profit (the ones who did the work were not marketers obviously).
When IBM finally realised that a little firmware was not enough to keep a lock on the market it was too late--they no longer steered the direction of that market. The MCA bus was technically superior to EISA, but it was closed and incompatible and IBMs share of the market they created was less than 50% or at least fast heading that way.
Don't confuse open architecture hardware platforms with Free/open software--they both have an advantage in that information is more free to move about, however control oof the design and direction of the former is still firmly in the grip of a select few hardware vendors: Intel controls the bus and motherboard dimensions, Intel and AMD the CPU and chipset, ATI and NVidia video and so on.
My understanding is that IBM was a "one-stop-shop"- hardware, software, and support. The only thing the customer had to do was write a check each month, and for whatever sum that was, they'd get the mainframe and the engineers to run it. I can't say with certainty, but I'm willing to bet that a signicant chunk of revenue was derived from these services. IBM didn't actually "sell" harware until the early 1980s.
All true. The point I was trying to make is the hardware side was a huge burden. The hardware fabrication side takes huge capital investment (eats cash VERY fast) compared to MS which basically just has to pay employees (no need to refit entire factories for each change in tech). Also, my point about hardware being the back-bone wasn't meant to say they didn't get reveue from software/services (I probably didn't word that very well). It was that hardware was the reason IBM got that revenue. Even though an income-statement would list lots of revenue from software and services, because it was all bundled with the hardware when people started to switch to intel in the server room not only did they lose hardware revenue but also software/services revenue because you only got those with the hardware sales.
They have since smartly changed this so hardware, software, and services are no longer really related. You can get any one of those without requring the others. The whole point wasn't really to show differences in revenue, but the differences in expenses because of the hardware side of the business. These heavy capital expenses requried by the hardware side put much more pressure on IBM and required steady revenue to stay out of trouble. MS doesn't have this same type of high overhead.
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
Such as this one. Its premise is non-new, but still important: the most likely way for Microsoft to lose its dominance of desktop computing is for there to be a fundamental shift in the way people do desktop computing. As long as desktop computing == PCs, Microsoft will be able to leverage technological lockin and captive customer base to control the market. (Assuming those evil socialist-liberals don't return to power long enough to succeed in breaking up MS.) But if people start using network appliances instead of PCs, Windows is in trouble, because manufacturers are not going to pay stiff license fees for an OS that basically sucks as a thin client platform.
Previous appliances, such as Audrey, have failed, partly because they cost too much, but also because they assumed an Internet infrastructure that wasn't in place. The infrastructure still isn't in place, but it seems to be getting there. And maybe new technology will bring down the cost of appliances, though TFA doesn't really make a good case for that.
Which is all kind of ironic. PCs become dominant as the most standard implementation of the "open" system concept that goes back to the Apple II. Wozniak invented that kind of system because he wanted a platform for geeks like himself to "plug in" new kinds of hardware and software. Now gatekeeper for the most common version of that platform is a huge monopoly most geeks hate -- and the only way to deprive them of their role a universal gatekeeper is to invent a new kind of platform that is much less hackable.
I don't think that outside of the Linux community anyone takes the "death of Microsoft" is a serious prediction - and I would think that even most Linux (or other OSS OS users) will judge this to be more of wishful thinking rather than a well founded serious prediction...
CP/M was not free or open source.
Since the cost of version 1.3 (1.4?*) was only 70 $, this operating system soon became installed on every 8080 computer. CP/M, what's that?
I'll leave adjustment for inflation as an exercise for the reader.
Um.. you mean the next X-Box?
Think about it folks... that's exactly where MS is headed.
-David
MS will not die anytime soon, they will at most render themselves irrelevant to the whole computerized world simply because their model does not work anymore. It belongs to the previous century.
Open source (not standards only) is the model that has been working in the scientific community for decades now. I can access any paper I want (maybe with a small fee that my University Institution will pay) and after that I can take their model, replicate it, add on to it, simply do whatever I want, without having to pay anybody a dime. My only obligation is to make sure I cite the reference where my work came from.
In contrast, the Microsoft model states that I have to pay royalties to MS in order to read the paper, I have to pay royalties in order to use the idea, and what is worse: everybody that wants to use my work, has to pay royalties to MS as well. You can imagine where science would be today if that was the case there as well.
So it simply will grow irrelevant, MS will grow irrelevant and out of the picture, unless they find a better more viable way to sustain themselves into the 21st century.
But I liked the spirit of the article. Seeing people ready to rise up and challenge authority, corporate rule and dominance is a promise for the future. Compare that to the apathetic, docile, gullible american public...
Yam, yam, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade
Just because something is cheaper doesn't mean it's better. Pull your heads out of your collective OSS is better asses and realize what people want is something easy to use out of the box not something to compile, to run folding, not to run seti on and not to look at a console output.
The price has to go a lot lower than that if they want to undercut M$. My current (windows) system ran less than $350. Granted that was without a monitor, but it included a printer. If they get the price to around $50, it'll be something. But why would I spend $200 on a stripped down system, when I don't have to. M$ has more to fear from Live Linux distros at the moment (Dynebolic rules!).
Netcraft confirmed it!
The likes of Atari ST / Amiga / ... "could" have ended the MS monopoly
That was 1985--a different time. Microsoft was far from being a monopoly. Wordstar was battling upstart WordPerfect to maintain supremacy in the Word Processor market. Accounting was still commonly done on CP/M and Apple II computers running VisiCALC spreadsheets. Although it was the biggest player in business PCs, IBM still commanded less than 50% of the market. IBM was almost non-existant in the home market--that market was dominated by the "big three": Apple, Commodore and Atari. The PCJr was laughed out of the market because it was complete garbage compared to the superior offerngs from Commodore and Atari.
It was IBM that was shunned by the home market--Apple, Commodore and Atari were not only accepted but very much embraced by the market. IBM was very successful in business because they presented a logical argument to businessmen--one big trusted vendor to hadle all your computing needs. If you spent megabucks to get that mainframe from them it only makes sense to get the PC from them too. In the home IBM was NEVER dominant--by the time the platform became popular in homes it was compatibles that took that market (Tandy/Radio shack probably sold more home PCs than IBM at first).
MS was also very successful, but mostly through licensing technology to IBM and others. Until the 1990s MS (like Intel) had no brand image at all--people who owned Commodores or TRS80s might've vaguely remembered the name from the copyright notice on the bootup screen. Their OS was nothing remarkably different than CP/M, their word processor (PCWord) sucked and was a bit player against WordStar and WordPerfect. Their spreadsheet (Multiplan) equally sucked against the kings Lotus and VisiCalc, both in terms of functionality and market share. They had no GUI except some plan to introduce the pile of crap Windows 1.0 "real soon now".
So why did MS succeed? Because they learned from their mistakes (even if it took a vew years and three versions) and Commodore and Atari didn't--those ones got much more right at the start but not only didn't learn from their mistakes, they repeated them with magnified intensity. While Microsoft was gradually building its brand and improving its products, Commodore and Atari were wandering aimlessly. The other reason MS is now dominant is that they "innovated" faster--I put quotations there becasue they borrowed or acquired innovation and their products were not tied to the success of one hardware vendor (even Commodore Tandy and Apple were licensees). The others suffered from "not invented here" syndrome and tried to engineer everything in-house and ket their designs closed and very proprietary. Commodore would've died much quicker if it stuck to what it was doing and didn't purchase Amiga--and when they did they bungled everything about it except the hardware itself.
Just because MS is big doesn't mean it will be there forever--it used to be smaller than Commodore. It'll just be a bit harder to knock them off--not because they are big but becasue they are smart/savvy. It'll also most likely take a collaberative effort and an open software/hardware design to do it.
I think most people would be happy with ending the monopoly and its concomitant abuse. There's still a place for private software vendors - it just shouldn't be in single-handedly setting standards for software interoperatbility.
just as soon as businesses start using it. Comparied to a C64/Amiga/AtariST using an 8086 was an ugly mess. Microsoft took off because people where too lazy/afraid to learn a slightly different UI. As businesses start using Linux for cost and the sake of their own software industry (especially as all those nasty copyright laws start getting enforced) you'll see more people with Linux at home. It doesn't matter how much Linux sucks for them. They're so scared of the home button being out of place they'll adapt to anything.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Are those the ones where people bought them, wiped the HDD and put on a dodgy copy of XP?
Does anyone know anybody who actually bought a PC from Walmart?
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider twitter and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Knoppix or Mepis or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.
If you're a /. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than twitter. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.
To get an idea of what I'm talking about, check this post out. This is an article about email disclaimers. The parent of the post is complaining about the ads in the linked page and so on, and twitter actually goes off on a rant to blame it on Microsoft and recommend Lynx, because "is teh free".
Here's another. In this post twitter not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "GNU". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +4) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.
Here's that drive-by advocacy and FUD in motion: twitter goes on about some topic and then drops the usual "oh and M$ is teh evil" because "WMP phones home" or some such. Called on his FUD, he then claims that WMP stores every song and movie you've ever played in a file, somewhere. Pressed further, he just sort of slithers out of sight, his FUD-spreading complete. This is not about some Microsoft technology that nobody likes anyway; it's about lying for the sake of lying. Way too many of his posts are exactly like this one.
More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own. Or these two. Or this one. Or this one.
Still not convinced? This is what twitter considers "humour" while going about his daily "M$" routine.
Prediction: The company/idea that kills MS is not going to be called an "MS killer" until after the fact.
I'm not sure software, even if only an OS, bundled by businessmen (ahem, they're not doing this for free, ya know) is necessarily good for OSS.
I like cheap hardware, but I sure don't want the OS bundled because I want to be able to choose.
ac.
don't you know the concept of open publishing?
take it with a graint of salt, as I'm sure you do when you watch Fox News.
That's the aim of IndyMedia, let anywhere publish WHATEVER THEY WANT.
If it comes to worse and your article is "malicious" or is full of shit, it will be put in hidden status where all other bad boy's messages are.
Your vision of the future makes no sense to me. People are constantly coming up with new uses for general purpose computers and these new uses are demonstrably popular with end-users. If you had "cherry picked" the apps in 1993, you would have missed the Internet. If you had done it in 1999, you would have missed Napster. If you did it in 2003, you would have missed iTunes. Today you might miss BitTorrent or Podcasting.
Maybe we will eventually reach a point where we can push the general purpose computing to a remote server but then you are talking about serious dependence on third parties and probably subscription fees (how else are you going to expect QOS). But "experts" have been predicting this "thin client" vision for years and I'm pretty skeptical.
If you look at the history of statements of Ballmer, Gates you will realize that they never have thought MS is untouchable. They see it as a constant war.
This is how I've even seen Microsoft for the last 20 years and this is the first time I see someone else pointing it out. I never saw Microsoft (Gates, really) as a greedy corporation wanting to take over the world. I've always seen him as a pathological paranoid schizophrenic thinking the entire planet was after him. Every one of his move is a "reaction" rather than an action. A "defensive" reaction.
Granted, today there are a lot of people out to get him, but this was not the case not that long ago. Things have changed, the markets have changed quite radically but the mentality remains. For anyone who has spent any lenght of time at the Microsoft campus, this is obviously clear. Microsoft behavior is hard to grasp for those without much understanding of the market and technology (the bulk of people). Few people understand what happens to competition when you control the OS, the development tools and the applications market. The whole anti-trust brouhaha was a joke as it never touched these issues and latched itself to silly browser integration and media players, things that people got used to and did not understand the underlying problems. Oh well... we all know what that means.
Free Windows CE for systems without hard disks or mapped network drives.
Microsoft will die only when we the people realize how we have been duped by Bill Gates and Co. into allowing them to rename, reuse, recycle and redistribute as proprietary copyright protected applications every bit of readable, routable data their toys are able to detect, capture and brand with that ugly-ass flag of theirs and sue the piss out of them as an enlightened (SUN-JAVA-VM) class.
Any individual or individual entity wishing to join the party "Thomas J. Wasserberg, Et Al v. Microsoft Corporation, Et Al" (In composition - to be filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas at Austin soon) is welcome to contact me as:
Thomas J. Wasserberg
Delta T Creations, S.P.
P.O. Box 3472
11102 Hialeah Drive
Del Valle, Texas 78617
#01.512.247.6696
SWBTx-pop3 to mailto: tommywho70x@yahoo.com
P.S. For those concerned about my safety giving this information, I have been robbed, beaten, kidnapped, poisoned and shot in the dirty civil war that only exists in the minds of "Unstable Malcontent/Potential Terrorist" FBI GOV Unknown Celebrity Profiles. Any day is a good day to die.
The price of Windows is not cast in stone.
If a copy of Windows sells for $100 now. Then they can sell it at $11 if a hundred times more computers are sold than now, and make 10% more in the process.
At that time the question will be if Windows is worth the extra 11 bucks.
It most likely will be.
Max M - IT's Mad Science
The biggest threat to Microsoft is not Linux. There are 2 threats that I perceive:-
OpenOffice.org. It's a simple thing to try/switch to, and the cost savings are large. I know quite a few converts now.
Web applications. I'm seeing a lot of companies building internal applications as web applications through a browser. Mostly because it's just simple in control/deployment terms. But the more apps are built as cross-platform browser based, the easier it will be for companies to switch/mix their clients at any time. Web-based solutions will get more and more popular as storage, power and bandwidth increase.
I expected some rebuttals. Actually, I'm a bit disappointed there aren't more. Wow! How you extrapolate from what I said to a thin-client or "network computer" model isn't readily apparent to me. Perhaps you missed my point, which is that we'll reach a point where the software is so "fully cooked" that there is no need for any kind of an update. If you don't need updates, you don't need a subscription.
I have in fact, stated on many occasions that Network computers and subscription based software services are bad for the very reasons you cite, namely dependance on 3rd parties and subscription fees.
Your point about new apps being developed however, is a valid one. OTOH, there is precedent for what I'm talking about. Ever see an electric typewriter with word-processing built in? They sure enough built 'em. It made sense when there was a large customer base of electric typewriter users and few people were interesteed in what computers had to offer on their klunky little screens back then.
Now we are still in the golden age where general purpose computing dominates the market; but the pendulum might swing back towards hard-coded functionality.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Who's to DEVELOP the software ... for free ? And I don't mean copies of Windows apps. Like Linux today, no one really uses it to get real work done. It's just not there, and nothing ever will be there that wasn't on Windows already, and better. AND easy to use.
That was a great, and very informative explanation.
But *please*, for the love of god, learn how to spell the word "ridiculous".
This is more than just a spelling nazi nitpick - your spelling ability affects who people percieve you, and the credibility they give your comments.
As a devout fan of relay-based computers, I can truly sympathize with MS. I've been shaking my fist at those newfangled manufactureres with the fancy pants "solid state" components for the past 40 years now. What with their transistors, diodes, integrates circuits and what have you, they're turning electronics into disposible components! Makin' a laughing stock out of it! In my day, if a computer didn't have Hi-Fi on the side of it, it was just a calculator.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Uh, isn't Windows CE Microsoft's cheap solid-state OS?
If you're interested in more details about the Mobilis here's another article with couple different photos.
Whenever subject of solid state computers comes up I have to throw in a few words about the Audrey, a failed Internet appliance made by 3Com a few years ago. When they didn't sell for $499 3Com dumped them and they are readily available on EBay for about $85.
The Audrey has a 7-inch 640x480 color touch screen built into a 2-inch-thick package that looks like like a Jetson's version of an Etch-a-Sketch. Several dedicated buttons on the front were intended to start dedicated apps like email, address book and web browser. It was made to sit on the kitchen table so you could read the news, send email and look up recipes. Inside is about a P200, 32Mb ROM and a 32 Mb flashcard for RAM. The original built-in software included a telephony app. There is a built-in 56K modem, microphone and two tiny speakers, also 2 USB ports and an audio out jack, and a no-frills wireless IR keyboard. Most of the ones sold on EBay include a USB LAN interface and have replacement software, an embedded Unix called QNX.
When these things came out on the market for such a low price a hacking community quickly sprang up (for example Audreyhacking.com). You can find lots of free goodies such as an mp3 player and home automation software. Because of the touch screen I bought 5 of them to use as UIs for streaming music to stereos all over the house. Anyway, they are fun toys.
I doubt Apple engineers complain long, loud and daily. Officially Apple and MS are partners, but I'll bet I know what drives the people at Apple to create new and better products. We're talking about Microsoft: The company that was convicted of monopoly abuse of an illegal fashion and got off with less than a slap on the wrist. And yes, when I see a Ford Explorer rolling down the road, I think about the Firestone incident and the 119 people who died to protect an executive's bank account. If Ford Motor Company ceases operations tomorrow, I won't shed any tears.
Do corporations exist to make money for shareholders? Sure, but they exist primarily to shield shareholders from liability. On a large scale, that leads directly to criminal negligence, monopoly abuse, and class action settlements for vouchers. Don't try to paint corporations as the holy savior around here. We're not buying it.
I would still want a decently-sized display, and a comfortably sized-input device for extended use. Until someone can provide me with adequate and inexpensive solutions for those, mobile devices will be seriously hindered.
Microsoft, as such, isn't going to die for the foreseeable future; barring someone finding out that Windows XP causes Heart Disease, Cancer, Burns down homes, and gives you Bad Breath; but then, the Tabacco industry isn't doing too badly.
I'm predicting a cycle of corporate splits; that is companies spinning off business units to 'focus on core compantencys(sp?)' and to be more agile; why was MS so slow to catch on to the Internet back in the early '90s? and now they are behind on hand held computing.
Time to trim the excess beurocracy, increase shareholder choice, and get the DOJ off their backs maybe.
At least they didn't use their excess cash to aquire more and more businesses and become truly bloated. (AOL/Time/Warner?)
Microsoft's deceptive and borderline-illegal business practices destroyed a couple of companies friends of mine worked at---they lost their jobs.
Microsoft's perjury and influence-buying in their antitrust case means that my friends and family are mostly stuck with expensive, inferior software through lock-in.
I actually have worked for Microsoft, indirectly, and have cooperated with them in various ways. I don't hate everyone there. But their upper management? Yeah, I pretty much hate 'em. They're evil.
Google could kill Microsoft on the parental PC. Most people use PCs because they don't know what else is out there, and most of the time whenever I ask anyone over 40 what they use their computer for, I get the same answer -- email, web, word processing, and occasionally some other random office apps.
Well, Firefox is gaining popularity, which is forcing more and more people to design to real standards again, not just Internet Exploder -- so people won't notice if they are using a cheap Linux with Firefox vs. Windows, if all they are doing is Web.
And all those office apps? Well, Google has already rolled out the AJAX replacement to one -- Email. Gmail is good enough that the simply "web and email" people could switch to just a web browser. If Google keeps it up, before long we'll have "Google Office" and "Google Money" and so on.
Eventually, we'd literally be giving people a web browser in a box -- or more accurately, Linux + Firefox + 1 gig of Flash memory, at most -- and they would be fine with it.
With that, the MS stranglehold on the "Desktop" is gone, and the only desktop computers left are gaming ones. Well, if IBM decided to throw as much muscle at Wine as it's been throwing at the kernel, we'd have all the games. From there, we just need enough gamers, and Linux already beats Windows in the raw benchmarks. Last I checked, someone tried identical boxes, side-by-side, generic Linux (forget which one) vs. Windows 2000. The Windows version of Quake 3 ran ok on Win2K, but faster under vanilla Wine on Linux, and the fastest still was the native Linux version. Id admits that the only reason Doom 3 is faster on Windows is that they haven't optimized the Linux code enough.
So, enough benchmarks and enough companies comitted to Linux, and we've got the gamers.
How to sell to the companies? Boot DVDs. Turns a desktop into a console, at no licencing cost to the development shop.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The beautiful thing about open source is scratching a personal itch. The sad thing is that no one seems to understand it.
Look. You are getting something FOR FREE. A lot of people are putting time into it with no hope of anything but street cred in return. A lot of them probably learned to program from a book. There are some GOOD programming books on the Internet.
So if you really think it's so damn easy to do a better job, then GO DO IT.
Oh, and by the way, GNOME and KDE both actually innovate some small things, and copy some absolutely killer features from older systems (workspaces, anyone?), and they've gone out of their way to make things easier than Windows. Yet the average user still bitches because "There's no Start button!" or something easily stupid. Yeah, I know, so click on the foot instead. Or the K.
Honestly, what we always have in this argument is, someone bitches that there's no innovation from the open source desktops, then the SAME PERSON bitches that the open source desktops are hard to use. Maybe they are "harder" because they are innovating, which makes them DIFFERENT than Windows -- not worse, just different -- and you grew up on Windows, so anything that's not an exact dupe of Windows is "hard", and anything that is an exact dupe isn't creative enough.
My dad is like that sometimes. I got him using Firefox, and he bitched about how in Internet Explorer, you hit "backspace" to go back one page, whereas in Firefox, it didn't work. I taught him that you hit "alt-left" to go back, and "alt-right" to go forward. But instead of praising the innovativeness of a fundamentally better design, he was annoyed by the fact that it wasn't exactly the same as IE.
If you really want to see which is better, start some people off who've never seen a computer before, and try to train some of them on Windows, some on Gnome, some on KDE, and some on OSX. Make sure you've got zealots from each group training them, so they don't miss any of the killer features. Measure how productive they are, and ask them how they felt about the system's user-friendliness.
And, if you really want a better system, do it yourself, and make sure that it gets into schools. The next generation should grow up on heterogenious systems, so they can actually make an informed decision about the best one.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The sine wave is 3.579545 MHz (315/88). The point is that it's 113.75 times the horizontal refresh rate, which is 525 times the field rate, which is 60/1.001 Hz. Those numbers may seem whacky, but they were probably chosen to either avoid or take advantage of harmonics / resonances in other parts of the system. For example, originally 60 Hz was chosen to try and keep the picture synchronized with the 60 Hz electricity that was running the lights in both the studios and the homes where the TVs were - no rolling bars. It was shifted a tiny bit when color arrived, but I don't know exactly why.
The sine wave is imposed upon the luminance signal, true, but its amplitude is also important as well as phase shift. Each line, between the end of the horizontal sync pulse and the start of the line contains a few cycles of colorburst signal to be used as the phase reference against which the phase of the color information is compared. The amplitude of the color information is the chrominance (aka Saturation). The luminance (aka Value, often abreviated Y) and Hue values round out the HSV triplet. Only NTSC changes the axes somewhat. Instead of HSV (aka YUV, only the V here means something else), they call it YIQ. The subtle math of RGB, HSV, YUV, YIQ and the like are, alas, beyond me. However, if you start with YIQ, you can modulate I and Q together to make C, or Chroma. A YC cable gives you S-Video. Mix those two together and you get ordinary composite video. DVDs and other MPEG encoded material start with YUV, since you don't have to devote nearly as much bandwidth to the color information as the luminance (because of how the human eye works), so it's easy to make a DVD player output S-Video.
it's true... why would anyone aroudn the world want a fucking laptop? no one seems to get the big outside point, sure the internet is dope, sure Doom 3 in africa is a worthy goal for an entrepreneur but fucking COME ON!!
people dont want a laptop, they want to be CONNECTED. you dont need a keyboard if your cellphone can dictate information to you. you dont need to give everyone a solid monitor, an 8in^2 cell screen is plenty to show mufatu the picture of the buffalo's banging on the plain.
where the hell you gonna set a laptop on the serengeti anyway? throw the mobile in your pocket... but laptops do have an advantage, they can be multi user machines. 8 people share a laptop on MTV's whatever show, so a whole village can share 12 of them. you can't rellay multi user a phone. how do you get in touch with someone when the phone they are using that day changes?
Where do you plug the bloody laptop in? power usage in both machines differs. a foot of solar panel can pour enough juice in a car battery to recharge more phones than bones in the nose of new guinan.
Where am I gonna be connected with these laptops? no network no networking. what do we say to the tribes who need 800miles of cable to get hooked up? Wifi shows potential, the same solar panel could juice a local cell tower, and the ranges on wifi routers get stretched every day with less and less power.
but it seems that both the laptop and the mobile phone come closer and closer to fulfilling our desire to communicate without quite locking in on what is needed. imagine a future where the network covers the landscape. little apps are showing up right now, you can ask an expert a question with text messaging at random. the barriers in between our minds are falling.
imagine when the wearables start looking sexy.... all you see is some chunky framed shades, they see people the're connected to through myspace highlighted in pink, with the names, faces, and contacts all available INSTANTLY. asking someone's name triggers a google search, every politico's dream.
world getting crazier every day homie. what did your great grandfather say when he saw that first horseless carraige? could he even comprehend a freeway? parallel parking? rush hour double lane switches with burning hot coffee all over your crotch so you don't miss the onramp to the 101? what about WAL-mart? no truckers no walmart right? Change is in the air.
can you imagine a future where everyone is connected. where holding a phone for 10 minutes reroutes your information so people looking for you can IM, text, video, audio, voice, walkie talkie, whatever? it's expensive to run fiber optic cable everywhere, and dropped laptops get cracked. how about captain genius puts some thought into something radical.... small scale satellite phone packages. mount the dish/server to something tall, point it at the sky. use the local broadcast/mesh network of the phones for local shite, and satellite everything outside the network. or just mesh it over to the satellite dish network over there... one big wireless network, with everyone connected. all your tribe needs to do is come up with the 3k price tag. for fun's sake we'll make it so that anyone with one of grass roots towers can use any grass roots satellite/ mesh network for free. all the tower needs is juice, so hook up the panel to a battery so the tower can run at night. if you wanted to get frisky, have every tribe pony up $200 a year. take all that cash and spend it to upgrade key network points for faster overall network thoroughput. post a 3k online grant to people who post the best hacks to the system's code. fuck microsoft, let's get ALL the big fish. from the telcos to the cable companies to the broadcast media. why pay a reporter when an on site "network animal" vids the scene with his camera, posts the reel to his "satellite tree" which bit torrents the informaiton to all the other animals through the "mesh network canopy". it wasn't the video from the ne
Surfing is religion
you are silly
I Hack You! - Ninja Fish
If their investors don't like it they can sell their shares to other investors, with the Windows & OS cash cows churning a total of billion a month in profit combined, there will always be someone willing to buy MS shares no matter how they fall.
Just as no matter how the price of some mint postage stamp goes up 'n down as philatelists buy & sell it, it's totally irrilivent to it's economic productivity/potential, IE it's ability to transport a letter a certain distance, well it's the same with Stock investors. The productive output of a company is determined by it's output, in regards Ford that's the cars & trucks running off it's lines, & the value of it's stock is as irrilivent here as the value our philatelists put on our mint postage stamp.
Really once money is raised via a prospectus & a company is floated on a exchange the value of it's shares become meaningless to a company. Each time the shares are then bought & sold is just a exchange of part ownership with no net investment gain or loss to the company. IOW investors don't matter, all that matters are potential investors if a company plans to raise more funds by a future share issue.
So please tell me why investor confidence matters to MS? With their Windows & Office cash cows they never need to ever think about raising new funds with another issue, & if MS investors don't like the way things are going they can sell their shares, it makes no difference to MS. Ontop of which MS's CEO could hypothetically divest all it's non liquid assets in a free lottery & there would still be billions for the major shareholders to retire on & live off the interest.
Why MS keeps wasting billions doing things like buying up companies 'n software & developing new products for no net return is beyond me. You know spending a obcene amount of money on things like the Xbox as the've done over the years. Each new field or product being a billion dollar gamble in the hope of striking lucky the way they did with Windows & Office (like the way Hitler kept gambling on new campiaigns after the winter of 41 in the hope of emulating the successes of the Spring of 1940 & the summer of 41). Especially when they can just rake in a billion a month on just their Windows & Office markets & simply invest the profits in property, the banking, arms & pharmacuetical industries (all can be very profitable relative to the average earnings/asset ratio in business) for the inivitable day when there isn't enough of a market for Windows & Office to be worth while sustaining. Whether that happens in a year or a decade it makes no differance to MS sustainability in regards filthy profits.
Gez instead of wasting a fortune on the numerous things over the years like the XBox 'n Underdog & buying up other companies 'n IP, they could simple burn a million or 2 a year & the net result would be the same - the losses totally eclipsed by the Profits from Windows & Office.
Corporations should consider themselves lucky if they fluke one cash cow, but MS fluked 2 cash cows, meaning the odds are a million to one that they'd ever fluke 3 times lucky. Better to just invest in the companies/sectors/industries with the top earning to asset ratios. That will set them up much better for the inivitable day whenever when the Windows & Office cashcows splutter down.
It's about time Ballmer got smart & divested MS of everything but their Windows & Office cash cows & turned itself into a merchant bank with the cash.
they will require 1000 new nuke plants for that amount of PCs
seriously
300watts * 500 million ppl = terawatts that doesnt exist
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Another point, I hear a lot about China as a market for *nix/JavaOS machines but very little actual data on adoption rates. The reality is that there is a potentially huge market there, but what do we find on the ground? Windows. Pirated Windows, but Windows all the same. The Chinese government can madate all it wants, but they can't seem to make the mental transition between thinking they have a central, commmand economy and the reality that the most vibrant part of the economy is actually free market. On theo other hand, the command part of the economy is a total mess wasting resources at a prodigious rate. That part may follow the directive not to use Windows, we shall see what the rest of the economy does.
Personally, I'd love to see Open Source take off (and I mean real F/OSS, not that Sun bastardization), but as an econometrician and engineer, I deal in reality. not pipe-dreams and rants. I think my tagline says it all :-).
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
Thats okay, they seem bent on suidide most days of the week. (No .NET 2.0 in Longhorn? No WinFS? Etc., etc., etc.) Perhaps they will succeed. Someday. And someday, my computer will magically take care of all my email for me, mix me a martini, and even write and post all my SlashDot entries for me. Yeah, that's the ticket!
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
Twitter, you're a petulant cock-gobbling sycophant to Linux Torvaldyos! Quit taking DP from ESR and RMS's feculent cocks and why don't you try to stop sucking quite so much? Get out of your parents' basement and see the real world - maybe then you'll see how pathetic you sound, with your neverending stream of bullshit about how Microsoft is stalking you. Wasn't it you who said that Microsoft believes your insane ranting is actually a threat to them, so they PAY PEOPLE to reply to you on Slashdot? No sir, I don't get any money. I do it for the love. Someone has to go up against your paranoid whining. So get back in your cage and shut the fuck up already.