Moore's Law Is Microsoft's Latest Enemy

Glyn Moody writes "Until now, the received wisdom has been that GNU/Linux will never take off with general users because it's too complicated. One of the achievements of the popular new Asus Eee PC is that it has come up with a tab-based front end that hides the complexity. But maybe its real significance is that it has pushed down the price to the point where the extra cost of using Microsoft Windows over free software is so significant that ordinary users notice. As Moore's Law drives flash memory prices even lower, can ultraportables running Microsoft Windows compete?"

Comments

Slashdot

[hotsauce]

Only on Slashdot would an article ask if Windows can compete with Linux.

*Shakes head*

Get out of mom's basement once in a while, guys.

Re:Slashdot

[gQuigs]

100 years from now. Do you thing proprietary software has a chance in hell? It just is not sustainable to have every business, school, and government paying 1 provider of software for an operating system.

The school district I grew up at pays MS $400,000 every year for the software assurance program (and then $75,000 to Symantec to secure it). The total budget is about 150 Million. This can not be sustained.

Windows can not compete with Linux. That's why they use lock-in, FUD, etc.

And advertising/capitalism is Linux's enemy

[sqldr]

Namely, that with a closed source OS, vendors are being paid by software companies to install reams and reams of crapware on your system. When (eg) Dell installs Linux, they lose that revenue, which on a $200 unit, is a significant portion.

Re:And advertising/capitalism is Linux's enemy

[MightyYar]

You will see reams and reams of crapware installed on linux PCs too if it ever takes off. Even Apple can't resist pushing their .Mac at you and putting some trial applications on the machine.

Pertains to density at a given price

[tepples]

Moore's law pertains to transistor density, not price. The quotation in the Wikipedia article implies that Moore's law pertains to density at a given price: "The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year" (my emphasis).

Re:Pertains to density at a given price

[peragrin]

It's too bad we are talking about Gordon Moore, and not steve Moore.

Re:Pertains to density at a given price

[Evanisincontrol]

Here's a choice quote from the page you gave: "Steven Moore was a well known ultra-Zionist that was known to make romantic passes at goats."

The text you describe appears nowhere in the article for Moore's Law. This should come as no surprise, since Moore's Law is named after Gordon Moore, not Steven Moore.

I figured that would have at least gone to the trouble to vandalize the article yourself and add in such garbage. However, a quick look at the page's history shows that you did not even go to the trouble to do that. (not that it matters; vandalism on Wikipedia is typically reverted in under a minute.)

Congratulations, you are not only a liar, but you are also lazy. Please take your poorly made strawman arguments elsewhere.

Re:Pertains to density at a given price

[sm62704]

But Wikipedia is not accurate! Uncyclopedia says

Moore's Law
Moore's Law was enacted by the Florida legislature in 1999. This law makes it a felony to posess or sell any film or documentary produced by Michael Moore. Moore's Law had its beginnings when a Florida Legislator heard some old Geezer complain about the damned kids on his lawn saying "there ought to be a law" and told his fellow congressthings that the old guy had said "we need more laws." As all the legislators are hearing aid wearing geezers themselves, they took this to mean that Michael Moore should be outlawed. Florida Governor Jeb Clampett, President George Clampett's brother, signed the law so quickly that the friction of the pen caught the paper on fire and the law had to be passed again.

Many slashdot nerds believe that Moore's law has something to do with computers, but this is patently false.

Re:Moore's law has nothing to do with price

[FudRucker]

you're being too pedantic, the styling of Moore's law can be applied to progress of most anything, (from the Ford model A to the Ford Mustang for example, not just transisters)...

Re:Moore's law has nothing to do with price

[node 3]

Moore's law pertains to transistor density, not price.

It's such a well-known thing that anyone who makes the inference that Moore's law has anything to do with price is an idiot. Moore's Law is strongly correlated with price. For about the same price, you can double the number of transistors every 18-24 months, *or* you can keep the same amount of transistors for less cost, or some combination thereof.

In fact, the relation between Moore's Law and price is so well known, that I'd say anyone who thinks it has *nothing* to do with price is the idiot...

Re:Eee PC vs. REAL UMPCs

[Selfbain]

If you have $3000 to blow on a laptop then you're not the target market for the Eee in the first place making your comment irrelevant.

it's called a corollary

[way2trivial]

an excerpt....
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?currentPage=2
"WASTE AND WASTE AGAIN
Forty years ago, Caltech professor Carver Mead identified the corollary to Moore's law of ever-increasing computing power. Every 18 months, Mead observed, the price of a transistor would halve. And so it did, going from tens of dollars in the 1960s to approximately 0.000001 cent today for each of the transistors in Intel's latest quad-core. This, Mead realized, meant that we should start to "waste" transistors."

Flexibility Not Price

[WesternTreefrog]

It's not price that cripples Microsoft in the mobile market, it's flexibility. As anyone who's used a Pocket PC or Windows CE device knows, it's the chained to the desktop mentality that's killing them.

The inability (well, ok, extreme difficulty in) to skin/specialize the user interface is going to hurt them. Microsoft appears to be mentally permanently stuck in one-size-fits-all land. And to be fair, it would be really hard to let people customize as deeply as they need to without letting them muck with the deep details of your OS.

Re:Flexibility Not Price

[Cro Magnon]

And to be fair, it would be really hard to let people customize as deeply as they need to without letting them muck with the deep details of your OS.

Only because of how MS made its OS. Some OS's *cough*Linux*cough*BSD*cough* let you choose among dozens of different UI's without messing with the kernel.

Re:Moore's law has nothing to do with price

[caerwyn]

Moore's law does pertain to transistor density, but anyone who doesn't see the relationship between the two is just as silly. Increasing transistor densities invariably mean price drops for the previous generation of chips, and since the power/capacity of chips is growing more rapidly than the needs of devices, especially in the ultraportable segment, it is not at all surprising that the chip prices for those devices see a corresponding drop.

Moore's law may pertain to transistor density, but increasing transistor density indirectly affects the price of chips at lower transistor densities.

I think they don't

[alx5000]

I don't think ordinary users notice. When I talk to my non-tech-savvy friends, they usually ask me if this or that price is right for a given computer, mostly without taking into cosideration its characteristics (Once a girl I know asked me if a 300 price tag for a laptop could be right, and when I asked for specs, she only replied "Acer"). Besides, we've got big PC stores here (like PC City) whose prices can be 50% more expensive than those you find in smaller, franchised, specialized shops, and they still sell the most.

So no, ordinary users will judge the price based on how awesome the salesman tells them it is (and, of course, if it doesn't come with Windows, don't bother calling it a PC, please, it just confuses them).

$3 is not significant on a $200 computer

[davidwr]

MS had a $3 XP license in the 3rd world for awhile. If they did that worldwide and cooperated with these low-end PC vendors it would short-circuit the Linux retail-price advantage.

If need be, they'll give windows away

[sam_handelman]

The point has already been made that these linux-based minicomps may not be as accessible as you might like - having never used one, I'll just give the benefit of the doubt that they successfully fill the needs cheaply. If they don't play mp3s now, they'll do so sooner or later.

  Microsoft can make money on windows without charging for it; they can charge $15/copy for the minicomputer version. Microsoft has an endless number of strategies, which they will employ to keep market dominance for as long as they can.

  There will be a whole *series* of retrenchments. Microsoft is in a very powerful, very profitable place, so they will fight each retrenchment as hard as they can - but they're not stupid, they've got contingency plans to stay in the market and, frankly, to stay extremely profitable whatever happens. Put another way: they can compete with free, maybe not on a level playing field, but on the playing field that exists, and they intend to do so.

  Forcing them to compete, even on a biased field, is good for the rest of us, so I'm all for it. But driving MS out of any market segment is going to be extremely difficult.

Re:If need be, they'll give windows away

[whoever57]

Microsoft can make money on windows without charging for it; they can charge $15/copy for the minicomputer version. Microsoft has an endless number of strategies, which they will employ to keep market dominance for as long as they can.

MS could afford to give away the OS, if they chose. The real profit comes from Office -- so what are those minicomputer users going to use? As you rightly point out, MS is not just going to give up. MS has lots of cash which can be used to oompete (and I am sure that Google wants the Yahoo deal to go through because this removes all of MS's cash, which will hinder MS's future freedom of action).

In the past, MS has effectively given away software -- in the form of licenses that could be used on two computers: so that a license bought for a work machine could be taken home and used on the home machine.

Microsoft has two advantages over Linux: familiarity and applications. Recent Linux distributions are as easy, if not easier to use than Windows, but many applications (such as iTunes) are simply not available on Linux. Both of these advantages can be swept away if Linux gains a significant foothold in the desktop market.

I just wish that Apple would see that helping Linux would also help Apple. Breaking MS's dominance is the most important goal and Linux can help that to happen.

Re:Eee PC vs. REAL UMPCs

[InsaneProcessor]

For a portable email, quick document, travel internet browser this $400 "piece of crap" is the perfect solution in a hostile environment. I won't let my 11 year old touch the Vaio with my business on it, but when traveling in the car and checking hotels, he can do this easily with this little gadget. When dropped (it is actually more durable than the Vaio) and broken, I am only out a few hundrend and am not stuck with a multi thousand dollar pile of junk. I have no problem sending this "piece of crap" with my kid to school for a project. Would you send a $3000 Vaio with your 11 year old son?

Everex has now come out with the Cloudbook (Linux) at WalMart so, now it is being exposed to the masses. The revolution is starting!

MS strikes back

[lixee]

MS is using all its weight in anticipation of the problem. The new and upcoming Eee 900 for example, has been announced by Asus France as a Windows only version.

http://www.blogeee.net/2008/03/06/le-eeepc-900-uniquement-avec-windows-xp-dapres-asus-france/

The good news is that the French customer is very well protected and forcing a software with a PC down their throat is illegal. So essentially, what will happen is thousands of geeks demanding reimbursement of the XP licenses. That oughta hit Asus really hard, and teach them a good lesson.

I read that Asus Germany announced a similar "forced sale", but can't seem to find the article.

Sure they can!

[OpenSourced]

can ultraportables running Microsoft Windows compete?

Sure they can! Sure, Linux is free, but Windows can be also made free. After all, it's not like it's not already amortized, or something. They can even _pay_ the PC makers to put Windows inside, if it's just in some models. Linux cannot really compete with that, can it?

Failure of Moore's law is more of a threat to MS

[iamacat]

Once CPU speeds cease to double every few years, competition becomes too complex to sustain a monopoly. Further increases in software performance and features will be done in many different ways - robust multithreading for multi-core CPUs, instruction sets more efficient than x86, use of GPU and CPU's vector unit for general computations, programable hardware with each application supplying Verilog-like code, distributed computing and of course plain old good code. It's impossible for one operating system or one application of a given category to be optimum in all these areas. Programming languages very different from C++, Java or .Net will be needed for good auto-parallelization, auto-vectorization and use of programable hardware. A market for a bare-bone, hand coded in C and assembler OS may once again develop if it allows a movie frame rendering app to run 30% faster when hardware performance is not anticipated to rise wildly in a couple of years.

Microsoft can not possibly maintain 10 operating systems with radically different code bases and programming interfaces. In fact it's likely that some use scenarios will be too specialized for a commercial company and will instead be realized by open-source coding by the prospective users. Eee-PC and OLPC are already more about failure of Moore's law that it's continuation. People want to have a cheap, light and silent notebook with extraordinary battery life, but the technology to run Vista+Aero on such a machine is not anywhere on the horizon. So it suddenly makes more sense to run Linux in order to have the hardware that the user wants.

Clear for a long time

[Bombula]

It's been clear for many years that part of M$'s strategy has been to maintain a high overall cost of personal computing, and thereby ensure that they are getting a slice of a big pie. If the total cost of a computer falls - if the pie shrinks - their slice will shrink with it. Their strategy has therefore been to write software that requires more and more demanding hardware, not to offer enriched user experiences (as claimed) but rather as a rationalization for keeping costs up.

If a P3 500Mhz system was coded with the efficiency and elegance that prevailed on the Commodore 64, your OS and every application running would be so blazingly fast as to seem instantaneous, and with 1GB RAM you would not require a harddrive for anything except storing large image/music/video files. Instead, my early-generation P4 2ghz machine at work with 2GB of RAM chugs and sputters and stutters along and I can't wait to get home and use my 'powerful' personal machine that operates much faster. It's absolutely ridiculous.

Re:Clear for a long time

[xZgf6xHx2uhoAj9D]

I keep hearing this mantra, but I think a lot of it is a case of people looking at the past through rose-coloured glasses. Do people really think that software was more efficient in the days of the Commodore 64?

I remember in the late 1980s, a fair number of games for the PC would take at least 3 minutes to start up, just to initialize look-up tables and pre-render sprites! In the early 1990s, Netscape would literally take more than 45 minutes to start up on his PC. In the mid 1990s, I remember seeing, for the first time in my life, a game rendered at more than 30fps.

My point is, people are a lot less patient these days with computers. No one in their right mind is going to wait a minute for an application to start up, and certainly not 45 minutes for a browser!

If you want to know how bad software was in the 1980s, try to run some software from the 1980s. I used to think like you do, that software was incredibly efficient and incredibly well written in the 1980s. Then I tried to run some software from the 1980s. A game from the 1980s often runs slower on today's hardware than today's games do. There are all sorts of ill-conceived hard coded limits in old games. Take software from the 1980s and try to run it on data sets measuring in the gigabytes: no dice.

Again, people expect more from their software today than they did from yesteryear. I'm extremely suspicious of people who say that old software is more efficient/better written than today's software. I've used software from the C64 age. Guess what: IT SUCKED.

rolling my eyes

[dodgedodge]

Utter nonsense. The last paragraph illustrates perfectly why. 99% of the market does't want to customize their OS, they want apps. I can't believe 30 years later some people still don't get that.

Why don't you actually read the Wikipedia article?

[Reality Master 201]

You're impugning the credibility of Wikipedia as a way of dismissing anything that contradicts your argument, rather than dealing with the matter head on. That's intellectually dishonest, and a lazy, stupid way to argue.

Also, if you'd bothered to look at the article, you'd find that the quote provides a citation, and that citation points to a PDF file of the article in which Moore made the statement in question:

ftp://download.intel.com/museum/Moores_Law/Articles-Press_Releases/Gordon_Moore_1965_Article.pdf

In short, you lose on both style and substance.

Windows XP will soon go out of print

[tepples]

Asus is already has an XP model overseas, and it is coming to the US. They have created a smaller footprint for the OS, so I dont see any barriers... Microsoft has stated that it will put the System Builder version of Windows XP on a sales moratorium from January 31, 2009, through December 31, 2096. (The sales moratorium for the retail and OEM versions starts seven months earlier.) After January 31, 2009, the least resource-intensive version of the Windows operating system that continues to be available from Microsoft to the public will be Windows Vista, and I doubt that using Windows Vista on a subnotebook will become economic by that date. How many of these computers can Asus and its partners ship by the end of January of next year?

No.

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

"As Moore's Law drives flash memory prices even lower, can ultraportables running Microsoft Windows compete?"

No, it can't.

Here, on this laptop:
# du -sx /
4677115
# du -sx /home
2026303
# echo "4677115 - 2026303" | bc
2650812


(This is Gentoo so you need to subtract about 300M for the metadata caches,etc. Also, /usr/portage is on a seperate partition from hda1 and not included in that measurement.)

2 1/2 Gig. That's it. Sure I could slim it down more if needed (I don't really use timidi much at all, etc.).

That's for a FULL, USABLE Operating System. OOo, Full install of KDE, several other User things that make this machine (a near 9 year old laptop) a User's PC and not a "workstation".

Given that same space, Windows will get your machine to boot to a Desktop and that's about it. Linux will soar on flash drives, especially with them getting larger and cheaper. Windows (unless you run CE... :\ ) can not match that.

Actually, Moores' law is what keeps MS afloat

[earthforce_1]

If it wasn't for Moore's law, Linux would have long since caught up with them. Imagine if hardware hit a wall, and technology couldn't advance beyond say what existed in 2000 or 2005. Then MS couldn't sell a more complex OS or office suite, and customers would be "stuck" with Win 2000 XP. There would be security patches or hard tuned optimizations to make it a bit faster, but that would be it. They couldn't justify the release an expensive major update for existing customers. Users would dead end at office 2000 or office 2003, since there would be no incentive to update. Office 2007 and/or Vista would not run at all, or would run impossibly slow on such machines.

Eventually, Open Office and Linux would catch and match them feature for feature, so new customers would have no incentive to go with the proprietary solution, since their protocols would eventually be reverse engineered bug for bug, feature for feature, driver for driver. The only way MS keeps Linux at bay is by releasing new feature laden stuff that takes advantage of new, updated hardware.

My prediction: The end of Moore's law will herald the end of Microsoft.

Familiarity isn't worth that much

[Dr. Manhattan]

Familiarity is worth $200 to a lot of people.

A lot less people all the time. Every single electronic gizmo nowadays has its own menu system, along with half the websites and such. People are used to learning slightly different interfaces all the time these days, 'familiarity' is much less of a barrier. And then there's the fact that Vista's Aero interface isn't all that familiar to XP-users compared to the latest Linux systems, anyway.

There are still plenty of dealbreakers - niche Windows-only software - but those niches are shrinking, and 'familiarity' alone isn't enough to save Windows forever.

Re:Familiarity isn't worth that much

[bkaul01]

For rote computer users (people who don't really learn how to do what they're doing, just a number of steps that will produce a desired result), leaving things in the same place but changing the transparency/color is something they can adjust to easily. Moving something to another part of the screen (i.e. top taskbar vs bottom) can, unfortunately, confuse them. It's a minor difference to you or I, but for those who don't understand the function, but only know to click on the button in the lower left corner of the screen, the differences seem larger.

I've met a few of these people... set up a network with an Active Directory domain at a church about 4 years ago, and the secretary still can't grasp the concept of a user account being the same anywhere on the network, and occasionally sends an e-mail asking for the password for another computer. In this case, she couldn't handle the difference between the Win95/NT/2k style taskbar and the Playskool-looking one in XP, so even apart from issues of taste (avoiding the tacky blue and green), running anything other than the "Classic" look and feel would be too much of an adjustment for her. More typically, the color schemes are something that people seem to be able to handle changes in, so long as the layout is the same. There are millions of these people out there - they're the masses of regular users for whom Microsoft does massive market research towards designing a UI that will work for them as well as the rest of us.

It's not that they couldn't have learned the Gnome or Nautilus (or MacOS) UIs, but that they've now learned how to do what they need in the Windows Explorer UI by rote and are too intimidated to try anything else. From their perspectives, it's a completely different system to memorize, and there's little (if any) incentive to do so.

This is 100% true.

[Mongoose Disciple]

As long as Microsoft Office runs on Windows and doesn't run on Linux, Microsoft will be able to compete.

Maybe in ten years that won't be true. After all, I didn't really expect Word to overtake WordPerfect and other alternatives in the market the way it did back in the 90's... but even in that case, it's because something has happened to Office, not because of Moore's Law.

Re:Yes? Is this a question?

[CastrTroy]

But it's starting to become more than $200. With the hardware requirements of Vista, you have to buy a much more expensive computer, just to get the same usability. I bought a laptop that runs Linux. It cost me $500. To get a machine that runs Vista just as well, I'm looking at spending $1000, at least.

Re:Moore's law has nothing to do with price

[rucs_hack]

Moores law can also be applied to the correlation between the increase in ones Unix knowledge, and the corresponding decrease in ones attractiveness to the opposite sex.

Dammit.

Simplicity does not mean usability

[node 3]

The tabbed interface of the Eee PC is simpler, but that does not mean it's more usable. That's one of the big mistakes people make about the Mac. Mac OS X is more usable than Windows (as a general rule, YMMV), but it's not simpler. In many ways, OS X is much more complex than Windows, but that complexity is *managed*, not merely limited.

The main problem Linux faces is not that it's too complex, but that it's designed with a philosophy that tends to value "technologically correct" above all else. There are times when being less precise, less technically oriented, less detailed or less optioned is better for the human user, even if it is not as "true" to the computer itself. Apple seems to explicitly understand this, Microsoft seems to sort of intuit this without understanding it (so they don't make the right choices, but they realize such choices need to be made, which is better than nothing), while on Linux, this seems to be poorly understand, and often seen as a negative.

With most cases of usability efforts on Linux, it's often just trying to copy (and improve upon) some existing system (GIMP vs Photoshop, KDE vs Windows, GNOME vs Mac OS (classic), etc.), it's an attempt to be more usable for admin-types (dselect, aptitude, etc.), or--and this is where Linux truly falls flat on its face--when someone attempts to make a truly usable Linux, they don't think, "let's make a Linux that works the way people work," they think, "let's make an interface that is so simple, even an idiot can use it." Instead of respecting the humanity of their target audience, they insult them.

That is a problem Moore's Law can't do anything about.

Linux won't truly take off until they stop insulting the normal person, and start respecting them. Ubuntu is close, but it's still too technically-oriented. The thing is, though, I'm not sure this is a bad thing. It might be, as it does keep Linux from being a mainstream OS, but on the other hand, it *is* an excellent OS for the people who are more technically-minded, and prefer absolute control, who value technology over aesthetics and the humanity of the interface. If Linux truly evolved to become a user-oriented OS, it would leave a void for the technical user. I suppose there'd still be the DIY Linux distros, plus there's always BSD or Plan 9, or some new OS yet to be created. Still, I'm not sure that if a User-Oriented Linux became a major OS player, that the more bare-bones technically-oriented Linuxes wouldn't find themselves losing significant attention by both users and developers alike.

Yeah, but

[geekoid]

he wins in jackassory!

Not a revolution

[geekoid]

a movement. Revolution implies you end up where you started.

I am running a 289 dollar "piece of crap" desktop. I have been 4 four years. It plays WoW and does general work just fine... stupid computer, I promised i wouldn't by another one until it broke. I gave it a year.grrr.

Maybe I should install Vista, that would break it.

Re:The Year of Linux on the Ultraportable?

[psychodelicacy]

I would argue that you're utterly wrong on this. Some of my DRMd music wouldn't play on Linux until I sorted it out, but that's a problem with iTunes and not with Linux. MP3s were never a problem.

More than that, I installed Ubuntu from scratch myself, knowing nothing about Linux beyond what I could find on Google and had picked up from using the Eee for a week or so. The only thing that gave me significant trouble was the wireless card, but that's working fine after a bit of tweaking. I'm now using egrep, shell scripts and a bit of perl to do some great stuff which has advanced my PhD research (into medieval literature) astronomically.

The problem is not that Linux is in any way "unusable", but that many people are scared of learning to use new tools. I have genuinely come across a lot of people who think they will "break" their computer if they do anything beyond what Windows easily allows. Downloading codecs for MP3s or using the command line to move or rename a file would be terrifying for them because they fear the kind of hissy fits that Windows tends to throw if you tinker with it. We need to encourage people to understand that customising your OS, playing with it, trying things out, should be the norm - and that you really have to be quite clever to "break" a computer!

Re:Yes? Is this a question?

[CastrTroy]

You shouldn't need 2GB to do those things though. That was the entire point of my post. You can do most things on Linux with 1/4 of the resources that Vista takes. If the next windows takes the same approach, and requires that you have 6 GB of RAM for a 3D desktop while playing mp3s, then Linux will just seem that much more attractive. My Linux laptop has 512 MB of RAM, and i've never felt like I needed more memory. Granted, I don't do video editing or editing of 80 MegaPixel images, but most people don't do that kind of thing anyway.

Yes and No

[istartedi]

This is somewhat akin to asking in 1920 "100 years from now, do you think Ford's cheap cars have a chance?".

At the rate we are going, it's entirely possible that the Ford Motor Company will go Chapter 11 (or more likely be bought by some other company) and for all intents and purposes cease to exist. In both cases, there is broad mass appeal in the first wave of a technology adaption, and a cash horde and corporate infrastructure with "legs".

In 1920, electric and steam were still competitive engine technologies. In the 1920s it was probably apparent to most that gasoline engines would dominate. This happened, and the engine in mass-market autombiles was fundamentally the same (emission, computer, and many other refinements aside, still the same fundamental technology) until hybrids were mass-marketed in the late-90s. Now it looks like hybrids might dominate some day; but gasoline-only had quite a run, didn't it?

100 years from now, who knows what the trend in computing will be? Maybe most people won't even have general-purpose computers. Maybe they'll just have boxes with a dozen killer apps built into hardware for better reliability, because the "do it in software first" stage of development will be considered "done".

Or, maybe the introduction of inexpensive multiprocessing technology, smart non-volatile memory, or some other combination of these will reveal deficiencies in OS design that require re-writing the OS from scratch, and maybe that OS will dominate for 30 years. 100 years from now is enough time to fit about 3 lifetimes of MS and *NIX. In other words, 100 years is a long time even in a conservative technology like automobiles, nevermind tech where 10 years is an "eternity".

Re:Moore's law has nothing to do with price

[Archangel Michael]

which will forever be known by the moniker "Rucs' Corollary" in honor of the man credited with both discovering it, and proving it; simultaneously no less.

Re:Eee isn't "better" than Windows

[guisar]

Like what? Have you ever even used one? Your comment is pure FUD. For instance, does your out of the box MS Windows machine have skype installed? What about word processor and other business applications? What about disk encryption and mobile sync software? Can it sync up your calendar and contacts with google or other calendars and your PDA? My eeepc does all that and more, out of the box. So quick your FUD or name specific examples of USEFUL tasks that aren't just made up to justify your point.

Microsoft will threaten Asus

[Undead Ed]

Standard Operating Procedure for Microsoft is to have a little chat with Asus about their 'nice little business'.

It could go something like this:

Microsoft, "You have a nice business here; you sell a lot of motherboards."

Asus, "We sure do. The motherboard business has been very very good to us."

Microsoft, "And we at Microsoft have always been good to you, right?"

Asus, "Well... there was the tablet fiasco. Remember how you convinced many of us...

Microsoft, "Nevermind that. I am talking about all the help and access you get in order to write all your drivers for Windows. We have always been there for you, right?

Asus, "Well... Vista didn't...

Microsoft, "Forget about Vista for now! Just how far would you get without confidential access to all our operating systems?

Asus, "We couldn't sell any motherboards to Windows users, just Linux, BSD, Solaris...

Microsoft, "In other words, You Would Be SCREWED!"

Asus, *hangs head* "What do you want?"

Microsoft, "We are not happy about your $200 little laptop running Linux."

Asus, "But we can't stop it now - we have taken orders..."

Microsoft, "We want you to offer it with Windows!"

Asus, "But Windows is too big and too expensive and...

Microsoft, "Let me tell you what you are going to do. (1) You are going to raise the price to $400 instead of $200. (2) Then you are going to offer a Windows XP version for $395. (3) Then you are going to make a larger version that will actually work with XP.

Asus, "But our original version is underpowered and doeesn't have enough storage for XP and Office..."

Microsoft, "Too bad. Our customers have to become used to much less performance - haven't you tried Vista yet? And you leave the storage problem to us - once we trim out all the useless crap XP will fit - so will Office. It will still be slow but who cares."

Asus, "But our customers..."

Microsoft, *screaming* "They aren't YOUR customers!!! They are OUR customers!!! The only reason they buy your motherboards and computers is to run OUR operating system. And if you don't cooperate with us, you just may have all kinds of problems getting the information you need to create the drivers for your new products. UNDERSTAND?"

*CRASH*

Asus, "Yeah, sure. We understand Mr. Ballmer... Could I get you another chair?"

Microsoft, "Maybe later. Where are the girls?"

And so it goes, Microsoft Standard Operating Procedure for the last 25 years.

Ed (UnDead)