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Microsoft To PC and Tablet Makers: You're Not Our Future
snydeq writes "Microsoft's plan to build its own Windows 8 tablets puts longtime allies in peril — and it may be the right thing to do. 'In announcing the Surface tablets, due to be released this fall, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer cited Apple's advantage (without mentioning Apple) of integrated software and hardware. "Things work better when hardware and software are considered together," he said. "We control it all, we design it all, and we manufacture it all ourselves." ... Like Apple, Microsoft will hire a few PC makers to do the actual production work. But the need for 20 brands of me-too laptops, tablets, and convertibles is low. Manufacturing sophisticated electronics is a skill requiring manufacturing innovation. But all those branded-but-otherwise-undifferentiated PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones just aren't needed in the vision Ballmer sketched out yesterday.'"
And yet again, Microsoft ape Apple.
The market is already saturated with what people want. Style and pose value from Apple and usefulness and financial value from the Android market. They think that they have a brand to bring to the table but they do not have that. Look at how they do in the Smart Phone world...
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
If this occurs, then Microsoft has every reason to properly secure the bootloader, so that running other OSs is absolutely impossible.
The golden dream for Microsoft in this is that there are two companies making and selling hardware - Apple and Microsoft.
Two, to avoid anti-trust concerns.
To make a secure device, you need perhaps $1 or $2 extra in hardware, and $100K or so spent on getting it audited by someone with a cryptographic clue.
Microsoft has this money, and the incentive to spend this money.
Your average tabletmaker doesn't care that much.
Hello,
I do not see this so much as an ultimatum by Microsoft to its partners as a warning.
Microsoft has invested a great deal of R&D into making Windows fast and reliable, only to find those efforts wasted by computer manufacturers who load up trial or otherwise limited versions of third-party programs which slow down the boot process and system performance overall, use up memory and disk space and introduce incompatibilities with other operating system components and third-party software, all in the pursuit of pumping up profits by turning the computer that you buy from them into a billboard, with those programs being the advertisements. Software companies have to pay for pre-loading the trial version onto a computer, and also have to pay a commission when a license is sold from that preloaded version.
The fact that whole taxonomies of software have been created (bloatware, crapware, shovelware to name a few), and that an ecosystem of programs like CCleaner (formerly Crap Cleaner) and PC Decrapifier (formerly Dell Decrapifier) have sprung up to solve the problem indicates how badly Microsoft's partners have abused their position.
In the case of the whole OEM software preload business, I think Microsoft has largely been the victim. They put strict branding requirements into Windows 95 for the desktop because they wanted end users to have the best experience possible. Manufacturers saw it as a way to make more money ("sell advertising space") and that's what pretty much started the initial antitrust investigation into Microsoft by the US DoJ. Yes, Microsoft has done plenty of horrible things, but they've also paid the price for those past misdeeds, not just in terms of fines, but in the distraction of having to deal with lawyers instead of being able to focus on delivering products and competing with companies like Apple.
Microsoft's partners cannot have ignored what Microsoft is doing with Windows Phone, Windows RT, the Microsoft Store, the Signature PC program and so forth. The writing has pretty much been on the wall for a while; this is just the latest paragraph: We have worked very hard to provide you with the tools to provide customers with a great Windows experience. If you do not choose to execute on that, we will.
As usual and for the record, all of this is my own opinion and commentary derived by observation and other public sources and neither reflects the opinions of Microsoft or my employer (who actually competes with them), although they'd both be fools to disagree with me. :)
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Dexter is a good dog.
It certainly seems smarter than trusting their fate to likes of HP and Dell as they continue to ride out the death spiral of slapping their branding on cheap ODM crap.
Or it could have the opposite effect...
If the windows tablet bombs, then that will drive OEMs away faster than ever.
If it succeeds, then it will be a competitor to the OEMs which may also discourage them, especially since MS will have an inherent advantage due to being able to get the software for free whereas other OEMs will have to negotiate a price, giving them thinner margins on otherwise comparable devices.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
What's the future for Nokia?
Look at both of these URLs and you tell me.
http://ompldr.org/vZWQzcw/charting.the.charts.png
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-06-15/moodys-downgrades-nokia-to-junk-status
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BMO
Being able to run the same apps on your phone, tablet and PC is an awesome feature
Not really. Microsoft's biggest fault is that they don't recognize that the phone, tablet and PC have different purposes, and different modes of usage. In some cases, there's some applications, such as e-mailing or browsing that are done on all devices, but even then there's no need to have exactly the same app. The apps just need to be compatible, and be capable of sharing the files, but apart from that, they should be optimized for the platform and typical use.
Microsoft is stuck with OEMs because they don't have the resources to supply an entire computer market with their own hardware.
This is categorically false.
You have no idea how big the electronics contract manufacturers are or what they are.
They are the people who actually manufacture the devices for the OEMs. Microsoft can surely hire Foxconn or Flextronics to build their tablets. iPads and Surface tablets coming off parallel assembly lines in the same building at Foxconn. Don't think it can't or won't happen.
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BMO
year of the demise of the desktop...
Absolutely. We have moved into the age of the appliance. For the majority of people this is a good thing. They don't understand, and have no interest in understanding, the complexity of general purpose computers. They want access to the internet, an ability to manipulate digital media, and something to load useful apps and games onto. They want something that is protected from being rooted by malicious hackers. They want to be able to trust their device to not transfer all of their account details to someone able to install a keylogger or similar.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
Microsoft is very close to doing what they're poo-pooing: Releasing a me-too clone with a commodity operating system.
Sure, they would control the supply chain now, but so what? It's still playing wannabe behind Apple and Android in the tablet market at this point, and seems to be a peer to all the other manufacturers who plop Windows or Android on hardware and try to enter the market. Especially in the Android segment, companies already have full hardware & software control (like Amazon), because of the (mostly) open-source nature of Android.
So no, MS, you're not special, and you're still playing catch-up.
As an owner of a Zune HD, I can attest to it being a great product let down by abysmal marketing and poor support from Microsoft. It was the only real competitor to the iPod Touch and one of a very small number of PMPs that has (had?) 64GB flash memory. If they'd released it properly in the EU and actually paid for advertising it might have fared differently.
No device can ever be "secure", and running your own code can never be "absolutely impossible" so long as it is in the hands of consumers...
It can easily be secure enough to require a hardware modification to get another OS to run on it. For the mass market that's probably secure enough.
The intersection between people who want to use Linux and the people who'll buy a Microsoft tablet to do it on instead of an Android tablet which doesn't require any soldering is small enough for it not to be a problem. Besides, Microsoft already made money on the tablet even if you do use it for Linux so it's still a profit for them.
No sig today...
Maybe this goes towards what you mean about advertising, but Microsoft let everyone else control the conversation about Zune.. Letting it be the butt of everyone's jokes.. At it's prime - it had THE BEST online service: curated rotating themed playlists, "School" for people who wanted to learn more about a specific genre, complete with different "guest professors", and a "Smart DJ" system before Apples.. What good is a product, with awesome features, if not a damn person knows about it, or has the completely wrong idea about it?
If a smartphone or a tablet is an appliance, then so is most business PCs where you don't have administrative privileges. A traditional gaming console you could probably say is an appliance, it mainly does one thing but the current multi-devices? Is a rooted Android phone a general purpose computer and an unrooted phone an appliance? To me it sounds ridiculous to say that something that runs thousands of apps for all sorts of different things is anything but a general purpose computer, though possibly in chains.
People have simply outsourced the whole technical side, like running under a regular user account with a limited sudo to install apps from a predefined repository. And the indications are not that the desktop is going away, but rather it's going the same way. It's the death of being the real administrator, there's a "superlevel" above you so you're no longer root. OS X Lion was a start, Mountain Lion is a continuation and I suspect in not so long the iOS Desktop will be the norm and Microsoft will probably follow. The desktop is dead, long live the "desktop"?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
No, what you're describing is necessary in a more complex society. Do YOU understand how to fix your car? Or, are you like most people, in that you turn the key, and hope it starts?
I don't respond to AC's.
Well, they also wrote their own obituary with the way they handled the release. The main thing that sticks out is breaking "Plays for Sure", which pretty much told the consumer how much they could trust MS.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
So you're saying the biggest problem with the Zune is that the company that developed it was bought out by Microsoft? Who then proceeded to run it into the ground? I don't know where I've heard that story before...
Fanatically anti-fanatical
How do you know they're not planning to really emulate Apple's "success" and move to proprietary hardware/software and tell all of their "partners" to go pound sand? A walled garden would be next.
They did OK with the XBOX going that route.
Remember, Microsoft is a goddamn corporation. They would gladly drown your grandmother for a nickel's bump in share price. Drowning an entire industrial ecosystem of hardware and software manufacturers (and users who like being able to make choices) would just be a day at the office for them.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Dear hardware manufacturers: You are now utterly dependent on your biggest competitor to supply you with the software you need to run your product. If MS thinks you have a better product at a better price than theirs? Oops, sorry, our Windows OEM licensing system is having technical difficulties. Oh, wait, it's working again, but we had to double the price. You can only build what Microsoft allows you to build.
Unless you want to become a de facto division of Microsoft, you have only two choices: write your own operating system, or use one that's free.
...right down to the bottom of the sea.
Let's count the problems with this model. Suppose I'm a maker of tablets or laptops or PCs. So far I've put Windows on them to market them because frankly, I have little choice -- it's that or Linux and besides, in order to remain price competitive I have to get the price breaks that come from Microsoft for using Windows exclusively as a pre-installed OS. However, I have taken comfort in the fact that all of the other manufacturers are in the same boat -- we all have the same product, within hardware choices and tweaks, we all run the same OS preinstalled for pretty much the same price, that OS breaks on our hardware about the same fraction of time and we get enough help fixing it that we can usually release a semi-stable product and not piss off our consumer base.
But now Microsoft is going to play! It will design its own hardware, and will apply its own team of umpty-gazillion semi-unemployed programmers to ensure that its OS works perfectly on that hardware, both optimized and with absolutely functional device drivers. OTOH, Microsoft will have absolutely no incentive to help out third party hardware manufacturers like me. Indeed, they will have a disincentive! If my hardware has a constant list of creeping minor problems, then Microsoft's huge team of sales reps will be able to convince many buyers that my hardware just isn't reliable, where theirs is!
It's not like we haven't seen this before, after all. It is precisely how Microsoft became the monopoly that they are today -- Microsoft branded software always worked when a new version of its OS was released, where non-Microsoft software was usually subtly broken for six months afterwards. This problem was so prevalent and reproducible that the term "FUD" was coined to describe the predictable response of the Microsoft reps in that six month window, while they gradually took over the world from the likes of Lotus, Corel, Borland, all of whom owned a serious piece of the PC software business before Microsoft decided it wanted it all, not just the OS and maybe a reference compiler or two.
So now Microsoft has decided to go one step further and become Apple, even though they at one point took Apple to within coup-de-grace range of bankruptcy and refrained from wiping it out entirely only because they were already in trouble with anti-trust suits and needed a viable competitor to convince the courts that they didn't, actually, need to be broken up. Apple, of course, has succeeded largely recently because they have a certain amount of genuine innovation (on top of a fair bit of righteous anti-innovation, adopting Unix as their basic OS and "inheriting" an enormous base of free/open source software that nevertheless becomes part of their overall offering). So Microsoft is thus committed to out-Jobbing the now deceased Steve Jobs, in spite of the fact that as a corporation it has stolen -- well, "hijacked" is a better term -- almost all of its best ideas using the dual weapon of cloning by the world's largest closed shop of programmers who control both software and OS, and FUD. Worked great with corporations and corporate tools, but how will it play with consumers? How will it play with the vast ocean of hardware makers?
The latter is fairly predictable. The minute Microsoft becomes Apple, and adopts hardware that it either makes itself or outsources from just one specific manufacturer, the incentives that have long given them dominance on the desktop disappear. True, they are already getting hammered by e.g. Android and can read the writing on this particular wall, but it may well be that their only alternative at this point is one form or another of elegant suicide. When all of the hardware manufacturers realize that they are competing with Microsoft as well as Apple, with very likely no room left in between, what alternatives do they have for survival? Anti-trust suits, sure. And support for any viable alte
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
They are the people who actually manufacture the devices for the OEMs. Microsoft can surely hire Foxconn or Flextronics to build their tablets. iPads and Surface tablets coming off parallel assembly lines in the same building at Foxconn. Don't think it can't or won't happen.
Yes they can, but it's not like this will guarantee them any success against Apple. Foxconn and Flextronics make the devices. Their relationships with OEMs may not include things like sourcing and designing the devices. Supply chain logistics is a boring but necessary part of making theses devices. Apple's advantage in the last decade is slowly becoming known in that they have been able to master the supply chain. Palm found this out trying to build WebOS devices. Many times when they sourced a part like a camera, they found out that the part wasn't available for six months because Apple bought the entire supply of the same part for their devices.
OEMs who have been doing this for decades are have a hard time competing with Apple. MS who have little experience on this magnitude will have to become this company which they have not done before. The Zune never reached the scale of tens of millions per quarter. The Xbox has sold in this order however, the design only changes every few years and not in significant ways. MS will have to do what it do with the Xbox but with at new design every year at the least.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Apple would have no part in it, which is why they're a distant 2nd....
There are these things called shares, see, and some people pay money to buy and sell them.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
That's good news for the customers,
Er, go have a look how much an office PC costs then go look how much a Mac is.
And that's despite Apple using mainly off the shelf components and thus benefiting from the highly competitive hardware market that exists for Windows PCs.
If MS goes closes the hardware it's pretty much game over for anyone who doesn't get a contract with MS or Apple, and the competitive hardware market disappears.
It's unclear whether this would be a net win or lose for MS. On the one hand the hardware industry becomes generally less competitive, but on the other hand the relative scale economics of MS becomes much more substantial. They get to realise their advantage over competitors. One thing's for sure though, the consumer is going to lose. Badly.
There's already a duopoly on the software, which while significant is still just a fraction of the overall cost of a PC, of which the remainder of the cost is the highly competitive hardware. Now we'd have a duopoly over the entire PC.
Remember, Microsoft is a goddamn corporation. They would gladly drown your grandmother for a nickel's bump in share price.
An absurd statement if I ever heard one. To claim that there is something inherently evil about corporations is just silly. It's one thing to criticize the political or economic system that allows corporations to conduct business in an unethical manner, but to make the claim that any group of individuals that forms an organization funded by public stockholders for the sake of operating a profitable business are inherently evil is inherently dumb.
Believe it or not, but there actually are corporations run by individuals who care about running the business in an ethical manner. Of course, Microsoft isn't one of them, but it's unfair to judge every corporation based on the actions of Microsoft. That's like judging all Republicans on the basis of what Rush Limbaugh says.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Oh, please. I have a new laptop, and despite the SSD and extra memory I shoved into it, it still can't hold a candle to my desktop.
The people crying that the end of the desktop is nigh are those people who never needed a desktop to begin with, and would be happy with an iPhone for all their 'computing' needs.
I am John Hurt.