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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.