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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.'"
This maybe the smartest move microsoft made in the last 15 years
That's good news for the customers, because in order to penetrate the market Microsoft will throw shitloads of money at the development of their new hardware toys and essentially give them away underpriced and possibly at a loss.
All we need to find out is a way to hack them and install Linux on them, and there it is, your super-cheap Linux tablet. :-)
So now all the PC manufacturers need a non-MS alternative... this could be the year... sounds good for EFI being able to boot linux after all!
blog.sam.liddicott.com
All of the recent commentary about MS rupturing their alliance with OEMs is overblown. Microsoft is stuck with OEMs because they don't have the resources to supply an entire computer market with their own hardware. OEMs are stuck with Microsoft because Apple won't license OS X and most consumers won't want linux for the foreseeable future.
MS will make a flagship tablet, which will showcase Windows 8 in the way that they want to show it (without manufacturer bloatware etc). The OEMs will rush in and undercut MS with a range of comparable but slightly cheaper options, and life will go on.
To be honest, I have 4 tablets in my house. One I use constantly for travel and three others for the wife/kids. Do they use them? sometimes but for me I have a Laptop, a Desktop and other systems to use. The tablet form factor is nice and it does provide a needed distraction from the obnoxious guy sitting behind me in 10A on the flights. I've also seen people now diligently taking their tablets everywhere, as if they're so much jewelry. Today I went to lunch and next to where I was, there was a young couple. Both with tablets, both watching stuff, exchanging e-mail and not really talking to each other. So why go to lunch together if you're not going to be part of the actual experience. Yes, it could be laptops, eepcs etc. but it's simply amazing the tools we now have that actually discourage face to face communications. Oh yeah, I can Skype too but that's beside the point.
Microsoft for jumping into this with a "Me Too" approach seems to be too little, too late. Much like their phones. Maybe they'll sell a few but right now I think the market is saturated by Apple and all of the Android based models out there. This move will also alienate them from a lot of their tried-and-true supporters, the Toshibas, the HPs and the ASUSs for example.
Well, let's wait and see in two years to see if it makes sense or if Ballmer will do his Monkey Boy Dance again!
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
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.
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!
7% of android devices are running ICS 7 months after it was released, compared to Apples 80%.
Can you substantiate your claim that 80% of Apple's devices are running ICS? I thought it would take a lot longer than 7 months for that to happen...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
It's getting that way already. Nokia is burning through money and isn't enjoying the sales to assure its own survival. Supposedly the Lumia 800 & 900 didn't sell very well at all and new cut price phones like the 610 (which runs a gimped Windows Phone 7) will sell even worse. If they had a tablet planned they can kiss goodbye to strong sales now they're competing with their own new best friend with deeper pockets. Analysts are already bandying words about like "death watch". I can't see them lasting another year in this state. Someone has to buy them out.
yay I can't wait to store my data on some remote server that could disappear any time. people like you are the reason society is more and more ignorant of consequences. who cares as long as the method is a tiny bit more convenient right the fuck now, right?
1. bw isn't free, esp on cell networks.
2. the internet will never offer the speed and capacity of local storage
3. monthly fees for storage
4. government surveillance/censorship
5. connectivity dependence and 'cost stacks'.. instead of buying a storage device once, the user has to pay for storage and connectivity, usually with monthly charges or else access is lost/the data's gone for good.
Slashdot links are rel="nofollow", which means Google doesn't count them. So no.
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.
Dell Launches Laptops Pre-Loaded with Ubuntu Linux in 850 Stores Across India: http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Dell-to-bring-Ubuntu-laptops-to-850-retail-stores-in-India-1620657.html This was announced on the SAME day that Microsoft announced the Surface RT and Surface Pro. It seems that the OEM industry is secretly betting that Linux Desktop will overtake Windows in the huge Asian market. This is interesting considering that Valve is releasing Steam for Linux and that EA and other game companies are interested as well. They are predicting that Linux will be a big win and replacement for Windows in the long term. earlier... Dell Launches Laptops Pre-Loaded with Ubuntu Linux in China: http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Canonical-Dell-bring-Ubuntu-laptops-to-220-Chinese-retail-stores-1368347.html The OEM's are the BIGGEST CLOWNS for not jumping on Linux earlier to counter the Microsoft threat to their eco-system.
...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.