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Microsoft's Surface Caught Windows OEMs By Surprise
MojoKid writes "Microsoft's Surface isn't just an attempt to take on the iPad or an articulation of MS's independent design philosophy — it's a fundamental threat against the OEMs who've spent decades as Microsoft's partners and collectively destroyed the industry's perception of the PC as a high-value product. The adversarial roots run deep. Microsoft didn't tell its partners about Surface until three days before the event and gave only the most minimal details on the product. Only the largest vendors even got a phone call; Asus and Acer, the 4th and 5th largest PC manufacturers worldwide, have stated that they had no idea anything was coming. For OEMs who have spent decades working in lock-step with Redmond, that's deeply unsettling."
*** Announcement project***
***to be distributed to all OEM guys.***
Hey guys, we're going to try ruin you again in 3
( ) years
( ) months
() days
***
Please select the right choice, boss.
Marketing Slime Department
This was a real Gomer Pyle moment the bottom feeders.
Vietnam Veteran / Former Postal Worker -- Use Caution When Taunting!
HP and Dell are doing just fine killing themselves on their own, don't need Microsoft's help
They have counterparties.
Remember what happened the last time Microsoft tried to compete with Apple hardware by themselves. I predict this hitting the market with the giant *THUD* usually associated with MS products.
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
Okay, so you've been partnering with the evil Overlord for decades, and you thought yourself immune?
I don't think that there are many former MS partners alive, and of those, all are alive not because MS, no they are alive despite MS.
Apple has taught them well. First locking down the software supply chain (Metro marketplace), now secrecy for new products.
This is MS's way of reminding other companies that a partnership with Microsoft is merily a list of companies that MS can label as suckers.
I miss the Karma Whores.
Once upon a time a scorpion needed to cross the river and asked a frog to carry him across.
"No, you'll sting me", said the frog.
"I promise I won't", responded the scorpion.
Somewhat dubiously the frog agreed and they started to cross the river, the scorpion riding on the frogs back. However, halfway across the river,t he frog felt a siny sting and noticed the sting of the scorpions tail sticking into him.
"Why have you done that?", The frog asked as he died agonisingly.
"Because it's in my nature", returned the scorpion as the waters swallowed them both.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
...one way or the other. People who want the sleekest looking tablet or phone will go for the iPhone or iPad, and people who want the average market 'just gets the job done' will get Androids. MS is trying to position itself in Apple's space, and in this battle, will lose badly, since it's beauty that's going to win in the end.
The only thing MS could have done to differentiate itself would have been to make Fusion or Medfield based tablets or phones that could have run some, if not most Windows apps. But by going w/ ARM, which is alien space for them, they've chosen to play on away turf, rather than on home grounds. Why would anyone prefer Windows RT or Windows Phone 8 to either Android or iOS, which has a long head-start over Windows here? This will be a repeat of NT on MIPS and PPC.
Microsoft's lockstep with OEMs has been the most irritating part of their existence to me, from the Windows Tax to the horrendous upcoming UEFI SecureBoot debacle. Hopefully this will split the hardware manufacturers enough so that I can buy some decent parts that have been made with priorities other than 'get the windows sticker.'
Please stop the mockery for one minute and show a little respect... these companies are deeply unsettled!
For Microsoft, this isn't so much as a betrayal, as it is survival. Microsoft has spend decades relying upon third-parties innovating hardware in order to sell Windows Licenses. And, especially of late, those third-parties have failed. With the mobile market taking off and those third parties having mediocre mobile hardware AT BEST, Microsoft has no choice than to make a product. Maybe, it will diminish into a mere reference design, but only if those third parties actually get to serious work. This should be a wake up call for HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc., to "innovate or die." Of course, if Microsoft has signed agreements saying they'd never create a competing device, it IS downright betrayal.
There is a simple reason why MS is releasing their own tablet, the OEMs like Acer, Asus, etc.. keep producing shoddy pieces of crap. It is impossible for MS to compete in the tablet space with Apple when all the products are cheap, half baked, poorly designed products. In addition all these companies have been happy to jump on any and every bandwagon at the expense of MS.
Yet they expect MS to keep supporting them while they continually stab MS in the back? fat chance.
Good news...maybe this will herald in the age of cheap Chromium laptops and desktops.
Actually I believe this is too bad for MS, they chose wrong time. Now the OEMs actually have an options (Android, Ubuntu and co.) to deliver compeling use experience without MS. The one who can actually loose here is MS, since it can have hard time to compete with gazillions of generic lower priced offerings on the bottom end and iPad on the high end.
OEMs have, with few exceptions, done a pretty dismal job of creating Windows-based mobile hardware, and utterly abysmal at producing competitors to the iPad. Is it any wonder MS said to itself "these guys can't deliver, let's do it ourselves"?
All the disappointed OEMs will be turning to Linux, making this year (yes, I promise this time is for real!) the Linux Desktop year.
The poor reporting around the recent Microsoft announcements is like chum to the anti-Microsoft sharks here at Slashdot.
Microsoft announces a piece of hardware that is better than any of their hardware partners have offered EVER. Any yet, Microsoft is the "Bad Guy"?
How is it that the "hardware specialists", who have had over 3 years to come up with an iPad clone, just can't get it done? At this point, the hardware vendors deserve what they get. They've proven that they either cannot, will not, or just simply refuse to invest in competing on quality. Blaming Microsoft for being a "bad partner" stretches credibility to the breaking point.
The secret wasn't that they were testing a tablet idea and interface, it was that they were going to build the thing themselves.
The common assumption would be the MS was going to do things like they have for the last 3+ decades. That is, they'll make the software and the OEMs will make the hardware.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The rest of the industry has had years to come back with an IPad competitor. Yet even with Apple sourcing all its hardware from the same parties, these OEMs haven't been unable to compete.
Yes, they didn't have Win8 but they had Android and potentially WebOS.
Right now MS realizes that the only way to take on Apple right now is to match ( or copy if you prefer ) their best moves.
It is a good time for Desktop/Laptop makers start to ship Android??
I wouldn't be too surprised if it was Foxconn...
Once upon a time there lived a tiger by the name SteveJ. It would keep everything thing uppity tight close to itself and dramatically show things things to the world. A cat by the name SteveB saw the show and wanted to be like the tiger. It thought "Tiger is successful because it has black stripes all over its body. I will also get black stripes on my body" and bought itself a barbecue, heated it well and jumped on the red hot grill. It did not realize only tigers who make both hard and soft part of the product can do that and cats who make soft part and not the hard part could not do that.
(OK OK my modern fable sucks. But that fable was refined over a couple of millennia and I am winging it in 5 minutes. Pardon me.)
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
For years now, I've been building my own PCs. I expect most people on this board do the same.
Why? So I don't have a crap power supply. So the motherboard has a few features beyond "power on". For decent air cooling. The hardware reasons go on and on. For years, anything that you couldn't easily put in a 20-word blurb about a PC has been shaved down and sacrificed beyond bone-deep cuts to create truly craptastic hardware setups.
I'm rather confident this isn't the vision Microsoft had as it built its OS. At least, not for the *entire* non-boutique market.
And then there's the software. My god, the crapware that gets shoveled onto computers. On the rare occasion I bow down to necessity and buy a laptop, the first thing I do is buy a new license to Windows, wipe the thing, and start fresh. It's damn near unusuable otherwise, thanks to the likes of McAfee, Norton, SomeDamnKidsGamesCompany, Yahoo, Earthlink, Google, AskJeeves, and every other piece of stupid bloaty crashy adware that I have to pull out root and branch.
I'm rather confident this isn't the vision Microsoft had as it built its OS. At least, not for the *entire* non-boutique market.
It will be a joy and a wonder to see someone not fuck over a Windows machine before it ever comes out of the box. Eyes will be opened, tears of joy will be shed, and people will think it's all because of Windows 8.
And that's the true shame.
Because it was always there to begin with.
Apple has always gained value from controlling the software and the hardware. How many Windows headaches are directly attributable to the @#)(*#@) hardware various OEMs use?
But the iOS success has really made it clear: Control the hardware supply chain and you can produce products (e.g. the iPad, the iPhone) that are actually cheaper than your competitor's products, as well as better.
(For those who say the iPhone is not cheaper, its that the carriers subsidize it less because the phone itself is more valuable to customers. Compare the no-contract price of a shiny new Samsung Galaxy or Windows phone vs an iPhone 4s)
Test your net with Netalyzr
If Surface is a success it will jumpstart the entire Windows ecosystem and check the growth of the iPad. This will only help the OEMs in the end. If it's not a success then it's not a threat to OEMs.
While there are plenty of things I personally do not like about Windows 8 -- first and foremost Secure boot -- I still cannot help but feel that Microsoft's new direction will translate to various kinds of benefits for the general populace. Microsoft is now pushing for better integration of the hardware with the OS, for cleaner default installations and for innovation in the hardware, the only downside for the general populace being slightly higher prices on their new computers. One can hope that instead of rushing to the bottom the manufacturers will in the future try to focus on producing higher quality hardware and stop with their bloatware-installations and insanely crappy "feature software."(1) There are better ways of offering new software and getting people to buy stuff than just stuffing the computer full of pre-installed trialware, like e.g. why not ASK the user what kind of software they might need on their newly-installed device or what they plan on doing with it, and then OFFER to install trial-versions so they can try and see if the software does what they need?
(1): a girlfriend just recently bought herself a new laptop from ASUS and I went there to help her set it up. Well, not surprisingly it was chock-full of all kinds of crapware, and ASUS's own software was actually the worst of all. One example of such software from ASUS is ASUS Update: it is nothing more than an application that checks ASUS's website for new driver releases for the laptop, but it is chock-full of spelling mistakes, it's dog-slow, it tries its god damn best to stick out of the desktop like a needle in the eye and so on. Heck, it was trying to install a 500 kilobyte update for 30 minutes before I got fed up with waiting, killed it and installed the update manually, which only took 3 seconds! Another thing I noticed was that the application kept one of the cores at 100% usage at all times, even when it was not doing anything, but when I minimized the application the CPU usage dropped to about 12%: looks like a rather clear case of the application just redrawing its own window all the time as fast as it can, with or without any reason whatsoever for that. It really baffles me how on Earth can ASUS think this is good for their image or for their customers.
Microsoft's shell company with some innocuous name based in the Caymans contracted a factory to have them made. Thus, even the OEM making it had no idea who it was really for.
Now the PC manufacturers are free from Microsoft.
They can build their own tablets using their hardware expertise and probably _buy_ a good software package easier than Microsoft can purchase hardware expertise.
IIUC, this surface thing is just a laptop, with a stand to hold up the monitor?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I'm not. Historically speaking, any time you set out to do business with Microsoft you are going to get screwed. That's what Microsoft does. That's what they've always done. If you're surprised, you either haven't been around long, or your simply an idiot.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Anybody know?
Also... what term can we use now for gesture-based computing that isn't necessarily geared towards tablets? The term "surface computing" has been around for a while, but now I expect that term is going to just be too heavily associated with this particular mainstream product.. where at least with the old MS Surface, Microsoft could legitimately have made a claim to being the first one to commercialize a product that the term would get named for. Now calling something "surface computing" is just going to sound like people are trying to "microsoftize" an industry where there are already a number of other players.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You buy a $600 Mac Mini, drop in more RAM, then install the OS of your choice on it...
One of the things Apple does is make sure that their hardware isn't the bottom-of-the-line crap that PC OEMs use.
So yeah, with a Mac Mini, you're paying a $200 premium for the elegant packaging compared to the typical PE OEM drek of comparible specs, but you also get IO chips that don't blow dead goats.
Apple is vicious about getting the most out of their suppliers, but at the same time, they demand a level of quality out of their suppliers thats lacking in the misbegotten cess-pool that is the rest of the x86 OEM world.
Test your net with Netalyzr
.
In other words, Apple did not just facilitate the paradigm shift towards mobile devices, Apple changed the entire strategic fiscal structure of the market.
Microsoft's hardware entourage had to be cut free. It would not be the first time Microsoft has left the decaying bodies of its partners behind, after sucking all the profits and life out of them.
The major Microsoft OEM's really don't have many other options. You can't OEM the Mac OS, and as much as we would all see a major linux distro get more widely adopted, that just not realistic. Especially in the corporate space.
MS can piss off their OEM's to the Nth degree. They still need to sell MS products to move hardware.
In other words, the OEM's need MS more than MS needs the OEM's. Especially now that they've shown (not proven) the ability to design and manufacturer a very decent Windows hardware platform.
No man is an island, But if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie them together, they make a pretty good raft.
Microsoft couldn't do this in the past because they were already defending themselves against charges of being a monopoly. Now that Apple has gained enough market share Microsoft is free to do whatever they want.
There's no reason why OEMs should be scared or even feel threatened by this. Although I'm not a huge M$ supporter, they do this kind of stuff all the time. They layout a standard, show the OEMs, and then the vendors duplicate it and personalize it. There is still plenty of money to be made for OEMs that choose the Windows 8 platform for their devices. All companies like Acer and ASUS need to do is just release a tablet that actually comes with a digital ink stylus, or perhaps built-in mobile broadband support. Simply take the components that Microsoft hasn't included, and put it in yours instead. Tablets are innovating all the time so there's no reason to think of this as a threat. Consumers will continue to choose what they feel is right for them. If anything, a bold move like this will make vendors more confident in Microsoft's abilities and they'll stand by their side.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
"I have altered the deal. Pray that I do not alter it further"
MS devised Surface, very clever and a rational progression from Kinect. Quick, how many manufacturers have integrated Kinect into their products? I'm unaware of it being integrated into any hardware. Would a Kinect interface in a laptop be interesting?
So, it's really like this: If you want your innovations in the marketplace fast, you better be putting them there yourself. Apple gets this.
Microsoft can either plead with its 'partners' to build these things, or they can contract with a partner or two to make stuff for them.
Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, etc are not going to risk much making cool PC stuff, they are just volume manufacturers. Some (Dell) aren't really manufacturers at all.
So Microsoft will contract for stuff that is cool. Apple does this, and iPads get the better technology earlier. Microsoft's Surface would NOT, repeat NOT be on the market before 2014 if left to the manufacturers. They need to noodle over the design, drive out the cost, maximize profit, and guarantee a market. Microsoft needs to establish themselves in the market, get there before someone else does, and provide the MVP to at least leverage their capital and crush the opposition. Surface is a step past whatever the iPad interface is. Gestures that don't even need a touch screen interest me.
Apple strategy. Evil is as evil does, no matter the name on the product.
If you need examples of failure, the HP touchpad and RIM Playbook come to mind first. Toshiba, Acer, etc have tablets that are superfluous in the marketplace. If you want the iPad market, you have to do B E T T E R than the iPad.
'as good as' leads me to just buy an iPad. Feh.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Its the right strategy from Microsoft, not having the right hardware for Windows 8 would have meant sure shot failure which they cannot afford and not planning to do. Also Microsoft is not stopping OEMs from using Android or Linux for tablets either. So why are the OEM's complaining? Best for them is to beat Microsoft, and come up with better hardware, experience and competitive price. They need to realize without it they cannot compete with iPad anyway.
The modern high tech world is global and borderless. Today's version of national governments cannot reverse that trend for you.
Obviously Microsoft didn't build their own factory from scratch (or did they?). If so, who is actually building this thing? For the original Zune it was Toshiba. I guess it isn't Asus or Acer :-)
If its not Nokia surely Elop will have to go. Seriously.
MS have much fatter profit margins then Apple...
No they don't. Both companies have net profit margins around 29.5% with Apple slightly higher in the most recent quarter than Microsoft.
Apple gets marketshare by innovating and creating products people want, Microsoft gets marketshare by government contract and strong arm monopoly tactics.
Ignoring there recent monopolistic price fixing abuse by forming a Cartel with Book publishers. It seems to spend all its time across the world trying to stop the sales of competing innovative products. In fact it seems to abuse the legal systems in ways that I find uncomfortable. Their use of IP what is meant to be a sign of innovation has been insane, taking freely from others with a sue me I'll pay later attitude to a demanding a ban on anything that looks like an innovative product with weak minimalistic design patents.
It will be seen as the year when the desktop computer started its real decline and the ordinary user started to replace desktops and laptops with small-screen machines, the majority of which run Linux and just about all of which run POSIX-compliant Unix-like operating systems. Meanwhile at home televisions are being replaced by Internet-connected machines which run...Linux. Microsoft is being squeezed in two directions.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
360 is second a LONG way behind Nintendo and PS3 is close behind PLUS 360 still fails in Japan so Sony is far from out of the picture meaning there will be a new round. Also, MS has no presence in mobile gaming at all. As for profit on hardware, is that before or after the losses on the original platform have been accounted for and does it include the countless units that had to be replaced under warranty?
Anyway, MS can do hardware. They have done keyboards and mouses for a long time and they are "okay". No, I wouldn't touch them but some people do.
Not as many as buy Logitech...
Oh and for the final nail in the coffin, the 360 had a rather important thing that MS hoped to launch,HD-DVD. Boy, did that bomb. Blu-ray won instead. Who was behind that again?
No, the 360 did alright but MS is barely breaking even on games and that is only after some creative accounting.
I predict the surface will be another dud. Why?
The one spec that is conspicious by its absence. MEMORY. Not storage, main memory.
Tablets typically come with 1gb nowadays. Do you want to run Windows Desktop with 1gb of memory? You can't even buy netbooks that underpowered anymore. All the memory guzzling of Windows software, all the memory restrictions of a tablet, 10.6 inches (note how well these sell, NOT) and lower resolutiuon then the leader of the pack.
MS only did okay with the 360 because Sony screwed up really badly with the PS3. MS Office only beat Word Perfect because Corell dropped the ball and the IBM PC Compatable only made it because Apple, Commodore and Atari complety screwed themselves over.
MS only wins a race if everyone else trips up. Is Apple likely to do that?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
M$ profit margin is, I believe, higher than Apple's. M$ charges $400 for a copy of Office - digital download. What's the margin on that do you think?
You would be wrong to think that. Apple has a (slightly) higher profit margin as of the most recent fiscal quarter. (MSFT around 29.3% and AAPL at 29.6%) Apple does enough volume that they can drive the margins on the hardware they have made for them pretty thin for their suppliers. Believe it or not, with the right products you can have very good profit margins selling physical objects. You just can't sell a commodity product for big margins. That doesn't presently apply to Apple. Apple's hardware is nice but what really sets their products apart is the software and design. People have proven they are willing to pay a fairly steep markup for the value those add.
Apple spent years perfecting their supply chain management and they've done the engineering but stayed out of manufacturing itself which explains a lot of their profit margin. Can M$ get that smart that quickly?
Microsoft is arguably just as experienced in supply chain management. It's not as if they manufacture the Xbox themselves. MSFT has some pretty good engineers too even if they are hamstrung by bad decisions from years past. The problem Microsoft has is that they are built around selling through channels and don't have the experience Apple does in designing an integrated platform. Their company culture is built around software only and it is pretty hard to shift that. Luckily for MSFT, they have a huge war chest to work with and that insulates them from the mistakes they are almost certain to make.
They create and throw out products and platforms willy-nilly whenever it suits them and with absolutely no regard for the customers and clients that their hardware and software vendors serve. Want to be that guy who has to find someone to support a VB6 or Silverlight app on a desktop box in 5 years? Good luck with that. You're much better off with open source on Linux.
Signed, a frequently screwed MS developer
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Welcome to the Post-PC Era. Invented by Apple, designed in California, built in Shanghai.
never turned on a partner before? As many others have stated, Microsoft is a company for profits and nothing stops them from doing what they decide is their direction to get those profits. laws or no laws, contracts or no contracts and surely nothing like how long you have been a partner matters.
The story here is not who was not told or how surprised they were, it's what they plan to do now they know they signed those exclusive contracts and now got burned by Microsoft themselves.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Why thanks, voluntary-serf man! Have some *more* kool-aid!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
From TFA: "Car analogies might be overdone"
The fucking hell you say!
If Surface heats up, the other OEMs have two stark options. They can continue their race-to-bottom, devouring each other in consolidations and acquisitions until only the brand names are left and every PC component and system has been outsourced to Malaysia -- or they can start building names for themselves as innovators.
This.
Adapt or Die. That is the mantra of the computer industry. Apple has seized on this notion and have reaped the rewards for it. Microsoft is learning, but they have a long way to go. Personally, I am glad that they didn't let their OEMs know what is going on. "But Dharma, you charismatic stallion, why would you support an Evil Empire like Microsoft," you ask, It's quite simple....Microsoft is willing to step out of its' comfort zone. Look at the XBox, look at the Zune, look at the Windows Phone. Sure, all of those products had the missteps and out and out failures, but they got past that and made a better product up the road, and the consumer has been better for it on the whole.
HP and Dell have forgotten how to innovate because they stopped making things. And when they stopped making things, they stopped thinking about how to make things better. Making things in Malaysia does not count here, because those people over there are not making things. They are following a blueprint that has already been set in stone. They do not innovate. They are robots made of meat and it seems to me that this is what business in the 21st Century wants is robots made of meat.
See, that's just it, everyone keeps saying that Win 7 doesn't exactly do anything spectacular that WinXP didn't, except for its re-architected security. (Vista being the Giant Bluff Beta).
So now that they're moving away from the Aero Shiny thing, why can't they use one of these iteration rounds to really drill down the code, under the hood, and make it absolutely sizzle? Portions of the conversation keep floating around Laptop vs Tablet but there shouldn't be any differences! A Tablet should just be the Final Generation of a Laptop, with solid state memory instead of the spinning drive, and other improvements. Then you make Metro and Classic (Windows Explorer) be alternating interfaces to the same back end code. There really isn't a reason one tablet-sized machine can't do both. You dock the thing in an office to a big screen and "do work", then you undock it to play Angry Birds and read the NY Times (Your Media May Vary) at home. Then Mom checks her email.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I'll repeat a shorter version of my theme to you.
There's gonna come a time when they're almost all the same, except phones. "Desktop" = "Portable In a Dock to a screen".
They're struggling a little on Moore's law this generation, but one good boost of game changing technology will kick it all back into overdrive.
You see the first hints of it in the All In One Screen-Computers.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Everyone.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
It keeps them from stampeding. Or switching to Linux.
Have gnu, will travel.
Perhaps if the manufacturers would have done/chose good hardware, nice setup and given good technical support Microsoft would not do that...
Was it the OEMs that refused to allow customization of their desktop? Or in any way stepping outside of the Windows look and feel standard?
Have gnu, will travel.
"Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!"
Completely off topic - Why didn't you give your son the awesome name Dante? Why alter the spelling? He would have been able to say he was named after the cool Heaven & Hell Guy from the 13th century.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
This is slashdot. We all know better than everyone else, therefore without senseless disagreement in the forums, the site would fail to exist.
The reasonI disagree is because I feel the lack of demand for Windows Phone is more because the only companies who make them have long histories of lack of commitment to their phones. Nokia made a fortune for decades by selling new phones when a feature could have been adde through an update, but because software updates are free to the consumer, they sold new phones instead. Having been a developer on Nokia phones for years, I can say even the developers often couldn't update the phones without a JTAG cable and sometimes soldering on wires to connect it.
Samsung and LG have dipped their toes in te water, but their commitment is half assed. HTC... Don't make me laugh. They toss the OS on the phone, load it up with crapware, ship it and say screw it.
Apple changed the way we perceive phones. If Nokia had adopted Android as opposed to Windows Phone, they'd have released 10 new Android phones back to back and screwed all their users from version to version and Android would have sucked instead.
Apple's success wasn't entirely because of iOS. It was very much about the commitment to the actual platform. They provided an operating system, tools, PC and Mac software which was good (unlike Android sync crap and Zune) and then gave content distributors a reason to hype their product for them too.
Android would have been screwed if Samsung didn't try to duplicate the iPhone experience by committing to a small number of variations of the device which were each maintained for long periods. People like to know their phones will have all the cool features for a year or two after they buy them.
Also, Apple and Samsung focused less on tech (let's face it, you can getter better tech elsewhere) and instead focused on style. Nokia makes a crap phone that only people in poor parts of Asia and the Eastern Block would think looks cool. LG and Samsung's Windows Phones look like utility bricks. And HTC... Well... Looks like HTC. Dell tried and ended up making something which looks like "The Budget Windows Phone".
If Microsoft wants Windows Phone to succeed (and Windows 8 tablets), try have to try and make one device a year with NO focus on the underlying tech and a huge focus on the overall experience. It has to be snappy, easy and sexy. Sell the features and style, not the tech.
I hope they polish Metro or made it djinn able enough so others can. Metro is amazing, but it needs some more sex appear to work. The start screen is either too busy or busy in a non-astheticly pleasing way. But it works so damn well it's forgivable. Additionally, when using Metro split-screen, the splitter bar is too wide or maybe chunky. It gives it a kindergarten or preschoolish feel. App design using existing controls is troublesome since drill down entry is hard to work out in the screen format the way they did it. Classic Windows desktop doesn't integrate as well in split screen as it should.
I think the fatal flaw of Surface is that they didn't make one or the other. They should have made x86 only (Windows RT is lame... No classic desktop apps and no visual studio on device... So development sucks for it) and they should have made a ultra and a lite version of it. Core i3 ULV with 8" screen and Core i5 with 10" or 11".
I will buy one of each of the surface tablets anyway, but I don't like that it seems too PCish. Specs don't really matter. Functionality and price are all that matters
About 7 months after I got my mac mini, the nasty slot-loading pioneer DVD drive could no longer detect that a disk was loaded. Replaced it with an external. So I'm not too impressed with the hardware quality. About equal to the PC I owned that I didn't build.
Wow, you're basically the only Non-AC guy who mentions Zune.
That is the comparison I see the biggest here, except this time it's right in MS's home camp.
Apple takes world by storm with iPod. MS Scrambles.
They start with their usual "commodity" strategy and license 20 3rd party hardware makers with some cert specs and calls it "Plays For Sure". So far, so fine. Except Apple was on to something with the whole Integration thing, so generic makers aren't working this time. So then MS does a giant evil backstab and makes the Zune, switching from their classic biz style into a Me Too but minus the 5 years of secret R&D that Apple was doing. So it flopped.
Apple crushed the phone market with the iPhone, and I'm a casualty. I had a Win Mobile 6 phone, and I hated it. It was an overgrown brick in my pocket. While I dislike some of Apple's snooping, the iPhone makes it easy to download apps and it doesn't auto ring by itself twice a day like the HTC phone did.
So suddenly Apple figures out that Mac OS isn't actually going anywhere, but it has some good concepts. So they switch the game to Phone & Tablet, and suddenly Microsoft is panicking, after a 20+ year monopoly on Windows? They want to make their own hardware now? THAT has GOT to piss off the OEM network to no end.
MS gave up ever influencing music, and washed their hands of it.
But this one? This feels like a Bet the Farm move. Remind me to look up the news 4 years from now when the fake urgency wears off. But this feels different.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
If not MSFT, where else can OEMs get their OS?
Canonical, Google, Red Hat, Novell? I don't think so. The OEM are stuck with working with the devil because there are no other viable option. Basically, MSFT is going to try to take the high-end, high-margin Apple market and the OEMs will be left with the low-end, razor thin margin market.
Because :
- You want a desktop PC
- You are ready to install an OS
- Elegant packaging is not the primary reason you want to buy a mac
Then your best bet is to build a PC yourself with quality components. It will probably be better and cheaper than the mac.
Its the right strategy from Microsoft, not having the right hardware for Windows 8 would have meant sure shot failure which they cannot afford and not planning to do. Also Microsoft is not stopping OEMs from using Android or Linux for tablets either. So why are the OEM's complaining?
Best for them is to beat Microsoft, and come up with better hardware, experience and competitive price. They need to realize without it they cannot compete with iPad anyway.
It did not work for Windows Phone 7 it has not worked for Nokia [and the rest]. If it didn't work before...and even Microsoft didn't trust them to produce decent enough hardware(sic) why should they try now?
...in this article, citing "two people familiar with the matter."
Then it would of been in warranty and they would of serviced it for free, unless of course you bought it used and it wasn't really only 7 months old.
Anyone caught by surprise by this one should give me a phone call, I have a few bridges for very competitive prices that I know you really want to own...
Not the "surface" thing per se, but that backstabbing. MS has been doing that for decades. Everyone who got in bed with MS got burnt, sooner or later. The OEMs had the luxury of being in the "later" category, but any CEO who does not have a contingency plan in the drawer for this very, very predictable scenario (again, not in the details, but in principle) ought to be fired and sued by the shareholders.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Stick the Surface where the Sun don't Shine.
Eat my electrical shorts, Microserf.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
HP, Dell, Acer, and whoever else they can recruit should pledge $1 million for REACTOS development.
http://reactos.org
Windows 8: enough of this foolishness.
Part of the problem is Microsoft tries to fix the unit costs of their OS per unit, when the literal price of the unit drops, meaning what used to be a $100 OS component of a $4000 machine became a $200 OS component of a $2000 machine became a $150 OS component of a $350 machine.
At some point, the utility factor of paying ransom to Microsoft becomes too high and the market self-corrects by cutting their payment.
The easiest way to do that is hang Microsoft to dry and not support them. When you're surviving on $1.25 (not a joke) margin on a physical machine, this becomes critical.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Are you telling me that the intel CPU in a Mac Mini last longer than an intel CPU in a PC? Or that the Seagate/Western Digital hard drive in a Mac Mini last longer than the exact same hard drive in a PC?
Apple do not use higher quality parts. They uses the same as everyone else. A PC at the same price point will last just as long, but will be more powerful.
I think they are ultimately doing this with powershell, and the windows servers that will have no GUI. As they separate design and function more they will be able to deploy multiple UI on a solid core.
Back when Windows 95 was announced, IBM was a competitor with their OS/2. IBM kept requesting but never got the technical details of W95 until the day of release. That intentional withholding just one spark of the antitrust case against Microsoft.
Seventeen years later MS pulls the same trick again and have confirmed that they are never, ever to be trusted.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
There's a long, long way to go there, outside of casual browsing. The role of PEDs right now is more or less about remote access to or portable copies of data stored elsewhere. They're media and communication devices, but not workstations or storage devices. Sure, there may come in time in the future where they're much more capable of heavy processing and multitasking, but not in the immediate future, and certainly not already - which is what your post was claiming. These devices are nigh useless for much more than simple apps, browsing the internet, syncing email and entertaining yourself. Especially in enterprise, they're just tools for accessing or carrying around work you've done on an actual computer. Even laptops didn't kill desktops. There's a long way to go, and there's a lot more to it than just having more processing power and memory.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zxk_WywMTzc
50% Flamebait
30% Underrated
20% Funny
pop quiz, how many times can this happen before you post at a negative?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What made you choose a Vaio? This is just my personal opinion, but it does come from over a decade of working with various brands etc. Sony used to make good hardware in various markets, but I never found them to be particularly good in the laptop/notebook market for the price-point. I've never bought a $3500 laptop, but I'd wager than a good portion of that price is simply the brand. Overall, I've found that the Vaio laptops were often thinner, but more prone to failure/damage and not any better spec'd than their somewhat less expensive counterparts.
E.G. In a generation where a Toshiba, HP, and Dell laptop would be able $8000-1200, the Vaio might be $1000-1500+ but not offer any better hardware. For a long time they often offered *less* than other manufacturers by only offering Sony-centric hardware (Sony memory-stick reader instead of a multi-card reader, etc). I knew a lot of asian (generally Chinese) students who were big on the Sony brand and - as the designated "tech guy" - often asked me to check out their laptops when they broke. There were terrible issues with display hinges, optical drive failure, and docking ports etc.
That's not to say that other manufacturers are great. My issues with HP hardware and support (known defects which they deny, major issues with graphic card overheats, etc) have been pretty nasty, so I'd actually rather go Sony than HP, but generally I've found that most others go through cycles of good/bad but are generally predicable overall.
My recommendation (again, just IMHO). Don't got with the just-out-the-door latest laptop. Give them at least a few months to have a few reviews and watch the reviews, etc. Unless you happen to just hit a major technology milestone or the next-year models, there's probably not going to be a huge difference between this month and a few months ago. Get what you need. The biggest, baddest GPU+CPU is also going to generate a lot of heat. That MacBook air is in many ways built for comfort over speed (GPU-wise etc). Also, check some of the less-common brands.
I ended up with an Asus laptop - which many stores don't carry a lot of compared to the HP's/Toshibas/Lenovo's etc - and it's served me well. Good warranty. No hardware issues. It runs current games with good performance, and while it gets hot running battlefield 3 or compiling, it's pretty cool for normal use. It took me about a month of shopping around and checking reviews. Next time might be a Toshiba, Lenovo (or who knows, maybe even a Sony), but whatever it is will be a balance of comfort and power.
A young trainee is flying a helicopter with an instructor in Seattle. Suddenly a thick fog blows in and the student begins to panic and they lose their bearings. The instructor takes control and flies around for a few minutes until they come to a hover outside a large office building. The instructor pulls out some paper and writes a sign which says 'where are we?' and shows it through the window to the workers in the building; the workers huddle up for a moment or two and write up a sign which says 'in a helicopter' and displays it to the pilot. The instructor immediately banks left and flies directly to the airport. The student is amazed and asks 'how did you know from that sign where we were?' The instructor replied 'that answer was technically correct but completely useless. I knew we must have been outside the Microsoft building.'
You don't eat crackers in the bed of your future or you get all...scratchy! - The Tick
Even laptops didn't kill desktops.
tell that to my 8-core macbook pro w/ 16GB of ram.
There's no such thing as an 8-core Macbook Pro.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
But the iOS success has really made it clear: Control the hardware supply chain and you can produce products (e.g. the iPad, the iPhone) that are actually cheaper than your competitor's products, as well as better.
This point gets made often, but I'm deeply suspicious about it.
Methinks Apple happily contributes to it so as to distract from the fact that its impeccable supply chain is even more key. Apple moves its entire --and colossal-- worldwide inventory in five days. No one comes even close, by a very wide margin.
There's no fundamental incompatibility IMO for an OEM to line up only two lines of well designed laptops (consumer/pro) whose models only differ in their display (11", 13", 15", 17"), and whose components are broadly shared between the various models.
When Vista was still called Longhorn there were 3 projects that were going to be part of it:
1) A full database filesystem like you have on mini computers and mainframes.
2) An entirely new security architecture with DRM built in at every level so that any author of any document could use effective DRM.
3) A new spitzy interface.
1 & 2 requires getting the hardware guys and the app guys to cooperate while (3) Microsoft could do alone.
There are elements within Microsoft that think Windows needs a massive overhaul to bring their domain back to life and there are elements that think that the success of Windows is based on backwards compatibility and tampering with that would open the doors to competitors. Both are right.
"We are so big we don't need you guys anymore, go away and bother someone else"
Lets hope they are militant about this, so that they will hasten their extinction.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Intel, HP(Compaq) and Dell are pretty much the only major OEM players that have worked directly with Microsoft for anything other than business deals and high-level stuff, or were up through 2011 or so. HP/Intel have been the two primary partners for low-level tech development such as UEFI, with Dell playing a sort of Mongo to HP's Sheriff Bart simply because they were the biggest OEM before HP/etc. outsourcing to ODMs in China (Acer, Foxconn, ASUS) killed Dell's profit margin advantage.
You can bet that HP/Intel will share in the benefits of any new tech that comes out of the Surface product due to the above close relationship. I can almost guarantee Microsoft will delay giving anything new and profitable to Chinese ODMs because as soon as they get it, history has shown it will be on the shelves in knockoff products as soon as they can retool to get it done (usually 6-9 months).
And really, considering the fiasco with Palm/Touchpad, does anyone really think HP had any interest in trying it again on their own? If this tablet goes well for MSFT, HP will be happy to become a partner and develop their own version(s) with similar build quality and the usual tight integration with Microsoft.
TL;DR = nothing to see here but another disgruntled or otherwise axe-grinding article against the PC industry. The people at HP/MSFT/Intel actually still making things happen are I'm sure laughing their asses off (to the bank?) at these sorts of drama-laden missives. ;)
Being able to replace it under warranty doesn't change the fact it was a poor quality drive that started to fail prematurely.
I think they are ultimately doing this with powershell, and the windows servers that will have no GUI. As they separate design and function more they will be able to deploy multiple UI on a solid core.
I just GOTTA ask: Why would MS remove (or rather not add) their GUI to their server products? Is it an attempt to get some street cred with the Linux crowd's Computer Priesthood? That's the ONLY reason I can see for not having at least a GUI AVAILABLE (maybe they do, I don't know. The Server 2008 R2 machines I work with seem to have a GUI). But this day and age, with CPUs having a zillion cores and even simple desktop machines (let alone server-class computers) having more RAM than existed in the entire world just a couple of decades ago, there is just no excuse (other than fostering the Computer Priesthood) to make people have to type incantations into some 1950's command-line.
Seriously. Aren't we kinda past all that?
You install the GUI on top of the base command line portion. It's for squeezing resources out of your machines.