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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
From TFA: "Car analogies might be overdone"
The fucking hell you say!
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
It keeps them from stampeding. Or switching to Linux.
Have gnu, will travel.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Even laptops didn't kill desktops.
tell that to my 8-core macbook pro w/ 16GB of ram.