Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates: the Traditional PC Is Changing
Billly Gates writes "Bill Gates, in an interview with Charlie Rose last night, defended the move to Metro-ize Windows 8 and focus solely on the tablet experience (here's the video — tablet talk starts around 28 minutes in). When asked how traditional PC users will react, he explained that the world is moving into tablets, and a new PC needs to have both experiences integrated together. Also, he defended the move to build the Surface while charging his competitors a bundle for Windows 8. He says users have access to both experiences, whether it is a signature Microsoft one, or from an OEM. Is the a sign the desktop is dead or dying?"
Gates stopped short of saying the traditional PC is dead, but dodged direct questions about its future. This is a big change to the stance he has advocated in years past.
Mobile computing is the future -- just ignore the battery life.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I don't see Apple shoving a grand unified UI down the throats of its tablet, laptop, and desktop users. And I don't see Apple users complaining or getting confused by tablet gestures vs keyboard/mouse operations.
How about we just standardize on the iPod? Put one wheel on the front of everything and be done with it.
Have gnu, will travel.
No, it's a sign that /. needs editors.
Slashdot's editors are actually AIs that battle each other deep inside the Gibson. The stories are chosen by the one that survives 17 rounds of gruelling competition. If you listen carefully, you can almost hear the crunch of cheetos and the pounding techno music as hot girls in glowing costumes introduce the contenders. Malda didn't retire, he just returned to userspace.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Yeah, running a massive charity that helps eradicate disease around the world and improve education? What a selfish jerk.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Some people browse the web on iPads now. This is approximately the only piece of evidence I've seen that the PC is "dying".
We all still have a PC in our office to do real work. People write code, write papers, design things, run simulations, SSH into servers, work with complicated spreadsheets and databases, run custom software applications, etc. When there's any sign at all that most of that work is moving onto tablets, then it'll be reasonable to start saying the PC is dying.
Yeah, but ....
Asking Bill Gates about Microsoft's platform direction is like asking Mikhail Gorbachev about the future of Russia.
Have gnu, will travel.
Isn't it amazing how Microsoft seems to have been put on the defensive? What a change from not that long ago, They no longer seem to have much strategic vision, and just respond (usually poorly) to Apple's moves. How freaked out they must be now that the iPhone alone makes Apple more revenue and profit than all of Microsoft.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
It's like that time in the 1990s when Bill Gates discovered the Internet several years later than everyone else...
But it's Bill Gates, so some people listen and think he's said something profound!
#DeleteChrome
If the PC is dead, what are the developers writing dinky little games and apps for your shiny new tablets going to use? Have you tried designing a gui with gestures? Typing 150,000 lines of code on a touchscreen? Sure, you can attach a bluetooth keyboard and mouse ... as long as the batteries hold out.
In addition to that, if PC gamers wanted a braindead machine they'd get a handheld or a console. The sort of games I enjoy need a mouse, keyboard and very large screen. Tablets have their place but they're no substitute for a real computer.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
Yeah, running a massive charity that helps eradicate disease around the world and improve education? What a selfish jerk.
Yeah, running A strongarm for big pharma that pretends to eradicate disease without being able to get into every country where it is an issue because of regressive IP policies and attempt to shape education in a way that results in more sales for Microsoft, using money that he effectively stole from the entire computing industry by illegally abusing a monopoly position in such a way that it held the computing industry back at least half a decade, and probably a whole one? I call that a selfish jerk, but I guess that's just because I own a dictionary.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When I'm designing stuff (mechanical, schematic, PCB layout), I need a desktop computer: good optical mouse, comfortable chair, big monitor, full-sized keyboard, fast/loaded computer. I have tried to do that on a tablet or notebook, it's not even close. I agree with Spacejock, there is no replacement when you need real development.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
> We just need to make sure cars have a safety interlock so you can't drive with your smart glasses on.
Why? The cars will be driving themselves by then so we will need something to do while travelling.
Democrat delenda est
The premise that Metro is a forgone conclusion for the way a tablet/phone experience succeeds is a poor one. The market has not shown that to be true. I figure Win8 is their move to try to force the issue and gain some traction by effectively throwing the desktop market under the bus, since they don't have to worry about losing those to competitors by and large (Vista proved that in relatively modern history).
I've always hated hot corners, and Windows 8 demands they be used a lot. Both in the annoying 'mouse happened to go to a corner of a screen, do something without user 'clicking' anything' and the somewhat more forgiveable hidden UI element to click on and do things. The hotcorners aren't as bad as the 'activities' hot corner of Gnome 3, but I find it a questionable choice, *particularly* in the context of touch interfaces where hot corners don't even have their 'auto-find' aspect that people like so much.
The jarring difference between 'Metro UI' and Desktop applications is unfortunate. It's especially bad where you have two 'Internet Explorers" that behave very differently. OSX full-screen really did this right, the full-screen app management pretty much let's the apps be the same in windowed and fullscreen mode, and just tweak the navigation/task switching.
The search feature is 'hidden' (a common theme in the Metro interface) as there is no visual indication of it's availability. For a keyboard user, I consider this minor, but wonder how it plays in a tablet UI, where typically a text field is a cue for virtual keyboard. More annoying is that the search by default hides all but 'Apps' results, meaning you have to note the non-Apps categories count when searching. Worse yet, that summary will auto-hide, leading you with no UI indication of actual results that you actually want.
All that said, conceptually there is one thing I think is nice about Metro and Gnome 3, the general concept that when you do 'Start' or 'Activities', that the entire screen real estate is dedicated to the action. I kind of prefer Gnome 3's view over the Metro start (the former giving better consideration for task switching rather than just launching).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I get it now. He says the PC is changing. Because he (well, Microsoft) is going to MAKE it change. Change to a locked down environment that can only run Microsoft approved OSes. And do things the Microsoft way. And you are going to like it because they will spend bazillions in marketing dollars making everyone think it is the best thing since sliced bread.
Count me out.
Through it all we persevered. A few of us were preaching separating "GUI from kernel" "event driven code from procedural code". And we pulled extra hours to practice what we preached. Fellow developers from MS world randomly included afxwin.h deep inside non graphical kernel library code to add a one line debug statement, broke the linux builds and threw tantrums when called to fix the offending code, "it is working in Windows, so it can't be my problem. You fix it in Linux". We suffered all these indignities and got our product to build and run in Linux all the time. We no longer have a 3 month delay in releasing linux version.
Now this. Good riddance. Let the windows and its market dominance and its subsidizing the computing platform go chasing the tablets or whatever. Before Wintel monopoly we had 90% revenue fro unix sales, it dropped to 10% at the height, now linux is back up to 40%. If they cram the win-8 interface down the throat or make our software to be sold through appstore or something, our windows version sales will have no place to go but down. Finally sanity will return. We will separate content from presentation. We will separate gui code from non-graphical code. We will separate event driven code from procedure libraries. Vindication at last.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Windows 7 will soldier on until MS replaces 8 with a useful PC OS. Just like XP did when Vista bombed and MS needed a couple of years to replace it.
The very near future beings shirt-pocket computing more powerful than Star Trek tricorders and communicators. It frees us all from being bound to one spot in order to compute and game and browse.
One thing I don't see very often on shirt-pocket computers is a keyboard for entering large amounts of text or a gamepad for controlling a video game character. A completely flat touch screen is no substitute, as Intellivision II owners learned in 1983.
We have to put out our own tablet, because our OEMs can't build a competitor to the Kindle Fire and sell it for 199.00 if 80.00 dollars out of that 199.00 is for our OS.
Microsoft can't release a 700.00 tablet. Anyone going to spend that much money would go for an Apple product. The logical entry point to sell a lot of them is on the low end, and guess what...the OEMs can't meet the low end price point and use Windows 8.
This may not be the year of Linux, but it could be the year it backed MS into a corner.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
That's what happens when you spend too much time defending your market and not enough time 'innovating'.
Apple didn't just put out more and better hardware, they created a unified approach to handing all their customers a market in a box. The iPhone and iPad apps market, the music on your device(s) market, the internet as a TV show market, the eBooks market...
BG was a visionary, but you can only get just so much productivity out of your Office employees before the hardware improvements are lost on those who are moved primarily by the ROI arguments. And the web is a great platform to deliver services, but again, how long does it it take before the western world is saturated with sales opportunities and M$ had to start targeting the 3rd or diminishing marginal returns.
Apple is riding the tide of people who believe that the most portable device that gives them everything, everywhere all the time with slick engineering reliability built in is worth a premium. It's a good thing Steve Jobs came back and rescued us from the inevitable degradation that the Mac clone wars would have ultimately delivered, as evidenced by Microsoft taking back their hardware in an effort to combat the crap that's marketed in the PC world.
Thanks Steve!
(I really enjoy my Swiss Army knife of markets in a box!)
Where the hell is everyone going that the personal computer has to suddenly become "mobile computing"? I move around more than most people and despite my best efforts, I still can't find anything so freaking important that requires a computer while I'm going from point A to point B. I mean, I really want to justify the price of these tablets, but besides playing a few not-so-good games and watching some movies, it's just shopping and reading. Are any of those things so crucial that the entire world of personal computing has to be transformed into "mobile computing"? The reading thing is nice, but how "mobile" can you be when your battery doesn't even last half a day?
I hear a lot about how "mobile computing is the future" but I still don't understand the "I'm always on the move" part and I need that computer while I'm moving" part. I mean, I understand it, but not enough that the entire world of personal computing has to change.
I think what Mr Gates really means is "computers are for shopping, instead of making". I have yet to meet someone who has produced anything meaningful on a smartphone or tablet.
And does it matter to Mr Gates and the Zombie Steve Jobs that there are still a lot of us who actually want to make things with our computers and would actually like a nice powerful machine with a big screen and full-size keyboard? Maybe a couple of cool interfaces and controllers? A desk full of control surfaces, a variety of interface devices, good sound reproduction and display technology?
Why is it that whenever one of the god-kings makes a pronouncement like this I seldom feel that the actual desires and needs of consumers are being taken into consideration? It's all about what they want for us - what they think we should have.
Remember how we were all going to have netbooks? How tablets are the new black? Well, couple years have gone by and they're still just shopping interfaces and metered toys.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Only on a slashdot discussion of bill gates would you find someone finding fault with curing diseases.
This is not a defensive move in reaction to the iPhone at all. Microsoft's move to tablet computing began back in the Windows 3.1 days with Windows for Pen Computing as extensions to the OS. It became a version of Windows in its own right with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. This was merged into the main OS with Vista and is still part of Windows 7.
Their efforts to change the user interface to suit the tablet continued with the introduction of the Ribbon in Office 2007.
With Metro, they have come full circle with their efforts to make their phone interface the same as their desktop interface. Previously they had adapted the phone interface to look like the Windows 95 desktop, including a tiny little start menu (it even ran on the ARM CPU). Now they are making their desktop look like a phone. It was a dumb idea then and it is a dumb idea now, but that is another issue. However, it does show that everything they have done as been consistent long term strategy, and not just a knee-jerk reaction to one Apple product.
socialism just ensures that we all live in squalor. Just look at the ex-soviet state lifestyle
Choosing the USSR as an example of socialisim is like choosing Somalia as an example of capitalisim. The scandanavian countries are more socialist than most and they are definitely not "living in squalor". Thing is when you tie yourself to one ideology you automatically throw out all the good ideas from other ideologies which is why US citizens currently pay top dollar for a second rate health system.
The US system is ideologically afraid that someone will get "something for nothing", so afraid that they spend most of that extra money on an army of accountants that do nothing but try and work out who pays for what and how. In other words it's costing the average US citizen more to exclude each other from health care than it would to bite the bullet and implement a sane system (almost 10X more for a single-breadwinner family of four when compared to Australia's 'solialist' system).
you don't have a right to another's property without his permission
Of course not, but there are different definitions of what is and isn't private property. For example it's virtually impossible to amass billions in private property in a Scandanavian country due to the tax regime, meaning it's impossible for the bulk of the nations weallth to be concentrated into a few hands as it is in the US. This doesn't mean you can't be rich in a Scandanavian country, it just means you can't be filthy rich. And lets face it, most people become filthy rich via luck or hereditry, they DO NOT work any harder than the guy who cleans their corporate bathroom.
I'm no bill gates fan
I'm a big fan of his philanthropic activities, the guy has put his money where his mouth is and (along with Warren Buffet) has encoraged many other billionaires to make similar pledges. Did he (or any other multi-billionaire) do anything to "deserve" that level of property and power in the first place? - Definitely not.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It's not the architecture as much as the input device. A video game controlled by on-screen buttons on a completely flat multitouch screen gives the player no way to find the buttons by sense of feel. This is true whether the CPU behind the touch screen is x86, ARM, or a freaking 6502 for all that matters. Did device makers learn nothing from the Intellivision II's flat keypad? What would surprise me is if more makers of tablets and smartphones were to introduce gaming models including physical buttons. The only one I can think of right now is Xperia Play by Sony.
I DON'T WANT A TABLET
I DON'T WANT A TABLET
I DON'T WANT ANYTHING LIKE A TABLET
I don't care if the marketoids think it's the future
I DON'T WANT A TABLET
Have I made myself clear?
I think this is what you call a figure of speech. It encapsulates in a few words what will probably take a paragraph or more of explanation. Perhaps it's better phrased as "the PC is dying" or more prosaically: "The phenomenal growth in the market for personal computers is levelling off and is expected to go down. It's even possible that the total number of PCs will go down in the near future."
So is the PC dying? What we have are a few indisputable trends. There are now more cellphones in the planet than there are PCs. The percentage of cellphones that can somehow connect to the Net are increasing. Smartphones today are more powerful than the typical desktop from the Windows 95 era, arguably the turning point when the PC migrated from the office to colonize the home market.
The only thing missing for the smartphone to replace the PC is the consistent ability to connect to input-output devices that are taken for granted in the PC world. Support for keyboards and external pointing devices is iffy at best. Support for printers and large monitors is even more dismal. But these issues are being addressed (some of the pricier smartphones now have HDMI output).
Developers and hardcore gamers don't count in the post-PC world. Developers weren't a large breed to begin with. For them the PC will become a niche product, just like mainframes. Hardcore gamers will always have their consoles.
Yes, the tablet is no substitute for a real PC. But superior technology don't always win out. Microsoft should know this better than any other gigantic tech company.
I never said or meant it was "a knee-jerk reaction to one Apple product." Clearly Microsoft has also been paying close attention to OS X, the iPod, the iTunes Store, as well as iPhone/iPad/iOS, and they have had their own innovatives. But perhaps I should have said Microsoft hasn't had a workable or successful strategic vision for a while now. Sure, they have new ideas, they just don't seem to work out. Microsoft makes money, but from long-existing products. Even their relatively recent success of the Xbox may not have yet turned a profit, given the billions they sank into getting it going.
(I don't consider the fact that their old pen and tablet products have been subsumed into the current version of Windows means they were successful or even very noteworthy. In history they are footnotes, not milestones and game-changers.
I'm not sure how going from "make phone look like tiny desktop" to "make desktop look like big phone" counts as a "consistent long term strategy," though. Is this "coming full circle" or "going in circles"?
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Since when has MS been on the offensive?
Over the past several decades they have always been highly defensive. Every offensive move (aggressive pricing of Office to outcompete WordPerfect; developing a web browser to kill off Netscape; hostile take-over of other competing companies) have always been to defend the status quo which includes Windows on the desktop. MS never innovated much, instead they have bought up many small companies with innovative products, sometimes including the product in their own offering, usually killing it off (by making it suck).
MS makes money by selling Windows and Office to the desktop computers. Anything that threatens this status quo they will defend against.
Now the mobile computing has quite suddenly matured and become popular, and that's what keeps MS scrambling. They don't have an easy answer to that. It's too big to buy (and Apple and Google are not for sale, anyway), and most devices are using hardware that Windows doesn't work well on (ARM processors, touch screens, small screens, no keyboard/mouse).
Add to that the notorious slowness of MS and the company has a big problem. The first iPhone, that set off the revolution, was released five years ago. The first Android release by Google followed two years later. Another three years later and MS still doesn't have a viable competitor, and is by many considered a few years behind Android and iOS.
MS is on the defensive, still, while to survive they must be on the offensive. The Surface proves that they are trying to do just that now. An interesting concept, I wonder if it will be released as product before competitors take over the ideas and release their own. When the first iPad was announced by Apple it was mere weeks before the Chinese manufacturers started to churn out 7" iPads - running Android but looking exactly like the real thing. Just smaller, and cheaper.
I see Microsoft today, and I see a company that has no idea what it's doing. Well, I don't claim to know what is best to do, but I'd at least aim for consistency.
I'd thought about making an Ask Slashdot based on this premise, but I probably will never actually do it. So here's what *I* would do if I ran Microsoft.
Windows. Still a good product, at least on the desktop, but the brand keeps getting diluted, and attempts to "re-imagine" it or "re-invent" it simply will not work. On the desktop side, you really don't NEED to change much. Just keep focusing on making the existing experience incrementally better. Try to get boot times down to under a second, make it more stable, little improvements like that.
Windows Server? Can it. Windows Server is so far behind *technically* that it's not even funny. The only reason it's used is because a) it's far easier than Linux, and b) Microsoft. (B) won't last forever, so you know what? Give up. Give up a bit of control. Make the next Windows Server a Linux distro.
BUT
Don't do it like every other Linux distro.
The theme should be "it all works together seamlessly". Port Active Directory, port Exchange, port Microsoft SQL, port ASP.NET and everything (make sure it runs as Apache or nginx modules, though. IIS itself is a "maybe"). Wrap it all up in a GUI that makes things easy to figure out - your goal should be that you don't even need a manual. But don't ignore the command line and config files. Make the best damn Linux distro you can, and *sell* it.
Yes, sell. Obviously, anything open-source should stay open-source. Maybe even open-source the stuff that lets others integrate with you - AD stuff, .NET, and so on. But the big stuff? Keep it proprietary, and sell it. And not ridiculously overpriced, either.
In fact, hedge your bets on the desktop side as well. Port the Windows desktop environment over to Linux, because trust me, KDE and GNOME are fucking things up right now, and the Windows desktop experience is actually *better*. You don't even have to make it natively X11, just include an X11 library so all the old apps still work (like how OS X does it). And release for free tools that make Linux integrate well with Windows, stuff to EASILY integrate with AD and such. Yes, open-source stuff can do most of this already, but those are both a pain, and not supported by Microsoft.
Windows Phone? Drop it. You aren't going to win unless you have the apps. And WP7 does not have the apps. It does have some good ideas, though, some very good things. So you know what you should do? Take Android, and mod the shit out of it. Put Office on it. Make it integrate with Active Directory and Exchange and all that shit, so businesses will love it. Make it work with the Xbox and whatever else you've got. And license it out to whoever wants it. Make it "Android, but with ___, ____ and ___". Still compatible with the millions of Android apps, but it has several that, at best, you'd have to buy on the marketplace; at worst, simply not available.
The Xbox is one of the few things Microsoft's not just doing well, but is recognized as doing well. This is your new Big Brand. Make a new Xbox, price target $400-$500. It should be a powerful core-gamer machine. Let Nintendo have the low-end market with the Wii U. And make it more than a game console - you're doing well already, having Netflix and all that on there. Keep that up. Make it work with your WinDroid phone systems, both as a Wii U-like display for the console, and as a remote for Netflix and such. This way, you aren't just fighting Sony - you're also fighting Apple TV and whatever that Google thing is called. Keep backwards compatibility, maybe add a Blu-Ray drive (even if the movies aren't selling so well, it is good for games). But don't do anything crazy. Just... incremental improvements. Make one device that does the task of many others, well enough that it isn't a compromise, and cheaply enough that it's an option if you only actually want one part of it. Yes, that's
The AC would have a point (it would still be a terrible one btw, relieving human suffering is noble regardless) if it weren't for the family planning work that they're doing. As it is, it's a clear bias against a man who has committed the majority of his wealth to philanthropy.
...stop trying to be a visionary - you aren't. Your record on future predictions equals that of the world cup animal oracles.
Sure the PC will change - it always does. But the world isn't "moving to" tablets, it is adopting tablets. Most tablet owners also own a PC and for that reason alone don't want the two to be identical. One tool for the one job, another tool for a different job. Some people are happy with just one of the two, that's fine, too. Yes, some people now use a tablet instead of a PC because what they used to use the PC for is better done by a tablet, there just weren't any.
MS more than anyone should know this. Their second cash cow is MS Office, after all - something that nobody really wants on a tablet for any serious work. Sure, the iPad office apps (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) are bestsellers - because people want to read and update their documents on the road. But it is not only my own opinion that serious office work doesn't get done on a tablet. And if you need business numbers, look at the sales figures for notebooks and netbooks. Not exactly dead in the waters, are they? So even in the mobile computing market, there's still an interest in real computers in addition to tablets.
MS is missing the boat - again - because they are so out of touch with what the users want. That's the true secret of the Apple success - the give people something they want, sometimes something they didn't even know they wanted. Sure, it's a "our way or the highway" offering, but MS still thinks they dominate computing so much that they can get people to follow them anywhere - and that hasn't been true for a decade.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
BG was a visionary
Yes., he saw what others were doing, and copied it.