Dell Gives Android the Boot, Boots Up More Windows 8

hugheseyau writes "Dell vice chairman Jeff Clarke made a less than shocking announcement at this year's Dell World Conference in Austin. The company is officially giving up on Android phones and tablets. ... So if Dell is giving up on Android, what comes next? The company claims it's doubling down on Windows 8, and the enterprise market."

Comments

Re:good luck with that

[dagamer34]

Uhh.. the reason those features don't exist is to clearly push those kinds of customers towards Windows 8 Pro. It's the same reason why Office RT doesn't have Outlook. Microsoft doesn't want Windows RT to be used in enterprise and there are plenty of clues as to why not.

No help

[giveen1]

As the only Dell Streak 7 Android developer left, it doesn't surprise me that Dell has abandoned Android. I've spent over a year trying to get them to comply with the GPL and give me the last source code for their last kernel update. Every request I have put forth has been turned down or rejected. I still try my best to keep this tablet up to date with ICS and JB, but I can only do so much without more support.

Re:good luck with that

[fahrbot-bot]

Windows 8 and Server 2012 are far from "enterprise" they are basically toys.

Agreed. It seems the purpose of Windows 8 is to provide a consumer-oriented environment conducive to buying content such as music, movies, books, etc like on the iPad and other tablets and smartphones. To date, the only things I've seen people doing with Windows 8 systems in commercials is playing movies, games, finger painting, Skype, "clicking, clicking, clicking," sliding and (often angry) dancing. No one's using the thing for any actual work...

They have their place

[TWX]

Their business support doesn't suck though. If you're an enterprise-level customer and have your IT staff certified through Dell's online coursework then you can do all of your warranty work in-house and they generally next-day parts to you, and they really don't make a big deal of misdiagnosed machines where you end up replacing perfectly good parts. We use mostly Optiplexes and Latitudes and keeping up with about 30,000 PCs has been possible with a paltry staff.

Personally I'm typing this on a several-year-old Lenovo Ideapad S10-2, my wife uses a Thinkpad X301, and Dad bought an Ideapad G550 based on our recommendations, so I like old-IBM/Lenovo fairly well, but I don't think that Dell is quite as bad overall as you've dealt with. I'm using an old Latitude D520 at work in the field without problems, and my Optiplex 780 workstation has handled its duties without problems.

Not yet.

[Andy Prough]

Touchscreen-enabled Chromebooks could change all that in 2013 though.

Re:good luck with that

[smash]

We run operating systems for one reason: application delivery. Windows is where the industry specific applications are, so that is what the client machines run.

To administer the clients, it is a lot easier to do so with Windows servers.

Do i run windows servers facing the internet? Fuck no. They are well protected by hardware firewalls, mail, etc. comes through FreeBSD. But Windows has its uses.

I'm a big fan of heterogeneous networks. Use the most appropriate platform for the service you are attempting to deliver. Any mainstream OS these days can be secured "well enough" with minimal effort if you know shit from clay.