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Microsoft's Mission To Reignite the PC Sector (nytimes.com)
HughPickens.com writes: Sales of personal computers have been declining for so long — 14 consecutive quarters — that it's hard remember a time when PCs ruled the tech world. Now Nick Wingfield writes in the NY Times that Microsoft is leading the way on a mission to re-ignite the PC market by taking the once-unthinkable step of competing with its hardware partners. This week, Microsoft dived even further into the business with a laptop device, the Surface Book. The stated reason that Microsoft got into the PC hardware business three years ago, with the original Surface, was not to put PC companies out of business — but to better illustrate the capabilities of its software, providing devices that would inspire PC makers to be more innovative.
One of the most remarkable things about Microsoft's growing presence in the hardware business is that it has not led to open revolt among its partners. Initially, many of them were not happy about Microsoft's moves, complaining in private. "It's positioned as a laptop, very squarely against the MacBook Pro as an example. But that could also be extended to a Dell XPS 13, or an HP x360," says Patrick Moorhead. One reason there hasn't been more pushback from OEMs is that Microsoft's Surface business is still relatively small. Another is that the money Microsoft has poured into marketing Surface has raised the broader profile of Windows PCs. While Microsoft obviously risks alienating its partners, it's doing so with a much bigger fight in mind. "Right now Microsoft really believes that it has to have a combined hardware, software, and services play to go up against the likes of Apple," says Moorhead. "That's why it's doing this. That's why it's taking such an aggressive stance now, moving to laptops."
One of the most remarkable things about Microsoft's growing presence in the hardware business is that it has not led to open revolt among its partners. Initially, many of them were not happy about Microsoft's moves, complaining in private. "It's positioned as a laptop, very squarely against the MacBook Pro as an example. But that could also be extended to a Dell XPS 13, or an HP x360," says Patrick Moorhead. One reason there hasn't been more pushback from OEMs is that Microsoft's Surface business is still relatively small. Another is that the money Microsoft has poured into marketing Surface has raised the broader profile of Windows PCs. While Microsoft obviously risks alienating its partners, it's doing so with a much bigger fight in mind. "Right now Microsoft really believes that it has to have a combined hardware, software, and services play to go up against the likes of Apple," says Moorhead. "That's why it's doing this. That's why it's taking such an aggressive stance now, moving to laptops."
Microsoft is "igniting" PC sales like the KKK "lights" a cross.
OK, that's a bit over the top; but *nothing* MS has done implies that they're attempting to drive PC sales. They're doing everything they can to kill the PC; to transform it into an iPad that just happens to be sitting on your desktop. They're pushing spyware on it, making it a fascist data collection device instead of the PERSONAL computer that WE OWNED. Get it, MS? If you want this "ignition" to be something other than a funeral pyre, you need to get back to your roots.
Day late. Dollar short.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I don't think PCs are boring, no more than your average Mac, which is the same thing.
There is nothing overly special about a MacBook, other than it costs a lot and says "Apple" on it.
If you want the ultra light, ultra thin formfactor, sure, go for it... but frankly you can get a really nice PC for a whole lot less money and it works just fine.
I'm typing this reply on an ASUS 15.6" Core i3 notebook that was $349.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...
4GB of RAM, 500GB HD, AC Wi-Fi, DVD burner, 1080p display, Windows 10.
The only upgrade I did to it was replace the 500GB SSD with a 256GB Transcend SSD that I picked up on sale from Amazon for $72.
Turns the machine into a rocket for basic tasks. No, it isn't a gaming machine, but it runs everything else as fast as is needed, for less than $450.
If that is "boring", I'll take it.
PC sales are declining for a reason.
You make a statement, but don't give the reason.
IMHO, one of the biggest issues is that PCs have been "good enough" for some time now for everything but games, and even then they haven't been growing much.
Office 2016 doesn't run noticeably faster for 95% of what people use it for on a 6700K Skylake than it does on a Core2Quad Q6600.
Windows 10 also runs just as well on a Q6600 as it deos on a Core i7 whatever. Oh sure, it IS faster on the newer machines, but not by so much to make millions of people throw them out.
I have a dozen computers of various power levels, ranging from the above Q6600 up to a Haswell i7 4790K refresh, having recently retired the last Athlon X2 5000 machine a year or so ago (it was just so old that it wasn't worth testing against anymore, if you're using something 10+ years old, it is time to upgrade).
Windows 10 runs beautifully on all of them, and while I can see a difference when they are side by side, on a stand alone basis, they are all "fine".
That is the real problem, IMHO.
Sales of personal computers have been declining for so long â" 14 consecutive quarters â" that it's hard remember a time when PCs ruled the tech world.
"Please, Old One, tell us again of this wondrous age of 'Early 2012', when the great 'Peesees' roamed across the tops of the desks all over the world."
IBM tried to compete with hardware using the proprietary Microchannel buss to replace the ISA/EISA buss. IBM refused to release documentation on the buss and sought to profit on licensing the standard through a certification program. Third party OEMs scoffed. IBM permanently lost market share as 3rd party MC cards, developed from unofficial specifications, proved to be incompatible which drove customers away from IBM towards clone makers such as Compaq and Gateway who stole the market with non-MC systems. The MC debacle ushered the end of personal computers for IBM.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
My first ultra light, ultra thin laptop was a Sony from 2001.
Everything that Apple has done with it's PCs was done by someone else first. That includes weird WTF form factors for workstation class machines.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
For a few decades, it transpired that content creators and content consumers were both using the same kind of device: the desktop PC. But content consumers never, ever wanted that kind of device. They wanted a media consumption platform they didn't have to understand or think about. Basically, they wanted TV 2.0.
Content consumers, on the other hand, wanted a powerful and open computing device.
So these two camps want very different things, and we're seeing the start of a market split into those camps. It is inevitable that when the PC market falls down below a point, economies of scale won't be there and the prices will rise, but there WILL still be a market, because content creators are not going away. It just means that, like in the 1980's, if you want a heavy-lifting creator device, be prepared to shell out for it. Most of the world is going to mobile, and that is where the economies of scale will be found.
Think that won't happen? Well, guess what? You have good company! The mainframe guys thought Unix workstations could never undercut them in the market. Then the Unix workstation guys thought the PC could never undercut them in the market. Just as now, some PC people think their cushy little world will carry on forever as it was. Just as then, there will still be PCs just as there are still mainframes today. But the market moved on, just as it will now, and not all the naysaying in the world will stop it.
I think what Microsoft may not be understanding, or may be trying to ignore, is that people aren't buying new hardware because their old hardware meets their needs. In the early days, there were two major factors that drove the PC industry -- (1) low saturation. PCs were a relatively new thing, and there were a lot of people who didn't have one yet. (2) PC hardware and software were in relative infancy -- we were on the steep end of the curve -- and resources didn't meet the needs of what people were trying to do. Software drove hardware in that each new release of the OS needed faster hardware and bigger disks to run reasonably. UI was still on the steep end of the curve, with new features coming out that were actually -- you know -- relevant, and not just eye candy.
All of that is long past now. Microsoft doesn't understand that the UI curve has flattened out, as their recent attempts to make the UI Really Different hasn't met with a lot of enthusiasm. About the time PCs routinely sold with quad core processors and terabyte drives dipped under $100, hardware stopped mattering for most people. What people could *do* with these resources started mattering more than the resources themselves. Hell, I do compute intensive work on a motherboard from 2005 sitting in a case from 2000, (running Win7 Pro) and I have no desire to upgrade anything except perhaps disk space. I do vacuum it out once in awhile.
So, Microsoft tries and fails to develop the hipster mindshare of Apple, so they need to try something different, and they see an over-saturated market, with a plethora of hardware overdesigned for most people's needs (given that "most people" do web browsing, facebook and email and other social media, and maybe a game or two, and perhaps a movie, and that's pretty much it), and decides that's the field they need to go into.
So... wow... I mean,... How is it they're still alive?
Someone I know works for Microsoft, and he's really been crowing about Microsoft's new laptop and how it's the greatest thing since, I dunno, Windows for Workgroups. And I look at it, and you know... it's just a laptop.
In summary, "reigniting the PC market" is problematic because the PC market is already saturated and over-built, and has been for years. It's like, when toasters first came out, everyone had to have one, and growth was steep. But now, everyone already has a toaster, and we only replace them when they stop working. Sorry, that's the nature of industry.
You want to create a new market, make apps for content creation on tablets (as opposed to content consumption) and maybe tablets will see a new renaissance. I don't own a tablet precisely because most of what I use a PC for is content creation, and the apps aren't there on tablets even now.
But PCs? They're toasters. Pick a size and a color.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The faster based on specs fuel innovation is looking at it thru a 1990s glasses. PC makers don't get it.
What is innovation? Apps that do new things, smaller, power efficient, shareable work flows, cloud integrated, high dpi, more mobile, better asthetics, etc
Compared to phones pcs suck!! 100 dpi in 2015 wtf . Bulky plastic, mechanical disks, etc
Office 2016 you quote? HUGE upgrade. Shared editing in real time with integrated Skype and chat is sweet for college students and groups. You can write a paper in real time and see others writting while having a video conversation. Functions are now searchable too. Yes Google Docs ripoff. :-)
I own a surface 3 pro which slashdot tees LOVE to bash as the coming of the anti christ with systemD as it's prophet. Truth be told it is night and day compared to a bulky core laptop with battery life and boot up time thanks to ssd and efi booting. Metro actually works. Lenovo yoga, HP convertables, and surface pro rock.
http://saveie6.com/
Wow, a laptop with a removeable keyboard!
So unlike the old Surface, the tablet with an attachable keyboard...
Not only that, but "it’s impossible to close the laptop all the way." Just what I've been looking for!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Enh. I have a feeling that the MacBook isn't a big seller because it's a better product, it's a big seller because Apple has been, and still is, really brilliant about developing "mindshare" amongst enough people to make a substantial profit. So they don't have to deliver a new product that's substantially better, because their followers will upgrade merely because it's new. Even when that means learning to do without some things they used to have (firewire).
It's *way* too late for Microsoft to build that kind of following. And this leaves them nowhere to go. Microsoft's machine is not a MacBook killer for one simple reason -- it doesn't have the Apple logo on it. And that's enough. They can't do it on specs, because there just isn't enough technical differentiation anymore to really swing people one way or another.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Using mindshare to sell your products means you aren't going to expand your market significantly. MacBooks obviously have qualities that appeal to people, or they wouldn't sell. Apple works on making them nice and easy to use, and many people are willing to pay for that.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Microsoft: Yesterday's technology, tomorrow!
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Even the laptops are giving way to tablets
If you want to type anything longer than a paragraph, you need to add a keyboard, which turns your tablet right back into (yes) a laptop.
Gaming has moved from the desktop to the laptop or game console. And at some point, it will be in the domain of the tablet/console.
Let me know when tablet or console games have (legit) mod support nearly as thorough as that in PC games. If your answer is Super Mario Maker, let me know when it has tools to create new block types or new enemy types.
> Compared to phones pcs suck!! 100 dpi in 2015 wtf . Bulky plastic, mechanical disks, etc
PCs are faster and bigger in all respects. That includes displays, storage, CPU power, and just app/gaming potential. Phones are terribly limited. The one key advantage they have is portability. They're ubiquitous. Beyond that, they're actually pretty crappy.
Phones are just (crude) terminals really and sooner or later you need a real machine of some sort to support it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
virtually ALL mobile devices using UEFI-SecureBoot WITH NO option to support legacy BIOS
Secure Boot is a UEFI feature that requires bootloaders to be digitally signed with a certificate stored in the PC's firmware. But there are two ways to implement it: normal or forced. With normal Secure Boot, the owner of a PC can replace the certificate or turn off the feature entirely. Forced Secure Boot, sometimes called Restricted Boot, cannot be disabled, much as in iOS devices and major video game consoles. In the Windows 8 (x86 and x86-64) era, Microsoft required normal Secure Boot for logo certification; it forbade Restricted Boot. As of Windows 10 (x86 and x86-64), Microsoft has changed the policy to allow either normal or forced Secure Boot. In theory, PC buyers could just avoid PCs with Restricted Boot, so long as they don't greatly outnumber PCs with normal Secure Boot. Have x86-64 PC manufacturers actually started to implement Restricted Boot widely?
My parents use their computer to browse the internet, connect with people via social media and play browser based games. All these things are achieved with an average smartphone / tablet.
I use a computer to make software, do business, make artwork, play video games. A phone is nice but it will be along time before I'm running Visual Studio off it, a PC fits my needs.
I'll take a wild ass guess that most people don't need a desktop computer to do what they need, and that's why there is a shift, and why there is no need to realign them.
There is a market for desktop computing, it's just not nearly as big anymore.
crazy dynamite monkey
Sell me an OS instead of using the OS to sell me.
Somehow people don't wanna be a product, ya know...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
14 quarters of failing to meet the expectations of their customers.
IMHO, one of the biggest issues is that PCs have been "good enough" for some time now for everything but games, and even then they haven't been growing much.
I also see a major reason is that for a long time, PCs were the only way to do things. Want to see videos, read email, visit a website: You had to have a PC as smart phones/tablets sucked. So people had to get a PC. Really the average consumer didn't need it; they just needed something that would work and PCs were the only solution. These days tablets and smartphones fulfill what your average consumer needs. Add to that other features that PCs are not good at doing: ebook reader, jogging tracker, etc, its not surprising why many people are not getting PCs. For example, many parents were set up with PCs for a decade and barely used them. Most of the time we had to clean up a lot of infections. They both got tablets and use them all the time.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Wasn't there an article the other day about the PC sales slump continuing because Win10 got pushed out as a free upgrade? Anything MS is doing with their own hardware isn't a market rejuvenation, it's a land grab. I predict within 2 years Redmond will outright buy an OEM, possibly with a Nokia-style Trojan executive scheme.
True, most of what Apple does was done by someone else... Apple has better PR and marketing however...
The iPod was not first, but it ran off with the market...
The SSD is the last most "amazing" upgrade IMHO for PCs in awhile...
It brought back to life a number of machines that felt "slow".
Put a SSD in a Core2 machine and suddenly you've removed the major bottleneck for a lot of things.
My Mother-in-Law has a 2008 era AMD notebook, it runs some dual core something or other (I haven't looked at it in about 2 years). I dropped a 120GB SSD into it 2 years ago and she sees no reason to replace it, it is "Fast enough".
She uses Facebook, the web, plays solitaire, etc. She recently upgraded it to Windows 10, runs perfectly.
Microsoft entering hardware business will lead to bad blood between HP Acer Asus Dell Samsung and the like and Microsoft. No matter how much it assures the partners, things will sour. The culture in Microsoft, the incentives it sets up, the way it administers incentives etc leads all the Microsoft employees to game the system and get any advantage they can get from other divisions to win over the competition. That tiny division will have some VP who would do things to get an edge over the rivals, and it would snowball. Microsoft does not know how to play nice.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Gaming has moved from the desktop to the laptop or game console.
That comment has been made before... many times...
You know what? The irony is that a PS4 or XBox One is really a desktop PC, abit one that you can't modify or upgrade much.
Yes, much of what the average person does with a computer works fine on a tablet or laptop, nothing wrong with that. The one area that will have problems for a long time to come is games.
And by games, I don't mean solitaire or candy crush, I mean Call of Duty type games. Those need lots and lots of power, something you can't get in a laptop due to size/power limits (there are rare expensive exceptions, but a desktop is still the best choice for those.
Yes, game consoles play many modern games as well, but they have the benefit of fixed hardware that can be optimized in a way that PC gaming cannot be, but that is also their limit.
The PS3/XB360 were great at launch, but REALLY out of date by the later years. The PS4/XB1 are fine today, but already they are behind a decent PC's performance.
4k gaming will require a whole pile of GPU resources the current machines do not have and it may be 7+ years before we see PS5/XB2.
The PC desktop market will never again be what it was in the 90s, but it isn't going away either.
> Gaming has moved from the desktop to the laptop or game console.
Uh, no. One might temped to think so with Best Selling Video Games, but the PC Market is holding its own.
Some genres are significantly superior on PC.
i.e. Let me know when I can play Starcraft 2 on a console.
> The PC simply has no future.
Content creation isn't dead.
I want a pc that fits in my pocket and has a touchscreen. It needs to be able to make phone calls and receive texts. It would be nice if I could also listen to music and if it could connect to things via bluetooth. Wi-fi would also be a good feature.
Someone told me that such a PC might already exist.
But in reality there is a PC that I would like that is close to the above. I want a PC basestation that is effectively my phone. Something that is just a keyboard, mouse and monitor but gets its computing power from my phone. I would snap the phone in and boop, I have a good computer, I pull it out and I have a good phone. Ideally though when it was a computer it would actually be a computer with proper mouseclicks, complicated interfaces, and whatnot. But when it was a phone it wouldn't be a crappy little computer but a good phone. But the real killer is that the basestation would not be proprietary to just that company or even just that phone series but general to all makes and models that supported the standard.
Oddly enough one of the things that has hurt the PC market is that about 8 or so years ago most cheap laptops and desktops were good enough for most people's purposes. They could watch 1080 videos without stuttering, they could connect to Wi-fi faster than their ISP would feed them data, and the USB standard means that few devices shortly before or anytime after wouldn't work. Unlike the 90s when this year's computer could do things that last year's couldn't we have nearly a straight decade where 99% of people don't need more power than is available in any of the latest machines.
We are now crossing that threshold with phones. They are crossing a power demand for most people. More than 1080 on a typical phone is nonsense, more than a quadcore 1.5ghz processor is nonsense, more than G wi-fi is nonsense, more than LTE data is nonsense. The few features that people really want are more battery, more durability, and lower price.
So why not take this ever growing pile of power and combine it with the generally minimal needs of the laptop/desktop world?
With a proper keyboard, mouse, and interface tied into a smartphone I know of few people who would need anything more than that.
Then the era of the PC would simply have a new chapter.
Sounds almost like you're asking for this: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us...
But that can't be right!
LOL! ZDNet? Really? They're some of the biggest MS shills on the net.
I and many others can PROVE that there is a keylogger with a simple packet analyser. Everything you type into your start menu gets sent to MS.