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Major PC Makers to Ship PCs Sans Windows
z@ph0d writes "This article tells how Dell, Compaq, and Gateway could announce soon they will be shipping low cost PC's without Windows. No word yet on what they'll ship with, but who knows? "
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If AOL's involved, maybe it will be the old GEOS/Geoworks Ensemble OS from back in the day. That's what AOL was originally developed on (After they stopped being Q-Link, that is.) That OS was written after the popularity of it on such machines at the Commodore 64, 128, etc. AOL liked it, and used it right away. Then Win 3.1 came out, and GEOS died. (Even though GEOS was by far superior. It was a full multi-tasking OS on even XT's... though it was slow on them:) But it screamed on a 286, even, and Windows could never claim that. It had a nice application package with it as well. The only reason they didn't become popular, is they were totally concerned about bug zapping. (The beta test lasted forever) My dad was a beta test, and they even started paying him $50 for every bug they found. Now you can only find them on palm type computers.. oh well. Maybe that's what will show up, because that would be a perfect choice for an Internet PC.. they could revive the original AOL for GEOS, and go from there. It all waits to be seen.
The Wall Street Journal had two articles on this today (no, they only have a paid site - I read the copy we get in our non-profit's library).
The first one said that they estimate 30-40% of all boxes shipping for consumers this year will be Windows-less, but this includes BeOs and Palm type boxes which are bailing from WinCE, as well as set-top boxen. Some of them were going to use Apple/iMac (kind of confusing, that one).
The second article said that some MSFT technical indicators indicated, for the first time in decades, that forward revenue (upgrades for Windows, Office, etc) at MSFT were down a very large amount (10-20%), whereas the stock has counted on these increasing every year and thus commands high P/E ratio as a result. Which means that the end may be nigh.
Figure in mid-January they'll release stats showing that MSFT boxen were a drastically smaller (70%) amount than usual.
Will in Seattle