The two phones MS made a couple years ago that sold ridiculously poorly and were pulled from the carrier (Verizon, I think) after only a few weeks. Yeah, a Microsoft phone will change everything.
The computer is an appliance. You press a button, it sends an e-mail. You press another one, it plays music for you.
In instances like what you describe, the computer is merely an appliance. The average user will treat it like an appliance because that's all they know.
To technical people, the average/.er, the computer is a tool. You code something, the computer does it.
Apple (and Microsoft) don't want the average person to realize the tool potential of a computer, because then Open things happen, and they don't want the same loss of control to happen on mobile devices that happened on the desktop. Think what you will of Google, but their approach with Android is much closer to that which allowed all of these companies to grow and thrive in the first place... and that strategy is working.
Microsoft has spent 10 years trying to crack open the tablet market, and always failed. Now that Apple has done it, suddenly Microsoft's response is the real holy grail?
The tablet market is fueled by hype and will die out in a couple years once the consumer realizes how limited they are. Just like netbooks
Microsoft has tied win8 to this sinking ship with every rope and chain they can find.
There is only one possibility: Nokia spirals down the toilet, and MS buys it when it becomes a good enough deal. MS, according to their plan of hoodwinking Nokia's Board and installing Elop, gets a handset manufacturer they can call their own which is already primed for Windows Phone exclusivity.
Plus consumers expect Windows === Windows. Even during the NT + 9x parallel Windows version paths (which were merged as of win2k, almost 13 years ago), the amount of software that would not run on both lines was for the most part not exposed to consumers.
The Win8/WinRT dichotomy will be baffling to anyone who isn't technically savvy enough to know there are different chip architectures, and retailers will find it difficult if not impossible to effectively explain the difference, if they even know it.
Every web WYSIWYG produces garbage markup, that's why I hate them. They're supposed to make HTML easier for plebians, but in reality they're given the power to make incomprehensible messes. Like handing a loaded shotgun to a toddler.
At least what CK produces (and FCK before it) is less fubar'd than what TinyMCE vomits out.
Inline editing is a recipe for an infinite amount of "I edited the page, and now it's broken" support requests. Only rabidly masochistic developers would even think of deploying it anywhere that a non-developer could access it.
Tablets are poised to take over the biggest market in business - eventually they're going to replace clipboards.
That is precisely the narrow vertical markets I described above. Also, the current tablet hype omits any mention of tablets replacing general purpose computers/laptops, leaving most people to assume they can. That's where the trouble starts.
I can't see tablets being useful for much outside of intranet applications. Word processing and spreadsheets would be nightmarish on tablets; projecting PowerPoint presentations would be a herculean task. Tablets will bring efficiency only to those tasks to which they are suited (being digital clipboards) and nothing else.
... to every organization with staff: tablets are for consumption, not production. If your staff will have the regular need to create or edit anything more complex than an email, it will be a chore on a tablet, if not impossible, regardless of whether the tablet can load files from a thumbdrive or over a network.
This story supports my position that tablets are stupid except for a very few vertical business markets, and will go away faster than netbooks once people can see past the hype.
Business tablets comprise are a few niche markets at best. Consumer tablets are doomed to failure.
The only reason the iPad has sold well is because of Apple's reality distortion field. No one made a commercially viable tablet before, and no one else will.
I have no idea why they can't [...] understand their target audience.
Because starting with Gnome3, they decided their target audience is tablet/touchscreen users. There has not been, nor is there ever likely to be, hardware installed with Linux+Gnome3 out of the box. They decided to cater to an audience that does not exist.
Gnome3, Unity, and the UI-formerly-known-as-Metro all suck donkey balls, assuming you don't believe the few users who have completely adapted their usage patterns and workflows, after much effort, for minimal gains. Any perceived simplicity is actually just more complexity hidden beneath the surface.
And this is all beside the fact that touch UIs are innately less capable than the traditional keyboard+pointer paradigm.
Except this time MS didn't decide to merely make the window titlebars look like plastic toys for toddlers.
They've bet the farm on tablets, and in all their wisdom (read: hubris) are forcing the tablet UI onto the established desktop for which it is not suited. MS wants to kill the desktop, and thinks that the now disillusioned users will flock to the MS branded tabets (the form factor MS thinks they'll control) running the same OS they wanted to escape.
This will never happen. Win8 will be ignored no matter what hardware it runs on. It's not for the desktop; Win7 will continue chugging along there. As for tablets, no one has replicated the iPad hype, and MS sucks at marketing anything but XBox to consumers (which also means Win8 phone marketshare will only stay stagnant at best). Win8 is being positioned as a paradigm shift, but in reality it will be a disaster, maybe even Ballmer's last.
As of now. How many times was support for XP extended because Vista took so long to gestate, and then nobody wanted it, and the uptake rate of 7 still meant XP was viable?
MS is making their own Windows8 driven tablets, huh?
If I were an OEM, I'd just passively ignore that for a time. Win8 might be passably usable on a tablet, but does anyone think MS can take any significant marketshare from the iPad? Besides that, tablets as consumer devices are bound to fail, present hype notwithstanding.
But when my OEM Windows distribution contract comes up for renewal, I'd demand that I can put whatever OS i want on any of my hardware, since MS decided to compete with me directly by making their own tablets (for what that's worth).
You really want to try playing any of the games mentioned in TFA on a touchscreen? Touchscreens are a horribly limited input device compared to keyboard+mouse, and this is why big games will stay on some combination of desktop and console. Dedicated (read: simplified controls) FPS/RPG/MMO games will rise for touch devices, but few of them will be ported elsewhere because of totally different input paradigms. As an example, I cite the dumbing down of Oblivion and Skyrim controls because of their XBox ports. Going to touchscreens requires an order of magnitude more simplification.
Furthermore, the desktop will not wither or die. Production of applications, games, graphics, video and audio has to be done somewhere, and it won't be on touch devices, which are almost purely for consumption. Simple things can be produced on touch, like email and IMs, but not much more, certanly nothing that requires UI precision or extended periods of typing.
Tablets are a fad that will go the way of the netbook, and faster. Once people see beyond the hype of "shiny! sleek! new!" they'll begin to wonder why they bought the thing. They make little sense for the average person, but in certain vertical markets where they act as a digital clipboard (ie, hospital patient charts) they have a future.
I'm not really a comics guy, but it seems to me that most if not all the top tier titles have already been done at least once: Superman, Batman, Spiderman, X-Men, and Avengers. And the only reason why all these movies get made is because Hollywood has become averse to spending large amounts of money without an existing fanbase for comics, novels, 80's cartoons, or even games, which bring an almost guaranteed return on investment. Sometimes a big name director can get the money, as in the case of Cameron with Avatar.
So Hollywood and the comics publishers are left with two options: dig deeper in the barrel of existing titles for diminishing returns, or keep rebooting.
Frankly, I'm burned out on comic book movies and wish Hollywood would sack up and give us original content.
Until Firefox OS gets installed at the factory by handset makers, no one will care. It'll enjoy the same dead-cat thump that Meebo/Maebo did.
Now we have another organization betting the (a) farm on HTML5, which in and of itself if flawed/broken. Even worse is that Mozilla dumped their better and richer XUL for it.
I'd rather see Gecko+XUL turned into a desktop environment to compete with GTK+, KDE, and the like. But that's the smart thing to do, which means Mozilla will never do it.
The options presented in the post here are not mutually exclusive, and are probably both true. The general population is uneducated about science. News reporting sucks; science reporting is especially dumbed down, if not saturated with speculation and lack of comprehension of the topic.
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The two phones MS made a couple years ago that sold ridiculously poorly and were pulled from the carrier (Verizon, I think) after only a few weeks. Yeah, a Microsoft phone will change everything.
By "silly", I think you mean antiquated.
In instances like what you describe, the computer is merely an appliance. The average user will treat it like an appliance because that's all they know.
To technical people, the average /.er, the computer is a tool. You code something, the computer does it.
Apple (and Microsoft) don't want the average person to realize the tool potential of a computer, because then Open things happen, and they don't want the same loss of control to happen on mobile devices that happened on the desktop. Think what you will of Google, but their approach with Android is much closer to that which allowed all of these companies to grow and thrive in the first place... and that strategy is working.
Microsoft has spent 10 years trying to crack open the tablet market, and always failed. Now that Apple has done it, suddenly Microsoft's response is the real holy grail?
The tablet market is fueled by hype and will die out in a couple years once the consumer realizes how limited they are. Just like netbooks
Microsoft has tied win8 to this sinking ship with every rope and chain they can find.
There is only one possibility: Nokia spirals down the toilet, and MS buys it when it becomes a good enough deal. MS, according to their plan of hoodwinking Nokia's Board and installing Elop, gets a handset manufacturer they can call their own which is already primed for Windows Phone exclusivity.
Plus consumers expect Windows === Windows. Even during the NT + 9x parallel Windows version paths (which were merged as of win2k, almost 13 years ago), the amount of software that would not run on both lines was for the most part not exposed to consumers.
The Win8/WinRT dichotomy will be baffling to anyone who isn't technically savvy enough to know there are different chip architectures, and retailers will find it difficult if not impossible to effectively explain the difference, if they even know it.
Every web WYSIWYG produces garbage markup, that's why I hate them. They're supposed to make HTML easier for plebians, but in reality they're given the power to make incomprehensible messes. Like handing a loaded shotgun to a toddler.
At least what CK produces (and FCK before it) is less fubar'd than what TinyMCE vomits out.
Inline editing is a recipe for an infinite amount of "I edited the page, and now it's broken" support requests. Only rabidly masochistic developers would even think of deploying it anywhere that a non-developer could access it.
Long live the textarea!
Hype and reality distortion.
That is precisely the narrow vertical markets I described above. Also, the current tablet hype omits any mention of tablets replacing general purpose computers/laptops, leaving most people to assume they can. That's where the trouble starts.
I can't see tablets being useful for much outside of intranet applications. Word processing and spreadsheets would be nightmarish on tablets; projecting PowerPoint presentations would be a herculean task. Tablets will bring efficiency only to those tasks to which they are suited (being digital clipboards) and nothing else.
And I should add, all the kids who got iPads from their schools are finding many of the same limitations that these teachers did.
... to every organization with staff: tablets are for consumption, not production. If your staff will have the regular need to create or edit anything more complex than an email, it will be a chore on a tablet, if not impossible, regardless of whether the tablet can load files from a thumbdrive or over a network.
This story supports my position that tablets are stupid except for a very few vertical business markets, and will go away faster than netbooks once people can see past the hype.
Why is Toys R Us producing a kid's tablet, instead of LeapFrog or even Amazon?
Business tablets comprise are a few niche markets at best. Consumer tablets are doomed to failure.
The only reason the iPad has sold well is because of Apple's reality distortion field. No one made a commercially viable tablet before, and no one else will.
Because starting with Gnome3, they decided their target audience is tablet/touchscreen users. There has not been, nor is there ever likely to be, hardware installed with Linux+Gnome3 out of the box. They decided to cater to an audience that does not exist.
Gnome3, Unity, and the UI-formerly-known-as-Metro all suck donkey balls, assuming you don't believe the few users who have completely adapted their usage patterns and workflows, after much effort, for minimal gains. Any perceived simplicity is actually just more complexity hidden beneath the surface.
And this is all beside the fact that touch UIs are innately less capable than the traditional keyboard+pointer paradigm.
Except this time MS didn't decide to merely make the window titlebars look like plastic toys for toddlers.
They've bet the farm on tablets, and in all their wisdom (read: hubris) are forcing the tablet UI onto the established desktop for which it is not suited. MS wants to kill the desktop, and thinks that the now disillusioned users will flock to the MS branded tabets (the form factor MS thinks they'll control) running the same OS they wanted to escape.
This will never happen. Win8 will be ignored no matter what hardware it runs on. It's not for the desktop; Win7 will continue chugging along there. As for tablets, no one has replicated the iPad hype, and MS sucks at marketing anything but XBox to consumers (which also means Win8 phone marketshare will only stay stagnant at best). Win8 is being positioned as a paradigm shift, but in reality it will be a disaster, maybe even Ballmer's last.
As of now. How many times was support for XP extended because Vista took so long to gestate, and then nobody wanted it, and the uptake rate of 7 still meant XP was viable?
MS is making their own Windows8 driven tablets, huh?
If I were an OEM, I'd just passively ignore that for a time. Win8 might be passably usable on a tablet, but does anyone think MS can take any significant marketshare from the iPad? Besides that, tablets as consumer devices are bound to fail, present hype notwithstanding.
But when my OEM Windows distribution contract comes up for renewal, I'd demand that I can put whatever OS i want on any of my hardware, since MS decided to compete with me directly by making their own tablets (for what that's worth).
You really want to try playing any of the games mentioned in TFA on a touchscreen? Touchscreens are a horribly limited input device compared to keyboard+mouse, and this is why big games will stay on some combination of desktop and console. Dedicated (read: simplified controls) FPS/RPG/MMO games will rise for touch devices, but few of them will be ported elsewhere because of totally different input paradigms. As an example, I cite the dumbing down of Oblivion and Skyrim controls because of their XBox ports. Going to touchscreens requires an order of magnitude more simplification.
Furthermore, the desktop will not wither or die. Production of applications, games, graphics, video and audio has to be done somewhere, and it won't be on touch devices, which are almost purely for consumption. Simple things can be produced on touch, like email and IMs, but not much more, certanly nothing that requires UI precision or extended periods of typing.
Tablets are a fad that will go the way of the netbook, and faster. Once people see beyond the hype of "shiny! sleek! new!" they'll begin to wonder why they bought the thing. They make little sense for the average person, but in certain vertical markets where they act as a digital clipboard (ie, hospital patient charts) they have a future.
I'm not really a comics guy, but it seems to me that most if not all the top tier titles have already been done at least once: Superman, Batman, Spiderman, X-Men, and Avengers. And the only reason why all these movies get made is because Hollywood has become averse to spending large amounts of money without an existing fanbase for comics, novels, 80's cartoons, or even games, which bring an almost guaranteed return on investment. Sometimes a big name director can get the money, as in the case of Cameron with Avatar.
So Hollywood and the comics publishers are left with two options: dig deeper in the barrel of existing titles for diminishing returns, or keep rebooting.
Frankly, I'm burned out on comic book movies and wish Hollywood would sack up and give us original content.
A snapshot of a broken, inconsistent "standard" is not an improvement. Scrap it all and start over with a sane person in charge.
I will stick with XHTML 1.0, because XHTML2 was sacrificed to appease the loonies, until a reasonable successor is devised.
The writedown was the result of a purchase in 2007, the same year Vista was released.
Later this year we'll get Win8, which may prove to be as big a turd as Vista, Me, Kin, WinPhone7, Bing, Live Search, and Bob... combined.
Until Firefox OS gets installed at the factory by handset makers, no one will care. It'll enjoy the same dead-cat thump that Meebo/Maebo did.
Now we have another organization betting the (a) farm on HTML5, which in and of itself if flawed/broken. Even worse is that Mozilla dumped their better and richer XUL for it.
I'd rather see Gecko+XUL turned into a desktop environment to compete with GTK+, KDE, and the like. But that's the smart thing to do, which means Mozilla will never do it.
The Tolkien family would have more control and enjoy more royalties if not for Saul Zaentz.
The options presented in the post here are not mutually exclusive, and are probably both true. The general population is uneducated about science. News reporting sucks; science reporting is especially dumbed down, if not saturated with speculation and lack of comprehension of the topic.