Absolutely. Apple gave my 'inner city' school some free computers, and in return got national press with a picture of some of my classmates in Newsweek. I've since paid them back many times over for that favor.
They're doing the same thing with the iPad right now BTW.
A long time ago, IBM held a monopoly in large-scale corporate computers. The US Department of Justice figured this out and forced them to sign a consent decree in order to curb their anticompetitive behavior.
After about 10 years microprocessors came along, and Apple, Commodore, Compaq, Radio Shack, etc were selling tens of millions of little computers. Thanks to the consent degree, IBM couldn't stop anyone from cloning their designs and "IBM Compatible" was a big selling point. IBM promptly took these sales figures down to the DOJ and convinced them they should be released from the consent degree. It certainly helped that President Reagan didn't think much of anti-trust laws.
The first thing IBM did after the consent degree was gone was release a fabulous new line of PCs featuring a proprietary bus that required a secret licensing deal to access. It almost worked, and would have if it wasn't for that darned megalomanic Bill Gates. So IBM just snuffed out their mainframe competitors instead, and they still hold a monopoly in that segment until today.
OK, what does this have to do with today? Well Microsoft can point to those 100M iPads and Android tablets and make a reasonable argument they no longer have a "PC" monopoly. Oh, also Ballmer was working the IBM account the whole time the above story happened.
I'd forgotten about the speech synthesizer. Someone had dumped a fully-loaded Model I system on my school, so the 'computer club' quickly dug into to see if there were any good games. We were playing a "Star Trek" style game when all of a sudden a giant ASCII alien appeared and started yelling - everyone jumped out of their seats.
There was also a neat drawing/animation program where you could create blocky movies. However, by the the system seemed so out of date, we spent most of our time trading Apple disks.
To be honest, until Reimer published those figures, I'd always believed Apple's claim of being the "best-selling personal computer", and it still seems to be a widely-held misconception. From where I was sitting (school), it sure looked like it too.
A lot of it is software, but the PC industry has never taken disk performance seriously as a UX factor, probably because Intel has bent them over to sell gigahertzes. One one table you have tablets with SSDs, and on the other there's PCs with the slowest hard drives you can find.
The user experience of a $329 PC is objectively pretty terrible. Trialware, anti-virus software, updater programs constantly popping up, hard to find & install software, slow-ass hard drive, relatively short battery life, dubious sleep support, and so on. The enthusiast crowd is used to these faults, but regular users struggle with this stuff all the time.
Well, no, if consumers sales are being dominated by laptops, then people can't just throw in a video card... that's 1999 style thinking. A self-selected group of "high end gamers" buys hardware designed for the "enthusiast' market.
However, there's tons of PC gaming going on in the laptop world, things like Spore or WoW and so on, and I'm sure Steam gets a piece of that. Even L4D might be old enough that its playable on basic Intel kit. That's the market that's more likely to be 'disrupted' by tablets
"I need this $300 video card for.... Photoshop. That's the ticket";)
I'm not intending to be judgmental, only pointing out that desktops aren't the default choice anymore. It's a pretty narrow audience that plays Valve-type PC games, and has little to do with Angry Birds or whatever. (I'd also bet the Valve audience is also a good deal more 'techie' than the general public, which means they're more likely to try Linux.)
"High performance desktop" gamers are a pretty self-selected group now days. If you're sitting in front of a ATX case with a discreet video card, you've gone out your way to avoid every computing trend over the last 10 years. Which is fine, but its not exactly a growth market.
I think strategy games could work really well on a tablet (e.g. Civilization), however the publishers have to get away from the mindset that everything needs to be 'casual'.
Think of it as the Bob Lazar rule. You can't have people adding their weird theories based on unverified personal experience.
And, IMO people tend to over-value certain bits of information based on personal opinions founded at the time. You see this all the time on Slashdot where a poster tries to pull rank by saying stuff like "I was there, I worked at a computer shop in 1998!". They then proceed to get basic facts incorrect (common one: the order of Windows releases), or just parrot some conventional wisdom.
My understanding is the state of Windows' OpenGL drivers is actually pretty poor outside of Nvidia. (Carmack has complained about this.) So in theory OpenGL gives you Windows support, in practice D3D may allow you to reach more machines.
A lot of sites are figuring out that user comments are relatively worthless. Yes, they increase page views and 'interaction', but at the same time only a small percentage of users are looking at them, because who has the time to read hundreds of largely worthless comments? When you see 1000+ posts about the latest smartphone news, most of those comments are "write-only", nobody ever reads them. But the site still has to maintain hosting and pay people to moderate the comments, which could easily outweigh the advertising revenue.
So, I can see how a site would be perfectly happy with a smaller number of 'boring' facebook comments.
Slashdot was largely set up as a discussion site with threaded comments, user moderation, filtering, etc. People post longer-form comments and actually reply to arguments. It's a tech audience which is generally OK with anonymity (even though everyone thinks everyone else is a "shill"). It's an entirely different atmosphere than most high-traffic blogs or newspaper comment sections.
Yeah, Windows 3.x (and games like Doom) really kicked off the 1990s upgrade boom.
But, prior to that the IBM clone market was in practical stasis. In 1991, you could still buy a brand new 8086 PC from all the major vendors (and a friend of mine did) -- 10 year old technology! They weren't running DOS 1.0, but they were running DOS 3.3 and most software targeted it. Stuff like OS/2 just barely registered with people. A year or two later, 486s got cheap and people started upgrading.
The greater point might be that MS figured out how to make the boring IBM business PC "cool" in the early 90s. Now they are the boring PC provider, and they don't seem to have any clue how to make it cool. (Hybrid tablet PCs? We'll see...)
On the other hand, if you time machine back 20 years, you'd find craploads of people treating their shiny new 486s like glorified PC XT clones - DOS, console mode applications like WordPerfect/123, NetWare, dumb term apps, etc.
There was an unprecedented IT boom from 1995-2000 - Internet, Y2K, ERP deployments, Java, and yes Windows upgrades. However that period now appears to be the historical exception rather than the normal state of the business.
Apple is an upscale brand, like Gucci and Prada yet you are seeing OEMs trying to compete, it'd be like slapping a $100,000 price on a Mustang and expecting it to outsell Ferrari, its just not gonna happen
That's only true in the old PC/Mac paradigm. Meanwhile Apple is selling tons of $400 tablets which displace those $350 AMD laptops you are talking about. And they're doing using the classic Apple tactics of selling into the.edu market and getting the kids hooked early.
Apple is only upscale like Target is upscale versus Walmart. Their ARM stuff is very much mass-market.
As a final note I can tell you this supposed "shift to ARM" everyone is talking about? Nobody is replacing their PCs, they are simply adding ARM to the mix.
Generational shift. If it's not apparent inside your PC shop now, it will be in a few years when kids head off to college and buy a keyboard dock for their *pad rather than a PC. PCs aren't going anywhere, but the consumer market is going to get a whole lot smaller. That's why I don't have any hope for AMD. I agree with everything you've said about their terrible execution, but beyond that, they have always lived in a market segment that's about to get the life squeezed out of it.
It's more commentary on the technology industry in general. As soon as something actually works correctly, it becomes "legacy" and all the money goes off chasing the "next big thing".
From a general user perspective, PC operating systems didn't become a solved problem until Windows 7 (and OS X circa 10.4, and Ubuntu, etc.) Not coincidentally, soon afterward everyone decided they really wanted a smartphone and tablet.
Microsoft has never really been good at technology.. Bill Gates made up for a weakness in tech, with a mastery of business strategy.
Microsoft may never have been 'high tech', but Bill Gates understood how mass-produce software on an industrial scale. Most of their old competition killed themselves with buggy/bloated/late products. However by the time 'Longhorn' came around, MS couldn't even do that...
While xbox is a household name, profit wise it isn't stellar. It also has had an interesting effect of moving the attention of Windows game developers onto consoles.
Agreed, the success of Xbox has come at the expense of devaluing Microsoft's main product; a high-end Windows PC.
I also question the real value of Xbox as a "household name". There's millions of satisfied Xbox customers, virtually none of whom bought a Zune or a Windows Phone or any other MS consumer initiative. Despite all the Xboxes hooked-up to TV screens, Microsoft's entire media center strategy has been a disaster, especially compared to Apple's. Do gamers even care about the Microsoft brand-name here, or is it just the cheapest way to play Call of Duty?
Interesting, it sounds like your meta-point is that you've found a niche where you can sell PCs at margins which are frankly unsustainable for Dell/HP. And extending the trend you've outlined, it will be interesting to see how low PC prices can go -- $200 laptops? $100?
Also, as I'm sure you're aware, AMD is in terrible financial straights, and is the most vulnerable to any widescale consumer shift to ARM.
As I said in another post, I think Newell is wrong, and Windows 8 is more of knee-jerk reaction than the cause of this. The consumer PC ecosystem is headed for a bloodbath, and Valve or anyone else in that space is going to face some ugly times.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure we spent a few hours giggling at it anyway.
Absolutely. Apple gave my 'inner city' school some free computers, and in return got national press with a picture of some of my classmates in Newsweek. I've since paid them back many times over for that favor.
They're doing the same thing with the iPad right now BTW.
Here's a relevant story:
A long time ago, IBM held a monopoly in large-scale corporate computers. The US Department of Justice figured this out and forced them to sign a consent decree in order to curb their anticompetitive behavior.
After about 10 years microprocessors came along, and Apple, Commodore, Compaq, Radio Shack, etc were selling tens of millions of little computers. Thanks to the consent degree, IBM couldn't stop anyone from cloning their designs and "IBM Compatible" was a big selling point. IBM promptly took these sales figures down to the DOJ and convinced them they should be released from the consent degree. It certainly helped that President Reagan didn't think much of anti-trust laws.
The first thing IBM did after the consent degree was gone was release a fabulous new line of PCs featuring a proprietary bus that required a secret licensing deal to access. It almost worked, and would have if it wasn't for that darned megalomanic Bill Gates. So IBM just snuffed out their mainframe competitors instead, and they still hold a monopoly in that segment until today.
OK, what does this have to do with today? Well Microsoft can point to those 100M iPads and Android tablets and make a reasonable argument they no longer have a "PC" monopoly. Oh, also Ballmer was working the IBM account the whole time the above story happened.
I'd forgotten about the speech synthesizer. Someone had dumped a fully-loaded Model I system on my school, so the 'computer club' quickly dug into to see if there were any good games. We were playing a "Star Trek" style game when all of a sudden a giant ASCII alien appeared and started yelling - everyone jumped out of their seats.
There was also a neat drawing/animation program where you could create blocky movies. However, by the the system seemed so out of date, we spent most of our time trading Apple disks.
To be honest, until Reimer published those figures, I'd always believed Apple's claim of being the "best-selling personal computer", and it still seems to be a widely-held misconception. From where I was sitting (school), it sure looked like it too.
It's a good rant, and you're right. I'm gonna chuck my iPad 1 because it's half gigabyte of RAM is insufficient open more than one web page.
I had a lot of fun with the BASIC with only two string variables: A$ and B$. Of course I had no clue what I was doing at the time.
"Trash-80" always seemed more like a term of endearment.
A lot of it is software, but the PC industry has never taken disk performance seriously as a UX factor, probably because Intel has bent them over to sell gigahertzes. One one table you have tablets with SSDs, and on the other there's PCs with the slowest hard drives you can find.
The user experience of a $329 PC is objectively pretty terrible. Trialware, anti-virus software, updater programs constantly popping up, hard to find & install software, slow-ass hard drive, relatively short battery life, dubious sleep support, and so on. The enthusiast crowd is used to these faults, but regular users struggle with this stuff all the time.
Well, no, if consumers sales are being dominated by laptops, then people can't just throw in a video card ... that's 1999 style thinking. A self-selected group of "high end gamers" buys hardware designed for the "enthusiast' market.
However, there's tons of PC gaming going on in the laptop world, things like Spore or WoW and so on, and I'm sure Steam gets a piece of that. Even L4D might be old enough that its playable on basic Intel kit. That's the market that's more likely to be 'disrupted' by tablets
If you're arguing that people buy systems specifically to play high-end PC games, then we are in total agreement.
"I need this $300 video card for .... Photoshop. That's the ticket" ;)
I'm not intending to be judgmental, only pointing out that desktops aren't the default choice anymore. It's a pretty narrow audience that plays Valve-type PC games, and has little to do with Angry Birds or whatever. (I'd also bet the Valve audience is also a good deal more 'techie' than the general public, which means they're more likely to try Linux.)
"High performance desktop" gamers are a pretty self-selected group now days. If you're sitting in front of a ATX case with a discreet video card, you've gone out your way to avoid every computing trend over the last 10 years. Which is fine, but its not exactly a growth market.
I think strategy games could work really well on a tablet (e.g. Civilization), however the publishers have to get away from the mindset that everything needs to be 'casual'.
Think of it as the Bob Lazar rule. You can't have people adding their weird theories based on unverified personal experience.
And, IMO people tend to over-value certain bits of information based on personal opinions founded at the time. You see this all the time on Slashdot where a poster tries to pull rank by saying stuff like "I was there, I worked at a computer shop in 1998!". They then proceed to get basic facts incorrect (common one: the order of Windows releases), or just parrot some conventional wisdom.
My understanding is the state of Windows' OpenGL drivers is actually pretty poor outside of Nvidia. (Carmack has complained about this.) So in theory OpenGL gives you Windows support, in practice D3D may allow you to reach more machines.
It was the Vista of the MS-DOS series -- everyone decided it sucked without trying it.
A lot of sites are figuring out that user comments are relatively worthless. Yes, they increase page views and 'interaction', but at the same time only a small percentage of users are looking at them, because who has the time to read hundreds of largely worthless comments? When you see 1000+ posts about the latest smartphone news, most of those comments are "write-only", nobody ever reads them. But the site still has to maintain hosting and pay people to moderate the comments, which could easily outweigh the advertising revenue.
So, I can see how a site would be perfectly happy with a smaller number of 'boring' facebook comments.
Slashdot was largely set up as a discussion site with threaded comments, user moderation, filtering, etc. People post longer-form comments and actually reply to arguments. It's a tech audience which is generally OK with anonymity (even though everyone thinks everyone else is a "shill"). It's an entirely different atmosphere than most high-traffic blogs or newspaper comment sections.
True, but it looked like a gem compared to what Apple was doing.
Yeah, Windows 3.x (and games like Doom) really kicked off the 1990s upgrade boom.
But, prior to that the IBM clone market was in practical stasis. In 1991, you could still buy a brand new 8086 PC from all the major vendors (and a friend of mine did) -- 10 year old technology! They weren't running DOS 1.0, but they were running DOS 3.3 and most software targeted it. Stuff like OS/2 just barely registered with people. A year or two later, 486s got cheap and people started upgrading.
The greater point might be that MS figured out how to make the boring IBM business PC "cool" in the early 90s. Now they are the boring PC provider, and they don't seem to have any clue how to make it cool. (Hybrid tablet PCs? We'll see...)
On the other hand, if you time machine back 20 years, you'd find craploads of people treating their shiny new 486s like glorified PC XT clones - DOS, console mode applications like WordPerfect/123, NetWare, dumb term apps, etc.
There was an unprecedented IT boom from 1995-2000 - Internet, Y2K, ERP deployments, Java, and yes Windows upgrades. However that period now appears to be the historical exception rather than the normal state of the business.
That's only true in the old PC/Mac paradigm. Meanwhile Apple is selling tons of $400 tablets which displace those $350 AMD laptops you are talking about. And they're doing using the classic Apple tactics of selling into the .edu market and getting the kids hooked early.
Apple is only upscale like Target is upscale versus Walmart. Their ARM stuff is very much mass-market.
Generational shift. If it's not apparent inside your PC shop now, it will be in a few years when kids head off to college and buy a keyboard dock for their *pad rather than a PC. PCs aren't going anywhere, but the consumer market is going to get a whole lot smaller. That's why I don't have any hope for AMD. I agree with everything you've said about their terrible execution, but beyond that, they have always lived in a market segment that's about to get the life squeezed out of it.
It's more commentary on the technology industry in general. As soon as something actually works correctly, it becomes "legacy" and all the money goes off chasing the "next big thing".
From a general user perspective, PC operating systems didn't become a solved problem until Windows 7 (and OS X circa 10.4, and Ubuntu, etc.) Not coincidentally, soon afterward everyone decided they really wanted a smartphone and tablet.
Microsoft has never really been good at technology .. Bill Gates made up for a weakness in tech, with a mastery of business strategy.
Microsoft may never have been 'high tech', but Bill Gates understood how mass-produce software on an industrial scale. Most of their old competition killed themselves with buggy/bloated/late products. However by the time 'Longhorn' came around, MS couldn't even do that...
While xbox is a household name, profit wise it isn't stellar. It also has had an interesting effect of moving the attention of Windows game developers onto consoles.
Agreed, the success of Xbox has come at the expense of devaluing Microsoft's main product; a high-end Windows PC.
I also question the real value of Xbox as a "household name". There's millions of satisfied Xbox customers, virtually none of whom bought a Zune or a Windows Phone or any other MS consumer initiative. Despite all the Xboxes hooked-up to TV screens, Microsoft's entire media center strategy has been a disaster, especially compared to Apple's. Do gamers even care about the Microsoft brand-name here, or is it just the cheapest way to play Call of Duty?
Interesting, it sounds like your meta-point is that you've found a niche where you can sell PCs at margins which are frankly unsustainable for Dell/HP. And extending the trend you've outlined, it will be interesting to see how low PC prices can go -- $200 laptops? $100?
Also, as I'm sure you're aware, AMD is in terrible financial straights, and is the most vulnerable to any widescale consumer shift to ARM.
As I said in another post, I think Newell is wrong, and Windows 8 is more of knee-jerk reaction than the cause of this. The consumer PC ecosystem is headed for a bloodbath, and Valve or anyone else in that space is going to face some ugly times.