Actually, if you look at the younger age group, mobile is replacing those other platforms. As that group gets older, and hardware becomes more capable, the game complexity will ramp up. This group can touch-type on a tablet keyboard, they'll figure out the controls somehow.
In fact, and this will blow the mind of many a geek but the average consumer? Does not look at the phone or the tablet as a computer at all! The phone is a "phone that plays games and does Google" and the tablet is a "touchscreen that lets me watch videos and does games and Google" and that's it. As far as they are concerned it might as well be a washer and dryer because to them its an appliance not a computer!
I've noticed something similar, and I think it's because for regular people, a "computer" has been identified with this scary complex thing with an unintelligible file system, error messages, viruses, lockups, slow booting, updaters demanding attention, and all sorts of other terrible things. In a lot of respects, we computer geeks were too myopic to see how much the desktop experience objectively sucks. (And yes, Mac and Linux have the same problems although to a lesser extent.) Instead we just told people to grin-and-bear it, don't click attachements, don't use that browser/use this browser, go to "Geek Squad" and get bent-over, etc.
So when people find something they enjoy using and it does whatever they want it to do, and it does not break all the time, there's a psychological aversion to identifying it with something "bad" aka a "computer". So in their brains they identify it with ~something else~.
And obviously, people understand the limitations and go back to their PC when they need to generate their TPS reports, and probably always will, but there's no sex appeal there, which means there's a lessening desire to load up Steam and fight with *its* updates and error messages. And there's no need to update the craptop when little Billy is having fun playing cheap $1 games and uploading YouTube videos directly from his phone and so on. And then HP folds like Newell predicated because margins cannot get any lower.
So I don't see Microsoft pushing the "post PC" world with much vigor, it's mostly something which has been thrust up on them by moore's lawish circumstances beyond their control, and everyone in the PC ecosystem is going to have to adapt, including Valve.
Because the "sweet spot" is between $350-$500 with the $400-$450 laptops being the biggest sellers and you just ain't gonna hit that price point with most of the Intel line and you sure as hell ain't gonna hit it by tacking on another $100-$150 a unit for touchscreens that nobody wants because poking your damned laptop or desktop all damned day is uncomfortable!
When Gabe Newell suggests that top-tier PC OEMs will fold up shop, this is exactly why.
They will never be "good enough" for some people. However, if people are moving away from the keyboard/mouse paradigm in general, it's less likely they will spontaneously sit at a desk and start buying Steam games. People will just play games amenable to mobile control systems instead.
We've heard this exact argument before about consoles -- the controls suck (and I agree they do), however that hasn't stopped companies from selling a bazillion console shooters.
There is a real market shift going on, this isn't just another Vista which will blow-over and things will go back to "normal".
IMO Windows 8 is more of a symptom than the real problem he's getting at when he mentions PC OEMs going under.
Even if people stick with Win7 for their main computer, more and more eyeball time is being directed at tablets (especially among the younger crowd) while the PC may be getting relegated for "boring stuff", e.g. word processing and not games. And it's only a matter of time before tablet graphics become 'good enough'.
But, I don't see how porting to Linux directly addresses this. Perhaps it might reinvigorate some excitement in the PC.
Because if they wanted to do that they've had nearly 20 years to do it. They aren't going to do it. It isn't feasible and their biggest problems aren't at the boot loader, it's the iPad and android devices.
On one hand, the iPad outsells Dell's entire PC line, so why should Microsoft really care about Linux's minuscule 2% desktop marketshare?
On the other hand, the popularity of tablets will allow Microsoft to escape all anti-trust regulators. So, if they want to hook their OS to locked-down proprietary hardware, they will be able to get away with it within a few years.
On the third hand, Linux has enough marketshare in tablets, workstations, and servers that slashdot-types will be able to get whatever hardware they want. However, it will crush the fanciful old dream that Joe Sixpack will suddenly become enlightened and install Linux on his Compaq Presario.
Woerperfect was clearly a better product, fewer people used it
WordPerfect had serious quality problems moving into a GUI environment, and already "lost" by the time Windows 95 came out, with only a 15% marketshare. (per Ars Technica) The legal users who loved it so much were predominantly on the 5.1 DOS version and hadn't purchased a new copy in years.
Also, Novell belatedly bundled in Borland QuattroPro as their spreadsheet software; it was never considered to be in the same league as MS Excel.
Way to miss the point. The advancements are going on in mobile space. Look at Windows 8: the "windows" side is largely stable & finished, while all the sexy new features are retrofitting mobile features onto the OS.
New computer technologies don't seem to kill off older ones, just make new markets. I mean it turns out that we have more mainframes today than when we had only mainframes, however that still isn't very many and there isn't any growth in the market.
They might not be literally "killed", but as soon as growth stops in the technology industry, the strategy shifts to cutting development and squeezing profit out of the legacy users. Then younger people stop learning the tech and it recedes further and further into dusty corporate corners.
That's fine, because PC is pretty much "done" technologically, we have all the hardware and software features anyone every wanted. But its unlikely there will be any great advancements that capture people's imaginations. Investment will flow into more interesting spaces such as mobile, where there's great potential for future upgrade cycles because shit barely works.
So what you are saying is maybe 10% of users have a use for all that power that modern PC's have and the rest basically need a dumb terminal that can run the internet browser of their choice and office application?
I'd bet a lot of people here can remember when a "workstation" was completely loaded with custom hardware, specialized CPUs, highly customized OS, and could cost more than a Mercedes Benz. Then those users figured out they could free-load off the R&D going into the gazillions of mundane Office/Browser PC, and a modern workstation is probably about 90% similar to the cheapest box you can buy.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the legs under the stool get kicked-out. My guess is that "workstation" type computing will get much more expensive (at least in the relative sense).
When MS introduced a vastly improved desktop with Windows 95, the old Program Manager/File Manager combo was still lurking in there, and a few old stick-in-mud types insisted on using them. Likewise, they've always maintained a "classic" theme if someone insisted on a Win95-style look.
Microsoft should realize that 95% of people will just stick with the defaults, while the other 5% will loudly resist any form of change. Completely removing even the option of restoring the Start Menu is incredibly arrogant, and is creating a backlash when they can least afford one.
The whole "Microsoft got the IBM DOS contract, The End." narrative is a pretty gross over-simplification. Its practically forgotten that Microsoft was much smaller than companies such as Lotus or WordPerfect, and were minuscule compared to say IBM or Apple.
However, when you look at the history, there's one big common pattern which jumps out. Most of these larger companies ran into serious issues producing quality software. Lotus, WordPerfect, Borland, Apple, IBM, and Netscape all shot themselves in the foot with buggy or cancelled products, giving Microsoft an opportunity to take-over their markets. While Microsoft's code wasn't necessarily "good", they did know how to produce it at an industrial scale (at least until the Vista period). It came out at regular intervals and generally ran OK on people's low end computers.
Like a lot of successful people/organizations, it's very difficult for someone to determine much of it is due to luck versus skill. A model that worked because it assumed the competitors would fuck-up starts to fail when Google and Apple can churn out superior products even faster. Everyone goes into 'pigeon mode' (eg. Windows Phone will sell because it says Windows on it), because that's all they know how to do.
The other factor is that almost none of the people who e.g. made Excel into a great product are still there aside from Ballmer. They've been replaced with 'pigeons'.
I can see the argument that Voyager is the most accessible, but the show's ratings didn't really bear that out. TNG used to be hugely popular among people who weren't otherwise scifi fans, while it seems only the hardcore types were watching Voy out of some sense of loyalty.
In this case I'd say the wisdom of the crowds is correct: TNG seasons 3-6, First Contact, TOS, Wrath of Kahn, and on from there.
No, Psystar was found to be violating Apple's base copyrights. They weren't installing directly from the disks, they had copied the software to an imaging server, so each installation was considered to be an unauthorized copy.
Apple's case was brought on copyright, EULA, patents, trademarks, and I believe the DMCA. The judge gave them a total victory on all counts IIRC. Psystar wasn't exactly the greatest test case.
All the humorous moments in Star Trek IV are based on the cultural iconography of Captain Kirk and Mr Spock. Someone who's never seen Trek before won't know the characters and probably won't "get it".
(Plus, Trekkies never seemed to understand this movie was a big hit because of the kitch-factor. The save-the-whales plot wasn't that entertaining.)
Well, it is very interesting article. Could you post a link to the original version? This one is stuck inside some messed-up tables and is unreadable without mucking with the CSS.
Yep. Gates used to be ridiculously paranoid that "someone will do to us what we did to IBM".
If the old MS crew was running the show, as soon as they heard the rumor that Apple was working on a touch-based phone, they would have started a crash program and bought the talent they needed. Now with Ballmer, you get the crash program, but its coming 3-4 years too late.
To a great degree, Internet services have defanged MS's monopoly power & ability to "cut off the air supply". But really they just got lazy after defeating their traditional competitors (AOL/Netscape, Sun, etc.) and never really took Apple seriously.
It depends, as Drinkypoo pointed out, the later 21064 chips demolished the Pentium Pro. However, there was a window in 1995 when Intel was putting out comparable SPEC scores, and that was enough to 'freeze' interest in NT/Alpha. (and yes, I mean native code)
Also NT/Alpha benchmarks generally didn't show the chip in the best light, probably due to running in 32-bit mode, MS compiler, etc. Some of the application benchmarks were pretty miserable as well, considering.
There actually was a window before the 21064 started shipping where Intel was damn close in SPECmarks. Might not have been "fair", but it was enough to convince people that NT/Alpha was a bad investment.
NT/Alpha at least had an emulator that worked well.
What killed all these RISC PCs was the Intel Pentium Pro chip. It offered 90% of the performance of the DEC Alpha chip without any of the downsides of running some weird platform. (keep in mind NT was 32-bit only) In retrospect, the RISC PC groups had more prescience than the server crowd. They saw the writing on the wall and got the fuck out quickly.
And you have to laugh at trolls knocking MS for not making software for dead platforms. As if Windows is the same as NetBSD or something.
To be honest, I find listening to them banter about people's husband/wife problems and "the puzzler" to be intolerable. When someone calls in with an old (usually foreign) car that the guys know back-and-forward it still can be entertaining, but they really don't have much to say about someone's 1999 Civic.
Why stop now...? Were they unready to embrace Electric Vehicles? "Too" ready...?
Technologies change... perhaps a new generation must take over the helm, when they do...
There's definitely something to that. The show was really great back when people had bizarre problems with something like a 1982 Suburu, and it turned out to be a vacuum hose leak. Now it's all "should I buy this used car?" and "take it to a dealership and have them read the codes".
No, "J++" was a contract violation. Microsoft licensed Java from Sun and agreed to keep it compatible with Sun Java. MS changed enough things to break it and Sun sued to prevent them from distributing their bastard Java.
There was another lawsuit where Sun sued Microsoft for antitrust violations (and settled for like a billion dollars), but this was several years later.
Meanwhile, Microsoft reverse-engineered Java (it was called J#), and nobody sued.
Wow, I hadn't see this angle on "BYOD", but your PC analogy is probably exactly correct. Let 'the business' bring in a bunch of tablets, and then in five-ten years once everything has shaken out, the CIO can save the day by centrally managing all this crazy stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if you look at the younger age group, mobile is replacing those other platforms. As that group gets older, and hardware becomes more capable, the game complexity will ramp up. This group can touch-type on a tablet keyboard, they'll figure out the controls somehow.
In fact, and this will blow the mind of many a geek but the average consumer? Does not look at the phone or the tablet as a computer at all! The phone is a "phone that plays games and does Google" and the tablet is a "touchscreen that lets me watch videos and does games and Google" and that's it. As far as they are concerned it might as well be a washer and dryer because to them its an appliance not a computer!
I've noticed something similar, and I think it's because for regular people, a "computer" has been identified with this scary complex thing with an unintelligible file system, error messages, viruses, lockups, slow booting, updaters demanding attention, and all sorts of other terrible things. In a lot of respects, we computer geeks were too myopic to see how much the desktop experience objectively sucks. (And yes, Mac and Linux have the same problems although to a lesser extent.) Instead we just told people to grin-and-bear it, don't click attachements, don't use that browser/use this browser, go to "Geek Squad" and get bent-over, etc.
So when people find something they enjoy using and it does whatever they want it to do, and it does not break all the time, there's a psychological aversion to identifying it with something "bad" aka a "computer". So in their brains they identify it with ~something else~.
And obviously, people understand the limitations and go back to their PC when they need to generate their TPS reports, and probably always will, but there's no sex appeal there, which means there's a lessening desire to load up Steam and fight with *its* updates and error messages. And there's no need to update the craptop when little Billy is having fun playing cheap $1 games and uploading YouTube videos directly from his phone and so on. And then HP folds like Newell predicated because margins cannot get any lower.
So I don't see Microsoft pushing the "post PC" world with much vigor, it's mostly something which has been thrust up on them by moore's lawish circumstances beyond their control, and everyone in the PC ecosystem is going to have to adapt, including Valve.
Because the "sweet spot" is between $350-$500 with the $400-$450 laptops being the biggest sellers and you just ain't gonna hit that price point with most of the Intel line and you sure as hell ain't gonna hit it by tacking on another $100-$150 a unit for touchscreens that nobody wants because poking your damned laptop or desktop all damned day is uncomfortable!
When Gabe Newell suggests that top-tier PC OEMs will fold up shop, this is exactly why.
(Fucking /. links to blog spam, here's the original interview: http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/25/valves-gabe-newell-talks/ )
They will never be "good enough" for some people. However, if people are moving away from the keyboard/mouse paradigm in general, it's less likely they will spontaneously sit at a desk and start buying Steam games. People will just play games amenable to mobile control systems instead.
We've heard this exact argument before about consoles -- the controls suck (and I agree they do), however that hasn't stopped companies from selling a bazillion console shooters.
There is a real market shift going on, this isn't just another Vista which will blow-over and things will go back to "normal".
IMO Windows 8 is more of a symptom than the real problem he's getting at when he mentions PC OEMs going under.
Even if people stick with Win7 for their main computer, more and more eyeball time is being directed at tablets (especially among the younger crowd) while the PC may be getting relegated for "boring stuff", e.g. word processing and not games. And it's only a matter of time before tablet graphics become 'good enough'.
But, I don't see how porting to Linux directly addresses this. Perhaps it might reinvigorate some excitement in the PC.
Because if they wanted to do that they've had nearly 20 years to do it. They aren't going to do it. It isn't feasible and their biggest problems aren't at the boot loader, it's the iPad and android devices.
On one hand, the iPad outsells Dell's entire PC line, so why should Microsoft really care about Linux's minuscule 2% desktop marketshare?
On the other hand, the popularity of tablets will allow Microsoft to escape all anti-trust regulators. So, if they want to hook their OS to locked-down proprietary hardware, they will be able to get away with it within a few years.
On the third hand, Linux has enough marketshare in tablets, workstations, and servers that slashdot-types will be able to get whatever hardware they want. However, it will crush the fanciful old dream that Joe Sixpack will suddenly become enlightened and install Linux on his Compaq Presario.
Woerperfect was clearly a better product, fewer people used it
WordPerfect had serious quality problems moving into a GUI environment, and already "lost" by the time Windows 95 came out, with only a 15% marketshare. (per Ars Technica) The legal users who loved it so much were predominantly on the 5.1 DOS version and hadn't purchased a new copy in years.
Also, Novell belatedly bundled in Borland QuattroPro as their spreadsheet software; it was never considered to be in the same league as MS Excel.
Way to miss the point. The advancements are going on in mobile space. Look at Windows 8: the "windows" side is largely stable & finished, while all the sexy new features are retrofitting mobile features onto the OS.
Just curious. How long does it take to render this thread, filtered at -1, though Slashdot's Javascript interface?
New computer technologies don't seem to kill off older ones, just make new markets. I mean it turns out that we have more mainframes today than when we had only mainframes, however that still isn't very many and there isn't any growth in the market.
They might not be literally "killed", but as soon as growth stops in the technology industry, the strategy shifts to cutting development and squeezing profit out of the legacy users. Then younger people stop learning the tech and it recedes further and further into dusty corporate corners.
That's fine, because PC is pretty much "done" technologically, we have all the hardware and software features anyone every wanted. But its unlikely there will be any great advancements that capture people's imaginations. Investment will flow into more interesting spaces such as mobile, where there's great potential for future upgrade cycles because shit barely works.
So what you are saying is maybe 10% of users have a use for all that power that modern PC's have and the rest basically need a dumb terminal that can run the internet browser of their choice and office application?
I'd bet a lot of people here can remember when a "workstation" was completely loaded with custom hardware, specialized CPUs, highly customized OS, and could cost more than a Mercedes Benz. Then those users figured out they could free-load off the R&D going into the gazillions of mundane Office/Browser PC, and a modern workstation is probably about 90% similar to the cheapest box you can buy.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the legs under the stool get kicked-out. My guess is that "workstation" type computing will get much more expensive (at least in the relative sense).
When MS introduced a vastly improved desktop with Windows 95, the old Program Manager/File Manager combo was still lurking in there, and a few old stick-in-mud types insisted on using them. Likewise, they've always maintained a "classic" theme if someone insisted on a Win95-style look.
Microsoft should realize that 95% of people will just stick with the defaults, while the other 5% will loudly resist any form of change. Completely removing even the option of restoring the Start Menu is incredibly arrogant, and is creating a backlash when they can least afford one.
The whole "Microsoft got the IBM DOS contract, The End." narrative is a pretty gross over-simplification. Its practically forgotten that Microsoft was much smaller than companies such as Lotus or WordPerfect, and were minuscule compared to say IBM or Apple.
However, when you look at the history, there's one big common pattern which jumps out. Most of these larger companies ran into serious issues producing quality software. Lotus, WordPerfect, Borland, Apple, IBM, and Netscape all shot themselves in the foot with buggy or cancelled products, giving Microsoft an opportunity to take-over their markets. While Microsoft's code wasn't necessarily "good", they did know how to produce it at an industrial scale (at least until the Vista period). It came out at regular intervals and generally ran OK on people's low end computers.
Like a lot of successful people/organizations, it's very difficult for someone to determine much of it is due to luck versus skill. A model that worked because it assumed the competitors would fuck-up starts to fail when Google and Apple can churn out superior products even faster. Everyone goes into 'pigeon mode' (eg. Windows Phone will sell because it says Windows on it), because that's all they know how to do.
The other factor is that almost none of the people who e.g. made Excel into a great product are still there aside from Ballmer. They've been replaced with 'pigeons'.
I can see the argument that Voyager is the most accessible, but the show's ratings didn't really bear that out. TNG used to be hugely popular among people who weren't otherwise scifi fans, while it seems only the hardcore types were watching Voy out of some sense of loyalty.
In this case I'd say the wisdom of the crowds is correct: TNG seasons 3-6, First Contact, TOS, Wrath of Kahn, and on from there.
No, Psystar was found to be violating Apple's base copyrights. They weren't installing directly from the disks, they had copied the software to an imaging server, so each installation was considered to be an unauthorized copy.
Apple's case was brought on copyright, EULA, patents, trademarks, and I believe the DMCA. The judge gave them a total victory on all counts IIRC. Psystar wasn't exactly the greatest test case.
All the humorous moments in Star Trek IV are based on the cultural iconography of Captain Kirk and Mr Spock. Someone who's never seen Trek before won't know the characters and probably won't "get it".
(Plus, Trekkies never seemed to understand this movie was a big hit because of the kitch-factor. The save-the-whales plot wasn't that entertaining.)
Well, it is very interesting article. Could you post a link to the original version? This one is stuck inside some messed-up tables and is unreadable without mucking with the CSS.
Yep. Gates used to be ridiculously paranoid that "someone will do to us what we did to IBM".
If the old MS crew was running the show, as soon as they heard the rumor that Apple was working on a touch-based phone, they would have started a crash program and bought the talent they needed. Now with Ballmer, you get the crash program, but its coming 3-4 years too late.
To a great degree, Internet services have defanged MS's monopoly power & ability to "cut off the air supply". But really they just got lazy after defeating their traditional competitors (AOL/Netscape, Sun, etc.) and never really took Apple seriously.
It depends, as Drinkypoo pointed out, the later 21064 chips demolished the Pentium Pro. However, there was a window in 1995 when Intel was putting out comparable SPEC scores, and that was enough to 'freeze' interest in NT/Alpha. (and yes, I mean native code)
Also NT/Alpha benchmarks generally didn't show the chip in the best light, probably due to running in 32-bit mode, MS compiler, etc. Some of the application benchmarks were pretty miserable as well, considering.
There actually was a window before the 21064 started shipping where Intel was damn close in SPECmarks. Might not have been "fair", but it was enough to convince people that NT/Alpha was a bad investment.
NT/Alpha at least had an emulator that worked well.
What killed all these RISC PCs was the Intel Pentium Pro chip. It offered 90% of the performance of the DEC Alpha chip without any of the downsides of running some weird platform. (keep in mind NT was 32-bit only) In retrospect, the RISC PC groups had more prescience than the server crowd. They saw the writing on the wall and got the fuck out quickly.
And you have to laugh at trolls knocking MS for not making software for dead platforms. As if Windows is the same as NetBSD or something.
To be honest, I find listening to them banter about people's husband/wife problems and "the puzzler" to be intolerable. When someone calls in with an old (usually foreign) car that the guys know back-and-forward it still can be entertaining, but they really don't have much to say about someone's 1999 Civic.
Why stop now...? Were they unready to embrace Electric Vehicles? "Too" ready...?
Technologies change... perhaps a new generation must take over the helm, when they do...
There's definitely something to that. The show was really great back when people had bizarre problems with something like a 1982 Suburu, and it turned out to be a vacuum hose leak. Now it's all "should I buy this used car?" and "take it to a dealership and have them read the codes".
No, "J++" was a contract violation. Microsoft licensed Java from Sun and agreed to keep it compatible with Sun Java. MS changed enough things to break it and Sun sued to prevent them from distributing their bastard Java.
There was another lawsuit where Sun sued Microsoft for antitrust violations (and settled for like a billion dollars), but this was several years later.
Meanwhile, Microsoft reverse-engineered Java (it was called J#), and nobody sued.
Wow, I hadn't see this angle on "BYOD", but your PC analogy is probably exactly correct. Let 'the business' bring in a bunch of tablets, and then in five-ten years once everything has shaken out, the CIO can save the day by centrally managing all this crazy stuff.