Insurance companies. Car companies will love it if all non robotic cars are booted off the roads as weapons of mass destruction. Gear heads will cry and wail but 35,000 deaths is a 9/11 every month.
The key question is not how many of this or that MS is shipping but why and what direction the sales are going. Most companies and home users have a bevy of Windows only software that they are somewhat committed to. People also need to buy a new machine every now and then. These two facts mean that your average corporate or home consumer will buy their next machine without much thought and will buy a windows 8 machine. The more savvy buyer might even insist on getting Windows 7. But the average user, both corporate and home, are moving into a cloudy world where they need a browser as their primary software and an Office suite as a secondary. This still allows MS to have a slight grasp as MS Office is still mostly the standard.
But and this is a big but. Things like LibreOffice can suit many user's needs and if I were a student doing term papers I would use a combination of google drive and google docs. Docs so my stuff is everywhere and can't be lost and Drive so that if I loose connectivity I have it on my machine. This might seem like a small market but the students of today are the consumers of tomorrow.
Lastly many home consumers are skipping the whole home desktop/laptop all together. A larger screened phone is generally all they need for most of their needs. This also goes for corporate types. The average higher level manager / road warrior is fine with a tablet / BB combo or some other mobile technology.
Soon the only people really needing a Windows machine (as opposed to some agnostic OS that primarily serves up a browser) will be specialty users such as accountants. Many other power users will be fine with either a Mac or Linux.
Which then leads to the whole server market. Linux is pretty dominating. My personal experience is that the MS shops out there are hard core MS evangelists who don't mind buying and managing huge piles of licenses which is getting even harder with many larger companies going with internal cloud systems that can spool up 20/200/2000 new machines on a whim.
I don't think that Windows 8 is the problem. I don't think it is the Metro interface beyond the fact that some MBAs at MS probably had these great spreadsheets showing huge desktop app sales. MS is declining for many other reasons. Preinstalled Bloatware would be a big one. But the key question is why I should not be using Linux, Android, MacOS, QNX? What is it that MS offers me to come back? For some reason it just doesn't appeal to me to pay an extra $100 when I buy a $500 device just so that I can run Windows. I don't see why I would want to run servers that could get me sued if I don't manage the licensing. I can see why people might stay through inertia but that isn't a very good business model in the long term.
Once cars are robotic enough that we are only giving guidance to the car (pretending to drive but the car will ignore stupid inputs) insurance will become the battleground. I can see a car company like Tesla offering free liability insurance with their cars. They will know that basically their car can not cause an accident and with the camera/computer system will have the proof to avoid a he-said-she-said situation.
At the same time I can see the insurance companies realizing that a huge huge HUGE market will simply go away when car accidents become unlikely enough for car companies to be able to cover it. Think about it. Every car that you see is paying in around $1,000+ for insurance. The only insurance people will want after robotic cars will be theft (hard to do with a hi-tech upgradable car), vandalism, trees falling on them kinds of insurance. Plus nearly every jurisdiction says you must have something like 2 million in liability; that need will vanish or at least be covered by the manufacturers.
So my robotic car prediction is that car companies will be trying to terrorize us into hating robotic cars. They will show videos of families being driven off cliffs, or saying it is our god given right to have control of our cars. And of course they will spend ungodly amounts of money lobbying everyone from the president down to your school board to stop this.
But the simple reality is that 35,000 people are killed every year in the US and robotic cars might take this down to a few hundred. (mechanical failure, trees falling on them, sinkholes, etc)
My theory is that it will be that one person in 100 or less who sees scientists at work and it rings them like a bell. Full resonance. But for the other 99 getting them hopped up on pop-sci then gets them to support funding this stuff. Those penguins won't film themselves.
I would like to be able to type more on my iPad. I even got the iPad keyboard (stupid thing is in portrait not landscape) but that is not what small devices are for. Small devices are for content consumption. Large double/triple screened monsters are for content creation. By consumption, taking pictures or sending texts are at the small end and doing 3D animation is at the large end.
Even accountants need double monitors. I am mostly a C++ developer using 2 screens and wishing for 3. My iPad is for watching Coursera and other lecture videos. My iPhone is for texting, a tiny bit of email, a microscopic amount of browsing, and for listening to Audiobooks and lectures, oh and phone calls.
In a super emergency I use my iPhone or iPad for SSHing into my server; but that is purified suckage.
If I had to make a prediction it would be that many consumers won't even consider getting a home PC what they will do is get large screened smart phones. A possibility is that a good docking station comes out so they can have a laptop type interface where the vast computing bulk comes from the phone. This way they can type longer letters, write school reports, properly interface with a printer, and fill out complicated on-line forms.
I don't want my tablet/smartphone to try to be more and fail. I don't ever want to edit a spreadsheet on something so frustrating. Any attempt to make it less frustrating will just frustrate me more.
The popularity of TED shows that there is an unsatisfied hunger for genuinely stimulating intellectual stuff out there. PBS can be good but I am talking about people out there with a huge hunger to hear about cutting edge discoveries in various fields. This will always be a somewhat niche market but it seems that money and stupid always drown out intellect. Case in point: The Discovery Channel.
It seems the moment the MBA types start noodling with their spreadsheets they will say oh look a TED talk will pull in an audience of 2.3 million but a re-run of friends will pull in 2.31 million; my work is done here.
So we end up with a generation of kids who want to co-habit in a loft and drink coffee instead of a generation inspired to be the next Richard Feynman.
I am not saying their should be no Friends re-runs nor that all kids can become Richard Feynman; just that the ratio of Friends to TED type programming is in need of a little tweaking.
I would love to see the financial logic (assuming there is any) behind this. They might be basically going from Henry Ford's: "If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse". This might mean that they have looked at the future of windows with a Start button and realized that it has no future. Many companies in the past stuck with "if it ain't broke don't fix it" and ended up in the rubbish heap of companies while some upstart came along with a new way of doing things and ate their lunch.
So if I had to guess the MS plan it is that they see the mobile type platform as becoming dominant. They probably see people showing up at work and becoming frustrated with their work machines not being more like their mobile platforms. To see this point of view dig out your favorite iOS or Android product and envision your anger if the next version comes out with a start button style UI. Most people would scream "What is this? Hello 1998 is calling and wants its UI back!"
I am not saying that the new Windows 8 interface is some work of genius but I suspect that it is the result of a company that knows that it has to do something to stay relevant.
If I did have some suggestions for MS marketing it would have been to do two things. Assume that all mobile initiatives are loss leaders. Win hearts and minds is the primary goal. So I would have put out 3 versions of the new mobile platform at zero cost. One designed for the crappiest phones possible. Basically step in front of Android for people testing the smart phone waters. A second version aimed at people who are going to have a phone as their primary interface to the world; so basically aimed at large screen fairly good phones and people who usually consume but once in a while might need to do some work so a docking station option. And a third optional interface that could be turned on in Windows 7 (I never would have put out an 8). This way once you are familiar and love your mobile interface you could go to work / school / staples and make the computer just like your phone.
So the goal is to not win Windows 7 people over to your mobile platform but to win mobile people and then keep them in your ecosystem.
Where I don't think MS gets it is that the days of the Windows Tax are dwindling. It seems that they put out overpriced phones that were loaded down with the windows tax. Then they took their desktops where they already charge their tax and managed to get people who used to be happy to pay rethinking their relationship with MS.
Technology is only going to make it easier and easier for governments and corporations to spy on us to an ever higher degree. There will always be those governments who are "doing it for our own good" and corporations that just do it for money. So I don't think that we should have to fight our governments and corporations every time that a new idea or abuse of technology pops into their heads. We don't just need laws but an actual constitutional amendment enshrining our Right to privacy. The 4th amendment is pretty good and often interpreted but I think that governments should be extremely limited in their data gathering ability. I don't want license plate readers noting where I am, and I really don't want video recognition systems starting to note where I am and who I'm with. I don't want visa selling information about what I buy.
There is certain information that certain parts of government genuinely need. Say driver's license information. But I think that it should be a jailable offense for any other government or non government person to access that information for any reason outside of checking if I am legally allowed to drive or not. If my power company has my billing information and address then they should only be allowed to access the information for the purpose of billing me or turning my power on. Even if their own marketing department wants a list of customers to send "educational information" they should not have access to that information. Certainly the government or a corporation should not be ever able to sell my information to "trusted third parties." Not only do I not trust those third parties but I Hate them.
One tiny trick I do is to use slight variations of my address with different organizations that I have to deal with Suite 30, Apt 33b, Unit 30 Upper to see who sells my information. Basically they all do. With extended information gathering do you think they won't sell that information.
I am in the grocery store and they are watching me (as in their facial recognition knows its me) and they see me look at Crapios a new cereal that is 110% Sugar. I examine the box to laugh at how crappy it is. Then I get a text with a coupon for crapios, I get home and there are flyers for crapios, And Visa makes a note that I am less credit worthy because people who eat crapios are generally stupid. On my drive home I get 3 speeding tickets and 4 stop sign tickets because the drones and nearly infinite traffic cameras get you each time you go 1mile over the speed limit or don't come to an absolute halt at a stop sign. Having lost my driver's license I decide to leave this stupid country for one with personal privacy protection and print my boarding pass and see another ad for crapios. Then I log into the internet and get no ads for crapios because I have ad-blocking software.
The horrible horrible truth is that if you have an awesome product and no marketing you will have no money. If you have little to no product and awesome marketing you will have piles of money (think con artists). That said, the world is a better place with more awesome products and fewer con artists. I have always thought that there should be a limit to how much marketing is tax deductible as a huge number of companies make terrible products such as junky fizzy sugar water or fast food and are able to run circles around products that are vastly superior. As a bonus R&D spending should (and in some places does) have tax benefits such as every R&D dollar would give you 1.2 tax deductible dollars.
In my area there are ways to get government grants for product development. They are loth to give R&D money but will pile it on for marketing. So they end up funding scam after scam after scam. These are companies that cobble together a prototype of some technology made up from the latest buzzwords. I am willing to bet that they are now funding: A strategic coupling of graphene based mobile with cloud infrastructure that enables a low carbon 3D printing of big data.
I usually find his views a bit extreme but in this case I believe that DRM will be the thin edge of the wedge. Suddenly a huge amount of perfectly open content (say government data) will be DRM'd as a reflex. Plus the DRM will come out on Monday and be cracked on Tuesday resulting in just having a new buggy and useless layer to deal with. So now you will invite a whole new audience to the cracking party. So people will all start downloading FirefoxK'd.
I see IT people from the early 2000s demanding to install as much controlling software on people's own devices as possible. People from before 2000 even more. But I see IT people from say after 2010 on just saying, "I don't want to install crap on their devices, they either work or they don't. If they don't do their work they get fired. I'm not their parent."
I have a friend who was recently hired in a consulting role. He was there to oversee bringing a company's IT system in to the 21st century. Needless to say he brought his own laptop. The first encounter was the head of IT sending in a drone in with a Novell CD that must be installed before he could connect to the Internet or anything. Needless to say not only did he not install Novell but Novell was gone within a week. The best part was that upper management had been repeatedly told that there was nothing that could do what Novell did. The reality was that there were things they had long wanted to do where Novell was getting in the way. Not to mention the huge amount of money freed up by not paying the per user costs for Novell. The setup that my friend implemented was basically IT as an ISP. His built in thinking was that people will screw up over and over so instead of trying to make it impossible he moved to a more ISP like model of helping people to do the best they could. He found it bizzare to treat senior management as idiots. They might not know much about computers but they aren't dumb. So he just gave them the tools to make sure the company data wasn't flying out the window. Things like encrypted HDs on any laptops that left the building. People suddenly felt comfortable asking IT for advise instead of going to war with them.
Another thing he shut down was IT monitoring people's web activity and then selectively creating reports.
The old IT guy even stated that the day after my friend left he would be re-installing Novell on every machine.
I have watched people use their BB devices with some morbid fascination for some years. I would say that BB got it right in the early years in identifying that people wanted a pocket computer with a phone feature. They also nailed it in selling these devices to go-getter MBA bring-your-A-game business types. They solidly earned the name Crackberry. But somewhere after 2000 they just seemed to drop the ball. My brother called it when one of the BB owners bought a sports team. He said, "If you are a nerd and suddenly you are able to hang out with the cool kids do you go back to hanging out with the nerds?"
The horrible thing is that BB had just about everything right but just kept missing out on the little things that were show stoppers. They had apps long ago but it was almost impossible to sell an app as they really didn't seem to want to help. People blah blah about the toughness of older Nokias but older BB were at least as indestructible.
But then suddenly there were 8,000 different models and as the phones genuinely became more capable BB gave IT departments huge capabilities to disable all kinds of features like connecting to WiFi. So you had a bunch of people running around with smartphones that had IT inflicted brain damage. The result was Fortune 500 companies handing out free BB phones to their executives and management who then went out and bought their own $700 iPhone. This was because the iPhone was cool but also hadn't been molested by the IT department in the name of security or some nonsense.
Then they created the hot-mess of the playbook. I have written at length about how crappy that thing is even though it has good bones. BB put layer upon layer of stupid and then dipped it in a bath of frustration. It just popped into my head. I should check to see if there is an Android hack/port for that thing.
About the only thing that I would say about the tablet (dying) is that smart phones are almost the size of iPad minis. I would call them tablet phones. By that measure the tablet market is about to boom. Personally I am not a tablet phone fan but for those who don't buy a desktop/laptop and it is their primary interface to the internet then bigger is better. If smart watches then can reduce the need to pull out the monster phone to see texts, check the time, etc. Then the boom will become a full on explosion of tablet phones.
All in all I would ignore just about anything a BB person has to say as they clearly haven't talked to(as in listened to) any customer/potential customer in 10 years.
A simple example of this would be that I noticed that nearly all my 13 year old daughter's friends had BBs. They loved the great texting. I suspect that many of the BB phones were hand me downs from parents getting one for free and then replacing it with an iPhone. But many were actually going out and buying them. BB didn't seem to exploit this market in any way that I detected. Now the 14 year old crowd has all gone iPhone (not android much).
Now when I see someone with a BB I think: Middle management slave.
These glasses appeal to my inner sci-fi fan but I am not sure what problem they solve. It's great to have a display in front of but without a correspondingly good input interface I am not sure what good they will be. Think back to when touch screens finally started working and how that changed the whole smart phone thing. Blackberry would be one of the first useful smartphones with their awesome keyboard. People bought them in droves but as blackberry learned their market was limited to businesspeople who want to type at each other. A big market but a limited one.
So from what I can tell Google has opted for a largely voiced interface. Well every voice interface I have ever tried really sucked. Plus let's face it unless they are sunglasses wearing glasses sucks. The laser vision market shows how much glasses suck. People get their eyeballs scraped and gouged to avoid glasses. So when people say, "I'd rather a root canal" keep in mind "I'd rather a root canal than getting laser vision surgery"
What I wouldn't mind wearing is a watch. A watch that did what it could to keep my phone in my pocket, or backpack. Check the time, play pause music, check to see who's phoning, check to see messages, check the weather, check stocks, check to see if I am heading to my destination, plus basically every other popup that come up on my phone. I don't want to surf on my watch, and I don't want to play games. The key here is that a watch is comfortable, durable, fairly cheap, and can be beautiful so I am willing to wear it. A well programmed watch should greatly extend the use of my smartphone while not trying to replace it.
So I can't wait to try Google glasses but I can't wait to buy a smart watch to go with my smart phone.
I'm not sure I want 100W always flying out of my laptop's USB ports. That seems like A) a good way to drain my battery dead in 8 seconds and B) cheap USB devices will explode like a Star Trek bridge panel.
What I would like would be that only one my ports is 100W or some other distinction so that I can tape over that one or turn off until needed. In theory it will be nice to not have so many cords running to printers and whatnot but the early days will be fraught with peril (And explosions)
Once these bozos were on the run they were generally no more dangerous than some bankrobbers. For a bankrobber you would never shut down a major city. Now these evil doers are thinking, "Oh look we can shut down Western cities at a whim."
Keep in mind that by shutting the city down they made it safer at least as much through traffic deaths as through any risk these guys posed. Expand that math and you could have this bombing every day of the year and you don't touch the carnage of traffic deaths, or medical mistakes, or accidental overdoses, or even workplace accidents.
So yes these bombings are awful and the people doing them should be hunted down but the moment people start to toss away their liberties to get a few punks is like hunting houseflies with a shotgun. You aren't going to be happy with the results.
The key here is never to use the end justifies the means. What you have to ask is does the end outweigh the means? Effectively declaring marshal law does not outweigh the need to arrest two punks. If they had a nuke then yes, few would disagree with that equation. People talk about slippery slopes so lets look at an equivalent crime of different motivation. Two punks rob a bank. There is a shootout and some people are killed and many are hit by stray bullets. The perps get away. Do you shut down the city? What if they ended up with "strong" evidence that they had fled to NYC; do you then shut down NYC? Do you toss out civil rights? Don't we have laws that allow for the police to run about sirens blaring, search warrants in hand, to generally hunt a few punks on the run down?
I don't want people blah blahing about the environment in the abstract such as global warming. I want more focus on the measurable such as polluting the ground, the air, and the water in ways that can be specified, limited, and measured. Any government that allows some company to pollute is effectively giving them a subsidy. This subsidy can be measured in either in the damage done to the environment(very hard) or the much simpler how much would it cost them not to pollute. This way companies can easily be fined multiples of how much it would cost to have not polluted if the cost of a cleanup is too hard to measure.
I pick this one as many above have gone with my real favorite: Patent Reform!
What I have observed is that many corporate types adopted Java about 8-10 years ago and seem to be largely sticking with it. But what I don't see are any organizations now switching to Java. The very occasional organization also seems to be dropping Java. At this rate the corporate world will still be using Java for a long time but I don't think it is where the cool kids are. Interestingly there seems to be no one thing replacing Java. I see python definitely becoming the language of choice in certain limited areas such as science and hedge-funds. I see some people tossing their java web front ends and replacing it with an array of things even including PHP.
So all in all where Java is it will probably stay and I doubt that these security concerns will damage that audience much. What reports like this will certainly do is to dissuade many potential adopters of Java based technologies.
One thing that has kept me away from Amazon's cloud is the unknowns with its pricing. I have visions of a DDOS either clearing out my bank account or using up my monthly budget in the first 2 days of the month. Plus if I mis-click on something I might get an awesome setup that cleans me out. I am not a large corporation so one good bill and I am out of business. But even larger companies don't like surprises. So regardless of the potential savings I am willing to spend more if the price is fixed in stone instead of chancing being wiped out. I like sleeping through the night.
Plus as a human I really like being able to reach out and touch my machines, even if I have to fly 5 hours to do it. So the flexibility of the cloud sounds really cool where the pricing is not so flexible. It would be nice to spool up an instance of a machine that isn't going to do much most of the time that doesn't actually use up a whole machine. But then when one machine starts to get pounded to give it some more juice. Plus upgrading your hardware would be much more of a dream. You move your most demanding servers to your hottest hardware and slide the idle servers over to the older crap. Plus restores and redundancy are a dream.
Then you still have the option to fully dedicate a machine in "realspace" to a demanding process. While VM does not have much overhead it does have some. So taking a server(s) that is being pushed to the maximum and sliding it onto bare metal will then allow your hardware to be used to maximum efficiency.
Then by having no real cost overhead to having more near idle machines spool up your developers can play interesting games. Maybe they want to see what your software will do with 20 MongoDB servers running instead of the current 3; or 200.
This all said, I am a fan of Linode; where I can predict my pricing very well.
Doesn't matter if your development SQL is free if the deployment isn't. As opposed to the many completely free databases where licensing fees aren't a factor. Need to spool up 20 more servers? Easy peazy if you don't have to think about managing your licenses.
And what kind of place has the developers have to come begging to a non developer for a machine? That would be like the doctors having to grovel to the nurse for a scalpel.
The articles are too long to read online, and too short to put on a book reader. Plus flipping through a magazine is way better than looking at a list of headlines. The art in the Economist denotes the nature of the article. Plus the Economist is fairly low on ads.
My prediction is that people will be so resistant to just letting go of the steering wheel that the major car companies will give up with that route and pursue having super assisted driving. That is basically cruise control on steroids. Already companies like Mercedes have cruise control that will maintain a safe distance from the car in front, matching their slower speed or even emergency braking if needed. Other cars will do what they can from having you change lanes and side-swiping another car. So I suspect that all the robot driver technology will end up holding your hand more and more. Technically you will be the driver but the robot will be ready to prevent stupidity and also react when you don't. After a while it will finally reach a point where you can just take your hands off the wheel (the car will probably bleat plaintively) and the car will maintain speed and the lane. But nobody will call it robotic driving.
But then the breakthrough will be that some company that has crossed some critical line of self-driving capability will say that full liability insurance is included with the price of the car. Potentially they will even cover all insurance short of trees falling on the car and whatnot as they will be sure the car can't cause an accident and that with all the cameras and sensors that some other fool can't blame you or your car if they are the cause of the accident.
At this point my money would be on cars finally being marketed and sold as robotic self-driving cars. Shortly after this the tidal wave will wash away all the non-robotic cars as being a dangerous menace. The key here is that most cars by this point will be largely capable of being autonomous or very close to autonomous with only antiques being the hold outs.
But, and the big but, is that some robotic car will drive off a cliff or into a train or whatever and that single incident or small collection of incidents (and their Youtube videos) will get everyone saying, "Those things are death traps, I'll never let the car drive." This will temporarily postpone the inevitable but going from 35,000 US annual road deaths to 35 will be too much reality for foolish people to fight for long.
I hear Visual Studio is pretty good but I haven't touched since VS 2008. But what completely put me off from MS products was the relentless flogging of their other products. You would choose one product and they would try and shove their other products down your throat. Then there is the religious zealotry of MSDN shops. I have seen company after company where they have an MSDN certified IT head and that is it, Microsoft everything. Can't afford another SQL license then develop it in Access. And office is the worst; I sense within MS that they shove Office even down the throats of people there. If you develop something at MS it seems to be mandatory that somehow it will have some aspect that will exist to promote Office. XBox seems to be a huge exception to this rule and I suspect it was not due to lack of trying on the part of the Office mandarins.
But in the world of programming there are all kinds of tools that exist on their own. They have no agenda beyond being a good product. Python exists for people to make cool things. Boost exists to make C++ better. MySQL went a bit off the rails so MariaDB sprung into existence to serve up the data of zillions of people. Github exists for people to work on code together. This is where Visual Basic/Visual Studio were many eons ago. About the only product VB VS promoted was Windows which was fine at the time because the choices were DOS or Windows. But now we have many choices of Platform and OS. If MS doesn't want to become irrelevant they need to expand their horizons. Office needs to go on all the platforms. People will buy it. Visual Studio needs to allow development for all the platforms. People will love it.
But as it stands there is no product of MS that makes me go ooooh, got to get me some of that. Windows 8 just sounds more annoying than Windows 7. This whole PCs not booting anything but Windows sounds horrible.
I don't blame Windows 8. Windows 8 is just a clear sign that MS is so completely out of touch that they think that by taking the worst parts of iOS (locked up systems) that they can compete. I remember reading articles in early 2012 that about how MS was going to have 15% of the smart phone market. I saw the metro interface up close in product placements on TV and I said, BS. There is no reason for anyone to even try it. Then when the surface came out people even said that this would take a bite out of the iPad, Nope. These are examples of MS trying to buy reality. Buying reality is costly and doesn't change reality. So if they keep on this path of trying to bend everyone to their will instead of giving people compelling reasons to buy their products I just wonder if MS has one decade left, or less?
I love my buckyballs. I don't like a stupid nanny state telling me not to have them. There are all kinds of things around the house that kids shouldn't eat. What would only slightly annoy me would be a greater warning. Explain to people the risk. Not just a generalized "Keep away from small children." But an explanation about the balls pinching etc.
Your link isn't working but getmyo.com is where you meant to sent me. Very cool; assuming that it works I can remember the first time I saw someone with a bluetooth earpiece talking in front of our library on their cellphone. They had hair covering their ears so to me they were walking back and fourth arguing with nobody. I thought it was odd for someone so well dressed to have joined the ranks of crazies that hover near the library. Then I finally caught a glimpse of an ear thingy.
So with this gesture thing I anticipate that same early adopter in front of the library waving his hands like a nutbar and confusing me once again.
Slashdot Mirror
Insurance companies. Car companies will love it if all non robotic cars are booted off the roads as weapons of mass destruction. Gear heads will cry and wail but 35,000 deaths is a 9/11 every month.
The key question is not how many of this or that MS is shipping but why and what direction the sales are going. Most companies and home users have a bevy of Windows only software that they are somewhat committed to. People also need to buy a new machine every now and then. These two facts mean that your average corporate or home consumer will buy their next machine without much thought and will buy a windows 8 machine. The more savvy buyer might even insist on getting Windows 7. But the average user, both corporate and home, are moving into a cloudy world where they need a browser as their primary software and an Office suite as a secondary. This still allows MS to have a slight grasp as MS Office is still mostly the standard.
But and this is a big but. Things like LibreOffice can suit many user's needs and if I were a student doing term papers I would use a combination of google drive and google docs. Docs so my stuff is everywhere and can't be lost and Drive so that if I loose connectivity I have it on my machine. This might seem like a small market but the students of today are the consumers of tomorrow.
Lastly many home consumers are skipping the whole home desktop/laptop all together. A larger screened phone is generally all they need for most of their needs. This also goes for corporate types. The average higher level manager / road warrior is fine with a tablet / BB combo or some other mobile technology.
Soon the only people really needing a Windows machine (as opposed to some agnostic OS that primarily serves up a browser) will be specialty users such as accountants. Many other power users will be fine with either a Mac or Linux.
Which then leads to the whole server market. Linux is pretty dominating. My personal experience is that the MS shops out there are hard core MS evangelists who don't mind buying and managing huge piles of licenses which is getting even harder with many larger companies going with internal cloud systems that can spool up 20/200/2000 new machines on a whim.
I don't think that Windows 8 is the problem. I don't think it is the Metro interface beyond the fact that some MBAs at MS probably had these great spreadsheets showing huge desktop app sales. MS is declining for many other reasons. Preinstalled Bloatware would be a big one. But the key question is why I should not be using Linux, Android, MacOS, QNX? What is it that MS offers me to come back? For some reason it just doesn't appeal to me to pay an extra $100 when I buy a $500 device just so that I can run Windows. I don't see why I would want to run servers that could get me sued if I don't manage the licensing. I can see why people might stay through inertia but that isn't a very good business model in the long term.
Once cars are robotic enough that we are only giving guidance to the car (pretending to drive but the car will ignore stupid inputs) insurance will become the battleground. I can see a car company like Tesla offering free liability insurance with their cars. They will know that basically their car can not cause an accident and with the camera/computer system will have the proof to avoid a he-said-she-said situation.
At the same time I can see the insurance companies realizing that a huge huge HUGE market will simply go away when car accidents become unlikely enough for car companies to be able to cover it. Think about it. Every car that you see is paying in around $1,000+ for insurance. The only insurance people will want after robotic cars will be theft (hard to do with a hi-tech upgradable car), vandalism, trees falling on them kinds of insurance. Plus nearly every jurisdiction says you must have something like 2 million in liability; that need will vanish or at least be covered by the manufacturers.
So my robotic car prediction is that car companies will be trying to terrorize us into hating robotic cars. They will show videos of families being driven off cliffs, or saying it is our god given right to have control of our cars. And of course they will spend ungodly amounts of money lobbying everyone from the president down to your school board to stop this.
But the simple reality is that 35,000 people are killed every year in the US and robotic cars might take this down to a few hundred. (mechanical failure, trees falling on them, sinkholes, etc)
My theory is that it will be that one person in 100 or less who sees scientists at work and it rings them like a bell. Full resonance. But for the other 99 getting them hopped up on pop-sci then gets them to support funding this stuff. Those penguins won't film themselves.
I would like to be able to type more on my iPad. I even got the iPad keyboard (stupid thing is in portrait not landscape) but that is not what small devices are for. Small devices are for content consumption. Large double/triple screened monsters are for content creation. By consumption, taking pictures or sending texts are at the small end and doing 3D animation is at the large end.
Even accountants need double monitors. I am mostly a C++ developer using 2 screens and wishing for 3. My iPad is for watching Coursera and other lecture videos. My iPhone is for texting, a tiny bit of email, a microscopic amount of browsing, and for listening to Audiobooks and lectures, oh and phone calls.
In a super emergency I use my iPhone or iPad for SSHing into my server; but that is purified suckage.
If I had to make a prediction it would be that many consumers won't even consider getting a home PC what they will do is get large screened smart phones. A possibility is that a good docking station comes out so they can have a laptop type interface where the vast computing bulk comes from the phone. This way they can type longer letters, write school reports, properly interface with a printer, and fill out complicated on-line forms.
I don't want my tablet/smartphone to try to be more and fail. I don't ever want to edit a spreadsheet on something so frustrating. Any attempt to make it less frustrating will just frustrate me more.
The popularity of TED shows that there is an unsatisfied hunger for genuinely stimulating intellectual stuff out there. PBS can be good but I am talking about people out there with a huge hunger to hear about cutting edge discoveries in various fields. This will always be a somewhat niche market but it seems that money and stupid always drown out intellect. Case in point: The Discovery Channel.
It seems the moment the MBA types start noodling with their spreadsheets they will say oh look a TED talk will pull in an audience of 2.3 million but a re-run of friends will pull in 2.31 million; my work is done here.
So we end up with a generation of kids who want to co-habit in a loft and drink coffee instead of a generation inspired to be the next Richard Feynman.
I am not saying their should be no Friends re-runs nor that all kids can become Richard Feynman; just that the ratio of Friends to TED type programming is in need of a little tweaking.
I would love to see the financial logic (assuming there is any) behind this. They might be basically going from Henry Ford's: "If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse". This might mean that they have looked at the future of windows with a Start button and realized that it has no future. Many companies in the past stuck with "if it ain't broke don't fix it" and ended up in the rubbish heap of companies while some upstart came along with a new way of doing things and ate their lunch.
So if I had to guess the MS plan it is that they see the mobile type platform as becoming dominant. They probably see people showing up at work and becoming frustrated with their work machines not being more like their mobile platforms. To see this point of view dig out your favorite iOS or Android product and envision your anger if the next version comes out with a start button style UI. Most people would scream "What is this? Hello 1998 is calling and wants its UI back!"
I am not saying that the new Windows 8 interface is some work of genius but I suspect that it is the result of a company that knows that it has to do something to stay relevant.
If I did have some suggestions for MS marketing it would have been to do two things. Assume that all mobile initiatives are loss leaders. Win hearts and minds is the primary goal. So I would have put out 3 versions of the new mobile platform at zero cost. One designed for the crappiest phones possible. Basically step in front of Android for people testing the smart phone waters. A second version aimed at people who are going to have a phone as their primary interface to the world; so basically aimed at large screen fairly good phones and people who usually consume but once in a while might need to do some work so a docking station option. And a third optional interface that could be turned on in Windows 7 (I never would have put out an 8). This way once you are familiar and love your mobile interface you could go to work / school / staples and make the computer just like your phone.
So the goal is to not win Windows 7 people over to your mobile platform but to win mobile people and then keep them in your ecosystem.
Where I don't think MS gets it is that the days of the Windows Tax are dwindling. It seems that they put out overpriced phones that were loaded down with the windows tax. Then they took their desktops where they already charge their tax and managed to get people who used to be happy to pay rethinking their relationship with MS.
Technology is only going to make it easier and easier for governments and corporations to spy on us to an ever higher degree. There will always be those governments who are "doing it for our own good" and corporations that just do it for money. So I don't think that we should have to fight our governments and corporations every time that a new idea or abuse of technology pops into their heads. We don't just need laws but an actual constitutional amendment enshrining our Right to privacy. The 4th amendment is pretty good and often interpreted but I think that governments should be extremely limited in their data gathering ability. I don't want license plate readers noting where I am, and I really don't want video recognition systems starting to note where I am and who I'm with. I don't want visa selling information about what I buy.
There is certain information that certain parts of government genuinely need. Say driver's license information. But I think that it should be a jailable offense for any other government or non government person to access that information for any reason outside of checking if I am legally allowed to drive or not. If my power company has my billing information and address then they should only be allowed to access the information for the purpose of billing me or turning my power on. Even if their own marketing department wants a list of customers to send "educational information" they should not have access to that information. Certainly the government or a corporation should not be ever able to sell my information to "trusted third parties." Not only do I not trust those third parties but I Hate them.
One tiny trick I do is to use slight variations of my address with different organizations that I have to deal with Suite 30, Apt 33b, Unit 30 Upper to see who sells my information. Basically they all do. With extended information gathering do you think they won't sell that information.
I am in the grocery store and they are watching me (as in their facial recognition knows its me) and they see me look at Crapios a new cereal that is 110% Sugar. I examine the box to laugh at how crappy it is. Then I get a text with a coupon for crapios, I get home and there are flyers for crapios, And Visa makes a note that I am less credit worthy because people who eat crapios are generally stupid. On my drive home I get 3 speeding tickets and 4 stop sign tickets because the drones and nearly infinite traffic cameras get you each time you go 1mile over the speed limit or don't come to an absolute halt at a stop sign. Having lost my driver's license I decide to leave this stupid country for one with personal privacy protection and print my boarding pass and see another ad for crapios. Then I log into the internet and get no ads for crapios because I have ad-blocking software.
The horrible horrible truth is that if you have an awesome product and no marketing you will have no money. If you have little to no product and awesome marketing you will have piles of money (think con artists). That said, the world is a better place with more awesome products and fewer con artists. I have always thought that there should be a limit to how much marketing is tax deductible as a huge number of companies make terrible products such as junky fizzy sugar water or fast food and are able to run circles around products that are vastly superior. As a bonus R&D spending should (and in some places does) have tax benefits such as every R&D dollar would give you 1.2 tax deductible dollars.
In my area there are ways to get government grants for product development. They are loth to give R&D money but will pile it on for marketing. So they end up funding scam after scam after scam. These are companies that cobble together a prototype of some technology made up from the latest buzzwords. I am willing to bet that they are now funding: A strategic coupling of graphene based mobile with cloud infrastructure that enables a low carbon 3D printing of big data.
Plus it could be used as anti-anti-advertising. If you can't mess with the content you can't run ad-blocking software.
I usually find his views a bit extreme but in this case I believe that DRM will be the thin edge of the wedge. Suddenly a huge amount of perfectly open content (say government data) will be DRM'd as a reflex. Plus the DRM will come out on Monday and be cracked on Tuesday resulting in just having a new buggy and useless layer to deal with. So now you will invite a whole new audience to the cracking party. So people will all start downloading FirefoxK'd.
I see IT people from the early 2000s demanding to install as much controlling software on people's own devices as possible. People from before 2000 even more. But I see IT people from say after 2010 on just saying, "I don't want to install crap on their devices, they either work or they don't. If they don't do their work they get fired. I'm not their parent."
I have a friend who was recently hired in a consulting role. He was there to oversee bringing a company's IT system in to the 21st century. Needless to say he brought his own laptop. The first encounter was the head of IT sending in a drone in with a Novell CD that must be installed before he could connect to the Internet or anything. Needless to say not only did he not install Novell but Novell was gone within a week. The best part was that upper management had been repeatedly told that there was nothing that could do what Novell did. The reality was that there were things they had long wanted to do where Novell was getting in the way. Not to mention the huge amount of money freed up by not paying the per user costs for Novell. The setup that my friend implemented was basically IT as an ISP. His built in thinking was that people will screw up over and over so instead of trying to make it impossible he moved to a more ISP like model of helping people to do the best they could. He found it bizzare to treat senior management as idiots. They might not know much about computers but they aren't dumb. So he just gave them the tools to make sure the company data wasn't flying out the window. Things like encrypted HDs on any laptops that left the building. People suddenly felt comfortable asking IT for advise instead of going to war with them.
Another thing he shut down was IT monitoring people's web activity and then selectively creating reports.
The old IT guy even stated that the day after my friend left he would be re-installing Novell on every machine.
Old IT thinking, new IT thinking.
I have watched people use their BB devices with some morbid fascination for some years. I would say that BB got it right in the early years in identifying that people wanted a pocket computer with a phone feature. They also nailed it in selling these devices to go-getter MBA bring-your-A-game business types. They solidly earned the name Crackberry. But somewhere after 2000 they just seemed to drop the ball. My brother called it when one of the BB owners bought a sports team. He said, "If you are a nerd and suddenly you are able to hang out with the cool kids do you go back to hanging out with the nerds?"
The horrible thing is that BB had just about everything right but just kept missing out on the little things that were show stoppers. They had apps long ago but it was almost impossible to sell an app as they really didn't seem to want to help. People blah blah about the toughness of older Nokias but older BB were at least as indestructible.
But then suddenly there were 8,000 different models and as the phones genuinely became more capable BB gave IT departments huge capabilities to disable all kinds of features like connecting to WiFi. So you had a bunch of people running around with smartphones that had IT inflicted brain damage. The result was Fortune 500 companies handing out free BB phones to their executives and management who then went out and bought their own $700 iPhone. This was because the iPhone was cool but also hadn't been molested by the IT department in the name of security or some nonsense.
Then they created the hot-mess of the playbook. I have written at length about how crappy that thing is even though it has good bones. BB put layer upon layer of stupid and then dipped it in a bath of frustration. It just popped into my head. I should check to see if there is an Android hack/port for that thing.
About the only thing that I would say about the tablet (dying) is that smart phones are almost the size of iPad minis. I would call them tablet phones. By that measure the tablet market is about to boom. Personally I am not a tablet phone fan but for those who don't buy a desktop/laptop and it is their primary interface to the internet then bigger is better. If smart watches then can reduce the need to pull out the monster phone to see texts, check the time, etc. Then the boom will become a full on explosion of tablet phones.
All in all I would ignore just about anything a BB person has to say as they clearly haven't talked to(as in listened to) any customer/potential customer in 10 years.
A simple example of this would be that I noticed that nearly all my 13 year old daughter's friends had BBs. They loved the great texting. I suspect that many of the BB phones were hand me downs from parents getting one for free and then replacing it with an iPhone. But many were actually going out and buying them. BB didn't seem to exploit this market in any way that I detected. Now the 14 year old crowd has all gone iPhone (not android much).
Now when I see someone with a BB I think: Middle management slave.
These glasses appeal to my inner sci-fi fan but I am not sure what problem they solve. It's great to have a display in front of but without a correspondingly good input interface I am not sure what good they will be. Think back to when touch screens finally started working and how that changed the whole smart phone thing. Blackberry would be one of the first useful smartphones with their awesome keyboard. People bought them in droves but as blackberry learned their market was limited to businesspeople who want to type at each other. A big market but a limited one.
So from what I can tell Google has opted for a largely voiced interface. Well every voice interface I have ever tried really sucked. Plus let's face it unless they are sunglasses wearing glasses sucks. The laser vision market shows how much glasses suck. People get their eyeballs scraped and gouged to avoid glasses. So when people say, "I'd rather a root canal" keep in mind "I'd rather a root canal than getting laser vision surgery"
What I wouldn't mind wearing is a watch. A watch that did what it could to keep my phone in my pocket, or backpack. Check the time, play pause music, check to see who's phoning, check to see messages, check the weather, check stocks, check to see if I am heading to my destination, plus basically every other popup that come up on my phone. I don't want to surf on my watch, and I don't want to play games. The key here is that a watch is comfortable, durable, fairly cheap, and can be beautiful so I am willing to wear it. A well programmed watch should greatly extend the use of my smartphone while not trying to replace it.
So I can't wait to try Google glasses but I can't wait to buy a smart watch to go with my smart phone.
I'm not sure I want 100W always flying out of my laptop's USB ports. That seems like A) a good way to drain my battery dead in 8 seconds and B) cheap USB devices will explode like a Star Trek bridge panel.
What I would like would be that only one my ports is 100W or some other distinction so that I can tape over that one or turn off until needed. In theory it will be nice to not have so many cords running to printers and whatnot but the early days will be fraught with peril (And explosions)
Once these bozos were on the run they were generally no more dangerous than some bankrobbers. For a bankrobber you would never shut down a major city. Now these evil doers are thinking, "Oh look we can shut down Western cities at a whim."
Keep in mind that by shutting the city down they made it safer at least as much through traffic deaths as through any risk these guys posed. Expand that math and you could have this bombing every day of the year and you don't touch the carnage of traffic deaths, or medical mistakes, or accidental overdoses, or even workplace accidents.
So yes these bombings are awful and the people doing them should be hunted down but the moment people start to toss away their liberties to get a few punks is like hunting houseflies with a shotgun. You aren't going to be happy with the results.
The key here is never to use the end justifies the means. What you have to ask is does the end outweigh the means? Effectively declaring marshal law does not outweigh the need to arrest two punks. If they had a nuke then yes, few would disagree with that equation. People talk about slippery slopes so lets look at an equivalent crime of different motivation. Two punks rob a bank. There is a shootout and some people are killed and many are hit by stray bullets. The perps get away. Do you shut down the city? What if they ended up with "strong" evidence that they had fled to NYC; do you then shut down NYC? Do you toss out civil rights? Don't we have laws that allow for the police to run about sirens blaring, search warrants in hand, to generally hunt a few punks on the run down?
I don't want people blah blahing about the environment in the abstract such as global warming. I want more focus on the measurable such as polluting the ground, the air, and the water in ways that can be specified, limited, and measured. Any government that allows some company to pollute is effectively giving them a subsidy. This subsidy can be measured in either in the damage done to the environment(very hard) or the much simpler how much would it cost them not to pollute. This way companies can easily be fined multiples of how much it would cost to have not polluted if the cost of a cleanup is too hard to measure.
I pick this one as many above have gone with my real favorite: Patent Reform!
What I have observed is that many corporate types adopted Java about 8-10 years ago and seem to be largely sticking with it. But what I don't see are any organizations now switching to Java. The very occasional organization also seems to be dropping Java. At this rate the corporate world will still be using Java for a long time but I don't think it is where the cool kids are. Interestingly there seems to be no one thing replacing Java. I see python definitely becoming the language of choice in certain limited areas such as science and hedge-funds. I see some people tossing their java web front ends and replacing it with an array of things even including PHP.
So all in all where Java is it will probably stay and I doubt that these security concerns will damage that audience much. What reports like this will certainly do is to dissuade many potential adopters of Java based technologies.
One thing that has kept me away from Amazon's cloud is the unknowns with its pricing. I have visions of a DDOS either clearing out my bank account or using up my monthly budget in the first 2 days of the month. Plus if I mis-click on something I might get an awesome setup that cleans me out. I am not a large corporation so one good bill and I am out of business. But even larger companies don't like surprises. So regardless of the potential savings I am willing to spend more if the price is fixed in stone instead of chancing being wiped out. I like sleeping through the night.
Plus as a human I really like being able to reach out and touch my machines, even if I have to fly 5 hours to do it. So the flexibility of the cloud sounds really cool where the pricing is not so flexible. It would be nice to spool up an instance of a machine that isn't going to do much most of the time that doesn't actually use up a whole machine. But then when one machine starts to get pounded to give it some more juice. Plus upgrading your hardware would be much more of a dream. You move your most demanding servers to your hottest hardware and slide the idle servers over to the older crap. Plus restores and redundancy are a dream.
Then you still have the option to fully dedicate a machine in "realspace" to a demanding process. While VM does not have much overhead it does have some. So taking a server(s) that is being pushed to the maximum and sliding it onto bare metal will then allow your hardware to be used to maximum efficiency.
Then by having no real cost overhead to having more near idle machines spool up your developers can play interesting games. Maybe they want to see what your software will do with 20 MongoDB servers running instead of the current 3; or 200.
This all said, I am a fan of Linode; where I can predict my pricing very well.
Doesn't matter if your development SQL is free if the deployment isn't. As opposed to the many completely free databases where licensing fees aren't a factor. Need to spool up 20 more servers? Easy peazy if you don't have to think about managing your licenses.
And what kind of place has the developers have to come begging to a non developer for a machine? That would be like the doctors having to grovel to the nurse for a scalpel.
The articles are too long to read online, and too short to put on a book reader. Plus flipping through a magazine is way better than looking at a list of headlines. The art in the Economist denotes the nature of the article. Plus the Economist is fairly low on ads.
My prediction is that people will be so resistant to just letting go of the steering wheel that the major car companies will give up with that route and pursue having super assisted driving. That is basically cruise control on steroids. Already companies like Mercedes have cruise control that will maintain a safe distance from the car in front, matching their slower speed or even emergency braking if needed. Other cars will do what they can from having you change lanes and side-swiping another car. So I suspect that all the robot driver technology will end up holding your hand more and more. Technically you will be the driver but the robot will be ready to prevent stupidity and also react when you don't. After a while it will finally reach a point where you can just take your hands off the wheel (the car will probably bleat plaintively) and the car will maintain speed and the lane. But nobody will call it robotic driving.
But then the breakthrough will be that some company that has crossed some critical line of self-driving capability will say that full liability insurance is included with the price of the car. Potentially they will even cover all insurance short of trees falling on the car and whatnot as they will be sure the car can't cause an accident and that with all the cameras and sensors that some other fool can't blame you or your car if they are the cause of the accident.
At this point my money would be on cars finally being marketed and sold as robotic self-driving cars. Shortly after this the tidal wave will wash away all the non-robotic cars as being a dangerous menace. The key here is that most cars by this point will be largely capable of being autonomous or very close to autonomous with only antiques being the hold outs.
But, and the big but, is that some robotic car will drive off a cliff or into a train or whatever and that single incident or small collection of incidents (and their Youtube videos) will get everyone saying, "Those things are death traps, I'll never let the car drive." This will temporarily postpone the inevitable but going from 35,000 US annual road deaths to 35 will be too much reality for foolish people to fight for long.
What has MS done for me in years?
I hear Visual Studio is pretty good but I haven't touched since VS 2008. But what completely put me off from MS products was the relentless flogging of their other products. You would choose one product and they would try and shove their other products down your throat. Then there is the religious zealotry of MSDN shops. I have seen company after company where they have an MSDN certified IT head and that is it, Microsoft everything. Can't afford another SQL license then develop it in Access. And office is the worst; I sense within MS that they shove Office even down the throats of people there. If you develop something at MS it seems to be mandatory that somehow it will have some aspect that will exist to promote Office. XBox seems to be a huge exception to this rule and I suspect it was not due to lack of trying on the part of the Office mandarins.
But in the world of programming there are all kinds of tools that exist on their own. They have no agenda beyond being a good product. Python exists for people to make cool things. Boost exists to make C++ better. MySQL went a bit off the rails so MariaDB sprung into existence to serve up the data of zillions of people. Github exists for people to work on code together. This is where Visual Basic/Visual Studio were many eons ago. About the only product VB VS promoted was Windows which was fine at the time because the choices were DOS or Windows. But now we have many choices of Platform and OS. If MS doesn't want to become irrelevant they need to expand their horizons. Office needs to go on all the platforms. People will buy it. Visual Studio needs to allow development for all the platforms. People will love it.
But as it stands there is no product of MS that makes me go ooooh, got to get me some of that. Windows 8 just sounds more annoying than Windows 7. This whole PCs not booting anything but Windows sounds horrible.
I don't blame Windows 8. Windows 8 is just a clear sign that MS is so completely out of touch that they think that by taking the worst parts of iOS (locked up systems) that they can compete. I remember reading articles in early 2012 that about how MS was going to have 15% of the smart phone market. I saw the metro interface up close in product placements on TV and I said, BS. There is no reason for anyone to even try it. Then when the surface came out people even said that this would take a bite out of the iPad, Nope. These are examples of MS trying to buy reality. Buying reality is costly and doesn't change reality. So if they keep on this path of trying to bend everyone to their will instead of giving people compelling reasons to buy their products I just wonder if MS has one decade left, or less?
I love my buckyballs. I don't like a stupid nanny state telling me not to have them. There are all kinds of things around the house that kids shouldn't eat. What would only slightly annoy me would be a greater warning. Explain to people the risk. Not just a generalized "Keep away from small children." But an explanation about the balls pinching etc.
Your link isn't working but getmyo.com is where you meant to sent me. Very cool; assuming that it works I can remember the first time I saw someone with a bluetooth earpiece talking in front of our library on their cellphone. They had hair covering their ears so to me they were walking back and fourth arguing with nobody. I thought it was odd for someone so well dressed to have joined the ranks of crazies that hover near the library. Then I finally caught a glimpse of an ear thingy.
So with this gesture thing I anticipate that same early adopter in front of the library waving his hands like a nutbar and confusing me once again.