I don't know that Microsoft doesn't have any drive. Spend some time at: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/, they have some very cool ideas. Even for Windows-8 I think the idea of ubiquitous computing is rather cool. Not having drive would be standing by and letting the switch to Android happen. What Microsoft is doing is stepping up and leading their platform. They win, they may lose but they are fighting.
Net statistics bias towards heavy internet usage which biases towards heavy usage which bias towards frequent upgraders. You want data on all machines you have to count the people who use their computer once every 2 weeks or only do one or two things with it.
I would suspect that XP users have well below average replacement rates. The XP people are the people who keep their computers for 10 years on the home / small business front. On the corporate front those are companies that haven't been spending on desktop infrastructure and still have XP licenses. The ones that are probably going to have a rough transition now that Microsoft is finally EOL XP and forcing them onto Win7.
Their home / small business customer base is already rapidly switching to iOS and Android. That's part of what's driving their urgency. Their belief is that in 2013 Android and iOS aren't mature enough yet for the more demanding 2/3rds to switch completely. That might not be true in 2017 so better to force the switch in Windows 8 now then fight that battle against Android in 2017.
As for the Linux desktop. They are opening themselves up to a bigger establishment of the Linux desktop at the low end. OTOH the Linux desktop hasn't been so disorganized in its entire life. The pieces are there but it could take a year or two get structures back in place for unified large scale desktop projects that would command community focus. That's likely enough time. 6 mo was plenty in the case of netbooks.
LAUSD is 640k not 10m. That being said having a bunch of districts get together to create their own texts and fund them works out. Texas does that. Ultimately the issue with multiple vendors is that it allows districts and often teachers to have more choice and freedom to choose books. An individual teacher can choose a book from dozens if not hundreds of vendors. So if you assume the publisher is at an 8% net margin, is it worth 8% so that teachers have choice?
I lived in LA for over a decade. I didn't see a lot of evidence of corruption. If anything the lack of corruption meant no political machines meant paralysis between conflicting interests. I'm not sure LA / CA government wouldn't be made better with more corruption. No I see no reason to believe that LA Unified didn't go with iPads because after due consideration they thought it was the right thing to do. But regardless of whether that's true or not they are policy now.
I've seen LAUSD schools. Constructions costs a lot more than $30m. California's schools system has been a wreck.
invented about 12,000 years before the first public school you pretentious douchebag.
First off you are going to call someone a pretentious douchebag respond to what they wrote. I said nothing about "public schools" I used education quite specifically. Education, that is older animals teaching younger animals skills was invented many millions of years before writing.
Do we have any evidence that education has ever been improved by technology? Any data we can point to as an unqualified improvement thanks to a specific technology?
Sure. 1910-1930 introduction of widespread sanitation caused huge dropoffs in brain damage and illness. As those things moved into areas within a few years education improved noticeably. This result has been repeated in other 3rd world countries. The use of floors in schools. Food is tested all the time and good nutrition helps. Contraception and drops in pregnancy pay off big.
Textbook quality matters some and that's been tested in the USA. Sudden surges in budget that are used for textbooks where none or bad ones existed have produced noticeable results.
That's a different issue and it is correct. iOS apps more or less will lock people in to Apple's world.
It is possible that GNUStep will get better and iOS apps will be able to be recompiled for Android sometime in the future. But that's a question of community interest.
There are two issues: a) Selling to administrators vs. teachers b) Selling to 100k school districts.
Who in the school district makes the choice varies by school district. i've worked with local governments where the fire chief runs everything. I've worked with local governments where the school board is a paper tiger and the teachers are firmly in control.... Pearsons I assume is good at their job. And if your district makes decisions based on administrators that's who they are going to sell to.
If by kickbacks you mean bribes and not incentives for the district that's a good way for Pearsons to be disbanded as a company. I doubt they are doing that. If you mean district incentives: buy X and we'll throw in Y for free that you couldn't get the school board to sign off on. Yeah I believe that. But all the other companies can do that too.
As for vertical integration, as yourself indicated that's going to be a moving target for them.
So what you're saying is there were no big deployments of iPads before this and there are no programming languages apps currently that canbe privately distributed, but this will magically happen now?
No I'm not saying that nor anything like it. There have been large iPad deployments before. Many of those customers have requested custom software and it has been delivered. There are programming language apps that currently are both publicly and privately distributed. LA unified doesn't care whether they exist or not. They aren't hard to create and they are a bit enough customer that if they agree to use / pay for them they will be created. There is nothing magical about it. They write a check, stuff happen.
Even if that happens, the school is in control if and whether it wants those apps. Also the sandbox and api restrictions are still in place on these iPads, so that precludes many interesting software experiences
The sandbox and API restrictions are not in place on those iPads unless LA unified wants them to be. That's up to LA unified. As far as the school being in control... yes they bought the devices.
They don't need to break backwards compatibility to support this, it's been done multiple times and you know it. I don't even know why you are bringing this up.
Because Microsoft has repeatedly indicated for 5-8 years now it is their single biggest headache in terms of supporting a range of devices. I assume Microsoft knows what Microsoft's problems are.
Duh. It's a success of backwards compatibility. It doesn't hurt anyone to have COM on their system. People who want to 'advance' can use.NET or node.js or whatever fancy system they want.
This isn't individuals. Microsoft can't have systems that don't support COM well if only some people are using.NET. I gave you examples of problems that are collective not individual.
iOS is mostly like OSX. You can create an iPad application for any language in XCode yourself pretty easily. As for "may" come in the future. This isn't the consumer market.
Heck, I personally would happily fund whatever LA Unified wants providing they guarantee me sales on completion. I suspect another 1000 system integrators and ISVs would say the same. All LA Unified has to say "we want it and we will pay for it" and they get it.
Layoffs creating restructuring charges that would cost the company money. Cost them less than keeping the employees but is still a cost. Qt was sold to digia for peanuts. Headquarters was $222m. That's real money but under 1/10 of the increase in cash position.
Do you really think the only way they can add features is by breaking backwards compatibility?
Only way, no. An important way to advance the platform, yes. For example they need to be able to have applications move between form factors ranging from phones to large screen TVs. Many older apps still use bitmaps, and most don't have complex handling for scalability. They can't even handle changes in dpi well. Microsoft needs to break those to get different screen sizes to work on their platform.
Many applications use simpler mouse point and click interfaces... so use looks like: mouse -> keyboard -> mouse -> keyboard.... rapidly switching back and forth. That isn't going to work well on next generation hardware. Switches need to be less frequent.
Many applications require installation routines before they can work for each system. Microsoft wants to move towards a situation where applications mostly run statelessly so that from the end user's perspective they have millions of applications available. Those apps need to break.
etc...
If you need an example,.NET is the new Microsoft way of doing things, but COM still works fine, and will continue to work for a long, long time.
Microsoft has been excellent about backward compatibility for a while. It is starting to do tremendous damage and they realize that. They've bred a generation of ultra conservative users with a slow upgrade culture. The continuing use of COM is not a success story in terms of advancing the platform. As for it continuing to work for a long time. It already with Windows 8 works less smoothly than on Windows 7. Expect that to continue. Microsoft can make COM more and more painful to use.
Because education is so much better now that we have "interactive books" instead of the old-fashioned kind.
We don't have many interactive books. But yes. Education will likely be much better when we have those vs. the old-fasioned kind. We know far more about mental retention than we did when writing was invented.
And there are ereaders less than half the price of an iPad that can display "graphs" just fine.
Probably. But the originally claim was 1/4-1/10th and those are e-ink. At 1/2 we are talking quality issues between moderately good Android and iPads.
Have you seen the numbers of tablet sales vs. laptop sales and relative rates of growth? People like ARM a lot. Assuming they aren't leaving all of Windows behind that means Win-RT.
Well remember developers that write educational applications will follow quickly LA unified. They can write them of work with any of their normal contractors to get them written. And that's assuming no other schools come along and drive the market themselves.
There are no $100 laptops that are even close. I doubt even granting a way slower system with a much worse screen and camera you can get both portability (weight) and battery life higher at the same screen size for $100.
Let's take your iView 7" model Definitely cheap. We'll compare to the iPad mini 512M ram vs. 1g 4g storage vs 16-64g 800x480 vs. 1024x768 Back 2MP webcam and front 0.3MP webcam vs 5MP/1.2MP with a much better lens 2.1 lbs vs..68 lbs (so much for better portability)
Yeah. That's what government spending usually looks like. Our government buys services from the same market consumers and business do which is mostly private business. The alternative would be the government runs most industry almost completely communist state.
The market for textbooks is profitable and competitive. School districts individually have the ability to purchase texts. There are just under 100k school districts. By going to electronic texts all sorts of less expensive texts become economically viable.
I'm having a hard time seeing how exactly is this a threat that Pearson establishes a long run monopoly without them hugely outperforming competitors.
I think most textbooks are terrible until college. But that's the school district's fault not Pearson's.
In the consumer market it matters less, so I'm guessing that's all you are familiar with. If you're making toys, backwards compatibility doesn't matter. But if you just spent $100million to build software to improve business processes, then you don't want to do it all over again in 10 years.
Agreed. In the enterprise sector Microsoft needs to maintain long term computability. But things like DirectX don't matter much there. Many business DOS apps still run fine or run with a little tweaking, while games don't run.
Breaking backwards compatibility because something is not 'pretty' or 'elegant' is a sign of an immature programmer.
I don't know where "pretty" or "elegant" are coming from. Forcing applications to use new mechanism for communication and control is not just aesthetics. For example if Microsoft decides to shift to a database filesystem they will be able to offer minicomputer / mainframe features to Windows desktop users. But the applications are going to need to be updated to pass more information about their intermediate files to the OS. This could very easily become a chicken and egg problem where application developers, including internal ones don't see a demand because end users don't use those features because applications don't support them. Microsoft as arbitrator of the platform can unravel that sort of problem.
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I don't know that Microsoft doesn't have any drive. Spend some time at: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/, they have some very cool ideas. Even for Windows-8 I think the idea of ubiquitous computing is rather cool. Not having drive would be standing by and letting the switch to Android happen. What Microsoft is doing is stepping up and leading their platform. They win, they may lose but they are fighting.
That was netbooks mainly. Those were never designed to be 4 year machines.
Net statistics bias towards heavy internet usage which biases towards heavy usage which bias towards frequent upgraders. You want data on all machines you have to count the people who use their computer once every 2 weeks or only do one or two things with it.
I would suspect that XP users have well below average replacement rates. The XP people are the people who keep their computers for 10 years on the home / small business front. On the corporate front those are companies that haven't been spending on desktop infrastructure and still have XP licenses. The ones that are probably going to have a rough transition now that Microsoft is finally EOL XP and forcing them onto Win7.
Their home / small business customer base is already rapidly switching to iOS and Android. That's part of what's driving their urgency. Their belief is that in 2013 Android and iOS aren't mature enough yet for the more demanding 2/3rds to switch completely. That might not be true in 2017 so better to force the switch in Windows 8 now then fight that battle against Android in 2017.
As for the Linux desktop. They are opening themselves up to a bigger establishment of the Linux desktop at the low end. OTOH the Linux desktop hasn't been so disorganized in its entire life. The pieces are there but it could take a year or two get structures back in place for unified large scale desktop projects that would command community focus. That's likely enough time. 6 mo was plenty in the case of netbooks.
LAUSD is 640k not 10m. That being said having a bunch of districts get together to create their own texts and fund them works out. Texas does that. Ultimately the issue with multiple vendors is that it allows districts and often teachers to have more choice and freedom to choose books. An individual teacher can choose a book from dozens if not hundreds of vendors. So if you assume the publisher is at an 8% net margin, is it worth 8% so that teachers have choice?
I lived in LA for over a decade. I didn't see a lot of evidence of corruption. If anything the lack of corruption meant no political machines meant paralysis between conflicting interests. I'm not sure LA / CA government wouldn't be made better with more corruption. No I see no reason to believe that LA Unified didn't go with iPads because after due consideration they thought it was the right thing to do. But regardless of whether that's true or not they are policy now.
I've seen LAUSD schools. Constructions costs a lot more than $30m. California's schools system has been a wreck.
First off you are going to call someone a pretentious douchebag respond to what they wrote. I said nothing about "public schools" I used education quite specifically. Education, that is older animals teaching younger animals skills was invented many millions of years before writing.
Sure. 1910-1930 introduction of widespread sanitation caused huge dropoffs in brain damage and illness. As those things moved into areas within a few years education improved noticeably. This result has been repeated in other 3rd world countries. The use of floors in schools. Food is tested all the time and good nutrition helps. Contraception and drops in pregnancy pay off big.
Textbook quality matters some and that's been tested in the USA. Sudden surges in budget that are used for textbooks where none or bad ones existed have produced noticeable results.
That's a different issue and it is correct. iOS apps more or less will lock people in to Apple's world.
It is possible that GNUStep will get better and iOS apps will be able to be recompiled for Android sometime in the future. But that's a question of community interest.
There are two issues:
a) Selling to administrators vs. teachers
b) Selling to 100k school districts.
Who in the school district makes the choice varies by school district. i've worked with local governments where the fire chief runs everything. I've worked with local governments where the school board is a paper tiger and the teachers are firmly in control.... Pearsons I assume is good at their job. And if your district makes decisions based on administrators that's who they are going to sell to.
If by kickbacks you mean bribes and not incentives for the district that's a good way for Pearsons to be disbanded as a company. I doubt they are doing that. If you mean district incentives: buy X and we'll throw in Y for free that you couldn't get the school board to sign off on. Yeah I believe that. But all the other companies can do that too.
As for vertical integration, as yourself indicated that's going to be a moving target for them.
No I'm not saying that nor anything like it.
There have been large iPad deployments before. Many of those customers have requested custom software and it has been delivered.
There are programming language apps that currently are both publicly and privately distributed.
LA unified doesn't care whether they exist or not. They aren't hard to create and they are a bit enough customer that if they agree to use / pay for them they will be created. There is nothing magical about it. They write a check, stuff happen.
The sandbox and API restrictions are not in place on those iPads unless LA unified wants them to be. That's up to LA unified. As far as the school being in control... yes they bought the devices.
Because Microsoft has repeatedly indicated for 5-8 years now it is their single biggest headache in terms of supporting a range of devices. I assume Microsoft knows what Microsoft's problems are.
This isn't individuals. Microsoft can't have systems that don't support COM well if only some people are using .NET. I gave you examples of problems that are collective not individual.
iOS is mostly like OSX. You can create an iPad application for any language in XCode yourself pretty easily. As for "may" come in the future. This isn't the consumer market.
Heck, I personally would happily fund whatever LA Unified wants providing they guarantee me sales on completion. I suspect another 1000 system integrators and ISVs would say the same. All LA Unified has to say "we want it and we will pay for it" and they get it.
Layoffs creating restructuring charges that would cost the company money. Cost them less than keeping the employees but is still a cost. Qt was sold to digia for peanuts. Headquarters was $222m. That's real money but under 1/10 of the increase in cash position.
No they aren't losing money on the phones sold.
Only way, no. An important way to advance the platform, yes. For example they need to be able to have applications move between form factors ranging from phones to large screen TVs. Many older apps still use bitmaps, and most don't have complex handling for scalability. They can't even handle changes in dpi well. Microsoft needs to break those to get different screen sizes to work on their platform.
Many applications use simpler mouse point and click interfaces... so use looks like: mouse -> keyboard -> mouse -> keyboard.... rapidly switching back and forth. That isn't going to work well on next generation hardware. Switches need to be less frequent.
Many applications require installation routines before they can work for each system. Microsoft wants to move towards a situation where applications mostly run statelessly so that from the end user's perspective they have millions of applications available. Those apps need to break.
etc...
Microsoft has been excellent about backward compatibility for a while. It is starting to do tremendous damage and they realize that. They've bred a generation of ultra conservative users with a slow upgrade culture. The continuing use of COM is not a success story in terms of advancing the platform. As for it continuing to work for a long time. It already with Windows 8 works less smoothly than on Windows 7. Expect that to continue. Microsoft can make COM more and more painful to use.
We don't have many interactive books. But yes. Education will likely be much better when we have those vs. the old-fasioned kind. We know far more about mental retention than we did when writing was invented.
Probably. But the originally claim was 1/4-1/10th and those are e-ink. At 1/2 we are talking quality issues between moderately good Android and iPads.
Have you seen the numbers of tablet sales vs. laptop sales and relative rates of growth? People like ARM a lot. Assuming they aren't leaving all of Windows behind that means Win-RT.
Well remember developers that write educational applications will follow quickly LA unified. They can write them of work with any of their normal contractors to get them written. And that's assuming no other schools come along and drive the market themselves.
There are no $100 laptops that are even close. I doubt even granting a way slower system with a much worse screen and camera you can get both portability (weight) and battery life higher at the same screen size for $100.
Let's take your iView 7" model Definitely cheap. We'll compare to the iPad mini .68 lbs (so much for better portability)
512M ram vs. 1g
4g storage vs 16-64g
800x480 vs. 1024x768
Back 2MP webcam and front 0.3MP webcam vs 5MP/1.2MP with a much better lens
2.1 lbs vs.
Those two products are just not remotely similar.
Yeah. That's what government spending usually looks like. Our government buys services from the same market consumers and business do which is mostly private business. The alternative would be the government runs most industry almost completely communist state.
The market for textbooks is profitable and competitive. School districts individually have the ability to purchase texts. There are just under 100k school districts. By going to electronic texts all sorts of less expensive texts become economically viable.
I'm having a hard time seeing how exactly is this a threat that Pearson establishes a long run monopoly without them hugely outperforming competitors.
I think most textbooks are terrible until college. But that's the school district's fault not Pearson's.
Which could result in a demand for free textbooks using a similar program. That might not be all bad.
Agreed. In the enterprise sector Microsoft needs to maintain long term computability. But things like DirectX don't matter much there. Many business DOS apps still run fine or run with a little tweaking, while games don't run.
I don't know where "pretty" or "elegant" are coming from. Forcing applications to use new mechanism for communication and control is not just aesthetics. For example if Microsoft decides to shift to a database filesystem they will be able to offer minicomputer / mainframe features to Windows desktop users. But the applications are going to need to be updated to pass more information about their intermediate files to the OS. This could very easily become a chicken and egg problem where application developers, including internal ones don't see a demand because end users don't use those features because applications don't support them. Microsoft as arbitrator of the platform can unravel that sort of problem.
How would that not apply to any other choice the district made? Windows, Linux...?