I know the NBC is comfortable with the bias. As they see it, MSNBC is a cable station that has established a strong niche regular viewership. A dedicated viewership in the millions is gold for a cable station it means reliable ratings i.e. advertising dollars day after day, week after week, year after year. And MSNBC's ratings are likely to double under a Republican administration. Moreover "news junkies" are a good demographic. Further this split allows NBC news to do important journalism with less political interference. Right now NBC can't do deep investigative work since they need access policy makers, which hampers the quality of their journalism. Even if it is the very same journalistic staff reporting for MSNBC and NBC, just being asked different questions by the hosts By shifting the power hostile reporting to MSNBC and then allowing NBC to just cover the controversy this has helped.
Finally of course MSNBC is a huge fan of clean energy which requires all sorts of complex devices made by GE.
My biggest sellers are the $400-$500 units why? Because that is all people are willing to spend and more features won't change that opinion, they'll either go elsewhere or not buy at all.
Maybe, maybe not. But if the market is really just a bunch of people in the $400-500 range who don't care about features Microsoft has already lost the consumer space. Game over. At that price point the windows ecosystem doesn't matter and the ARM based system are superior to x86. But even if it were the case that those sorts of skinflint customers were going to keep buying Windows systems forever, the $400-500 systems are generally sold at thin profit margins or a loss. Its a worthless market for the major vendors.
I should be thankful for MSFT because that kind of douchebaggery could seriously boost the repair side of my business, as more will be willing to actually buy desktops that can be fixed instead of cheap $400 laptops.
Oh absolutely. Not only that you'd make a ton of money refurbing old $1200 laptops to resell. There is no question that with a move towards more expensive systems the used market would be vibrant, just like it is for Apple where because Apple won't sell a system under $1k there is a huge resell value for used systems to fill that void. You'd do as much business as you could possibly handle.
This will be different if MSFT decides to fuck the OEMs, because you are talking about giving up ALL your sub $550 sales, which is a good 80% of companies like Dell. When a third party tries to fuck you out of 80% of your sales in a dead economy? Your company WILL do something about it.
I don't think its quite 80% of their sales. The median system is $515. But lets even assume it were 80%, that 80% probably represents almost 0% of the profits. Apple when they had 8% market share was already pulling 90% of the profits down. What Microsoft would be doing was reintroducing profits again. Systems would sell with real margin. Its not like that 80% completely walks. It probably looks something more like this:
1/3 don't buy a system at all. 2 years later though they have no choice and fall into one of the other 2 groups. 1/3 buy used or buy Linux or buy Android.... 1/3 buy a $1k new system and love it.
Dell sacrificed market share to move their net from 2.2% up to 4.4%. How much share would they be willing to lost to go back to 20% margins?
And lets not forget all those vendors are seeing their year over year sales drop by 10%, even with the low margin strategy. The PC business is miserable for them right how.
And the reason Android isn't ready is because again Google hasn't had a reason to give a fuck, MSFT was like Pepsi, a commodity product that is simply too cheap to care about competing with. All that changes if they hand over the sub $550 market to anybody that wants it, that's hundreds of millions of dollars right there for the plucking.
There is billions there for anyone who cares to pluck it. There is no question a high value approach will create a large opening for Linux, Android, iOS... to fill. Microsoft, if they are going to push their products up market is going to have to accept more of the market.
all it would take is Google packaging it into a friendly Crossover style installer, really not hard.
Of course its hard. Google is getting their ass handed to them on Android patents. You think they want to try and implement the Windows API without patent violations? IBM even without the patent threat, since they had immunity agreements couldn't keep up with the full API. No, the new systems will not support x86. You want x86 you are going to have to buy a Windows license. Microsoft can hold that line.
Finally i'm seeing a lot of places like Geeks selling "No OS" laptops and desktops cheap and you KNOW what that is about...piracy. hell probably 30% of the Windows boxes I see are Windows Pirate Edition and I have no doubt MSFT fuckes the OEM
Reread my original post. The protocols imposed by committee are those to fulfill an already existing need, i.e. they generate a consensus. Something like the revision to HTTP falls into the second group while the original HTTP was in the first. The HTTP revision protocol is that kind of protocol where Google is trying to drive the other big players towards adoption.
Gross profits for the last year is $6.5b That gives them EBITDA of $2.4b after all the write downs they lost $50m
And btw those write downs include settlements on the employees they laid off. That's not great it is not however a company dying quickly on the verge of bankruptcy. It is a company working through issues. Lets not overstate the problems.
The market is very concerned about their execution and with good reason. That's far short of bankruptcy though. As an aside any stock trading for a 1/3rd of book with only product problems, I'd happily buy and take my chances.
First off you aren't really presenting any evidence that people would go to those sorts of extraordinary lengths to avoid buying new machines. You are just reasserting that they don't really need software.
Gaming is less of an issue with each passing month, with companies supporting Linux and OS X more and more.
I've been on OSX for a decade now and Linux for 18 years. I don't game but for OSX its pretty much the same, games come to OSX a couple years after they come out for PC. There is much less selection and anyone who cares deeply about PC gaming owns a windows box. I think the real change as far as the gaming market goes is that gaming has mostly moved off of Windows and its less of a reason to upgrade the computer. The casual gaming market thriving though on phones and tablets and this might start driving an upgrades but we are still years from that.
And as for productivity software: sure, there are enterprise applications that are Windows-only, but those are also becoming more of a commodity. With most of the functionality of Microsoft Office (plus some features of their own), Open Office and Libre Office have made office software not just a commodity, but a free one.
Just go to the forum where people are discussing Outlook. People who are heavy Word users don't tend to post on/. but no OO does not support most advanced Word features. I think its great that OO and Google Docs are making a basic suite available to people cheaply. I've installed NeoOffice (a Mac only OO fork) on several family member's computers to meet their needs. But anyone who is going to be using these programs regularly and heavily still likely needs things that OO just doesn't have. The low end office suite is a commodity, the high end is still a pricey piece of software people are willing to pay for.
Of course. But increasing margins is good for the OEMs as well. There is no reason OEMs should want to live in a world of thin margins either. There is no reason that OEMs wouldn't want to back to the lucrative hardware markets of the 1990s. Dell, HP, Toshiba... would love a situation where there is plenty of money to go around and they can differentiate themselves based on features or quality. But they can't do that individually because Apple has skimmed off the price insensitive buyers and for most of the remaining Windows consumers they have shown time and time again that they would rather a $500 piece of junk than a $2000 excellent machine.
On the other hand if the $500 piece of junk didn't exist anymore.
and if the OEMs get together to support a single Linux?
Assuming they avoid anti-trust issues.... OK they do. And the situation is very much like Netbooks vs. laptops before the XP price cuts, or PCs vs. Commodore Amiga. Linux machines run on cheap hardware offering a poorer environment while Windows runs on better machines offering a much richer environment. Especially since the OEMs do not want to do for their consumer division what they are currently doing in their server division (and some of the companies like Toshiba and Acer don't do at all) in terms of the complexity of Linux support. Heck read your own posts on the topic of Linux support.
Don't think Google would be more than happy to help those OEMs with Android? hey it'll have all the casual games, all the web, and everything is tied into Google. Bet it would sure make Google happy, and it really wouldn't be hard to turn a decent chunk of the consumer market away from Windows when more folks are living on the net than ever and all the developers are working on Android and iOS.
I agree. I don't think that Android is ready yet though. Most consumers still have need for a few pieces of desktop software for which there is no internet equivalent. Android and iOS apps really are still fundamentally phone apps and very poor from a feature sense. SaS apps are somewhat better but even still limited. If Microsoft is going to have to fight this battle, far better in 2013 when Google isn't ready yet than in 2017 when they likely will be. It is far easier for Microsoft to move the cost of their hardware up, then for Google to create an entire infrastructure of full featured software. Meanwhile Apple is explicitly structuring iOS to act as a supporting OS for OSX, so they may likely never be ready.
if MSFT doesn't want that business I'm sure they'll find another OS happy to take that share and MSFT would do well to remember that more and more people only care about the net, not the Winflag.
I don't agree that's true. I think its a minority something like 1/4 of all users. There is not much Microsoft can do for the web only crowd. ARM is a better platform for them, and there is no reason for them not to buy an iPad or just use their phones other than inertia and that won't last.
I do think a lot of consumers will think that's true until they try and live without a desktop. To my mind its a lot like Google Docs. While it is absolutely true that most people don't use more than a few percent of Word's advanced features most people do need a few percent and they often all need a different few percent. Same with Excel. I have a lot of friends that have had to move up Excel to Quantrix, because they are actually pushing their system and Excel breaks down badly as the amount of rows goes over a few thousands and instead is more like a few million. Lets not even discuss Google Docs for sheets of that size.
The same thing happens when people don't have recourse to a desktop machine. That few percent for which they really do need power becomes a problem. And that's true even with web apps. I use Evernote on my phone all the time. I manage Evernote from my desktop. Without the management features that the desktop client brings, I couldn't use it on my phone.
Well I played a round a little with Apple's open-source calendar server. That has webdav but really isn't designed for document sharing which seems to be something you are looking for. But in terms of a good quality calendar share only that's free it's excellent.
egroupware which you mentioned is in the process of going commercial. Stuff is being dropped form the community edition to make it more annoying. For me the killer was you couldn't save views. But it has been around.
These were not a fit for me cost wise but Oracle Beehive and Oracle Communication are both worth taking a look at. Beehive is still quite active. Oracle is free for personal use and knowing these products is likely a marketable skill. Obviously the target market is huge.
After that I don't know anything more than you are likely to find in a websearch. Let me just give you a list you can google from though:
I understand your point and agree that PC customers are cheapskates. Moreover Microsoft has driven the profit from the hardware side to the software side with their grey box strategy. But Microsoft does have a substantial advantage here, they control the copyright to the operating system everyone wants to use.
Microsoft can very easily shift the economics. -- So for example they can set high standards for Windows 8 boxes and not license Windows 8, for boxes that don't qualify. They can charge a a steep premium for Windows 7. -- Or they could avoiding micro managing just ban it all together and set a minimum price for manufacturers of $800 or so. -- Or they could combine the two and punitive licensing to inexpensive machines. Something like, for every $100 your computer at time of final sale sold for less than $100 the final cost of the Windows license goes up by $50. People would have to have a strong preference for junk to pay 70% (which is likely what it will would work out to be final sale) for nothing over getting quality hardware.
etc... Now all of those approaches do create an opening for Linux at the low end. But if I'm Microsoft I'm thinking OSX, iOS and Android are much more significant threats than Linux in 2012 and I have to pick my battles. Linux's shortcomings, especially when sold to the bottom of the market, are likely to repeat what happened on the Netbook and even if they gain ground it will be easily retaken. That does mean that Lauren ad has to be a thing of the past.
If Microsoft doesn't do anything like that... then they repeat the mistakes of Vista. There are a small fraction of machines that run Windows 8 well and Windows 8 gets a terrible reputation. People hate Metro. Slowly the price of good touchscreens, and the associated hinge (you forgot that rather expensive part) come down and become standard features around 2015 or so and Windows 8 becomes usable on standard hardware. Then Windows 9 is released into a hardware market that can actually support it and this gets positive press. The question then is what does the consumer space look like with a 3 year surge of "windows sucks". For example is Apple / OSX up to 20% marketshare or worse, Vista was wonderful for Apple.
Conversely if Microsoft starts driving prices up again lots of other premium hardware starts seeming less premium. For example going all SSD on light laptops or a large SSD cache plus HDD. Taking a $500 computer and making it a $1000 computer to go SSD might be too much. But taking a $1500 computer to $2000 isn't going to be the same thing at all. Its not like Dell, HP, Lenevo, Asus, Acer... don't know how to make good computers its just that the customer base, especially in consumer has been demanding crap. As people use more premium parts, parts manufacturers can start to create more expensive parts. For example there is no reason that Windows people shouldn't be switching to retina displays. We might go back to the world where $4000 premium laptops aren't rare but represent a decent sized chunk of the market, $2000 is the average and $1000 represents the low end junk. And in that world, the $500 Windows 7 machines are seen as legacy junk. The market psychology just shifts as the software gets more demanding. And this drives upgrade cycles to be fast again as more powerful hardware leads to both more powerful hardware and more demanding software.
As an aside, Fujitsu pretty much makes the ideal Windows 8 computer today and those do sell well abroad and in medical. I wasn't an Apple guy I'd be getting a Fujitsu machine and running Windows 8. Even with an OS I don't want, I'm always sorely tempted to switch back to get the Fujitsu because of that versatility and durability. Microsost One Note is a great product, on the right hardware. There is no reason it couldn't be another Outlook, Excel, Word if the hardware manufacturers were making the machines en mass to support it.
Agreed. But that means that they wouldn't be cannibalizing sales of Outlook if they offered a strong email client which was my point. You are agreeing with me not disagreeing, just saying it different.
Why do you think businesses are still on XP? Because people have been tolerant of slow business upgrades. As XP becomes more painful businesses will be forced to migrate. That's a good thing. Vista was released January 30, 2007. Windows 7 ships with an XP compatibility mode to handle legacy. There is no good reason that any business computer at all anywhere should be using XP. One of the ways of making that happen is for stuff to start breaking in XP.
Small business -- This segment is cheap. But they are the ones that benefit the most from SaS. They will upgrade to the system that allows them to use SB apps. Home -- Home has entertainment and rich content needs. They should be moving over already and that's happening with iOS / Android. Enterprise -- Here the switching costs can be enormous but the problem is software not hardware. Hardware costs are trivial. Windows 7 offers Windows XP compatibility mode. These people can be easily moved.
I tried something like this last year using Linuxy solutions. For a midsized setup (30k users in groups ranging from about 30-500). For personal though I'm not sure it doesn't make more sense to just treat calendar and disk storage as two totally distinct problems and thus simplify the solution. Pick any of a dozen different internet calendar / scheduling services and do storage by itself.
But if you want to know the lay of the land as far as groupware:
1) I didn't go with Zimbra because at the time they were focused heavily on the rack server space and their longer term direction scared me. The cost per user was high for the commercial version and I did want commercial version features.
2) Scalix was really good 4-5 years ago. But is essentially now unmaintained. If you can live with broken compatibility and FireFox 3 for less than 10 users it is free. It has a very advanced calendar and an easy to use but powerful administration system. Really nice but I'd have a hard time going with a product that is now essentially dead.
3) OX (http://www.open-xchange.com/home.html) has what you are looking for. But understand that for whatever reason the app is not written MVC gui code is completely intermixed with functionality. It is effectively not much more changeable than a closed source program. They were working on this and by 2014 or so that likely will be fixed.
There were some others I experimented with if this is the sort of information you are looking for.
Your suggestion about postbox is a good one. And you are right. About halfway through writing that list I decided to grab a list from an existing rich mail client and picked postbox.:)
Second, why do so many people want a calendar in their mail client? Communication between different a calendar and a mail app I understand for things like invites. However, if you want the enterprise level features that come with Exchange/Outlook, just use them.
Outlook for Windows is a terrific client. The problem is it doesn't work well without exchange. I want exchange type features but with the client not the server doing the heavy lifting. The same way my client intermixes two email streams, and does invites is there any reason it can't do task management? People who don't work for large corporations still need task management and they need it on all their devices.
I'm an Apple guy. However if I could get Fuji laptop (i.e. a fully convertable durable tablet) running OSX I'd buy that in a second. Touch is really really nice. And applications like One Note work very well with stylus based input. Things like web browsers work well with even less refined input like a finger. At the same time, things like/. require a keyboard.
What Microsoft expects is a diverse world of hardware, like what exist on the x86 ecosystem. Some consumers go for finger based tablets others want an optional keyboard, others use primarily a portable laptop and a phone. Others don't need a laptop at all an do have a keyboard for the few times they need to do heavy text input....
I agree with most of your comment but not your assessment of Windows 8. Microsoft did not create the situation of everyone having a cell phone with rich content on it. Microsoft did not create the situation of this cell phone requiring a whole slew of SaS services. Microsoft did not create the situation of these SaS services being better used mobile and managed from a desktop. That is a genuine new problem which didn't exist a decade before. The same way that in the 1990s the possibilities of WAN based applications via. the browser introduced new problems or the same way that the shift to 64 bit processors introduced new problems that required the shift to.NET. Microsoft cannot keep offering the same product forever even if they wanted to. Staying still would be to effectuate change.
The new problem that Microsoft is addressing with Windows 8 is this list which is new: a) Every consumer owns a smartphone for every person loaded with apps and rich content. b) A large number want to use tablets that are ARM (low power, low functionality CPUs) with very high battery life and touch based c) A large number want to use tablets plus keyboard to be able to do work d) Virtually every consumer wants a laptop, a full featured portable personal system with a high functionality CPU. e) Virtually every consumer needs a workplace computer, which is either a desktop or laptop. Many want to be able to do some level of sharing between their workplace and home systems either work on a BYOD or access home services from a workplace computer. This frequently is addressed by virtualization i.e. guest operating systems in addition to their native operating systems.
The problem that Microsoft / Windows 8 is addressing is that society does not want the cost and integration expenses of (a)-(e) evolving into 5 totally separate technology infrastructures. That is a real problem and it is new. This isn't something Microsoft created or that Windows 7 is capable of addressing. Someone may agree or disagree with the Metro approach to solving this problem, but I don't think it is reasonable to argue that no problem exists.
I used all-in-one myself. Very nice system for the 80s. Its a pity that DEC just like Nokia moved themselves from having a rich product to just trying to be a Microsoft OEM. I also was a very long term elm and then pine user. I always used to admire the people who used emacs mail which was so feature rich. I resisted moving to an HTML enabled email client for a long time but eventually far too high a percentage of my emails had rich content or attachments.
I think rich clients are the best of both worlds. I've been using yahoo mail for like 15 years now as my personal email. I have a rich client, but if something goes wrong logging on directly has been a big plus.
I've use mail.app for compatability and Thunderbird as a secondary client.
1) The encryption stuff should not be such a pain. It should be on and self configure by default. 2) Task manager integrated into calendaring. Preferably allowing for task assignment. If you really want to push workflow (i.e. john should be able to read this hit approve and the email forwards to Suzie automatically with John's approval). 3) Digital signing 4) Labeling / tagging, integrated with gmail for gmail IMAP. 5) Twitter, evernote, linkedin... feeds and uploads 6) Link large files i.e. large files get replaced with links off a webdav and/or dropbox. 7) automatic multiple RE: Fwd reductions etc..
Huh? My mother, father, brother, wife and daughter all use email clients. Possibly my influence but I've yet to meet anyone who likes webmail over a client once its been setup for them.
They admit that's what they are doing. They are trying to drive manufacturers towards using high quality touch screens. They intend for the Windows 8 platform to be tablet + keyboard.
I don't see many hardcore Outlook users not wanting the rest of the Office suite. Everyone I've ever met whose a heavy Outlook user either uses Word daily or lives in Excel.
Slashdot Mirror
I know the NBC is comfortable with the bias. As they see it, MSNBC is a cable station that has established a strong niche regular viewership. A dedicated viewership in the millions is gold for a cable station it means reliable ratings i.e. advertising dollars day after day, week after week, year after year. And MSNBC's ratings are likely to double under a Republican administration. Moreover "news junkies" are a good demographic. Further this split allows NBC news to do important journalism with less political interference. Right now NBC can't do deep investigative work since they need access policy makers, which hampers the quality of their journalism. Even if it is the very same journalistic staff reporting for MSNBC and NBC, just being asked different questions by the hosts By shifting the power hostile reporting to MSNBC and then allowing NBC to just cover the controversy this has helped.
Finally of course MSNBC is a huge fan of clean energy which requires all sorts of complex devices made by GE.
My biggest sellers are the $400-$500 units why? Because that is all people are willing to spend and more features won't change that opinion, they'll either go elsewhere or not buy at all.
Maybe, maybe not. But if the market is really just a bunch of people in the $400-500 range who don't care about features Microsoft has already lost the consumer space. Game over. At that price point the windows ecosystem doesn't matter and the ARM based system are superior to x86. But even if it were the case that those sorts of skinflint customers were going to keep buying Windows systems forever, the $400-500 systems are generally sold at thin profit margins or a loss. Its a worthless market for the major vendors.
I should be thankful for MSFT because that kind of douchebaggery could seriously boost the repair side of my business, as more will be willing to actually buy desktops that can be fixed instead of cheap $400 laptops.
Oh absolutely. Not only that you'd make a ton of money refurbing old $1200 laptops to resell. There is no question that with a move towards more expensive systems the used market would be vibrant, just like it is for Apple where because Apple won't sell a system under $1k there is a huge resell value for used systems to fill that void. You'd do as much business as you could possibly handle.
This will be different if MSFT decides to fuck the OEMs, because you are talking about giving up ALL your sub $550 sales, which is a good 80% of companies like Dell. When a third party tries to fuck you out of 80% of your sales in a dead economy? Your company WILL do something about it.
I don't think its quite 80% of their sales. The median system is $515. But lets even assume it were 80%, that 80% probably represents almost 0% of the profits. Apple when they had 8% market share was already pulling 90% of the profits down. What Microsoft would be doing was reintroducing profits again. Systems would sell with real margin. Its not like that 80% completely walks. It probably looks something more like this:
1/3 don't buy a system at all. 2 years later though they have no choice and fall into one of the other 2 groups. ....
1/3 buy used or buy Linux or buy Android
1/3 buy a $1k new system and love it.
Dell sacrificed market share to move their net from 2.2% up to 4.4%. How much share would they be willing to lost to go back to 20% margins?
And lets not forget all those vendors are seeing their year over year sales drop by 10%, even with the low margin strategy. The PC business is miserable for them right how.
And the reason Android isn't ready is because again Google hasn't had a reason to give a fuck, MSFT was like Pepsi, a commodity product that is simply too cheap to care about competing with. All that changes if they hand over the sub $550 market to anybody that wants it, that's hundreds of millions of dollars right there for the plucking.
There is billions there for anyone who cares to pluck it. There is no question a high value approach will create a large opening for Linux, Android, iOS... to fill. Microsoft, if they are going to push their products up market is going to have to accept more of the market.
all it would take is Google packaging it into a friendly Crossover style installer, really not hard.
Of course its hard. Google is getting their ass handed to them on Android patents. You think they want to try and implement the Windows API without patent violations? IBM even without the patent threat, since they had immunity agreements couldn't keep up with the full API. No, the new systems will not support x86. You want x86 you are going to have to buy a Windows license. Microsoft can hold that line.
Finally i'm seeing a lot of places like Geeks selling "No OS" laptops and desktops cheap and you KNOW what that is about...piracy. hell probably 30% of the Windows boxes I see are Windows Pirate Edition and I have no doubt MSFT fuckes the OEM
Reread my original post. The protocols imposed by committee are those to fulfill an already existing need, i.e. they generate a consensus. Something like the revision to HTTP falls into the second group while the original HTTP was in the first. The HTTP revision protocol is that kind of protocol where Google is trying to drive the other big players towards adoption.
Gross profits for the last year is $6.5b
That gives them EBITDA of $2.4b
after all the write downs they lost $50m
And btw those write downs include settlements on the employees they laid off. That's not great it is not however a company dying quickly on the verge of bankruptcy. It is a company working through issues. Lets not overstate the problems.
The market is very concerned about their execution and with good reason. That's far short of bankruptcy though. As an aside any stock trading for a 1/3rd of book with only product problems, I'd happily buy and take my chances.
First off you aren't really presenting any evidence that people would go to those sorts of extraordinary lengths to avoid buying new machines. You are just reasserting that they don't really need software.
Gaming is less of an issue with each passing month, with companies supporting Linux and OS X more and more.
I've been on OSX for a decade now and Linux for 18 years. I don't game but for OSX its pretty much the same, games come to OSX a couple years after they come out for PC. There is much less selection and anyone who cares deeply about PC gaming owns a windows box. I think the real change as far as the gaming market goes is that gaming has mostly moved off of Windows and its less of a reason to upgrade the computer. The casual gaming market thriving though on phones and tablets and this might start driving an upgrades but we are still years from that.
And as for productivity software: sure, there are enterprise applications that are Windows-only, but those are also becoming more of a commodity. With most of the functionality of Microsoft Office (plus some features of their own), Open Office and Libre Office have made office software not just a commodity, but a free one.
Just go to the forum where people are discussing Outlook. People who are heavy Word users don't tend to post on /. but no OO does not support most advanced Word features. I think its great that OO and Google Docs are making a basic suite available to people cheaply. I've installed NeoOffice (a Mac only OO fork) on several family member's computers to meet their needs. But anyone who is going to be using these programs regularly and heavily still likely needs things that OO just doesn't have. The low end office suite is a commodity, the high end is still a pricey piece of software people are willing to pay for.
But without the OEMs they are seriously boned,
Of course. But increasing margins is good for the OEMs as well. There is no reason OEMs should want to live in a world of thin margins either. There is no reason that OEMs wouldn't want to back to the lucrative hardware markets of the 1990s. Dell, HP, Toshiba... would love a situation where there is plenty of money to go around and they can differentiate themselves based on features or quality. But they can't do that individually because Apple has skimmed off the price insensitive buyers and for most of the remaining Windows consumers they have shown time and time again that they would rather a $500 piece of junk than a $2000 excellent machine.
On the other hand if the $500 piece of junk didn't exist anymore.
and if the OEMs get together to support a single Linux?
Assuming they avoid anti-trust issues.... OK they do. And the situation is very much like Netbooks vs. laptops before the XP price cuts, or PCs vs. Commodore Amiga. Linux machines run on cheap hardware offering a poorer environment while Windows runs on better machines offering a much richer environment. Especially since the OEMs do not want to do for their consumer division what they are currently doing in their server division (and some of the companies like Toshiba and Acer don't do at all) in terms of the complexity of Linux support. Heck read your own posts on the topic of Linux support.
Don't think Google would be more than happy to help those OEMs with Android? hey it'll have all the casual games, all the web, and everything is tied into Google. Bet it would sure make Google happy, and it really wouldn't be hard to turn a decent chunk of the consumer market away from Windows when more folks are living on the net than ever and all the developers are working on Android and iOS.
I agree. I don't think that Android is ready yet though. Most consumers still have need for a few pieces of desktop software for which there is no internet equivalent. Android and iOS apps really are still fundamentally phone apps and very poor from a feature sense. SaS apps are somewhat better but even still limited. If Microsoft is going to have to fight this battle, far better in 2013 when Google isn't ready yet than in 2017 when they likely will be. It is far easier for Microsoft to move the cost of their hardware up, then for Google to create an entire infrastructure of full featured software. Meanwhile Apple is explicitly structuring iOS to act as a supporting OS for OSX, so they may likely never be ready.
if MSFT doesn't want that business I'm sure they'll find another OS happy to take that share and MSFT would do well to remember that more and more people only care about the net, not the Winflag.
I don't agree that's true. I think its a minority something like 1/4 of all users. There is not much Microsoft can do for the web only crowd. ARM is a better platform for them, and there is no reason for them not to buy an iPad or just use their phones other than inertia and that won't last.
I do think a lot of consumers will think that's true until they try and live without a desktop. To my mind its a lot like Google Docs. While it is absolutely true that most people don't use more than a few percent of Word's advanced features most people do need a few percent and they often all need a different few percent. Same with Excel. I have a lot of friends that have had to move up Excel to Quantrix, because they are actually pushing their system and Excel breaks down badly as the amount of rows goes over a few thousands and instead is more like a few million. Lets not even discuss Google Docs for sheets of that size.
The same thing happens when people don't have recourse to a desktop machine. That few percent for which they really do need power becomes a problem. And that's true even with web apps. I use Evernote on my phone all the time. I manage Evernote from my desktop. Without the management features that the desktop client brings, I couldn't use it on my phone.
He's saying $.12 / gb / mo. You are talking about one $.06 one time cost. Obviously if it were a one time fee no one would object.
RIM has $2b in cash and is doing well in some offbeat markets like Indonesia. They have problems but they aren't likely to go broke.
Well I played a round a little with Apple's open-source calendar server. That has webdav but really isn't designed for document sharing which seems to be something you are looking for. But in terms of a good quality calendar share only that's free it's excellent.
egroupware which you mentioned is in the process of going commercial. Stuff is being dropped form the community edition to make it more annoying. For me the killer was you couldn't save views. But it has been around.
These were not a fit for me cost wise but Oracle Beehive and Oracle Communication are both worth taking a look at. Beehive is still quite active. Oracle is free for personal use and knowing these products is likely a marketable skill. Obviously the target market is huge.
After that I don't know anything more than you are likely to find in a websearch. Let me just give you a list you can google from though:
Name
PBCS
patientos
Scalix
Zimbra
"bedeworks /
UW Calender project"
openEMR/EHRlive
sogo
citadel
open Xchange
"calendarserver.org
( Darwin Calendar and Contacts Server)"
Chandler
DAViCal
Dingo
Kerio
Zafara
OBM
egroupware
Oracle Communications (Java communications server)
Oracle Beehive
sabedav
radicale
Horde Groupware
Kolab
MoreGroupware
phpproject
I understand your point and agree that PC customers are cheapskates. Moreover Microsoft has driven the profit from the hardware side to the software side with their grey box strategy. But Microsoft does have a substantial advantage here, they control the copyright to the operating system everyone wants to use.
Microsoft can very easily shift the economics.
-- So for example they can set high standards for Windows 8 boxes and not license Windows 8, for boxes that don't qualify. They can charge a a steep premium for Windows 7.
-- Or they could avoiding micro managing just ban it all together and set a minimum price for manufacturers of $800 or so.
-- Or they could combine the two and punitive licensing to inexpensive machines. Something like, for every $100 your computer at time of final sale sold for less than $100 the final cost of the Windows license goes up by $50. People would have to have a strong preference for junk to pay 70% (which is likely what it will would work out to be final sale) for nothing over getting quality hardware.
etc... Now all of those approaches do create an opening for Linux at the low end. But if I'm Microsoft I'm thinking OSX, iOS and Android are much more significant threats than Linux in 2012 and I have to pick my battles. Linux's shortcomings, especially when sold to the bottom of the market, are likely to repeat what happened on the Netbook and even if they gain ground it will be easily retaken. That does mean that Lauren ad has to be a thing of the past.
If Microsoft doesn't do anything like that... then they repeat the mistakes of Vista. There are a small fraction of machines that run Windows 8 well and Windows 8 gets a terrible reputation. People hate Metro. Slowly the price of good touchscreens, and the associated hinge (you forgot that rather expensive part) come down and become standard features around 2015 or so and Windows 8 becomes usable on standard hardware. Then Windows 9 is released into a hardware market that can actually support it and this gets positive press. The question then is what does the consumer space look like with a 3 year surge of "windows sucks". For example is Apple / OSX up to 20% marketshare or worse, Vista was wonderful for Apple.
Conversely if Microsoft starts driving prices up again lots of other premium hardware starts seeming less premium. For example going all SSD on light laptops or a large SSD cache plus HDD. Taking a $500 computer and making it a $1000 computer to go SSD might be too much. But taking a $1500 computer to $2000 isn't going to be the same thing at all. Its not like Dell, HP, Lenevo, Asus, Acer... don't know how to make good computers its just that the customer base, especially in consumer has been demanding crap. As people use more premium parts, parts manufacturers can start to create more expensive parts. For example there is no reason that Windows people shouldn't be switching to retina displays. We might go back to the world where $4000 premium laptops aren't rare but represent a decent sized chunk of the market, $2000 is the average and $1000 represents the low end junk. And in that world, the $500 Windows 7 machines are seen as legacy junk. The market psychology just shifts as the software gets more demanding. And this drives upgrade cycles to be fast again as more powerful hardware leads to both more powerful hardware and more demanding software.
As an aside, Fujitsu pretty much makes the ideal Windows 8 computer today and those do sell well abroad and in medical. I wasn't an Apple guy I'd be getting a Fujitsu machine and running Windows 8. Even with an OS I don't want, I'm always sorely tempted to switch back to get the Fujitsu because of that versatility and durability. Microsost One Note is a great product, on the right hardware. There is no reason it couldn't be another Outlook, Excel, Word if the hardware manufacturers were making the machines en mass to support it.
Agreed. But that means that they wouldn't be cannibalizing sales of Outlook if they offered a strong email client which was my point. You are agreeing with me not disagreeing, just saying it different.
Why do you think businesses are still on XP? Because people have been tolerant of slow business upgrades. As XP becomes more painful businesses will be forced to migrate. That's a good thing. Vista was released January 30, 2007. Windows 7 ships with an XP compatibility mode to handle legacy. There is no good reason that any business computer at all anywhere should be using XP. One of the ways of making that happen is for stuff to start breaking in XP.
Windows 7 offers an XP compatibility mode. Microsoft has already handled this problem.
No they won't. Lets break this into groups:
Small business -- This segment is cheap. But they are the ones that benefit the most from SaS. They will upgrade to the system that allows them to use SB apps.
Home -- Home has entertainment and rich content needs. They should be moving over already and that's happening with iOS / Android.
Enterprise -- Here the switching costs can be enormous but the problem is software not hardware. Hardware costs are trivial. Windows 7 offers Windows XP compatibility mode. These people can be easily moved.
I tried something like this last year using Linuxy solutions. For a midsized setup (30k users in groups ranging from about 30-500). For personal though I'm not sure it doesn't make more sense to just treat calendar and disk storage as two totally distinct problems and thus simplify the solution. Pick any of a dozen different internet calendar / scheduling services and do storage by itself.
But if you want to know the lay of the land as far as groupware:
1) I didn't go with Zimbra because at the time they were focused heavily on the rack server space and their longer term direction scared me. The cost per user was high for the commercial version and I did want commercial version features.
2) Scalix was really good 4-5 years ago. But is essentially now unmaintained. If you can live with broken compatibility and FireFox 3 for less than 10 users it is free. It has a very advanced calendar and an easy to use but powerful administration system. Really nice but I'd have a hard time going with a product that is now essentially dead.
3) OX (http://www.open-xchange.com/home.html) has what you are looking for. But understand that for whatever reason the app is not written MVC gui code is completely intermixed with functionality. It is effectively not much more changeable than a closed source program. They were working on this and by 2014 or so that likely will be fixed.
There were some others I experimented with if this is the sort of information you are looking for.
Its been 3 rounds. I'm not playing 20 questions. Point to some specific text on a specific ad designed to appeal to consumers with dogmatic attitudes.
Your suggestion about postbox is a good one. And you are right. About halfway through writing that list I decided to grab a list from an existing rich mail client and picked postbox. :)
Second, why do so many people want a calendar in their mail client? Communication between different a calendar and a mail app I understand for things like invites. However, if you want the enterprise level features that come with Exchange/Outlook, just use them.
Outlook for Windows is a terrific client. The problem is it doesn't work well without exchange. I want exchange type features but with the client not the server doing the heavy lifting. The same way my client intermixes two email streams, and does invites is there any reason it can't do task management? People who don't work for large corporations still need task management and they need it on all their devices.
I'm an Apple guy. However if I could get Fuji laptop (i.e. a fully convertable durable tablet) running OSX I'd buy that in a second. Touch is really really nice. And applications like One Note work very well with stylus based input. Things like web browsers work well with even less refined input like a finger. At the same time, things like /. require a keyboard.
What Microsoft expects is a diverse world of hardware, like what exist on the x86 ecosystem. Some consumers go for finger based tablets others want an optional keyboard, others use primarily a portable laptop and a phone. Others don't need a laptop at all an do have a keyboard for the few times they need to do heavy text input....
I agree with most of your comment but not your assessment of Windows 8. Microsoft did not create the situation of everyone having a cell phone with rich content on it. Microsoft did not create the situation of this cell phone requiring a whole slew of SaS services. Microsoft did not create the situation of these SaS services being better used mobile and managed from a desktop. That is a genuine new problem which didn't exist a decade before. The same way that in the 1990s the possibilities of WAN based applications via. the browser introduced new problems or the same way that the shift to 64 bit processors introduced new problems that required the shift to .NET. Microsoft cannot keep offering the same product forever even if they wanted to. Staying still would be to effectuate change.
The new problem that Microsoft is addressing with Windows 8 is this list which is new:
a) Every consumer owns a smartphone for every person loaded with apps and rich content.
b) A large number want to use tablets that are ARM (low power, low functionality CPUs) with very high battery life and touch based
c) A large number want to use tablets plus keyboard to be able to do work
d) Virtually every consumer wants a laptop, a full featured portable personal system with a high functionality CPU.
e) Virtually every consumer needs a workplace computer, which is either a desktop or laptop. Many want to be able to do some level of sharing between their workplace and home systems either work on a BYOD or access home services from a workplace computer. This frequently is addressed by virtualization i.e. guest operating systems in addition to their native operating systems.
The problem that Microsoft / Windows 8 is addressing is that society does not want the cost and integration expenses of (a)-(e) evolving into 5 totally separate technology infrastructures. That is a real problem and it is new. This isn't something Microsoft created or that Windows 7 is capable of addressing. Someone may agree or disagree with the Metro approach to solving this problem, but I don't think it is reasonable to argue that no problem exists.
I used all-in-one myself. Very nice system for the 80s. Its a pity that DEC just like Nokia moved themselves from having a rich product to just trying to be a Microsoft OEM. I also was a very long term elm and then pine user. I always used to admire the people who used emacs mail which was so feature rich. I resisted moving to an HTML enabled email client for a long time but eventually far too high a percentage of my emails had rich content or attachments.
I think rich clients are the best of both worlds. I've been using yahoo mail for like 15 years now as my personal email. I have a rich client, but if something goes wrong logging on directly has been a big plus.
I've use mail.app for compatability and Thunderbird as a secondary client.
1) The encryption stuff should not be such a pain. It should be on and self configure by default.
2) Task manager integrated into calendaring. Preferably allowing for task assignment. If you really want to push workflow (i.e. john should be able to read this hit approve and the email forwards to Suzie automatically with John's approval).
3) Digital signing
4) Labeling / tagging, integrated with gmail for gmail IMAP.
5) Twitter, evernote, linkedin... feeds and uploads
6) Link large files i.e. large files get replaced with links off a webdav and/or dropbox.
7) automatic multiple RE: Fwd reductions
etc..
Huh? My mother, father, brother, wife and daughter all use email clients. Possibly my influence but I've yet to meet anyone who likes webmail over a client once its been setup for them.
They admit that's what they are doing. They are trying to drive manufacturers towards using high quality touch screens. They intend for the Windows 8 platform to be tablet + keyboard.
I don't see many hardcore Outlook users not wanting the rest of the Office suite. Everyone I've ever met whose a heavy Outlook user either uses Word daily or lives in Excel.
And their website is dogmatic as contrasted with other company's websites that tend to hem and haw indecisively about their products?
So what comes down to is you don't really have an example or a point.