Also, China to USA is what Germany is to Greece, except Greece cannot print money and USA can
That's a hell of a big difference. Greece has a lot of problems, but the reason why their current problems are so intractable is that they can't print their own currency – that is under the control of the European Central Bank, which pursues a monetary policy that might be suitable for Germany and Scandinavia, but is grossly inappropriate for Greece. The Greeks need inflation and currency devaluation to increase exports and tourism, but the Germans don't want this. The result is that Greek goods and services are overpriced due to the Euro, and Greece has no way of getting out from under its debt. In contrast, the US has control over its own monetary policy, and our debts are denominated in our own currency.
Building a "standard" building (1000 sq ft home) in the US costs about $250,000-350,000 without the lot (just building costs).
Nonsense. That figure might be accurate for a 3000-sq-ft McMansion, but a 1000 sq ft house is nowhere near that much, unless you're demanding that everything be WAY overbuilt.
Take for Ikea homes. Yes Ikea sells homes, using this method. They are cheaper than any other home. Look at this Ikea home for 86 K, which includes everything in the inside as well.
That won't sell well in the US. People in America hear "prefab home" and they think "double-wide". And the form factor of that Ikea house doesn't help any: the thing even looks like a double-wide. Not to mention that most parts of the US are dealing with a large volume of foreclosures. Where I live, there are a lot of houses cheaper than $86,000, and while some of them are dumps, many of them are of good quality. And keep in mind that the $86K price quoted by Ikea is for just the house, not the land.
The current record holder stands tall at 828 meters and took five years to build, but a Chinese company called Broad Sustainable Building aims to smash that record by building the 838 meter Sky City tower, in Changsa, China in a mere 90 days. BSB plans to use prefab building techniques to construct the tower in record time."
What is this company's track record? Have their prefab building techniques been used successfully in the past on smaller buildings? If so, how much smaller were they than the one they are planning to construct now? Do they have a good safety record?
Background information like this is important in order to determine whether they have a good chance of actually pulling this off, or if they're just blowing smoke.
It will be a while before a sub-$50 computer is truly available.
Intel could probably do it with the Atom if they wanted to, but for some reason they continue positioning Atom-based platforms as if they were competitive with Bobcat, which they clearly aren't. Where they might be able to stand out is by making a single-board x86 PC that includes 1GB or so of soldered-in DDR SDRAM, and ~40GB of solid state storage also on-board.
Not "Windows" in any meaningful sense
on
The $45 Windows Laptop
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I saw this same (or very similar) model on sale at the local CVS. One reason it's so cheap is that it doesn't run "Windows" in any meaningful sense. It runs an embedded-system OS that is called Windows, but isn't compatible with any existing Windows software. (Look for much more of this kind of confusion with the upcoming WinRT for ARM.) Furthermore, since this netbook doesn't have an x86 processor, it can't run the real version of Windows.
I know the existence of class action suits has benefits but there seem to be so many downsides that I have to hope there's another way.
There is another way: government regulation. That's what is done in most of Europe. The reason why we have so many class action lawsuits in the US is that American regulations and regulators are so toothless. Without class actions, companies would be free to commit a whole bunch of injustices that are too small to sue for individually, but add up to big profits in the aggregate. With class actions, the money mostly goes to the lawyers, but at least the companies have to shell out the money and don't get to keep their ill-gotten gains.
Windows 7 is the most recent production release of the Windows NT kernel, which effectively reimplemented the Win32 API from scratch in a new, modern OS. The WinNT security model is actually better than that of Unix, but the need for legacy compatibility required pretty much everyone to run as administrator during the Windows XP era, which rendered many of the security improvements null and void. That is why UAC was introduced on Vista; though it had serious flaws at first (multiple clicks required for basic OS functions) it did wave a big red flag in front of developers requiring admin permissions in their software, saying "YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG". By the time Windows 7 came around, limited user access was a realistic possibility for most users. Added functionality like protected mode for the browser also made a real difference. These days, exploits are much more likely to come through the Java runtime or through one of Adobe's browser plugins than through a security hole in Windows itself. Things aren't perfect by any means, but no matter what else you might criticize them for, no one can reasonably dispute that Microsoft has gotten a LOT better on system security since the Windows Me era.
Real servers need ECC RAM. I'd be reluctant to even run a home file server without it, if that server contains critical data.
Does ARM support ECC? If not, then it can be ruled out on that basis alone. Atom and Bobcat can also be ruled out at this time since neither support ECC RAM.
A while back Intel announced a 2-core, 1.2 GHz Sandy Bridge "Pentium 350" that has a max TDP of 15W and has the standard server chip package, including ECC support. This would be nice for small, low-power servers. But for some reason, I haven't been able to find them on sale anywhere (online or off), even though Intel's site says it was launched Q4 2011.
They didn't make everything out of CRAP in those days
Average build quality may have been higher (though it wasn't always), but that doesn't change the fact that old electrolytic caps will still fail. If you read a guide on troubleshooting an old solid-state pinball machine from the late 1970s or early 1980s, one of the first things it will tell you to do is replace the filter caps. They can and usually do go bad over time, causing unstable operation.
Few platform segregation points? Maybe, but one price is lots of legacy garbage. x86 still has to support those ancient segmented modes. Then there's junk like the ASCII adjust and decimal adjust instructions: AAA, AAS, AAD, and AAM, and DAA, and DAS. Nobody uses packed decimal any more! And hardly anyone ever used it
Actually, if you're emulating a Z80 CPU in x86 assembly, you probably will be using DAA or DAS (depending on whether the virtual N flag is set) to emulate the Z80's DAA opcode. I've seen this done in real-world code not too many years back.
Yes. Your post basically summarized the main problem underlying the philosophy of intellectual property.
I don't see the connection. Even if there were no patent laws, Intel's competitors wouldn't magically be able to catch up to its process technology. It's cost countless billions of dollars for Intel to get where it's going – and I mean billions in actual, on-the-ground manufacturing and operations costs, not just R&D.
Maybe stock market transactions should require a CAPTCHA. No human intervention, no purchase/sale. (There could be exceptions for stuff like limit orders, which have a long history and aren't that open to abuse - in this case the CAPTCHA would be at the time of placing the order, not the time it's executed.)
The x86 has four general purpose registers. No one in their right mind would design a chip like that today.
On what basis do you exclude ebp, esi, and edi from consideration as general-purpose registers? It's been a while since I did any serious assembly programming on x86, but as far as I remember, the only real limitations on them is that you can't access them in 8-bit chunks. (And there's specific register requirements for the string instructions, but does anyone even use those any more?) So I'd say x86 has 7 general-purpose registers, not 4. Granted, it is a limitation, and one area where x86 does fall behind some other architectures.
However, it's worth pointing out that x86 running in 64-bit mode has extra general-purpose registers, bringing it up to a total of 15. And you also get MMX and SSE registers on top of that on all newer x86 architectures.
There's a very easy way for Microsoft to avoid complaints about this: allow users to create their own Windows themes. Currently you can only change colors and text size/font on a standard Windows install. The actual Windows Explorer engine allows full customization via theme files, but the theme files are signed with a MS key, and no one has cracked this key yet to make it usable on a stock system without hacking a DLL. Why not give a registry option, at least, to enable unsigned themes? It could be disabled by default (and allow admins to force disable via group policy) if they're concerned about security, but it would give some choices to users who want their system to look the way they're used to.
I know there are third-party packages that can do this. But that's not the point. I shouldn't have to buy additional software just to get around some bullshit "protection" Microsoft put in to keep us from having full control over our own systems.
Who says I have to have a specific "beef" with Windows Phone? Microsoft is trying to sell me a product in a market niche that already has two major competitors; it's their job to explain why they are better than iOS and Android. And I just don't see it. Windows Phones aren't as polished as the iPhone, nor do they offer the freedom of Android. And they have far fewer apps available than either.
To the extent I do have an actual problem with Windows Phone (as opposed to just considering it not as good a product as its competitors), it's that Microsoft is insistent on pushing this failed model onto the consumer and even business desktop, despite the loud chorus of people saying "DO NOT WANT."
Stephen Elop's decisions as Nokia CEO indicate that he is placing the well-being of another company (Microsoft) over the well-being of the company he's supposed to represent. The result is the $1.2 billion quarterly loss mentioned in the original post. This loss is, in large part, a result of Elop's breach of his fiduciary duty to Nokia. Why haven't the shareholders sued him?
DirectWrite (and frameworks which use it, like WPF) use ideal rendering rather than pixel snapping by default.
And every time someone moves a major application to this framework, the users complain because it looks blurry as hell. We saw this with Visual Studio (I believe Microsoft eventually backed off and fixed the rendering) and with Firefox (fortunately, starting with FF7, you can tell it to use "GDI Classic" mode while keeping hardware acceleration on).
DirectWrite was one of the first examples of one of the most destructive tendencies in Microsoft today: Apple envy. Windows 8 is the apogee of this trend. What they don't get is that they're not Apple, will never be Apple, and most of their users - especially the business users who pay the bills - don't want them to be Apple.
So Windows RT is designed to address all those needs. It answers the threat to the platform. It will produce Apple like per unit revenue which will make the pension fund managers smile. And it ends the Linux threat by carefully locking the platform and keeping a very tight leash on the OEMs.
The problem is that this doesn't explain why any customers (and by customers I include OEMs) would go along with this arrangement. What incentive do they have to do so?
They can't even stay the same, they have around 90% of the market and PC sales are flat, shareholders have been waiting patiently for a decade to see some share appreciation on MSFT and there doesn't appear to be a lot of upside on the Windows PC.
Then the expectation of share appreciation needs to change. Microsoft is now a mature company, so they should be switching from capital appreciation to a greater focus on dividends.
Just wanting share appreciation really badly won't make it happen. In fact, the rollout of Windows 8 not only won't bring back the startup-level growth or Apple-style profit margins they want, but is likely to make matters worse by hurting Microsoft in their core market (business desktops and servers).
Wrong. A tablet OS that can do actual office work, and produce media instead of just consuming it, is a new market. I'm fine with paying an extra $50 for a tablet OS that enables me to retouch photos with Photoshop, produce e-learning content with flash or html 5, and edit sound with Audacity. These things are impossible or slow and kludgy on IOS and Android devices.
And it will still be impossible or slow or kludgy on a WinRT tablet. The problem isn't with the software, the problem is with the form factor. You need a keyboard and mouse to do this kind of work effectively.
A premium price for Windows tablets would make sense if Microsoft plans to leverage their (strangle)hold on the business world. The argument would be "you know how to manage and secure Windows desktops. By paying this premium for Windows tablets, you get tablet devices that you can similarly control, thereby reducing Total Cost of Ownership."
That plan would make sense... if Microsoft had implemented Active Directory on WinRT. The lack of this crucial IT management feature, which pretty much everyone in the business world uses extensively, indicates that this is a consumer-focused device.
But that would mean Microsoft is abandoning, or at least substantially downplaying, the consumer, and ceding that ground to Android and iOS. That -would be- a bet-the-company move for Ballmer, et.al.
That's what they should have done. The crappy, low-end OEM Windows desktop is indeed dying in favor of other devices that do a better job on the consumption side. But businesses, gamers, and power users will need a solid version of Windows for the indefinite future. People who do work and produce stuff still need a desktop OS, and that OS is still almost always Windows - thanks to Office, Photoshop, AutoCAD, and a million legacy one-off applications scattered all around the place.
Microsoft needs to narrow its focus to the core. Keep doing what is necessary to stay on top in its main competencies. Stop trying to own the world, stop trying to engage in massive growth into other fields. Accept that it's a mature company and de-emphasize stock price appreciation in favor of larger dividends.
It feels more like they are trying to kill ARM at an OEM level: "It's too expensive with Windows and no one wants it without"... Of course, that thought is nonsense...but have you seen reason and sanity at work lately there?
If they really are thinking that, they have delusions of grandeur. ARM existed before Microsoft had any products for it, and will continue to thrive after WinRT flops.
Microsoft really needs to come to its senses and give up the 1990s-era delusion that they can own the whole IT market. They have a *lock* on the business desktop, for good reasons (and a few bad reasons as well), a lock on the PC gamer desktop, almost total domination of the office suite market, and a decent though not overwhelming market share in the server OS business. They need to focus on maintaining and building this, rather than trying to control everything under the sun. This is their bread and butter. If they really want to spread their wings, they would have been better off buying Adobe (as was inaccurately rumored a while back), since Photoshop/Creative Suite fits in very well with their core business demographic and is the industry standard.
I think it is more of a cautious approach to entering the market.
Price the OS, so that it will only be included on the high end Tablets (ones with faster processors and more memory) So when these go on the market they run very well and smooth. You don't want bad reviews out of the starting gate because the starting tables are just running of the systems minimum specifications.
The problem with this argument is that WinRT will never even get "out of the starting gate" if the first devices are so grossly overpriced. This isn't a new market; Microsoft has to compete with Apple and Google, both of which have substantial installed bases. Apple, in particular, already has the premium tablet market sewn up, while Google's Android is found on a very wide array of devices and can be implemented at a very low price due to lack of licensing costs.
Microsoft has to seriously consider, from the customer's perspective, why anyone would choose a WinRT tablet over an iPad 3. The iPad 3 is $629 for the least expensive model with 3G/4G capability. WinRT tablets are going to be considerably more expensive. The iPad 3 has a premium name, massive installed software base, and Retina Display. The WinRT tablet won't have any of these things. What's more, you will get some customers who think because it's called "Windows 8" that it can run normal Windows software, and they aren't going to be very happy when they find out that this is not true.
The whole Windows 8 project is shaping up to be a failure greater even than Vista.
So they're basically screwing up the desktop experience on Windows 8 in favor of tablets and smartphones, and on top of that they're pricing it so high that it won't have any reasonable chance of success in the market they want.
I'm betting that Steve Ballmer will be out the door by the time all this is over.
Apple has abandoned Classic and Rosetta so now there is a tremendous amount of software, and the data accessed by said software, that can't run on the new machines.
If you cared about legacy support you should have gone with Microsoft instead.
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Also, China to USA is what Germany is to Greece, except Greece cannot print money and USA can
That's a hell of a big difference. Greece has a lot of problems, but the reason why their current problems are so intractable is that they can't print their own currency – that is under the control of the European Central Bank, which pursues a monetary policy that might be suitable for Germany and Scandinavia, but is grossly inappropriate for Greece. The Greeks need inflation and currency devaluation to increase exports and tourism, but the Germans don't want this. The result is that Greek goods and services are overpriced due to the Euro, and Greece has no way of getting out from under its debt. In contrast, the US has control over its own monetary policy, and our debts are denominated in our own currency.
Building a "standard" building (1000 sq ft home) in the US costs about $250,000-350,000 without the lot (just building costs).
Nonsense. That figure might be accurate for a 3000-sq-ft McMansion, but a 1000 sq ft house is nowhere near that much, unless you're demanding that everything be WAY overbuilt.
Take for Ikea homes. Yes Ikea sells homes, using this method. They are cheaper than any other home. Look at this Ikea home for 86 K, which includes everything in the inside as well.
That won't sell well in the US. People in America hear "prefab home" and they think "double-wide". And the form factor of that Ikea house doesn't help any: the thing even looks like a double-wide. Not to mention that most parts of the US are dealing with a large volume of foreclosures. Where I live, there are a lot of houses cheaper than $86,000, and while some of them are dumps, many of them are of good quality. And keep in mind that the $86K price quoted by Ikea is for just the house, not the land.
The current record holder stands tall at 828 meters and took five years to build, but a Chinese company called Broad Sustainable Building aims to smash that record by building the 838 meter Sky City tower, in Changsa, China in a mere 90 days. BSB plans to use prefab building techniques to construct the tower in record time."
What is this company's track record? Have their prefab building techniques been used successfully in the past on smaller buildings? If so, how much smaller were they than the one they are planning to construct now? Do they have a good safety record?
Background information like this is important in order to determine whether they have a good chance of actually pulling this off, or if they're just blowing smoke.
It will be a while before a sub-$50 computer is truly available.
Intel could probably do it with the Atom if they wanted to, but for some reason they continue positioning Atom-based platforms as if they were competitive with Bobcat, which they clearly aren't. Where they might be able to stand out is by making a single-board x86 PC that includes 1GB or so of soldered-in DDR SDRAM, and ~40GB of solid state storage also on-board.
I saw this same (or very similar) model on sale at the local CVS. One reason it's so cheap is that it doesn't run "Windows" in any meaningful sense. It runs an embedded-system OS that is called Windows, but isn't compatible with any existing Windows software. (Look for much more of this kind of confusion with the upcoming WinRT for ARM.) Furthermore, since this netbook doesn't have an x86 processor, it can't run the real version of Windows.
I know the existence of class action suits has benefits but there seem to be so many downsides that I have to hope there's another way.
There is another way: government regulation. That's what is done in most of Europe. The reason why we have so many class action lawsuits in the US is that American regulations and regulators are so toothless. Without class actions, companies would be free to commit a whole bunch of injustices that are too small to sue for individually, but add up to big profits in the aggregate. With class actions, the money mostly goes to the lawyers, but at least the companies have to shell out the money and don't get to keep their ill-gotten gains.
Microsoft Windows 7 is the same quality as Windows ME, just with a fancier UI, which I don't need anyways.
How the hell did a comment like this get modded Insightful?
Windows Me was a single-user OS with, frankly, no such thing as security. It was the last iteration of the 9x kernel, a system so archaic that it still used DOS as a boot loader and 16-bit device driver compatibility layer.
Windows 7 is the most recent production release of the Windows NT kernel, which effectively reimplemented the Win32 API from scratch in a new, modern OS. The WinNT security model is actually better than that of Unix, but the need for legacy compatibility required pretty much everyone to run as administrator during the Windows XP era, which rendered many of the security improvements null and void. That is why UAC was introduced on Vista; though it had serious flaws at first (multiple clicks required for basic OS functions) it did wave a big red flag in front of developers requiring admin permissions in their software, saying "YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG". By the time Windows 7 came around, limited user access was a realistic possibility for most users. Added functionality like protected mode for the browser also made a real difference. These days, exploits are much more likely to come through the Java runtime or through one of Adobe's browser plugins than through a security hole in Windows itself. Things aren't perfect by any means, but no matter what else you might criticize them for, no one can reasonably dispute that Microsoft has gotten a LOT better on system security since the Windows Me era.
Real servers need ECC RAM. I'd be reluctant to even run a home file server without it, if that server contains critical data.
Does ARM support ECC? If not, then it can be ruled out on that basis alone. Atom and Bobcat can also be ruled out at this time since neither support ECC RAM.
A while back Intel announced a 2-core, 1.2 GHz Sandy Bridge "Pentium 350" that has a max TDP of 15W and has the standard server chip package, including ECC support. This would be nice for small, low-power servers. But for some reason, I haven't been able to find them on sale anywhere (online or off), even though Intel's site says it was launched Q4 2011.
They didn't make everything out of CRAP in those days
Average build quality may have been higher (though it wasn't always), but that doesn't change the fact that old electrolytic caps will still fail. If you read a guide on troubleshooting an old solid-state pinball machine from the late 1970s or early 1980s, one of the first things it will tell you to do is replace the filter caps. They can and usually do go bad over time, causing unstable operation.
Few platform segregation points? Maybe, but one price is lots of legacy garbage. x86 still has to support those ancient segmented modes. Then there's junk like the ASCII adjust and decimal adjust instructions: AAA, AAS, AAD, and AAM, and DAA, and DAS. Nobody uses packed decimal any more! And hardly anyone ever used it
Actually, if you're emulating a Z80 CPU in x86 assembly, you probably will be using DAA or DAS (depending on whether the virtual N flag is set) to emulate the Z80's DAA opcode. I've seen this done in real-world code not too many years back.
Yes. Your post basically summarized the main problem underlying the philosophy of intellectual property.
I don't see the connection. Even if there were no patent laws, Intel's competitors wouldn't magically be able to catch up to its process technology. It's cost countless billions of dollars for Intel to get where it's going – and I mean billions in actual, on-the-ground manufacturing and operations costs, not just R&D.
Maybe stock market transactions should require a CAPTCHA. No human intervention, no purchase/sale. (There could be exceptions for stuff like limit orders, which have a long history and aren't that open to abuse - in this case the CAPTCHA would be at the time of placing the order, not the time it's executed.)
The x86 has four general purpose registers. No one in their right mind would design a chip like that today.
On what basis do you exclude ebp, esi, and edi from consideration as general-purpose registers? It's been a while since I did any serious assembly programming on x86, but as far as I remember, the only real limitations on them is that you can't access them in 8-bit chunks. (And there's specific register requirements for the string instructions, but does anyone even use those any more?) So I'd say x86 has 7 general-purpose registers, not 4. Granted, it is a limitation, and one area where x86 does fall behind some other architectures.
However, it's worth pointing out that x86 running in 64-bit mode has extra general-purpose registers, bringing it up to a total of 15. And you also get MMX and SSE registers on top of that on all newer x86 architectures.
There's a very easy way for Microsoft to avoid complaints about this: allow users to create their own Windows themes. Currently you can only change colors and text size/font on a standard Windows install. The actual Windows Explorer engine allows full customization via theme files, but the theme files are signed with a MS key, and no one has cracked this key yet to make it usable on a stock system without hacking a DLL. Why not give a registry option, at least, to enable unsigned themes? It could be disabled by default (and allow admins to force disable via group policy) if they're concerned about security, but it would give some choices to users who want their system to look the way they're used to.
I know there are third-party packages that can do this. But that's not the point. I shouldn't have to buy additional software just to get around some bullshit "protection" Microsoft put in to keep us from having full control over our own systems.
Who says I have to have a specific "beef" with Windows Phone? Microsoft is trying to sell me a product in a market niche that already has two major competitors; it's their job to explain why they are better than iOS and Android. And I just don't see it. Windows Phones aren't as polished as the iPhone, nor do they offer the freedom of Android. And they have far fewer apps available than either.
To the extent I do have an actual problem with Windows Phone (as opposed to just considering it not as good a product as its competitors), it's that Microsoft is insistent on pushing this failed model onto the consumer and even business desktop, despite the loud chorus of people saying "DO NOT WANT."
Stephen Elop's decisions as Nokia CEO indicate that he is placing the well-being of another company (Microsoft) over the well-being of the company he's supposed to represent. The result is the $1.2 billion quarterly loss mentioned in the original post. This loss is, in large part, a result of Elop's breach of his fiduciary duty to Nokia. Why haven't the shareholders sued him?
DirectWrite (and frameworks which use it, like WPF) use ideal rendering rather than pixel snapping by default.
And every time someone moves a major application to this framework, the users complain because it looks blurry as hell. We saw this with Visual Studio (I believe Microsoft eventually backed off and fixed the rendering) and with Firefox (fortunately, starting with FF7, you can tell it to use "GDI Classic" mode while keeping hardware acceleration on).
DirectWrite was one of the first examples of one of the most destructive tendencies in Microsoft today: Apple envy. Windows 8 is the apogee of this trend. What they don't get is that they're not Apple, will never be Apple, and most of their users - especially the business users who pay the bills - don't want them to be Apple.
So Windows RT is designed to address all those needs. It answers the threat to the platform. It will produce Apple like per unit revenue which will make the pension fund managers smile. And it ends the Linux threat by carefully locking the platform and keeping a very tight leash on the OEMs.
The problem is that this doesn't explain why any customers (and by customers I include OEMs) would go along with this arrangement. What incentive do they have to do so?
They can't even stay the same, they have around 90% of the market and PC sales are flat, shareholders have been waiting patiently for a decade to see some share appreciation on MSFT and there doesn't appear to be a lot of upside on the Windows PC.
Then the expectation of share appreciation needs to change. Microsoft is now a mature company, so they should be switching from capital appreciation to a greater focus on dividends.
Just wanting share appreciation really badly won't make it happen. In fact, the rollout of Windows 8 not only won't bring back the startup-level growth or Apple-style profit margins they want, but is likely to make matters worse by hurting Microsoft in their core market (business desktops and servers).
Wrong. A tablet OS that can do actual office work, and produce media instead of just consuming it, is a new market. I'm fine with paying an extra $50 for a tablet OS that enables me to retouch photos with Photoshop, produce e-learning content with flash or html 5, and edit sound with Audacity. These things are impossible or slow and kludgy on IOS and Android devices.
And it will still be impossible or slow or kludgy on a WinRT tablet. The problem isn't with the software, the problem is with the form factor. You need a keyboard and mouse to do this kind of work effectively.
A premium price for Windows tablets would make sense if Microsoft plans to leverage their (strangle)hold on the business world. The argument would be "you know how to manage and secure Windows desktops. By paying this premium for Windows tablets, you get tablet devices that you can similarly control, thereby reducing Total Cost of Ownership."
That plan would make sense... if Microsoft had implemented Active Directory on WinRT. The lack of this crucial IT management feature, which pretty much everyone in the business world uses extensively, indicates that this is a consumer-focused device.
But that would mean Microsoft is abandoning, or at least substantially downplaying, the consumer, and ceding that ground to Android and iOS. That -would be- a bet-the-company move for Ballmer, et.al.
That's what they should have done. The crappy, low-end OEM Windows desktop is indeed dying in favor of other devices that do a better job on the consumption side. But businesses, gamers, and power users will need a solid version of Windows for the indefinite future. People who do work and produce stuff still need a desktop OS, and that OS is still almost always Windows - thanks to Office, Photoshop, AutoCAD, and a million legacy one-off applications scattered all around the place.
Microsoft needs to narrow its focus to the core. Keep doing what is necessary to stay on top in its main competencies. Stop trying to own the world, stop trying to engage in massive growth into other fields. Accept that it's a mature company and de-emphasize stock price appreciation in favor of larger dividends.
It feels more like they are trying to kill ARM at an OEM level: "It's too expensive with Windows and no one wants it without" ... Of course, that thought is nonsense...but have you seen reason and sanity at work lately there?
If they really are thinking that, they have delusions of grandeur. ARM existed before Microsoft had any products for it, and will continue to thrive after WinRT flops.
Microsoft really needs to come to its senses and give up the 1990s-era delusion that they can own the whole IT market. They have a *lock* on the business desktop, for good reasons (and a few bad reasons as well), a lock on the PC gamer desktop, almost total domination of the office suite market, and a decent though not overwhelming market share in the server OS business. They need to focus on maintaining and building this, rather than trying to control everything under the sun. This is their bread and butter. If they really want to spread their wings, they would have been better off buying Adobe (as was inaccurately rumored a while back), since Photoshop/Creative Suite fits in very well with their core business demographic and is the industry standard.
I think it is more of a cautious approach to entering the market. Price the OS, so that it will only be included on the high end Tablets (ones with faster processors and more memory) So when these go on the market they run very well and smooth. You don't want bad reviews out of the starting gate because the starting tables are just running of the systems minimum specifications.
The problem with this argument is that WinRT will never even get "out of the starting gate" if the first devices are so grossly overpriced. This isn't a new market; Microsoft has to compete with Apple and Google, both of which have substantial installed bases. Apple, in particular, already has the premium tablet market sewn up, while Google's Android is found on a very wide array of devices and can be implemented at a very low price due to lack of licensing costs.
Microsoft has to seriously consider, from the customer's perspective, why anyone would choose a WinRT tablet over an iPad 3. The iPad 3 is $629 for the least expensive model with 3G/4G capability. WinRT tablets are going to be considerably more expensive. The iPad 3 has a premium name, massive installed software base, and Retina Display. The WinRT tablet won't have any of these things. What's more, you will get some customers who think because it's called "Windows 8" that it can run normal Windows software, and they aren't going to be very happy when they find out that this is not true.
The whole Windows 8 project is shaping up to be a failure greater even than Vista.
So they're basically screwing up the desktop experience on Windows 8 in favor of tablets and smartphones, and on top of that they're pricing it so high that it won't have any reasonable chance of success in the market they want.
I'm betting that Steve Ballmer will be out the door by the time all this is over.
Apple has abandoned Classic and Rosetta so now there is a tremendous amount of software, and the data accessed by said software, that can't run on the new machines.
If you cared about legacy support you should have gone with Microsoft instead.