My thinking is that if win8 takes off, then people will buy win8 tablets. They will demand more horsepower and someone somewhere will supply it.
But to get a really good battery life, which is really desirable in a tablet, you can't go for too much power. I can't imagine a tablet with quad core x64 CPUs lasting very long.
I'm torn between a blue tooth keyboard. Addd one and your got an underpowered laptop, but still lighter than lugging around a laptop all day.
I've actually seen roll-up blue tooth keyboards (actually, wow 30 bucks ?)... I just don't find myself needing a separate keyboard with my tablet just yet.
Although, I'm suddenly tempted.
Of course I could be wrong, and just sticking up for my expensive toy.
Amen brother. I find the entire form factor to be the most exciting thing in computers in several decades. There may have been instances of tablets, but they were expensive and specialized.
I don't care which tablet you're talking about, it really does represent the first significant change in how I interact with a computer since my TRS-80 color computer. It's always been a keyboard on a flat surface.
No matter what people say, wi-fi in your lazy boy is much cooler with a tablet than a laptop.
Right now they are only consumer devices, but in another 4 or 5 years, they will probably have the horsepower to be work machines. Hell probably qucker than that. The iPad 3 is supposed to have what a quad-core processor?
I don't think it's really a question of horsepower so much as form factor.
The GP has a point... there's no keyboard, and the input device is primarily the screen. Most people can type one handed on their tablets, but I'm not sure you'd be doing heavy duty work with it.
Now, don't get me wrong... I'd like to see them improve what you can do with it, and they really are still relatively new. But you're still limited by the shape of it. Sure, you can get a blue tooth keyboard for most of them, and at some point you might see an external pointing device that might even evolve the mouse. But photoshop and CAD are still a ways off.
Soon the tablet will be powerful enough to work on. Especially if Win8 takes off.
That sounds like a specious conclusion to me.
What about Win 8 is going to magically make the tablet form factor better for doing real work on? Lego colored buttons? From what I can see, the Win 8 tablet features are more or less taking what people have already been doing. It doesn't look like they're radically improved anything to made any huge leaps forward.
In fact, it seems like the usual Microsoft way of doing things... late to the game, and mostly playing catch up. Give the whole segment a couple more years as people really push what you can do with it, maybe. But if someone dropped a Win 8 tablet in your lap tomorrow you likely wouldn't be thinking it was a revolutionary device.
I will be curious to see how quickly Microsoft can get adoption of Win 8 tablets, though.
I'm actually currious how long or if the tablet concept can hold up. They are great for reading, great for reviewing on the go, but I don't see any real advantage for creating content.
Because the use case for the tablet isn't primarily for creating content.
Everyone I know with a tablet is using it to surf the web, play games, play videos, and do a small amount of email. Doesn't matter who makes it. It's not their work machine.
As long as people know that they're buying a secondary machine for doing other things, the tablet concept will hold up.
Not everyone is doing advanced photo editing or writing spreadsheets -- in fact, I'd be hard pressed to tell you the last time I made a spreadsheet. But when I travel on business, the tablet lets me watch movies on the plane, check news and gmail from the airport and hotel, and gives me some games to play in the evenings, find nearby restaurants. After work I can put it on the hotel bar, have a drink, read a few things, and then decide what I'm doing that evening.
My last bunch of business trips, I've brought my laptop, but never used it. My tablet, however, gets loads of use.
The advantage is that I can use it in my recliner, in the backyard, in bed, in a car, and more comfortably in an airplane than I could a netbook. I can't do any content creation on my music player either, and I'm OK with that. Because that's not what I bought it for.
Is it so hard to accept that probably the vast majority of what most people are doing is simply consuming media? To me it's mostly an entertainment device with some light internet connectivity, and works well as that.
My brother managed to get himself a 7" Android tablet for about $150 after Christmas, and he's not much of a techie. But, he uses it for eBooks, watching movies, and quickly checking stuff on the internet. He occasionally does some CAD work as a hobby... but he uses his desktop for that.
Do you have a smart phone? If you do, are you concerned you can't do any serious work on it? Or are you using it differently than you would your desktop? (In fact, I know people with smart phones who see the tablet as something they don't need... I don't have a smart phone, so the tablet is better for me. To some people, they fill the same niche.)
Anybody who expects it to replace their work machine is going to be disappointed. If you have a little spare cash to buy it as an entertainment device, it's worth the money.
But you didn't pay enough for the device. Console makers traditionally make very slim margins (or occasionally even a loss) on the device in order to make it up with high margins on the products that contribute to attach rate.
I understand what you're saying... buy why is it my problem? I'm not here to prop up their business model.
As I said, they can also find out about the detach rate too.
Because Microsoft didn't yet get paid for games that you haven't yet bought for it. In video game consoles, there's a concept called "attach rate" of how many licensed games and licensed accessories are bought for each console.
Yeah, well, adding ads to that screen almost gave them the option to learn about the detach rate. As in I sign out of XBox Live, disconnect my Xbox from the internet, and use it as purely an offline console. It's not like I play online, so it's not going to hurt me.
I think the only thing I'd lose is the live weather in Tiger Woods. And, really, I don't care much about that.
Seriously, don't put fucking ads in the middle of my screen unless you're offering me some compensation. I paid for the device, I pay for the internet connection, why should you expect ad revenue?
Half of the pictures are of a monitor so small I assume it's a tablet hooked up to a keyboard (the screen is *smaller* than the keyboard. The other half have no surrounding context and look like they're on a tablet. One of them is a picture of a web browser with a picture of a screenshot -- that looks like it's a picture of a tablet.
Seriously, if they're giving me this Romper Room GUI they deployed onto my Xbox lately, I'll be underwhelmed. I'm just having a hard time visualizing this as an actual desktop UI people would use.
The idea of turning my 23" monitor into something with big giant lego color buttons just seems kind of lame.
No screenshots from me (would violate NDA), but there is a tile you can launch that brings up the classic desktop. So your average user experience will be boot to metro, click this tile, now start working.
Please tell me that you can turn that on once and leave it? Or do you have to turn off the stupid every time?
As bizarre as it may sound, I'll likely stick with my Vista for now. Apparently I'm one of the few people who has really had a good experience with Vista.
Yeah, it looks just like my Xbox -- when they updated it and added ads to it. I don't want ads in my fucking Xbox screen, why did they feel compelled to "monetize" my game console? They already got paid for it.
My organization is in the middle of deploying Windows 7 to replace XP desktops.
Given the costs and time of doing this, it will likely be several years before this gets replaced.
I wonder if other organizations are only just getting to Win 7, if Win 8 might become one of those releases that everyone bypasses since they just finished upgrading. That would likely hurt MIcrosoft.
Anybody got any screenshots for the new interface? I'm curious to know how trying to make something optimized for phones and tablets is going to work as an actual desktop interface. It sounds like they might be trying a bit of a "one size fits all" approach, which doesn't always work so well.
This is very different to the situation in various other jurisdictions, where case law can set precedents for interpreting statutes but can never override them.
In theory, in having some overriding principles (ie the Constitution), laws which are indefensible will fall as they fail to meet a certain standard, or exceed certain bounds. I should hope that nobody could ever pass a law saying slavery was legal, for instance.
If case law can't overturn statutes, then you can pass any absurd, draconian, or otherwise bone-headed law... and there is no recourse for the courts to strike down that law. So, if someone manages to pass a law saying that to criticize the government is to commit treason... well, who wants to live there?
Personally, I find it far more scary that laws can be passed that don't have some form of minimum standards to compare them against, and no recourse to redress unjust laws.
Though, in fairness, there seem to be loads of things lately which seem to be in violation of the Constitution, so maybe it's just wishful thinking that there's still any noble, guiding principles any more.
Wow, nobody has posted yet. Apparently nobody cares about Google + enough to even try for a first post.
I know I've seen no incentive whatsoever to use Google+, and I have a gmail account that I've had for years which doesn't correspond to a real name -- so their whole "thou shalt have a real name" as an ID thing is a non-starter for me.
In all honesty, I'm not even sure of what Google + is meant to be used for, or why I'd even care.
That would be a real concern for me if using an American cloud hosting provider, as I am not located in the US. Do these companies have any choice but to bend over to the government when they are told?
You are correct, they have no choice.
The wording of the USA Patriot Act allows them to basically demand data from any US company (it might even be US owned). So, any data there you should consider to be essentially available to the Americans on a whim.
I've done some consulting for the Canadian government, and we legally can't store any data on any servers in the US or host certain data with US owned companies. Because, if the US authorities came in and demanded it, they'd have to hand it over and be legally bound to secrecy and not tell anybody it happened. Not a good situation for confidential government data with private information in it.
So, if you have data you don't want to be subject to US rules, the only solution is to not store it with them, and possibly not with anybody owned by a US company.
I believe the EU has encountered some situations in which companies can either be breaking the EU laws, or breaking the US laws... it's not possible to be in compliance with both if one prevents you giving access, and the other insists they get it.
The only way to keep your data secure, is to keep it in-house.
Outside of California and Nevada, I'm surprised people have heard of this trail, but not the River or common use of 'Crossing The Rubicon.'
Not all of us have 'classical' educations, some of the really old-shit gets glossed over a little more (or long forgotten) .
For instance, I heard of the Rubicon Trail in them magazines what had Big Honking 4x4s when I was 17. It's been legendary to off-road geeks for literally decades.
So, doing it in a Jeep? Absolutely. Julius Caesar and a river, nope.
But there needs to be a critical mass of people who create on the side in order to maintain enough demand for devices for creating. Otherwise, only people who create for a living will absolutely need devices for creating, and as such devices lose economies of scale, prices are likely to rise.
Well, the desktop or laptop are still viable options for that.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, or as a matter of reality... companies make products based on what people want to buy. If 5% of the consumers need a certain feature, it's pretty low on the list of the manufacturer.
I'm not really willing to pay extra to have features in my device that I don't use so that your hypothetical content creator can also buy his device at an affordable price. That's just me subsidizing you. Why would I want to do that?
If not enough people are looking for a device they can do content creation on, then the market has no interest in making a product people don't want. That would be stupid.
Like them or hate them, Apple more or less established the market for a consumer tablet... before then, they'd been mostly specialized (read, expensive) devices, or something extremely niche that most people never heard of. You either need to do a better job of identifying what the consumers actually want, or you tailor your product to fit that.
The problem comes when people buy a device on which to consume, short-sightedly assuming that they're never going to want to create.
But, really, how big of a 'problem' is this?
I know quite a few people with tablets (of all sorts and sizes), and every one of them loves the form factor, and primarily uses it specifically to consume content.
Watching movies in airplanes, surfing the web, playing games, checking your gmail... that seems to be what most people buy these things for. You can lay in lawn chair in the back yard surfing the web, read an ebook in bed (or on the can if you're so inclined), and get your email in the airport.
The last few times I've travelled on business, my laptop never even comes out of the bag, but my tablet gets used all the time. Because when I travel, I have a computer at the client site, but the tablet is a diversion when you've got down time.
I've never seen it as a primary device... just for one that I can use in places a traditional laptop (or even netbook) wouldn't be as convenient or comfortable.
I don't think I've met a single person who has said "if only I could create power point slides and word documents more conveniently this would be better".
In my experience, what you're describing doesn't correspond to the realities of what people expect to use these things for.
Consider how utterly ridiculous the marketing is in America before laughing at the Chinese. Trucks and Cars named after towns, cities and areas. Honestly, what exactly is 'Silverado' or 'Sonoma' about a vehicle? It certainly wasn't made there.
My personal favorite is the Nissan Armada... a word that I always think of as inherently plural.:-P
Jeep Rubicon? Excuse me, but that's an Italian river and more familiar with the phrase 'Crossing the Rubicon' akin to making a move from which there is no return, as Julius Caesar took his legion across the river
Actually, the Rubicon Trail is an actual place in the US. It got it's name in the 1800s, so it's a little more than just marketing. It's been called that for a very long time.
I suspect there's an awful lot of place names in the USA that are borrowed from European countries... Dover, Orleans, Bedford, Dartmouth, and probably loads of others.
When North America was getting settled by the Europeans, they just brought their place names with them.
In the case of the Rubicon, it's a hell of a challenging trail... so the Jeep Rubicon is supposed to convey trail-worthiness. People who scrape the mud off the metal in their 4x4's will all know that.
only for companies dumb enough to make such a short term decision.
Have you not been paying attention? In the last 10 years or so, both the stock market and the way most companies has become very focused on short-term decisions. Long-term thinking seems to have gone away.
Now it's all about meeting your quarterly numbers so the executives can get their bonuses... by the time any of this "future" stuff you talk about comes along, they'll have moved onto other companies and it won't be their problem anymore. They don't invest in infrastructure or R&D to make sure they'll be viable in 10 years... they cut, slash, and tweak to make sure that they're profitable in the near term.
It also means they're leaving themselves a bunch of things which they'll never be able to properly fix, because by the time it becomes an issue they'll not be in a position to fix it. Kind of like having a baloon payment on your mortgage and ignoring that you don't have the money for it.
Sadly, the stock market has come to expect this... if you're not growing 10% every year (which is impossible to sustain indefinitely) you're "underperforming". I find it completely unsurprising that companies are acting penny wise and pound foolish... the incentive is to save the pennies now and look good on paper, and hope that down the road is someone else's problem.
In part, I blame the shift in management that happened when all of a sudden you had people who only had a business education, no actual experience, and no experience in the industry they're working in. It became a purely "cut costs/increase performance bonuses for the management team" mentality.
Wow, that's weird and rather hard to comprehend honestly. I've worked at two large tech companies
In my experience, software companies especially suffer from this problem. They all grow by buying smaller companies with niche products, and then try to add the features from one into another. However, since the purchase is done at a management level, they often don't understand the technology barriers (product A is UNIX, product B is Windows -- you can't just smush them together in a week and get "New and Improved Product B").
Sometimes, the people who run the company are just incapable of seeing how bad of a job they're doing with this. Probably because the people in the middle are too unwilling/incapable of telling truth to power.
For instance, I have seen marketing glossies that basically boil down to the union of two sets of buzzwords from two totally different products. But, since the company made and sold both, they could claim to have a "solution" which did all of what both did. Trying to deploy two disparate technologies to actually do what the management and marketing people promoted, however, made for a lot of cynicism in the office. And, more than a few customers.
In general, I've found being in consulting means I'm not the one who has to lie about what the product can do, unlike when you actually work for the vendor.
You sound surprised, but I can guarantee my experiences are nowhere unique in that regard. I suspect the further you get from the CEO, the less cohesive a company actually is. Growth by acquisition leads to a bunch of silos and fiefdoms, and very few companies do a good job at managing that.
Yes. I consign you to multiple gadget hell for ever and ever.
You know, some of us don't find that to be a problem.
The single gadget, in my experience, often ends up with "almost good enough at 4 different things, but not actually that good at any of them".
It really comes down to how you use them, and what you expect to get out of them. My cameras, for instance, will always be only ever that, because I can't stand the pictures that I've seen from smart phones (and because my main camera is a fairly high end DSLR). And, unless I bought an absolutely huge memory card, my music collection is way too big to put onto a phone.
Secondly, internally, MS operates as a bunch of smaller competing companies, with various department heads constantly backstabbing each other rather than working together. It's amazing they get anything done in that environment.
I've worked for companies far smaller than Microsoft that have the exact same corporate culture.
Many years ago, one of the companies I worked for had grown through acquisitions. With each new one, the VP of R&D for the newest became VP of R&D for the entire company... and then proceeded to axe products and technologies that weren't from his company. It made for a whole lot of people trying to undo several years of development work that had already been sold to clients and had installed user bases. But, since their company made hammers, they couldn't see why anybody would be making wrenches. Even if a hammer was completely unsuited for huge sections of our business.
From our perspective, it made for some very Dilbert-esque moments as you had to explain to someone that we actually do need to keep these products unless we planned on getting sued.
I suspect that level of inter-departmental dysfunction isn't uncommon. Especially in tech or any company that grew through acquisition.
What gives? Did I totally miss the boat on this and the Zune actually sucks? Am I just destined to be forever uncool by being associated with a failed MS product?
Only if you were stupid enough to get it tattoed on your arm.;-)
Other than that, you should be able to buy the music player of your choice and pretend it never happened. Nobody need ever know.
FWIW, I'm not sure I ever remember anybody saying good things about Zune... except, of course, for the guy with the tattoo before he decided the product wasn't that good. It always struck me as Microsoft trying to get into yet another market when nobody really wanted their offering.
Though, except for the presence of the "Zune Marketplace" on my XBox (which I've never cared about), I have no experience with it. For all I know, it really is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
the PS3 especially but also the 360 would only do HD playback of movies on certain output types... the output types that encrypt the entire path. So, in that case, the monitor itself receives an encrypted data stream and your computer never has it.
It never happened since not enough people have those kind of monitors.
Well, flash forward from when HD-DVD was still a contender, and now you have HDCP. Built in, end to end encryption, mandated by the spec.
Newer devices that do HDMI are only allowed to pass on to another device which also implements HDCP (because you can't do HDMI legally without doing HDCP).
Your TV is DRM ready nowadays. And mandating encryption hardware is the beginning of doing it for computers; especially when they tell everyone else they can't play because of patents or security issues.
But that, I think, is a secondary argument. The primary argument, the one most compelling, is no, screw you, don't make it harder to watch your movies than it needs to be, I won't pay for that, and nobody should help you make that happen. That's the argument I find sufficient and compelling.
Well, given that they'll bribe the lawmakers to force this on you... while I appreciate the stance you're making, it might be the equivalent of saying you'll hold your breath until you die.
The content industry doesn't give a damn about what you or I find sufficient and compelling. They'll just tell the lawmakers to do it anyway.:(
Sadly, I don't know that we will get a vote as the media companies try to cram their vision of the internet down our throats. In some places, they've already tried to make the ISPs their own police force, and the big players who make the hardware will likely toe the line in order to not get sued for 'enabling theft'.
ACTA, SOPA, and any number of really awful laws show me where they're going with this.
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But to get a really good battery life, which is really desirable in a tablet, you can't go for too much power. I can't imagine a tablet with quad core x64 CPUs lasting very long.
I've actually seen roll-up blue tooth keyboards (actually, wow 30 bucks ?) ... I just don't find myself needing a separate keyboard with my tablet just yet.
Although, I'm suddenly tempted.
Amen brother. I find the entire form factor to be the most exciting thing in computers in several decades. There may have been instances of tablets, but they were expensive and specialized.
I don't care which tablet you're talking about, it really does represent the first significant change in how I interact with a computer since my TRS-80 color computer. It's always been a keyboard on a flat surface.
No matter what people say, wi-fi in your lazy boy is much cooler with a tablet than a laptop.
I don't think it's really a question of horsepower so much as form factor.
The GP has a point ... there's no keyboard, and the input device is primarily the screen. Most people can type one handed on their tablets, but I'm not sure you'd be doing heavy duty work with it.
Now, don't get me wrong ... I'd like to see them improve what you can do with it, and they really are still relatively new. But you're still limited by the shape of it. Sure, you can get a blue tooth keyboard for most of them, and at some point you might see an external pointing device that might even evolve the mouse. But photoshop and CAD are still a ways off.
That sounds like a specious conclusion to me.
What about Win 8 is going to magically make the tablet form factor better for doing real work on? Lego colored buttons? From what I can see, the Win 8 tablet features are more or less taking what people have already been doing. It doesn't look like they're radically improved anything to made any huge leaps forward.
In fact, it seems like the usual Microsoft way of doing things ... late to the game, and mostly playing catch up. Give the whole segment a couple more years as people really push what you can do with it, maybe. But if someone dropped a Win 8 tablet in your lap tomorrow you likely wouldn't be thinking it was a revolutionary device.
I will be curious to see how quickly Microsoft can get adoption of Win 8 tablets, though.
Because the use case for the tablet isn't primarily for creating content.
Everyone I know with a tablet is using it to surf the web, play games, play videos, and do a small amount of email. Doesn't matter who makes it. It's not their work machine.
As long as people know that they're buying a secondary machine for doing other things, the tablet concept will hold up.
Not everyone is doing advanced photo editing or writing spreadsheets -- in fact, I'd be hard pressed to tell you the last time I made a spreadsheet. But when I travel on business, the tablet lets me watch movies on the plane, check news and gmail from the airport and hotel, and gives me some games to play in the evenings, find nearby restaurants. After work I can put it on the hotel bar, have a drink, read a few things, and then decide what I'm doing that evening.
My last bunch of business trips, I've brought my laptop, but never used it. My tablet, however, gets loads of use.
The advantage is that I can use it in my recliner, in the backyard, in bed, in a car, and more comfortably in an airplane than I could a netbook. I can't do any content creation on my music player either, and I'm OK with that. Because that's not what I bought it for.
Is it so hard to accept that probably the vast majority of what most people are doing is simply consuming media? To me it's mostly an entertainment device with some light internet connectivity, and works well as that.
My brother managed to get himself a 7" Android tablet for about $150 after Christmas, and he's not much of a techie. But, he uses it for eBooks, watching movies, and quickly checking stuff on the internet. He occasionally does some CAD work as a hobby ... but he uses his desktop for that.
Do you have a smart phone? If you do, are you concerned you can't do any serious work on it? Or are you using it differently than you would your desktop? (In fact, I know people with smart phones who see the tablet as something they don't need ... I don't have a smart phone, so the tablet is better for me. To some people, they fill the same niche.)
Anybody who expects it to replace their work machine is going to be disappointed. If you have a little spare cash to buy it as an entertainment device, it's worth the money.
I understand what you're saying ... buy why is it my problem? I'm not here to prop up their business model.
As I said, they can also find out about the detach rate too.
Yeah, well, adding ads to that screen almost gave them the option to learn about the detach rate. As in I sign out of XBox Live, disconnect my Xbox from the internet, and use it as purely an offline console. It's not like I play online, so it's not going to hurt me.
I think the only thing I'd lose is the live weather in Tiger Woods. And, really, I don't care much about that.
Seriously, don't put fucking ads in the middle of my screen unless you're offering me some compensation. I paid for the device, I pay for the internet connection, why should you expect ad revenue?
Yeah, saw those.
Half of the pictures are of a monitor so small I assume it's a tablet hooked up to a keyboard (the screen is *smaller* than the keyboard. The other half have no surrounding context and look like they're on a tablet. One of them is a picture of a web browser with a picture of a screenshot -- that looks like it's a picture of a tablet.
Seriously, if they're giving me this Romper Room GUI they deployed onto my Xbox lately, I'll be underwhelmed. I'm just having a hard time visualizing this as an actual desktop UI people would use.
The idea of turning my 23" monitor into something with big giant lego color buttons just seems kind of lame.
Please tell me that you can turn that on once and leave it? Or do you have to turn off the stupid every time?
As bizarre as it may sound, I'll likely stick with my Vista for now. Apparently I'm one of the few people who has really had a good experience with Vista.
Yeah, it looks just like my Xbox -- when they updated it and added ads to it. I don't want ads in my fucking Xbox screen, why did they feel compelled to "monetize" my game console? They already got paid for it.
Greedy bastards.
My organization is in the middle of deploying Windows 7 to replace XP desktops.
Given the costs and time of doing this, it will likely be several years before this gets replaced.
I wonder if other organizations are only just getting to Win 7, if Win 8 might become one of those releases that everyone bypasses since they just finished upgrading. That would likely hurt MIcrosoft.
Anybody got any screenshots for the new interface? I'm curious to know how trying to make something optimized for phones and tablets is going to work as an actual desktop interface. It sounds like they might be trying a bit of a "one size fits all" approach, which doesn't always work so well.
I'd be surprised if Microsoft (or anybody) is actually offering five nines for uptime.
The fine print often says "well, we don't actually promise anything, and any outage and loss is your problem".
In theory, in having some overriding principles (ie the Constitution), laws which are indefensible will fall as they fail to meet a certain standard, or exceed certain bounds. I should hope that nobody could ever pass a law saying slavery was legal, for instance.
If case law can't overturn statutes, then you can pass any absurd, draconian, or otherwise bone-headed law ... and there is no recourse for the courts to strike down that law. So, if someone manages to pass a law saying that to criticize the government is to commit treason ... well, who wants to live there?
Personally, I find it far more scary that laws can be passed that don't have some form of minimum standards to compare them against, and no recourse to redress unjust laws.
Though, in fairness, there seem to be loads of things lately which seem to be in violation of the Constitution, so maybe it's just wishful thinking that there's still any noble, guiding principles any more.
Wow, nobody has posted yet. Apparently nobody cares about Google + enough to even try for a first post.
I know I've seen no incentive whatsoever to use Google+, and I have a gmail account that I've had for years which doesn't correspond to a real name -- so their whole "thou shalt have a real name" as an ID thing is a non-starter for me.
In all honesty, I'm not even sure of what Google + is meant to be used for, or why I'd even care.
You are correct, they have no choice.
The wording of the USA Patriot Act allows them to basically demand data from any US company (it might even be US owned). So, any data there you should consider to be essentially available to the Americans on a whim.
I've done some consulting for the Canadian government, and we legally can't store any data on any servers in the US or host certain data with US owned companies. Because, if the US authorities came in and demanded it, they'd have to hand it over and be legally bound to secrecy and not tell anybody it happened. Not a good situation for confidential government data with private information in it.
So, if you have data you don't want to be subject to US rules, the only solution is to not store it with them, and possibly not with anybody owned by a US company.
I believe the EU has encountered some situations in which companies can either be breaking the EU laws, or breaking the US laws ... it's not possible to be in compliance with both if one prevents you giving access, and the other insists they get it.
The only way to keep your data secure, is to keep it in-house.
Not all of us have 'classical' educations, some of the really old-shit gets glossed over a little more (or long forgotten) .
For instance, I heard of the Rubicon Trail in them magazines what had Big Honking 4x4s when I was 17. It's been legendary to off-road geeks for literally decades.
So, doing it in a Jeep? Absolutely. Julius Caesar and a river, nope.
Well, the desktop or laptop are still viable options for that.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, or as a matter of reality ... companies make products based on what people want to buy. If 5% of the consumers need a certain feature, it's pretty low on the list of the manufacturer.
I'm not really willing to pay extra to have features in my device that I don't use so that your hypothetical content creator can also buy his device at an affordable price. That's just me subsidizing you. Why would I want to do that?
If not enough people are looking for a device they can do content creation on, then the market has no interest in making a product people don't want. That would be stupid.
Like them or hate them, Apple more or less established the market for a consumer tablet ... before then, they'd been mostly specialized (read, expensive) devices, or something extremely niche that most people never heard of. You either need to do a better job of identifying what the consumers actually want, or you tailor your product to fit that.
But, really, how big of a 'problem' is this?
I know quite a few people with tablets (of all sorts and sizes), and every one of them loves the form factor, and primarily uses it specifically to consume content.
Watching movies in airplanes, surfing the web, playing games, checking your gmail ... that seems to be what most people buy these things for. You can lay in lawn chair in the back yard surfing the web, read an ebook in bed (or on the can if you're so inclined), and get your email in the airport.
The last few times I've travelled on business, my laptop never even comes out of the bag, but my tablet gets used all the time. Because when I travel, I have a computer at the client site, but the tablet is a diversion when you've got down time.
I've never seen it as a primary device ... just for one that I can use in places a traditional laptop (or even netbook) wouldn't be as convenient or comfortable.
I don't think I've met a single person who has said "if only I could create power point slides and word documents more conveniently this would be better".
In my experience, what you're describing doesn't correspond to the realities of what people expect to use these things for.
My personal favorite is the Nissan Armada ... a word that I always think of as inherently plural. :-P
Actually, the Rubicon Trail is an actual place in the US. It got it's name in the 1800s, so it's a little more than just marketing. It's been called that for a very long time.
I suspect there's an awful lot of place names in the USA that are borrowed from European countries ... Dover, Orleans, Bedford, Dartmouth, and probably loads of others.
When North America was getting settled by the Europeans, they just brought their place names with them.
In the case of the Rubicon, it's a hell of a challenging trail ... so the Jeep Rubicon is supposed to convey trail-worthiness. People who scrape the mud off the metal in their 4x4's will all know that.
Have you not been paying attention? In the last 10 years or so, both the stock market and the way most companies has become very focused on short-term decisions. Long-term thinking seems to have gone away.
Now it's all about meeting your quarterly numbers so the executives can get their bonuses ... by the time any of this "future" stuff you talk about comes along, they'll have moved onto other companies and it won't be their problem anymore. They don't invest in infrastructure or R&D to make sure they'll be viable in 10 years ... they cut, slash, and tweak to make sure that they're profitable in the near term.
It also means they're leaving themselves a bunch of things which they'll never be able to properly fix, because by the time it becomes an issue they'll not be in a position to fix it. Kind of like having a baloon payment on your mortgage and ignoring that you don't have the money for it.
Sadly, the stock market has come to expect this ... if you're not growing 10% every year (which is impossible to sustain indefinitely) you're "underperforming". I find it completely unsurprising that companies are acting penny wise and pound foolish ... the incentive is to save the pennies now and look good on paper, and hope that down the road is someone else's problem.
In part, I blame the shift in management that happened when all of a sudden you had people who only had a business education, no actual experience, and no experience in the industry they're working in. It became a purely "cut costs/increase performance bonuses for the management team" mentality.
In my experience, software companies especially suffer from this problem. They all grow by buying smaller companies with niche products, and then try to add the features from one into another. However, since the purchase is done at a management level, they often don't understand the technology barriers (product A is UNIX, product B is Windows -- you can't just smush them together in a week and get "New and Improved Product B").
Sometimes, the people who run the company are just incapable of seeing how bad of a job they're doing with this. Probably because the people in the middle are too unwilling/incapable of telling truth to power.
For instance, I have seen marketing glossies that basically boil down to the union of two sets of buzzwords from two totally different products. But, since the company made and sold both, they could claim to have a "solution" which did all of what both did. Trying to deploy two disparate technologies to actually do what the management and marketing people promoted, however, made for a lot of cynicism in the office. And, more than a few customers.
In general, I've found being in consulting means I'm not the one who has to lie about what the product can do, unlike when you actually work for the vendor.
You sound surprised, but I can guarantee my experiences are nowhere unique in that regard. I suspect the further you get from the CEO, the less cohesive a company actually is. Growth by acquisition leads to a bunch of silos and fiefdoms, and very few companies do a good job at managing that.
You know, some of us don't find that to be a problem.
The single gadget, in my experience, often ends up with "almost good enough at 4 different things, but not actually that good at any of them".
It really comes down to how you use them, and what you expect to get out of them. My cameras, for instance, will always be only ever that, because I can't stand the pictures that I've seen from smart phones (and because my main camera is a fairly high end DSLR). And, unless I bought an absolutely huge memory card, my music collection is way too big to put onto a phone.
I've worked for companies far smaller than Microsoft that have the exact same corporate culture.
Many years ago, one of the companies I worked for had grown through acquisitions. With each new one, the VP of R&D for the newest became VP of R&D for the entire company ... and then proceeded to axe products and technologies that weren't from his company. It made for a whole lot of people trying to undo several years of development work that had already been sold to clients and had installed user bases. But, since their company made hammers, they couldn't see why anybody would be making wrenches. Even if a hammer was completely unsuited for huge sections of our business.
From our perspective, it made for some very Dilbert-esque moments as you had to explain to someone that we actually do need to keep these products unless we planned on getting sued.
I suspect that level of inter-departmental dysfunction isn't uncommon. Especially in tech or any company that grew through acquisition.
Corporations can be very stupid that way.
Only if you were stupid enough to get it tattoed on your arm. ;-)
Other than that, you should be able to buy the music player of your choice and pretend it never happened. Nobody need ever know.
FWIW, I'm not sure I ever remember anybody saying good things about Zune ... except, of course, for the guy with the tattoo before he decided the product wasn't that good. It always struck me as Microsoft trying to get into yet another market when nobody really wanted their offering.
Though, except for the presence of the "Zune Marketplace" on my XBox (which I've never cared about), I have no experience with it. For all I know, it really is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
But ... but ... without corporate profit seeking, the Earth would stop spinning and the universe would collapse.
We need for this to be legal, it drives the entire economy. /sarcasm
Well, flash forward from when HD-DVD was still a contender, and now you have HDCP. Built in, end to end encryption, mandated by the spec.
Newer devices that do HDMI are only allowed to pass on to another device which also implements HDCP (because you can't do HDMI legally without doing HDCP).
Your TV is DRM ready nowadays. And mandating encryption hardware is the beginning of doing it for computers; especially when they tell everyone else they can't play because of patents or security issues.
What you're describing is well underway.
Well, given that they'll bribe the lawmakers to force this on you ... while I appreciate the stance you're making, it might be the equivalent of saying you'll hold your breath until you die.
The content industry doesn't give a damn about what you or I find sufficient and compelling. They'll just tell the lawmakers to do it anyway. :(
Sadly, I don't know that we will get a vote as the media companies try to cram their vision of the internet down our throats. In some places, they've already tried to make the ISPs their own police force, and the big players who make the hardware will likely toe the line in order to not get sued for 'enabling theft'.
ACTA, SOPA, and any number of really awful laws show me where they're going with this.