I realize Microsoft can't get them on code copying or decompiling. But they can try to get them on software patents, copyright of APIs (even if it failed for Oracle when trying to sue Google, that does not mean it would fail for Microsoft), and probably other legal attacks we don't know.
I would love to be wrong. I would love for Microsoft to be unable to bother WineHQ and ReactOS because they're completely free to do what they want under fair use terms. But Microsoft isn't going to let a multi-billion dollar source of revenue walk away without taking every possible step to block it.
As a Linux user, I don't hate the project at all. My fear is that as soon as ReactOS became a decent replacement for Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 and started to gain widespread use, Microsoft would hit the project with a mountain of lawsuits. I believe the same is true for the Wine project ( which I assume you also know, winehq.org ) - Microsoft ignores them because they're not successful.
I had problems with Linux at home too. Recent versions have been getting successively easier to install properly and I've been getting incrementally better at diagnosing and fixing problems, and between the two gradual changes I've reached the point where it's my primary home operating system for several years. But I still maintain a windows partitions for games that won't run on Wine, or won't run well on Wine.
I'm biased towards the free software side of the world. All of my industry job experience has been at companies too small to spend the time and money on a central proprietary software licensing system and someone skilled enough to manage it. So every time we replaced a motherboard, or set up a new device, or re-image the hard drive on a laptop that got whacked when a user downloaded a rootkit, or configure a virtual machine we either need to jump through hoops and send Microsoft yet another payment or else use pirated license codes. When I set up a Debian server install, there's no licensing hassle. When I reinstall, there's no licensing hassle. When half a dozen people have defunct XRDP connections to the server and I try to log in, I don't get prompted to purchase more Terminal Server Concurrent Access Licenses (I think that's what TS-CALS stands for, I don't even remember).
Now, for someone not working in IT or maybe even working in IT at a company that can afford the 'correct' solution to these problems (a Microsoft certified somethingorother and a properly configured license management server) these issues never appear. The person buy the computer with Windows pre-installed, they click a few checkboxes to activate the license on a newly installed device, end of story. So I can see why those people view me and others like me and find my strong dislike for proprietary software as bizarre. But Microsoft licensing, and Crystal Reports licensing, and SPSS licensing, and Citrix licensing have combined to push me strongly into the Free Software Foundation supporter camp.
Even if the real figure is a third of a billion, that's still a huge volume of people. The social value of the site is huge.
And a lot of people that feel disconnected socially have a lack of opportunity to communicate that they cannot easily fix in their own lives. If you work two jobs, you have time to post from your phone but not actually physically meet with friends and family. If your career took you 500 miles away from your previous friends and family, keeping in touch with them through social networking is more time efficient than writing individual letters or emails. If you have kids, you may not have the time or money to go hang out with friends a few days per week - but you can always fire up Facebook after the kids are in bed. etc... etc...
So in that respect, social networks are very valuable. The hard part is for us to help the world transition away from walled gardens where companies profit from accessing our personal information to something more distributed, where we control our own data - free software projects like Diaspora (which, last time I looked, seems decent - even if their original timeline never worked).
What's the alternative, returning to an agrarian society where everyone you know and care about is tilling a field half a mile away? If you like that, you could always join the Amish.
Competition in the technology industry is wonderful, and free software is wonderful, and thus I would love to see WebOS and for example Mozilla's Firefox OS spread like wildfire and become very common.
But what would drive adoption? I can see a small body of WebOS (and FirefoxOS) fans, myself among them, trying this out for fun. But what will make the market share of either move from 0.0001% to 0.001%, let alone 1% or 5%?
I'm sorry I was not more clear. apt-get handles dependencies from other packages packaged by Debian maintainers. It has a database where it tracks what is installed, what is available but not installed, and what the dependencies are. But apt-get does not know anything about software modules you install on your machine using Perl cpan, Python easy_install, Haskell cabal, or Java maven. So if you install something on your machine using 'cpan', even if the exact same Perl module is in the Debian package repository, your apt cache will not know the package was installed.
I did not know that the library versioning worked that way, I guess I should have examined my/usr/lib directory and how library dependencies are managed more closely. Thank you for the information.
I think what you need for this to really work is two fundamental changes. First, the directory hierarchy would need to be redone so that you can install and run multiple versions of different libraries at the same time. The Nix package manager tries to do this, though I'm not sure how well it succeeds.
Second, current Linux package managers have no ties to the dependency management systems that have been created around different languages. The Perl community has CPAN ( Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) and the command line tool 'cpan' that facilitates downloading and installing a CPAN Perl module and all of its dependencies. Ruby and Python have something similar with Ruby gems and Python easy_install. Java does the same with Maven or with Ant + Ivy or SBT. Haskell has the 'cabal' tool to install Haskell modules with automatic dependency resolution from their Hackage repositories. What I presume would really help is if some people made dpkg (the Debian and Debian offspring package manager), rpm (the Red Hat package manager), or newer package managers like Conary or Nix to be fully aware of the various programming language package management tools.
I reformatted my partition of Linux Mint and replaced it with Ubuntu 12.04, and I'm not going to reinstall just for the sake of forensics. I realize it would have been better for the Mint community if I had spent more time tracking down the problem, and I'm sorry I did not.
My hardware is not that unusual - ASUS m4A785TD-V motherboard, AMD Phenom XT1090 processor, AMD Radeon HD 5770 video card using the open source drivers, SATA 7200 RPM 1TB drive with partitions formatted ext4, 12 GB of RAM, no overclocking.
The only software I had installed that you couldn't obtain using the default Linux Minut software package repositories was the Linux clients for Google Music and the Spideroak backup service.
If you have permission from your employer to wipe the system, obviously that will work better. Otherwise doing this is better than doing nothing - it won't stop an especially determined person from collecting useful information about you, though - but then someone that determined to get your information may have already installed a keystroke logger or other malware or just videotaped you typing your passwords.
I think VolciMaster used urandom on the running system so that it would only overwrite free space in the drive. e.g. you have a 200 GB disk with 10GB operating system files and 3 GB of your data. You delete your data, and then fill the 190 GB with random information. When the computer restarts, you just delete the 190 or so GB giant file created by urandom. Your personal data is pretty well gone and overwritten, but the operating system is still intact.
I can only speak for myself, but I work at a small company that has to be pretty careful with the IT budget. We've had plenty of experiences with a useful piece of commercial software that was critical or nearly critical to our operations suddenly doubling in price. We've also had experiences where we brought a bug to the attention of the vendor and were asked to pay a premium support fee for them to fix it.
The worst was Crystal Reports. We used one of their products that cost $650 per license in 2004 and was over $15,000 for an equivalent license in 2009.
I have friends and relatives that work with Oracle and they're generally very pleased with their products. I respect that. But I'm not going to advocate using Oracle unless my employer has enough cash that they can swallow doubling of their proprietary software licensing costs without taking more than a few percent off their annual profits. Fortune 1000 companies are in that position, but the bulk of the economy is not.
I have random freezes and reboots on Linux Mint 12 with nothing printed in the logs. Four other versions of Linux and one Windows 7 partition never had a similar problem, so the Mint developers must have changed some driver settings in a particularly unfortunate way.
I defer to your expertise. ( And just to be clear, that's not sarcasm. ) I'm following the smart phone and tablet revolution with great interest, for many reasons including the fact that it will influence my long term career as a developer. But I still personally prefer a large monitor and a workstation, so I don't have any experience trying to accomplish serious work on relatively small touch devices.
I work at a small company, so my personal experience on Bring Your Own Device doesn't carry much weight. I'm under the impression from tech blogs and other media sources that the iPad has serious business use - if nothing else, it offers a handful of fully features RDP client programs so a user can run any Windows app they want right from the iPad. Obviously using RDP won't get a company away from Microsoft products, but the transition could never be a hard cutover anyway - as more and more business applications get ported to iOS and Android or have equivalents created in iOS and Android, the users will find themselves spending less and less time putting the tablet away and firing up the laptop or less time running RDP on the tablet.
But a lot can change in a hurry, and it's absurd to count out a company with tens of billions of dollars in the bank.
On (2), granted. So maybe Apple took a page from Microsoft's own playbook. But in any event, as far as I can tell Microsoft needs to take the same approach once again.
On (3), I don't know that better enterprise features are enough. I wouldn't mind being wrong, I think competition is better for consumers and speeds the rate of innovation, which is better for everyone.
The biggest problem with Unity, in my experience, was that it was not stable until Ubuntu 11.10.
But I've used Unity and Metro UI, and I find Unity to be far more intuitive. That's the real killer for Metro UI, in my not particularly humble opinion. I didn't need a tutorial to use Unity with a mouse and I don't imagine most people would need a tutorial to use one with a touch screen. Even if you hate what it does, the features are pretty easy to figure out. With Metro UI, I had to use a separate device to search for user tutorials and documentation to figure out how to switch apps, see what was currently running, log out, etc... Maybe if I gave it a few hours of work it would become quick and intuitive, but I gave up after the first half hour and haven't booted the Windows 8 partition since then.
I can see three counters to your position. I'm not sure it will be enough to save Microsoft, but I understand what they're trying to do:
1. If you've never used a computer before, I suspect learning to use a touch screen is easier than learning to use a mouse or keyboard. That doesn't affect most people in the US, but it does affect kids and a lot of countries that are only now joining the information age. My kids are pretty young, and they all figured out how to use games on my phone faster than they figured out how to use a mouse.
2. Apple and to a lesser extent Android destroyed Palm, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone because people got so attached to their iPhones that they brought them to work and refused to use corporate substitutes. If that's a few isolated incidents then the employee involved gets disciplined or fired. But when it affects a large percentage of employees plus managers and top executives, anyone in the IT staff that insists on Palm, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, etc... is told to change the IT policy or be replaced. So Microsoft is trying to work the same way - make Windows 8 consumer first, business second, and hope they can get back into enterprise business through the same "bring your personal device to work" route that the iPhone took. And unifying the interface across all devices works in both directions - maybe the consumer who buys a Windows 8 tablet takes his device to work, and maybe another consumer forced to use Windows 8 at work becomes accustomed to it and purchases a Windows 8 phone or tablet. I don't think it will work, but I can see why they are trying. I suspect that if Microsoft doesn't pour everything into this massive makeover, in ten years people will be using the iPad 15 with HDMI out to a 30 inch monitor with bluetooth keyboard and mouse at the office, and then taking the iPad home to surf the web and play games in the evening, and Microsoft will be cut out of most of the world's enterprise office space and consumer computing device market.
3. Microsoft executives must understand how important low price is. The iPad manages to sell like hotcakes at the $500 price point, but it has the strength of the Apple brand. ( I hate the Apple brand, but clearly most of the US doesn't share my views. ) The only Android tablets that have grabbed a significant piece of the tablet market are the 7 inch, $200 Amazon Kindle and now maybe the 7 inch, $200 Google Nexus 7 - smaller and more importantly much cheaper than the iPad. If Microsoft starts selling the Surface RT (ARM processor) 10 inch tablets at a $300 or so price point and they manage to adequately explain to buyers that Windows on Arm won't run legacy x86 apps so there is not mass confusion, I think they might have a shot at getting at least some of the market. If on the other hand they try to price head to head with the iPad or higher than the iPad they will get killed. I think they know that, and will price accordingly - if I was running Microsoft, at this point I would be trying to convince the board of directors that the long term survival of the company hinged upon dethroning the iPhone and iPad, and that if Microsoft had to take a loss for five years straight to pull it off, that would be a price worth paying.
Partly it's a time problem - if you only have two hours or so to set up the complete setting, characters, and story, adding depth to the story is difficult. See the Hulk film by Ang Lee as an example - Hulk destroyed a science lab, it fought giant mutant dogs, it destroyed an army base and had a prolonged battle with tanks and then a confrontation with helicopters, and then a climactic confrontation at the end. Tons of action. But Ang Lee tried to interweave a complex character story into the film and even with two and a half hours of screen time he failed to make anything coherent or interesting.
Neil Gaiman's American Gods novel would make for awesome film, but only if a good director made a big budget miniseries out of it. It's just too much for a traditional movie, even a three hour one.
I'll give you the fact that toolset maturity is a big problem.
But even with tons of native apps, mobile operating systems are still going to have a huge web browser focus. So Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Apple, Opera, and dozens of other minor players will continue to invest resources well into the tens of millions of dollars per year range into making Javascript and HTML more resource efficient, and the browser itself more power efficient. Between that kind of optimization on the software side and the march of technological innovation on the device side, I really suspect you'll be able to run the graphical equivalent of Unreal 4 using WebGL on your smart phone in ten or fifteen years.
The Democrats had to work very hard in the Senate to get some of the moderate Democrats and independent Senator Joe Lieberman to agree with them. The bill was modified many times - as I'm sure you know, it originally had a "single payer" option but Lieberman and a few others refused to sign it with that provision included.
And what exactly were they supposed to do about the economy? The Republicans has 2000-2006 to fix the economy, and in 2008 we discovered that all of the economic growth from 2000 forward was a lie built on real estate speculation and dishonest accounting on Wall Street. I'm convinced the Democrats have no clue how to fix the economy - I just happen to be convinced the Republicans also have no clue, and are more likely to grossly exploit every American that isn't already wealthy in the process.
Just because the Democrats nominally controlled Congress from 2008 to 2010 does not mean Obama could have passed any law he wanted. You need a 60 vote majority in the Senate to bring the debate on an issue to a close in order to have a vote, and the Democrat control hovered just at or below the 60 person mark - so if just one Democratic Senator disagreed with some part of the law, they could side with the Republicans and stop it, period.
Generally speaking, this kind of restriction is good - it prevents one party from getting power for a short period and then massively modifying the government. But it also means that you can't blame every Bush presidency problem on Bush, some are partly a result of Clinton. And you can't blame every Obama presidency problem on Obama, some are a result of Bush. And in all three cases, a lot of the problems may have been within the power of the sitting president to solve - or to make worse if this kind of intentionally constructed wall to changes did not exist in Congress.
Google has slightly more interest in promoting HTML5 than Apple - the Chrome browser has its own app store, and Google has Chrome OS. But of course in terms of engineering investment neither the browser nor the operating system receive anywhere near the attention or promotion that is given to Android.
With the lists you have to use the HTML formatting, so it's "less than" "br" "forward slash(optional)" "greater than" (all without the double quotes) . The br is literal, the rest are their respective characters on the key board. But don't sweat it, your stuff is easy to read.
Apple and Google are caught in a tug of war over HTML5 - if they support it well, it makes it easier for customers to move to the other guy. But if they support it too poorly, they miss out on developers and they miss out on the good apps for HTML5 that do exists. But at the end of the day I suspect you're right, Apple and Google are going to pour all their money into making the native apps better because locking the customers in gets them more money.
I'm just hoping something disrupts the situation. Competition is good for everyone, and while I'm thrilled that Android is mostly open and we're not stuck choosing between two completely proprietary options, I would still like to see three major players or four major players, and ideally everyone but Apple would be mostly or fully based on free software.
I think your arguments carry more weight than mine and Firefox OS will occupy a very tiny niche. But I have a few admittedly weak responses.
1. Hardware is better now and continues to improve. I wasn't a fan of OpenMoko's hardware specs, so I'm not one of the ones that failed to match talk with cash. I wasn't interested in any smart phone until they reached dual core and 1 GB of RAM, and I probably won't replace my junky bottom tier LG Android phone until a generation or two past the Galaxy Nexus 3. Maybe OpenMoko's biggest problem was being before its time.
2. The Linux kernel in Firefox OS is GPL, but Firefox itself is under the Mozilla Public License, which is kind of like a weak GPL because it protects the openness of its own code but makes no restrictions on intermingled proprietary code. The carriers can add their own proprietary features to the phone and remove features from the operating system so they can screw the customers with value add junk. They are legally required to give the customers copies of the Firefox OS source that they did not modify, but not their own code.
3. (Re WebOS instead) good point.
4. HTML5 app selections are improving all of the time, because you can run apps in it on Windows, on Mac OS X, on iOS, on Android, etc... and part of the Firefox OS project is releasing new HTML APIs for accelerometers, VOIP, etc... if they can get the major players to adapt those APIs, HTML5 will be even more cross-platform compatible.
5. Microsoft charges licensing fees, they have a relatively poor reputation with many consumers, and they screwed themselves by burning all of their early adopters by making Windows Mobile apps incompatible with Windows Phone 7 apps.
5 years ago no mobile phone had the memory and processing power to make HTML5 websites run well and the HTML5 app selection sucked hugely. This could have never worked then. It probably won't work now, but this is the best window of opportunity Mozilla will get.
I am very excited about OpenCores.org. But I'm under the impression that their very best designs are many generations behind the latest ARM chips, let alone Intel chips, for processing power and efficiency.
Having a small group of software developers build something like Rails or uTorrent or VLC is impressive. Having a medium size group of software developers build something like the Linux kernel is incredibly impressive. Having a bunch of volunteers put together something equivalent to an Intel Core 2 processor? That may not be possible.
I would love to be totally wrong about this. I don't know anything about computer processor design processes. But I figure if Intel spends many billions of dollars per year in research and development costs, you would need a large number of the brightest human beings on the planet working in a coordinated fashion to match their designs in OpenCores or something similar.
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I realize Microsoft can't get them on code copying or decompiling. But they can try to get them on software patents, copyright of APIs (even if it failed for Oracle when trying to sue Google, that does not mean it would fail for Microsoft), and probably other legal attacks we don't know.
I would love to be wrong. I would love for Microsoft to be unable to bother WineHQ and ReactOS because they're completely free to do what they want under fair use terms. But Microsoft isn't going to let a multi-billion dollar source of revenue walk away without taking every possible step to block it.
As a Linux user, I don't hate the project at all. My fear is that as soon as ReactOS became a decent replacement for Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 and started to gain widespread use, Microsoft would hit the project with a mountain of lawsuits. I believe the same is true for the Wine project ( which I assume you also know, winehq.org ) - Microsoft ignores them because they're not successful.
I had problems with Linux at home too. Recent versions have been getting successively easier to install properly and I've been getting incrementally better at diagnosing and fixing problems, and between the two gradual changes I've reached the point where it's my primary home operating system for several years. But I still maintain a windows partitions for games that won't run on Wine, or won't run well on Wine.
I'm biased towards the free software side of the world. All of my industry job experience has been at companies too small to spend the time and money on a central proprietary software licensing system and someone skilled enough to manage it. So every time we replaced a motherboard, or set up a new device, or re-image the hard drive on a laptop that got whacked when a user downloaded a rootkit, or configure a virtual machine we either need to jump through hoops and send Microsoft yet another payment or else use pirated license codes. When I set up a Debian server install, there's no licensing hassle. When I reinstall, there's no licensing hassle. When half a dozen people have defunct XRDP connections to the server and I try to log in, I don't get prompted to purchase more Terminal Server Concurrent Access Licenses (I think that's what TS-CALS stands for, I don't even remember).
Now, for someone not working in IT or maybe even working in IT at a company that can afford the 'correct' solution to these problems (a Microsoft certified somethingorother and a properly configured license management server) these issues never appear. The person buy the computer with Windows pre-installed, they click a few checkboxes to activate the license on a newly installed device, end of story. So I can see why those people view me and others like me and find my strong dislike for proprietary software as bizarre. But Microsoft licensing, and Crystal Reports licensing, and SPSS licensing, and Citrix licensing have combined to push me strongly into the Free Software Foundation supporter camp.
Even if the real figure is a third of a billion, that's still a huge volume of people. The social value of the site is huge.
And a lot of people that feel disconnected socially have a lack of opportunity to communicate that they cannot easily fix in their own lives. If you work two jobs, you have time to post from your phone but not actually physically meet with friends and family. If your career took you 500 miles away from your previous friends and family, keeping in touch with them through social networking is more time efficient than writing individual letters or emails. If you have kids, you may not have the time or money to go hang out with friends a few days per week - but you can always fire up Facebook after the kids are in bed. etc... etc...
So in that respect, social networks are very valuable. The hard part is for us to help the world transition away from walled gardens where companies profit from accessing our personal information to something more distributed, where we control our own data - free software projects like Diaspora (which, last time I looked, seems decent - even if their original timeline never worked).
What's the alternative, returning to an agrarian society where everyone you know and care about is tilling a field half a mile away? If you like that, you could always join the Amish.
Competition in the technology industry is wonderful, and free software is wonderful, and thus I would love to see WebOS and for example Mozilla's Firefox OS spread like wildfire and become very common.
But what would drive adoption? I can see a small body of WebOS (and FirefoxOS) fans, myself among them, trying this out for fun. But what will make the market share of either move from 0.0001% to 0.001%, let alone 1% or 5%?
I'm sorry I was not more clear. apt-get handles dependencies from other packages packaged by Debian maintainers. It has a database where it tracks what is installed, what is available but not installed, and what the dependencies are. But apt-get does not know anything about software modules you install on your machine using Perl cpan, Python easy_install, Haskell cabal, or Java maven. So if you install something on your machine using 'cpan', even if the exact same Perl module is in the Debian package repository, your apt cache will not know the package was installed.
/usr/lib directory and how library dependencies are managed more closely. Thank you for the information.
I did not know that the library versioning worked that way, I guess I should have examined my
Thanks for sharing, that's pretty fascinating.
I think what you need for this to really work is two fundamental changes. First, the directory hierarchy would need to be redone so that you can install and run multiple versions of different libraries at the same time. The Nix package manager tries to do this, though I'm not sure how well it succeeds.
Second, current Linux package managers have no ties to the dependency management systems that have been created around different languages. The Perl community has CPAN ( Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) and the command line tool 'cpan' that facilitates downloading and installing a CPAN Perl module and all of its dependencies. Ruby and Python have something similar with Ruby gems and Python easy_install. Java does the same with Maven or with Ant + Ivy or SBT. Haskell has the 'cabal' tool to install Haskell modules with automatic dependency resolution from their Hackage repositories. What I presume would really help is if some people made dpkg (the Debian and Debian offspring package manager), rpm (the Red Hat package manager), or newer package managers like Conary or Nix to be fully aware of the various programming language package management tools.
I'll have it finished Tuesday.
I reformatted my partition of Linux Mint and replaced it with Ubuntu 12.04, and I'm not going to reinstall just for the sake of forensics. I realize it would have been better for the Mint community if I had spent more time tracking down the problem, and I'm sorry I did not.
My hardware is not that unusual - ASUS m4A785TD-V motherboard, AMD Phenom XT1090 processor, AMD Radeon HD 5770 video card using the open source drivers, SATA 7200 RPM 1TB drive with partitions formatted ext4, 12 GB of RAM, no overclocking.
The only software I had installed that you couldn't obtain using the default Linux Minut software package repositories was the Linux clients for Google Music and the Spideroak backup service.
If you have permission from your employer to wipe the system, obviously that will work better. Otherwise doing this is better than doing nothing - it won't stop an especially determined person from collecting useful information about you, though - but then someone that determined to get your information may have already installed a keystroke logger or other malware or just videotaped you typing your passwords.
I think VolciMaster used urandom on the running system so that it would only overwrite free space in the drive. e.g. you have a 200 GB disk with 10GB operating system files and 3 GB of your data. You delete your data, and then fill the 190 GB with random information. When the computer restarts, you just delete the 190 or so GB giant file created by urandom. Your personal data is pretty well gone and overwritten, but the operating system is still intact.
I can only speak for myself, but I work at a small company that has to be pretty careful with the IT budget. We've had plenty of experiences with a useful piece of commercial software that was critical or nearly critical to our operations suddenly doubling in price. We've also had experiences where we brought a bug to the attention of the vendor and were asked to pay a premium support fee for them to fix it.
The worst was Crystal Reports. We used one of their products that cost $650 per license in 2004 and was over $15,000 for an equivalent license in 2009.
I have friends and relatives that work with Oracle and they're generally very pleased with their products. I respect that. But I'm not going to advocate using Oracle unless my employer has enough cash that they can swallow doubling of their proprietary software licensing costs without taking more than a few percent off their annual profits. Fortune 1000 companies are in that position, but the bulk of the economy is not.
I have random freezes and reboots on Linux Mint 12 with nothing printed in the logs. Four other versions of Linux and one Windows 7 partition never had a similar problem, so the Mint developers must have changed some driver settings in a particularly unfortunate way.
I defer to your expertise. ( And just to be clear, that's not sarcasm. ) I'm following the smart phone and tablet revolution with great interest, for many reasons including the fact that it will influence my long term career as a developer. But I still personally prefer a large monitor and a workstation, so I don't have any experience trying to accomplish serious work on relatively small touch devices.
I work at a small company, so my personal experience on Bring Your Own Device doesn't carry much weight. I'm under the impression from tech blogs and other media sources that the iPad has serious business use - if nothing else, it offers a handful of fully features RDP client programs so a user can run any Windows app they want right from the iPad. Obviously using RDP won't get a company away from Microsoft products, but the transition could never be a hard cutover anyway - as more and more business applications get ported to iOS and Android or have equivalents created in iOS and Android, the users will find themselves spending less and less time putting the tablet away and firing up the laptop or less time running RDP on the tablet.
But a lot can change in a hurry, and it's absurd to count out a company with tens of billions of dollars in the bank.
On (2), granted. So maybe Apple took a page from Microsoft's own playbook. But in any event, as far as I can tell Microsoft needs to take the same approach once again.
On (3), I don't know that better enterprise features are enough. I wouldn't mind being wrong, I think competition is better for consumers and speeds the rate of innovation, which is better for everyone.
The biggest problem with Unity, in my experience, was that it was not stable until Ubuntu 11.10.
But I've used Unity and Metro UI, and I find Unity to be far more intuitive. That's the real killer for Metro UI, in my not particularly humble opinion. I didn't need a tutorial to use Unity with a mouse and I don't imagine most people would need a tutorial to use one with a touch screen. Even if you hate what it does, the features are pretty easy to figure out. With Metro UI, I had to use a separate device to search for user tutorials and documentation to figure out how to switch apps, see what was currently running, log out, etc... Maybe if I gave it a few hours of work it would become quick and intuitive, but I gave up after the first half hour and haven't booted the Windows 8 partition since then.
I can see three counters to your position. I'm not sure it will be enough to save Microsoft, but I understand what they're trying to do:
1. If you've never used a computer before, I suspect learning to use a touch screen is easier than learning to use a mouse or keyboard. That doesn't affect most people in the US, but it does affect kids and a lot of countries that are only now joining the information age. My kids are pretty young, and they all figured out how to use games on my phone faster than they figured out how to use a mouse.
2. Apple and to a lesser extent Android destroyed Palm, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone because people got so attached to their iPhones that they brought them to work and refused to use corporate substitutes. If that's a few isolated incidents then the employee involved gets disciplined or fired. But when it affects a large percentage of employees plus managers and top executives, anyone in the IT staff that insists on Palm, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, etc... is told to change the IT policy or be replaced. So Microsoft is trying to work the same way - make Windows 8 consumer first, business second, and hope they can get back into enterprise business through the same "bring your personal device to work" route that the iPhone took. And unifying the interface across all devices works in both directions - maybe the consumer who buys a Windows 8 tablet takes his device to work, and maybe another consumer forced to use Windows 8 at work becomes accustomed to it and purchases a Windows 8 phone or tablet. I don't think it will work, but I can see why they are trying. I suspect that if Microsoft doesn't pour everything into this massive makeover, in ten years people will be using the iPad 15 with HDMI out to a 30 inch monitor with bluetooth keyboard and mouse at the office, and then taking the iPad home to surf the web and play games in the evening, and Microsoft will be cut out of most of the world's enterprise office space and consumer computing device market.
3. Microsoft executives must understand how important low price is. The iPad manages to sell like hotcakes at the $500 price point, but it has the strength of the Apple brand. ( I hate the Apple brand, but clearly most of the US doesn't share my views. ) The only Android tablets that have grabbed a significant piece of the tablet market are the 7 inch, $200 Amazon Kindle and now maybe the 7 inch, $200 Google Nexus 7 - smaller and more importantly much cheaper than the iPad. If Microsoft starts selling the Surface RT (ARM processor) 10 inch tablets at a $300 or so price point and they manage to adequately explain to buyers that Windows on Arm won't run legacy x86 apps so there is not mass confusion, I think they might have a shot at getting at least some of the market. If on the other hand they try to price head to head with the iPad or higher than the iPad they will get killed. I think they know that, and will price accordingly - if I was running Microsoft, at this point I would be trying to convince the board of directors that the long term survival of the company hinged upon dethroning the iPhone and iPad, and that if Microsoft had to take a loss for five years straight to pull it off, that would be a price worth paying.
Partly it's a time problem - if you only have two hours or so to set up the complete setting, characters, and story, adding depth to the story is difficult. See the Hulk film by Ang Lee as an example - Hulk destroyed a science lab, it fought giant mutant dogs, it destroyed an army base and had a prolonged battle with tanks and then a confrontation with helicopters, and then a climactic confrontation at the end. Tons of action. But Ang Lee tried to interweave a complex character story into the film and even with two and a half hours of screen time he failed to make anything coherent or interesting.
Neil Gaiman's American Gods novel would make for awesome film, but only if a good director made a big budget miniseries out of it. It's just too much for a traditional movie, even a three hour one.
I'll give you the fact that toolset maturity is a big problem.
But even with tons of native apps, mobile operating systems are still going to have a huge web browser focus. So Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Apple, Opera, and dozens of other minor players will continue to invest resources well into the tens of millions of dollars per year range into making Javascript and HTML more resource efficient, and the browser itself more power efficient. Between that kind of optimization on the software side and the march of technological innovation on the device side, I really suspect you'll be able to run the graphical equivalent of Unreal 4 using WebGL on your smart phone in ten or fifteen years.
The Democrats had to work very hard in the Senate to get some of the moderate Democrats and independent Senator Joe Lieberman to agree with them. The bill was modified many times - as I'm sure you know, it originally had a "single payer" option but Lieberman and a few others refused to sign it with that provision included.
And what exactly were they supposed to do about the economy? The Republicans has 2000-2006 to fix the economy, and in 2008 we discovered that all of the economic growth from 2000 forward was a lie built on real estate speculation and dishonest accounting on Wall Street. I'm convinced the Democrats have no clue how to fix the economy - I just happen to be convinced the Republicans also have no clue, and are more likely to grossly exploit every American that isn't already wealthy in the process.
Just because the Democrats nominally controlled Congress from 2008 to 2010 does not mean Obama could have passed any law he wanted. You need a 60 vote majority in the Senate to bring the debate on an issue to a close in order to have a vote, and the Democrat control hovered just at or below the 60 person mark - so if just one Democratic Senator disagreed with some part of the law, they could side with the Republicans and stop it, period.
Generally speaking, this kind of restriction is good - it prevents one party from getting power for a short period and then massively modifying the government. But it also means that you can't blame every Bush presidency problem on Bush, some are partly a result of Clinton. And you can't blame every Obama presidency problem on Obama, some are a result of Bush. And in all three cases, a lot of the problems may have been within the power of the sitting president to solve - or to make worse if this kind of intentionally constructed wall to changes did not exist in Congress.
Google has slightly more interest in promoting HTML5 than Apple - the Chrome browser has its own app store, and Google has Chrome OS. But of course in terms of engineering investment neither the browser nor the operating system receive anywhere near the attention or promotion that is given to Android.
With the lists you have to use the HTML formatting, so it's "less than" "br" "forward slash(optional)" "greater than" (all without the double quotes) . The br is literal, the rest are their respective characters on the key board. But don't sweat it, your stuff is easy to read.
Apple and Google are caught in a tug of war over HTML5 - if they support it well, it makes it easier for customers to move to the other guy. But if they support it too poorly, they miss out on developers and they miss out on the good apps for HTML5 that do exists. But at the end of the day I suspect you're right, Apple and Google are going to pour all their money into making the native apps better because locking the customers in gets them more money.
I'm just hoping something disrupts the situation. Competition is good for everyone, and while I'm thrilled that Android is mostly open and we're not stuck choosing between two completely proprietary options, I would still like to see three major players or four major players, and ideally everyone but Apple would be mostly or fully based on free software.
I think your arguments carry more weight than mine and Firefox OS will occupy a very tiny niche. But I have a few admittedly weak responses.
1. Hardware is better now and continues to improve. I wasn't a fan of OpenMoko's hardware specs, so I'm not one of the ones that failed to match talk with cash. I wasn't interested in any smart phone until they reached dual core and 1 GB of RAM, and I probably won't replace my junky bottom tier LG Android phone until a generation or two past the Galaxy Nexus 3. Maybe OpenMoko's biggest problem was being before its time.
2. The Linux kernel in Firefox OS is GPL, but Firefox itself is under the Mozilla Public License, which is kind of like a weak GPL because it protects the openness of its own code but makes no restrictions on intermingled proprietary code. The carriers can add their own proprietary features to the phone and remove features from the operating system so they can screw the customers with value add junk. They are legally required to give the customers copies of the Firefox OS source that they did not modify, but not their own code.
3. (Re WebOS instead) good point.
4. HTML5 app selections are improving all of the time, because you can run apps in it on Windows, on Mac OS X, on iOS, on Android, etc... and part of the Firefox OS project is releasing new HTML APIs for accelerometers, VOIP, etc... if they can get the major players to adapt those APIs, HTML5 will be even more cross-platform compatible.
5. Microsoft charges licensing fees, they have a relatively poor reputation with many consumers, and they screwed themselves by burning all of their early adopters by making Windows Mobile apps incompatible with Windows Phone 7 apps.
5 years ago no mobile phone had the memory and processing power to make HTML5 websites run well and the HTML5 app selection sucked hugely. This could have never worked then. It probably won't work now, but this is the best window of opportunity Mozilla will get.
I am very excited about OpenCores.org. But I'm under the impression that their very best designs are many generations behind the latest ARM chips, let alone Intel chips, for processing power and efficiency.
Having a small group of software developers build something like Rails or uTorrent or VLC is impressive. Having a medium size group of software developers build something like the Linux kernel is incredibly impressive. Having a bunch of volunteers put together something equivalent to an Intel Core 2 processor? That may not be possible.
I would love to be totally wrong about this. I don't know anything about computer processor design processes. But I figure if Intel spends many billions of dollars per year in research and development costs, you would need a large number of the brightest human beings on the planet working in a coordinated fashion to match their designs in OpenCores or something similar.