Us Linux folks have been waiting 10 years for this. The day that Microsoft started eating the OEM's lunch. At some point they will have to compete against Microsoft. Since Microsoft gets Windows for "free" the only way to match the price point on the hardware will be to load an OS that costs them less than Windows.
With the Windows 8 App store it looks like Valve has figured out they had better have an exit strategy for leaving the Windows PC Market. Hopefully the OEMs like Dell, HP and Lenovo will figure this out soon as well.
I understand they've renamed their table computer, but I don't think I've ever seen any explaination on what motivated them to want to change the name of that and call their new tablet "Surface" instead.
They are hoping it wont be in the red, the want to break even, get their head above the "surface" of the water to not drown?
I'm even sure that this was a wake up call for Microsoft and is the reason why they try to shove down "Metro" and their "unified" vision down our throat. That in the hope that familiarity will influence the choice people make when buying a new tablet. I know a lot of people who replaced their PC with a tablet or are using the PC a lot less since they have a tablet. I think for the general population that does some surfing, e-mailing and simple games a tablet can be good enough. And that is a big threat for Microsoft when the dominant tablets don't have a Microsoft operating system on board.
Here Here!
Price is going to be a big factor. The Nexus 7 is $200 and does alot. How much? Enough to make some one wonder if they want to buy 3 Nexus 7's for them, their spouse, and a kid, OR do they want to buy on Surface or other Winsows 8 tablet at $600 plus? The only way that Microsoft adds "value" for an OS that is priced at $50 or $150 is on expensive hardware. If you put Win 8 on the Nexus 7 it would be a $300 tablet. You have to hide the price of Win 8 in the cost of overpriced hardware.
That is not to say there is not value havind a keyboard as well as front and rear facing cameras. Microsoft is betting that someone will look at a Nexus 7 wth no keyboard, front facing camera, scratchable screen at $200 and pass it up for Win 8 tablet at $600. Remember, this is WinRT at $600 and there are more Andriod apps than Win 8 apps and you must trust Microsoft with your cloud info better than you trust google.
The market to me looks like Android owns the sub $400 market, Apple owns the $500 to $900 market and those that absoletely must run a Windows desktop on a tablet might spend $900 + on a Win 8 tablet... unless they would prefer a $900 Win 7 tablet. After all, one you hit that price point the hadware is goog enough to make Win 7 sing.
Be serious, the last time the justice department step in and the wheels of justice finished milling their product, every cometitor was locked out or dead due to Microsofts practices.
Betting on the DOJ stepping in, in time is NOT a good business plan.
Yes, but the key there is to go where the puck is going to be. Microsoft has been a day late and a dollar short at ending up where the puck is. I think is is much more likely that they are going to guess at where the puck will be, but they will end up no where near where the puck is going.
It is an interesting question. Look at Steve Jobs in 1984 and where he thought computers would be by now. Did he have a good idea where things were going? Or did he decide where he wanted to go, and bent our will to his?
It has happened a time or two for me. Distro provide version 1.32 from 3 years ago. Version 1.85 just came out on the website with a feature I need. And the guy botched the source tarball. No Makefile and nothing that would allow autogen to work either. Sure versions.1 to 1.84 all have tarballs with Makefiles. Which leaves you having to wait till they get around to fixing it.
But I will give you your point. No one does it on purpose. It is a statistical anomaly.
For instance, domain managed applications and login, resilient file sharing, group policies, etc. If any of these items surface (pun!), in the new product, there will be at least a corporate buying spree.
Really? None of those features will be available on the WinRT tablet that will be out in October. It will be January or February when the over a thousand dollar we don't know the battery life Windows 8 tablet hits the market.
Right now MS is to interested in their own app store to care about anything else after the Windows 8 launch.
These are the same people that predicted the massive rise to hundreds of millions of Netbooks after the first Netbooks hit the market. From 2009 we can see that their 2012 predictions are off. They did not see Microsoft killing the Netbook market. They also failed to note at the time the rise of the iPAD.
It is almost to the point that if Gartner predicts something I can be sure that is the ONE thing that won't happen.
Has the XBox really broken even? After all of the parlor games and accounting tricks?
Writing off 2 billion in repairs in 2009 for what will happen in 2010-2012 and only call it a loss for 2009. How can it be a "profit" it you make 500 million but paid out 600 million in repairs that year. It is like saying we turned a profit this year because of "revenue" in the sense of a loan we gave our self 2 years ago.
For years every Xbox was sold at a loss, then every XBox360 was sold at a loss. Then there were the repairs for defective XBox and XBox 360's. Multiple repairs. With development costs, advertising, etc, we are at somewhere between 8 to 10 billion in losses.
Plus all the other losses from that division. Such as Zune, Windows CE, Windows Mobile, etc. You are heading toward 20 billion. At this point, how many years will the Xbox 360 have to be profitable before they actually break even?
Then we can talk BING! Windows Live and MSN. which all loose money as well.
I'm fine with click the tray icon and roll the scroll wheel. You make it sound like that extra click is a tragedy. Given how tray icons work, this makes sense, btw. Otherwise explorer would have to catch what your doing and pass it to the tray icon.
You could just as easily justify the one-button mouse. The problem is, after getting used to a 2 or 3 button mouse going back to a one button mouse bothers you.
After becoming used to being able to control the volume with the scroll wheel, Windows feels primitive making me have to click, wait, then scroll.
Yeah, that is exactly the problem traditional educational institutions will have with it.
One thing is this stuff does not change, mathematics, chemistry, biology, book keeping, etc really has not changed. A very good book and video lecture should be as good in 20 years as it is now. If they spend time improving and adding material instead of just ditching everything and going with new material every few years like your typical college program does, they will be able to build something incredible.
It was only a community college that I attended. But it was pretty useless. There was the books, I was expected to read them. I could buy "for dummies" books that would be better to learn from. Then there was the classroom instruction, which was repeating what the book said. If you did not understand something from the book, the instructor might help. If something in the book inspired you to ask a more advanced question. Sorry, they instructor would not answer, it might confuse the slower students. It turns out the books are there for you to read, and to provide tests to prove that you read the book. The instructors are there to proctor the tests and grade the work.
Khan does not have to do much to do better than the current system at teaching students. Since he does not have to worry about real estate, sports, trustees, textbook publishers, unions and tenure he can focus on really teaching students instead of making money for everyone vested in doing things the way it has always been done.
I will go out on a limb and say I know. It is going to fail.
They have spent half a billion in advertising in the last 3 years and Windows Mobile has gone from 12% of the smart phone market down to about 4 1/2%. You have seen the commercials. They are dreadful. Do you really think Microsoft is going to put out an ad that makes a phone with WP8 on it the MUST HAVE device?
They have striped off most of the enterprise features, the market they have always sold the strongest in. Now they are going after the consumer market. A market which uses windows, but expects bugs and crashes. The market which has rejected the poop-brown Zune and the laughed the Kin off the market in less than 60 days.
Then the carriers like AT&T will sell the phone with a crappy service plan that will make iPhone, Android, and two tin cans with a piece of string between them all look like better deals.
Then the sales people who want their commissions will do them in. When a customer comes in and asks for an iPhone or an Android, they can sell it, get them out the door, and move onto selling another phone to someone else. They fear having to try and convince a customer that they really want a Windows phone, taking twice as much time to do that. Then the next day when they come back and want an iPhone or an Android, they have to waste their time doing that. So in the time it takes to handle one windows phone, they could sell two or three iPhones.
YMMV but every power user I know that had a WP6 phone and swears by Microsoft Products, have moved onto Android. Any normal person who was convinced to buy a WP7, has returned it within 24 hours demanding an iPhone or Android.
What would make anyone think that Microsoft or Nokia will have a success on their hands?
I am sure that will work out great for Nokia. After all, if having the N900 with WP7.5 tank 4 months before WP8 is out works good for Microsoft, I am sure it will work out even better for Nokia!
The real problem they have is the same one that Trintity, the fork of KDE 3 has.
Take any program that ported over from KDE 3 to KDE 4 like Amarok. Amarok is not a core KDE program. They have a small team and they are firmly committed to KDE 4. Yet they will get emails from Trinity users that want support. The Amarok developers are not working on anything KDE 3 related, Amarok 1.4 is the last of the old series. They only want support requests for Amarok 2.0 and above. Projects like K3b, K9copy and Amarok are clamoring for Trinity to rename the older versions of their apps so that they will not get confused Trinity users needing help.
With Trinity they have to find a way to port KDE 3 to QT 4, with Mate they have to find a way to port to GTK3. If they can do that they will survive. Otherwise, they will have to maintain old and outdated versions of QT3 and GTK2 as well as keeping those non-core applications working. That is a tall order to fill.
Once upon a time, it was IBM who had every misstep reported as evil and Microsoft was the could-do-no-wrong company,.
Twenty years from now, No one will talk about Microsoft at all, though they will still be in business. Everyone will jump on the evil that Google does, and no matter what they do, OCP (or the current new kid on the block) will do no wrong.
I was talking sarcastically about the situation where something is done for a customer, like setting up a new set of records for quickbooks or installing a sound card. Then years later the customer calls up and say that they have made NO changes to their computer in 4 years. Now they have a new problem, lets say the computer is running slow and a key on the keyboard sticks. They dont think it could be anything they have done in the last 4 years. nothing they spilt on the keyboard. They say they have installed no new software on the computer, but there are dozens of new programs and crapware installed. They have a dozen toolbars in their browser. But they will swear up and down that the computer moving slow and the sticky key on the keyboard is due to something you did wrong when you installed a sound card for them 4 years ago.
Symantec WinFax. is able to use live update. They pushed out 1 update back in 2000 or so. It caused so many problems they NEVER pushed another update out for WinFax. I worked WinFax support for 3 months in 2004. Customers would call and say that they purchased WinFax in 2002, it has been working flawlessly for the last 2 years and the lasted "Live Update" broke it. I would explain to them that the last "Live update" was pushed out 2 versions and 2 years before they even purchased the program and there was no chance a live update broke anything. You would be surprised at how adamant people can be at that point that there was an update and we should fix the computer for them for free.
I would say the difference is that no one is giving you a free car but makes you sign a 2 year contract that you will purchase $500 worth of gas a month giving you a total of 50 gallons of gas. You are not allowed to gas up at any competitors gas station and if you use your 50 gallons of gas, each additional gallon you purchase will be at the rate of $60 per gallon.
You were the last person to work on my computer and that was 4 years ago. It has been working perfectly, I have installed no new software, I have made no changes. Ha! now it is not working and it is something that YOU did 4 years ago that is causing the problem. Fix it NOW and fix it for FREE.
Yes, you are the hoodoo with the voodoo. Magically something you did 4 years back has kept the computer running beautifully for 4 years, then all of a sudden "poof" it has broken everything. Links don't open, and the computer runs slow.
Do I even need to mention that on a computer with NO software installs in 4 years, now has 10 browser bars and Add/Remove programs shows Smiley Central was installed 2 days ago.
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Us Linux folks have been waiting 10 years for this. The day that Microsoft started eating the OEM's lunch. At some point they will have to compete against Microsoft. Since Microsoft gets Windows for "free" the only way to match the price point on the hardware will be to load an OS that costs them less than Windows.
With the Windows 8 App store it looks like Valve has figured out they had better have an exit strategy for leaving the Windows PC Market. Hopefully the OEMs like Dell, HP and Lenovo will figure this out soon as well.
I understand they've renamed their table computer, but I don't think I've ever seen any explaination on what motivated them to want to change the name of that and call their new tablet "Surface" instead.
They are hoping it wont be in the red, the want to break even, get their head above the "surface" of the water to not drown?
I'm even sure that this was a wake up call for Microsoft and is the reason why they try to shove down "Metro" and their "unified" vision down our throat. That in the hope that familiarity will influence the choice people make when buying a new tablet. I know a lot of people who replaced their PC with a tablet or are using the PC a lot less since they have a tablet. I think for the general population that does some surfing, e-mailing and simple games a tablet can be good enough. And that is a big threat for Microsoft when the dominant tablets don't have a Microsoft operating system on board.
Here Here!
Price is going to be a big factor. The Nexus 7 is $200 and does alot. How much? Enough to make some one wonder if they want to buy 3 Nexus 7's for them, their spouse, and a kid, OR do they want to buy on Surface or other Winsows 8 tablet at $600 plus? The only way that Microsoft adds "value" for an OS that is priced at $50 or $150 is on expensive hardware. If you put Win 8 on the Nexus 7 it would be a $300 tablet. You have to hide the price of Win 8 in the cost of overpriced hardware.
That is not to say there is not value havind a keyboard as well as front and rear facing cameras. Microsoft is betting that someone will look at a Nexus 7 wth no keyboard, front facing camera, scratchable screen at $200 and pass it up for Win 8 tablet at $600. Remember, this is WinRT at $600 and there are more Andriod apps than Win 8 apps and you must trust Microsoft with your cloud info better than you trust google.
The market to me looks like Android owns the sub $400 market, Apple owns the $500 to $900 market and those that absoletely must run a Windows desktop on a tablet might spend $900 + on a Win 8 tablet ... unless they would prefer a $900 Win 7 tablet. After all, one you hit that price point the hadware is goog enough to make Win 7 sing.
Be serious, the last time the justice department step in and the wheels of justice finished milling their product, every cometitor was locked out or dead due to Microsofts practices.
Betting on the DOJ stepping in, in time is NOT a good business plan.
Ah, but can she get socks?
Yes, but the key there is to go where the puck is going to be. Microsoft has been a day late and a dollar short at ending up where the puck is. I think is is much more likely that they are going to guess at where the puck will be, but they will end up no where near where the puck is going.
It is an interesting question. Look at Steve Jobs in 1984 and where he thought computers would be by now. Did he have a good idea where things were going? Or did he decide where he wanted to go, and bent our will to his?
It has happened a time or two for me. Distro provide version 1.32 from 3 years ago. Version 1.85 just came out on the website with a feature I need. And the guy botched the source tarball. No Makefile and nothing that would allow autogen to work either. Sure versions .1 to 1.84 all have tarballs with Makefiles. Which leaves you having to wait till they get around to fixing it.
But I will give you your point. No one does it on purpose. It is a statistical anomaly.
Really? None of those features will be available on the WinRT tablet that will be out in October. It will be January or February when the over a thousand dollar we don't know the battery life Windows 8 tablet hits the market.
Right now MS is to interested in their own app store to care about anything else after the Windows 8 launch.
I noticed it the first time I thought about sitting down in the bathroom with it.
These are the same people that predicted the massive rise to hundreds of millions of Netbooks after the first Netbooks hit the market. From 2009 we can see that their 2012 predictions are off. They did not see Microsoft killing the Netbook market. They also failed to note at the time the rise of the iPAD.
It is almost to the point that if Gartner predicts something I can be sure that is the ONE thing that won't happen.
Has the XBox really broken even? After all of the parlor games and accounting tricks?
Writing off 2 billion in repairs in 2009 for what will happen in 2010-2012 and only call it a loss for 2009. How can it be a "profit" it you make 500 million but paid out 600 million in repairs that year. It is like saying we turned a profit this year because of "revenue" in the sense of a loan we gave our self 2 years ago.
For years every Xbox was sold at a loss, then every XBox360 was sold at a loss. Then there were the repairs for defective XBox and XBox 360's. Multiple repairs. With development costs, advertising, etc, we are at somewhere between 8 to 10 billion in losses.
Plus all the other losses from that division. Such as Zune, Windows CE, Windows Mobile, etc. You are heading toward 20 billion. At this point, how many years will the Xbox 360 have to be profitable before they actually break even?
Then we can talk BING! Windows Live and MSN. which all loose money as well.
I'm fine with click the tray icon and roll the scroll wheel. You make it sound like that extra click is a tragedy. Given how tray icons work, this makes sense, btw. Otherwise explorer would have to catch what your doing and pass it to the tray icon.
You could just as easily justify the one-button mouse. The problem is, after getting used to a 2 or 3 button mouse going back to a one button mouse bothers you.
After becoming used to being able to control the volume with the scroll wheel, Windows feels primitive making me have to click, wait, then scroll.
Why cant you mouse over the volume status in the system tray and roll your scroll wheel to change your volume? Linux has had it for over a decade.
Really Microsoft, people would not mind it you implement this feature.
Question: Are we not men?
Answer: We are not men, we are Devo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRguZr0xCOc
Yeah, that is exactly the problem traditional educational institutions will have with it.
One thing is this stuff does not change, mathematics, chemistry, biology, book keeping, etc really has not changed. A very good book and video lecture should be as good in 20 years as it is now. If they spend time improving and adding material instead of just ditching everything and going with new material every few years like your typical college program does, they will be able to build something incredible.
It was only a community college that I attended. But it was pretty useless. There was the books, I was expected to read them. I could buy "for dummies" books that would be better to learn from. Then there was the classroom instruction, which was repeating what the book said. If you did not understand something from the book, the instructor might help. If something in the book inspired you to ask a more advanced question. Sorry, they instructor would not answer, it might confuse the slower students. It turns out the books are there for you to read, and to provide tests to prove that you read the book. The instructors are there to proctor the tests and grade the work.
Khan does not have to do much to do better than the current system at teaching students. Since he does not have to worry about real estate, sports, trustees, textbook publishers, unions and tenure he can focus on really teaching students instead of making money for everyone vested in doing things the way it has always been done.
I will go out on a limb and say I know. It is going to fail.
They have spent half a billion in advertising in the last 3 years and Windows Mobile has gone from 12% of the smart phone market down to about 4 1/2%. You have seen the commercials. They are dreadful. Do you really think Microsoft is going to put out an ad that makes a phone with WP8 on it the MUST HAVE device?
They have striped off most of the enterprise features, the market they have always sold the strongest in. Now they are going after the consumer market. A market which uses windows, but expects bugs and crashes. The market which has rejected the poop-brown Zune and the laughed the Kin off the market in less than 60 days.
Then the carriers like AT&T will sell the phone with a crappy service plan that will make iPhone, Android, and two tin cans with a piece of string between them all look like better deals.
Then the sales people who want their commissions will do them in. When a customer comes in and asks for an iPhone or an Android, they can sell it, get them out the door, and move onto selling another phone to someone else. They fear having to try and convince a customer that they really want a Windows phone, taking twice as much time to do that. Then the next day when they come back and want an iPhone or an Android, they have to waste their time doing that. So in the time it takes to handle one windows phone, they could sell two or three iPhones.
YMMV but every power user I know that had a WP6 phone and swears by Microsoft Products, have moved onto Android. Any normal person who was convinced to buy a WP7, has returned it within 24 hours demanding an iPhone or Android.
What would make anyone think that Microsoft or Nokia will have a success on their hands?
I am sure that will work out great for Nokia. After all, if having the N900 with WP7.5 tank 4 months before WP8 is out works good for Microsoft, I am sure it will work out even better for Nokia!
Maybe so, But you could be running GNOME 2 in 10 years if you stick with RHEL or CENT OS.
The real problem they have is the same one that Trintity, the fork of KDE 3 has.
Take any program that ported over from KDE 3 to KDE 4 like Amarok. Amarok is not a core KDE program. They have a small team and they are firmly committed to KDE 4. Yet they will get emails from Trinity users that want support. The Amarok developers are not working on anything KDE 3 related, Amarok 1.4 is the last of the old series. They only want support requests for Amarok 2.0 and above. Projects like K3b, K9copy and Amarok are clamoring for Trinity to rename the older versions of their apps so that they will not get confused Trinity users needing help.
With Trinity they have to find a way to port KDE 3 to QT 4, with Mate they have to find a way to port to GTK3. If they can do that they will survive. Otherwise, they will have to maintain old and outdated versions of QT3 and GTK2 as well as keeping those non-core applications working. That is a tall order to fill.
Yes, but with the wide aspect display, I have plenty of room for my dockapps. 1368-68 = 1300 pixels of usable horizontal space.
It is the circle of life.
Once upon a time, it was IBM who had every misstep reported as evil and Microsoft was the could-do-no-wrong company,.
Twenty years from now, No one will talk about Microsoft at all, though they will still be in business. Everyone will jump on the evil that Google does, and no matter what they do, OCP (or the current new kid on the block) will do no wrong.
What?
I was talking sarcastically about the situation where something is done for a customer, like setting up a new set of records for quickbooks or installing a sound card. Then years later the customer calls up and say that they have made NO changes to their computer in 4 years. Now they have a new problem, lets say the computer is running slow and a key on the keyboard sticks. They dont think it could be anything they have done in the last 4 years. nothing they spilt on the keyboard. They say they have installed no new software on the computer, but there are dozens of new programs and crapware installed. They have a dozen toolbars in their browser. But they will swear up and down that the computer moving slow and the sticky key on the keyboard is due to something you did wrong when you installed a sound card for them 4 years ago.
Symantec WinFax. is able to use live update. They pushed out 1 update back in 2000 or so. It caused so many problems they NEVER pushed another update out for WinFax. I worked WinFax support for 3 months in 2004. Customers would call and say that they purchased WinFax in 2002, it has been working flawlessly for the last 2 years and the lasted "Live Update" broke it. I would explain to them that the last "Live update" was pushed out 2 versions and 2 years before they even purchased the program and there was no chance a live update broke anything. You would be surprised at how adamant people can be at that point that there was an update and we should fix the computer for them for free.
I would say the difference is that no one is giving you a free car but makes you sign a 2 year contract that you will purchase $500 worth of gas a month giving you a total of 50 gallons of gas. You are not allowed to gas up at any competitors gas station and if you use your 50 gallons of gas, each additional gallon you purchase will be at the rate of $60 per gallon.
Don't forget computer vo0doo.
You were the last person to work on my computer and that was 4 years ago. It has been working perfectly, I have installed no new software, I have made no changes. Ha! now it is not working and it is something that YOU did 4 years ago that is causing the problem. Fix it NOW and fix it for FREE.
Yes, you are the hoodoo with the voodoo. Magically something you did 4 years back has kept the computer running beautifully for 4 years, then all of a sudden "poof" it has broken everything. Links don't open, and the computer runs slow.
Do I even need to mention that on a computer with NO software installs in 4 years, now has 10 browser bars and Add/Remove programs shows Smiley Central was installed 2 days ago.
Now that IS an inconvenient truth.