In some cases I'm sure that's true, but in our case we documented the hell out of our processes, had meetings with an HP contact person, to turn over all of our procedures, I and other architects spent hours at a white board explaining how things were set up and how our processes worked,,,,, and cutover was still a disaster. And HP's official excuse was that they did not have documentation on our procedures, an excuse our upper management clung to in order to save face.
What actually happened is that they took positions that required expertise, knowledge, experience, and trouble shooting skills, and handed same plus a huge stack of procedures to former taxi cab drivers. You could *hear* the rustle of paper on the phone, as they paged frantically back and forth, trying desperately to find a written procedure to deal with whatever breakage we were reporting. It would have been comical if it wasn't so tragic.
"Dumbsizing", "brain-drain", "dump the wheat and keep the chaff", it was called a lot of things, but the mechanism is well known. The people who stay are the ones too incompetent or too insecure to find a job elsewhere.
When my company outsourced, our top IT people were rebadged as HP and remained onsite. They are still valuable employees who know the company intimately, and should we ever insource, they'd be the first employees we'd rehire. This isn't rocket science.
I have to wonder whether HP management even cares at this point. I get the impression that meeting short term attrition goals is considered more important than long term viability.
I think the important point is that the clock is ticking, both for the infrastructure and content providers. The ones that continue to cling to the old business model have a limited lifespan.
> So, not surprisingly, Intel has now run into "delays" in securing agreements with content providers (in this case, the word "delay" means a quantity of time as large as forever). Why on earth would Intel believe that they have the consumer electronics clout to pull this off where Apple and Google continue to fail?
It doesn't really matter. Arrogance aside, it's good for us the consumers that they're trying, even if they succeed partially or not at all. It's yet another sign to the content providers that the business model is changing. The industry survivors will have found a way to change with the times.
At the beginning of the economic downturn, I took a pay cut (it was that or go look for a job -- good luck with that) and as a consequence we dropped several things, including cable TV. I bought an outside antenna (not allowed by our HOA, but I dared them to try to make me take it down, and they declined) and a roku box, and that plus netflix kept wife and daughter happy. (I watch close to zero tv, so it didn't matter to me either way.) Cable at the time was full ride with two DVR set top boxes, and dumping all that was like getting a raise. I'm now almost back to what I was making then, but we've gotten used to not having cable. My only regret is the money I've wasted on cable all those years, and what I could have done with it instead.
This sometimes means that wife or daughter are up to a year behind on some pay channel show, but eventually everything worth watching gets released in some non-cable form, and it's just not worth the $$ just to see something the moment it gets released.
Cable ranks up there with an AOL account as something that people think they need, but really don't.
....which is a disturbingly large group, if the crowds at the store next to the Starbucks on the way to work are any indication. When Apple comes out with a new product, I have to skip coffee that morning.
I have no problem paying for a navigation app. I paid extra to have one built into my truck that uses a DVD for maps. But the for-pay nav apps for Android aren't very good. I think it's because they compete with the vendor's own appliances.
And so, things that the iPad can do is a strict subset of what mother-in-law wants to do. Or, if you will, they are intersecting sets. A Venn diagram with very little overlap.
The topic is about what tablets need and don't have. Hundreds of thousands of apps, most of which are crap, really aren't germane to the conversation. That a tablet is easy to use is not important if what the tablet does is not interesting.
Me too. It's a tradition in my immediate family not to travel during the Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year. Those are dangerous times to be on the road, and you don't want your holiday memories to be of sitting in the emergency room or dealing with a death in the family. (Been there, did that, never again.) We take time off in January to see close relatives and May to see the ones that are further away.
The problem as I see it is a matter of integration. For instance, sure there are video communicator apps that use the front facing camera; have been for some time, but none of them have the same degree of integration as the phone app. They are clumsy to use, not something mother-in-law could figure out.
> Built-in maps: No. This should be an app, not something that comes built-in to the OS. These apps exist. You're trying to move backward.
The problem is, built-in map apps from the big navigator companies tend to suck, presumably because they would otherwise compete with more-profitable navigator appliances made by the same vendor.
If the otherwise free Google Maps (for instance) just had the *option* to *buy* built-in maps, that would be fine.
OP has some excellent suggestions. Probably the best one is offline maps for gps. Tablets/smartphones will never be true navigation tools until this becomes available.
And no, suggesting he buy a laptop instead is not helpful. Tablets are supposed to be the new laptop, we keep hearing. Personally, I have no intention of owning Yet Another Device [TM]. When I buy a tablet, it will be because I can stop using one of my other devices. Not before.
My own list:
What He Said. Plus:
Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, and Adobe Lightroom for tablets. We keep seeing these commercials about how tablets are going to be the next big thing for content creation. It's time to PROVE it. And I *don't* mean drawing a moustache on a photo taken with the tablet's camera. And before you mention it, "Photoshop for Android" is a TOY, Carousel is a TOY, and your favorite free app is not the same thing.
Functional, reliable, cross-platform, built-in, as-easy-to-use-as-a-phone, commonly available two way video communication, integrated with the address book and built-in phone app. This is second only to "where the hell is my flying car" a thing we were all supposed to have by now and still don't. ("still don't" being defined as "if Grandma can't figure it out without tech support, it's not viable yet".)
I don't care how you do it, but tablets must work with all the web sites, including legacy sites that Windows and OSX work with. This is not negotiable. You can say all you want about how everyone should be using HTML5 or whatever the new cool standard is, but the fact is that there is still a lot of stuff out there that never worked on iOS, and used to work on Android but doesn't anymore. Fix that somehow, or no deal. I mean geeze, we're told that tablets are SOO GREAT for content consumption, but every place my wife points her Kindle Fire HD, the damned video WON'T PLAY. Yes, I know the reason why. It's stupid.
I'm challenging the industry to prove to me that tablets are not a toy.
(1) someone has been watching too many episodes of Beauty and the Beast. Or, (2) there's some really screwy secret experimentation going on. But if (2), why would we even hear about possible protocols to contain? (You'd think they would be secret too.)
But someone might see Linux on a surface and it would raise their expectations on what a Surface could do. I could see where that might cause problems.
The OS was VMS, and as I recall, data exited the room via tape cartridges for the most part, and RM05 disk packs occasionally. This was quite a bit before USB drives were even a concept. Validating the hardware wasn't in my area of influence, so I'm sorry to say I don't know much about it except that there were protocols in place. There were levels of security -- "the room" was seriously sequestered, (you needed a particular badge and know the door code) "the cage", where the equipment controlled by the software resided had slightly higher accessibility, (a particular badge would do) and then there were work areas outside the cage that had less security (any company badge but no visitors). The entire installation, though, was fenced and patrolled and had active guard stations 24 hours a day, so one could say that the building itself had a fairly high degree of security.
About transporting data -- funny story -- I worked on a slightly less secure project, which still used computers that had magnetic core memory, because that's what had been specified back when it was originally designed, and you know how the military will cling to a technology. Although this was awhile back, core memory was obsolete even then, but one of the advantages was that you could shut off the sequestered development machine, pull the memory board, walk out to the cage, slap in the memory board, and run the program. Just as you can do now with thumb drives. I designed boards with static memory, and later dynamic memory, and it seemed to me that in some respects we were going backwards.:-) With flash memory we finally had persistence like we used to have decades ago.
The thing is, you can't know every single detail for a big project. I designed the cpu board and wrote software (in assembly language) to control various things. There were certain things I was supposed to do to ensure security, but the details were someone else's job. This is often the case.
I have some knowledge of the sail area of dish antennas, because it was interesting, and there had been a spectacular failure when someone didn't do the calculations right for typical weather in the deploy area. But that really wasn't my job either.
That's a good argument to stay far enough behind the curve that you can find out what the typical user experience is (and the most common fixes/upgrades/workarounds) before buying the device.
It's often said that the user community acts as a gigantic unpaid QA department. This breaks down if nobody benefits. As you said, the manufacturers are generally not listening, and the early adopters will always adopt early regardless. It's the middle-to-late adopters that reap the benefits.
For instance, I have yet to buy a tablet, because I don't want another device in addition to my Windows laptop, I want a device that *replaces* my Windows laptop, and that includes media creative work. (As opposed to media consumption.) Until the apps I need are available in true touch-centric fashion, and vetted by other users, I'm not interested. (Counter-clockwise squiggle to emulate the right mouse button does *not* count.)
Back when I was looking at tablets, I noticed that a tablet would come out with a certain version of Android, and that would pretty much be it. So buying a tablet with Froyo and hoping to upgrade it some day to Ice Cream Sandwich (for instance) was a losing proposition. So I waited, and then I realized that the apps I wanted weren't available yet, so I waited some more. I'm still waiting. Why buy electronic junk that doesn't do the job? I choose not to contribute to e-landfill.
(My daughter bought a Win7 slate because her drawing programs ran on Windows, but it was so difficult to use that she went back to her digitizing pad on her desktop machine. Lesson learned. She hasn't decided yet whether to upgrade to Win8, attempt to load Android, or just dump it.)
I spent around 3300$(converted to $) a few years ago on a so called "smart TV" from Samsung. Less than a year after I bought it, they stopped updating the software. They never fixed it's problems with remember subtitles settings. The "Smart TV" part never got to be in any usable state and now after Netflix has entered my country, it is clear that this model will never get a downloadable app for Netflix.
So, no, I am not going to spend YET more money on a new TV when it is capable of showing a picture. Although I would have liked to have a all-in-one box, I guess it is not possible so I still have to buy boxes and then still use the tv as a monitor.
...but but but... I think that's the business model. You buy a TV, find that the apps are crap, and that you need to buy another TV for some of the apps to work, and then another TV comes along where more features work, so you have to have that, and so on in incremental improvements. It keeps workers in China, helpdesk people in India, and marketing people in the US all employed. As an added bonus, since the TVs are flat, the old ones stack really well in landfills.
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In some cases I'm sure that's true, but in our case we documented the hell out of our processes, had meetings with an HP contact person, to turn over all of our procedures, I and other architects spent hours at a white board explaining how things were set up and how our processes worked,,,,, and cutover was still a disaster. And HP's official excuse was that they did not have documentation on our procedures, an excuse our upper management clung to in order to save face.
What actually happened is that they took positions that required expertise, knowledge, experience, and trouble shooting skills, and handed same plus a huge stack of procedures to former taxi cab drivers. You could *hear* the rustle of paper on the phone, as they paged frantically back and forth, trying desperately to find a written procedure to deal with whatever breakage we were reporting. It would have been comical if it wasn't so tragic.
"Dumbsizing", "brain-drain", "dump the wheat and keep the chaff", it was called a lot of things, but the mechanism is well known. The people who stay are the ones too incompetent or too insecure to find a job elsewhere.
When my company outsourced, our top IT people were rebadged as HP and remained onsite. They are still valuable employees who know the company intimately, and should we ever insource, they'd be the first employees we'd rehire. This isn't rocket science.
I have to wonder whether HP management even cares at this point. I get the impression that meeting short term attrition goals is considered more important than long term viability.
I think the important point is that the clock is ticking, both for the infrastructure and content providers. The ones that continue to cling to the old business model have a limited lifespan.
> So, not surprisingly, Intel has now run into "delays" in securing agreements with content providers (in this case, the word "delay" means a quantity of time as large as forever). Why on earth would Intel believe that they have the consumer electronics clout to pull this off where Apple and Google continue to fail?
It doesn't really matter. Arrogance aside, it's good for us the consumers that they're trying, even if they succeed partially or not at all. It's yet another sign to the content providers that the business model is changing. The industry survivors will have found a way to change with the times.
At the beginning of the economic downturn, I took a pay cut (it was that or go look for a job -- good luck with that) and as a consequence we dropped several things, including cable TV. I bought an outside antenna (not allowed by our HOA, but I dared them to try to make me take it down, and they declined) and a roku box, and that plus netflix kept wife and daughter happy. (I watch close to zero tv, so it didn't matter to me either way.) Cable at the time was full ride with two DVR set top boxes, and dumping all that was like getting a raise. I'm now almost back to what I was making then, but we've gotten used to not having cable. My only regret is the money I've wasted on cable all those years, and what I could have done with it instead.
This sometimes means that wife or daughter are up to a year behind on some pay channel show, but eventually everything worth watching gets released in some non-cable form, and it's just not worth the $$ just to see something the moment it gets released.
Cable ranks up there with an AOL account as something that people think they need, but really don't.
Why should I buy something that doesn't do what I want?
I have no problem paying for a navigation app. I paid extra to have one built into my truck that uses a DVD for maps. But the for-pay nav apps for Android aren't very good. I think it's because they compete with the vendor's own appliances.
"Can I insert this SD card?"
"No."
"Fail."
And so, things that the iPad can do is a strict subset of what mother-in-law wants to do. Or, if you will, they are intersecting sets. A Venn diagram with very little overlap.
The topic is about what tablets need and don't have. Hundreds of thousands of apps, most of which are crap, really aren't germane to the conversation. That a tablet is easy to use is not important if what the tablet does is not interesting.
But then you're limited to what an ipad can do, which isn't very impressive.
I dunno, I'm having trouble coming up with a life better than that.
Me too. It's a tradition in my immediate family not to travel during the Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year. Those are dangerous times to be on the road, and you don't want your holiday memories to be of sitting in the emergency room or dealing with a death in the family. (Been there, did that, never again.) We take time off in January to see close relatives and May to see the ones that are further away.
The problem as I see it is a matter of integration. For instance, sure there are video communicator apps that use the front facing camera; have been for some time, but none of them have the same degree of integration as the phone app. They are clumsy to use, not something mother-in-law could figure out.
> Built-in maps: No. This should be an app, not something that comes built-in to the OS. These apps exist. You're trying to move backward.
The problem is, built-in map apps from the big navigator companies tend to suck, presumably because they would otherwise compete with more-profitable navigator appliances made by the same vendor.
If the otherwise free Google Maps (for instance) just had the *option* to *buy* built-in maps, that would be fine.
OP has some excellent suggestions. Probably the best one is offline maps for gps. Tablets/smartphones will never be true navigation tools until this becomes available.
And no, suggesting he buy a laptop instead is not helpful. Tablets are supposed to be the new laptop, we keep hearing. Personally, I have no intention of owning Yet Another Device [TM]. When I buy a tablet, it will be because I can stop using one of my other devices. Not before.
My own list:
What He Said. Plus:
Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, and Adobe Lightroom for tablets. We keep seeing these commercials about how tablets are going to be the next big thing for content creation. It's time to PROVE it. And I *don't* mean drawing a moustache on a photo taken with the tablet's camera. And before you mention it, "Photoshop for Android" is a TOY, Carousel is a TOY, and your favorite free app is not the same thing.
Functional, reliable, cross-platform, built-in, as-easy-to-use-as-a-phone, commonly available two way video communication, integrated with the address book and built-in phone app. This is second only to "where the hell is my flying car" a thing we were all supposed to have by now and still don't. ("still don't" being defined as "if Grandma can't figure it out without tech support, it's not viable yet".)
I don't care how you do it, but tablets must work with all the web sites, including legacy sites that Windows and OSX work with. This is not negotiable. You can say all you want about how everyone should be using HTML5 or whatever the new cool standard is, but the fact is that there is still a lot of stuff out there that never worked on iOS, and used to work on Android but doesn't anymore. Fix that somehow, or no deal. I mean geeze, we're told that tablets are SOO GREAT for content consumption, but every place my wife points her Kindle Fire HD, the damned video WON'T PLAY. Yes, I know the reason why. It's stupid.
I'm challenging the industry to prove to me that tablets are not a toy.
(1) someone has been watching too many episodes of Beauty and the Beast. Or, (2) there's some really screwy secret experimentation going on. But if (2), why would we even hear about possible protocols to contain? (You'd think they would be secret too.)
But someone might see Linux on a surface and it would raise their expectations on what a Surface could do. I could see where that might cause problems.
The OS was VMS, and as I recall, data exited the room via tape cartridges for the most part, and RM05 disk packs occasionally. This was quite a bit before USB drives were even a concept. Validating the hardware wasn't in my area of influence, so I'm sorry to say I don't know much about it except that there were protocols in place. There were levels of security -- "the room" was seriously sequestered, (you needed a particular badge and know the door code) "the cage", where the equipment controlled by the software resided had slightly higher accessibility, (a particular badge would do) and then there were work areas outside the cage that had less security (any company badge but no visitors). The entire installation, though, was fenced and patrolled and had active guard stations 24 hours a day, so one could say that the building itself had a fairly high degree of security.
About transporting data -- funny story -- I worked on a slightly less secure project, which still used computers that had magnetic core memory, because that's what had been specified back when it was originally designed, and you know how the military will cling to a technology. Although this was awhile back, core memory was obsolete even then, but one of the advantages was that you could shut off the sequestered development machine, pull the memory board, walk out to the cage, slap in the memory board, and run the program. Just as you can do now with thumb drives. I designed boards with static memory, and later dynamic memory, and it seemed to me that in some respects we were going backwards. :-) With flash memory we finally had persistence like we used to have decades ago.
The thing is, you can't know every single detail for a big project. I designed the cpu board and wrote software (in assembly language) to control various things. There were certain things I was supposed to do to ensure security, but the details were someone else's job. This is often the case.
I have some knowledge of the sail area of dish antennas, because it was interesting, and there had been a spectacular failure when someone didn't do the calculations right for typical weather in the deploy area. But that really wasn't my job either.
That's a good argument to stay far enough behind the curve that you can find out what the typical user experience is (and the most common fixes/upgrades/workarounds) before buying the device.
It's often said that the user community acts as a gigantic unpaid QA department. This breaks down if nobody benefits. As you said, the manufacturers are generally not listening, and the early adopters will always adopt early regardless. It's the middle-to-late adopters that reap the benefits.
For instance, I have yet to buy a tablet, because I don't want another device in addition to my Windows laptop, I want a device that *replaces* my Windows laptop, and that includes media creative work. (As opposed to media consumption.) Until the apps I need are available in true touch-centric fashion, and vetted by other users, I'm not interested. (Counter-clockwise squiggle to emulate the right mouse button does *not* count.)
Back when I was looking at tablets, I noticed that a tablet would come out with a certain version of Android, and that would pretty much be it. So buying a tablet with Froyo and hoping to upgrade it some day to Ice Cream Sandwich (for instance) was a losing proposition. So I waited, and then I realized that the apps I wanted weren't available yet, so I waited some more. I'm still waiting. Why buy electronic junk that doesn't do the job? I choose not to contribute to e-landfill.
(My daughter bought a Win7 slate because her drawing programs ran on Windows, but it was so difficult to use that she went back to her digitizing pad on her desktop machine. Lesson learned. She hasn't decided yet whether to upgrade to Win8, attempt to load Android, or just dump it.)
I spent around 3300$(converted to $) a few years ago on a so called "smart TV" from Samsung. Less than a year after I bought it, they stopped updating the software. They never fixed it's problems with remember subtitles settings.
The "Smart TV" part never got to be in any usable state and now after Netflix has entered my country, it is clear that this model will never get a downloadable app for Netflix.
So, no, I am not going to spend YET more money on a new TV when it is capable of showing a picture. Although I would have liked to have a all-in-one box, I guess it is not possible so I still have to buy boxes and then still use the tv as a monitor.
A review at the time said something like "Barbara Bain maintains exactly the same expression while undergoing massive accelleration".