Desktop and mobile operating systems are such different beasts. I really think Microsoft should cut the mobile team loose and shield them from all the product groups that want special support for their project. I think it might be a way for them to attract some much needed talent to their mobile team. Give up on the Windows-everywhere dream (especially when Metro doesn't actually have anything that normal users would call a window).
Getting a UI that adapts to the device is easy. Managing the power consumption is a whole different matter and something Microsoft has never been very good at. Apple has put a lot of work into this field and the battery life they get from their iOS devices is pretty remarkable. When you watch a movie on an iPad, most of the device is sleeping. Windows can't do that very well because the interrupt and polling driven nature of the OS keeps waking up subsystems.
Over its lifetime, the business segment containing the Xbox is down more than $5.5 billion -- not including the cost of acquisitions such as the 2002 purchase game developer Rare, which cost more than $300 million.
That was written a year ago. They've had profitable quarters since then so they may be coming close to the break-even point.
Microsoft makes almost all of its money in Windows and Office licenses (which are still very good businesses). Everything else is just a hobby.
I think it's a mistake to judge Ballmer's suitability as CEO going forward by what he was able to do in the last era. What are the trends looking like right now if you are Microsoft? They are incredibly nervous about Windows 8 / RT. They are disappointed with WP7. Bing is for sale. Their IIS business is moribund. XBox is dominating a shrinking (or at best, stagnant) market segment. They've alienated developers by dropping major technologies and products in their prime.
Worst of all, nobody is excited about Microsoft or Windows anymore.
> Ballmer has ignored the trends and innovations of other companies until success in the marketplace forces him to mount a too-late response
I hope one day Ballmer writes a book and talks about what he was thinking.
To me, it seems like Microsoft tried to predict where Apple was heading with iOS and I think they predicted a merging of their desktop and mobile operating systems. I really think that's how Microsoft ended up developing the dog that is Windows 8 / Windows RT. Their near future strategy seems totally bizarre to me and I can't figure out what it is they think they are going to accomplish.
In my day job, I work on a large Windows desktop application and we every change we've made lately has been to decouple us from Microsoft. I've always advocated choosing the cross-platform solution to a problem even if it is the more difficult path. Up until about a year ago, I've usually lost those arguments.
Last year, I bought a T520 with the 15" 1080p matte screen. It's the first Thinkpad I've bought and I have to say, it's a bit of a dog. Battery life sucks, the fans are too noisy, the machine is too flexy, the trackpad has a weird texture on it, and it comes pre-bloated with too much crapware. I think about reformatting it every time I use it. The screen is fantastic, but I don't have many other positive things to say about it.
PCs only existed since about 1984's so any degree he had has no relevance at all to modern computing.
CS from 1979 is certainly still relevant to modern computing. It doesn't encompass everything, but it is a solid foundation. If you took somebody from the class of 1979 and showed them the curriculum for CS today, it wouldn't look that alien to them. After all, lots of people teaching the class of 2012 are graduates of the 1979 era.
As to the 1979 CS degree, is there such a thing? PCs only existed since about 1984's so any degree he had has no relevance at all to modern computing. Who care what he did on PDP11s in Fortran?
This is an astonishingly ignorant thing to write. What part of CS is different now than from 1979? Has O(n) suddenly become equal to O(log n)?
Regardless, recent trends have been bringing computing back to the mainframe model. Computation started out concentrated on mainframes because computers were so expensive. Microcomputers pushed computation out to the edges. Cloud and webservices are swinging the pendulum back to a centralized model, but guess what? CS has been relevant and valid though that entire spectrum.
Whether or not CS is important to the CEO of Yahoo! is arguable. I think most people are concerned about Thompson's values, not his knowledge of balancing trees.
For me, the most interesting thing in this report is that tablets (mostly iPad and some Kindle Fire) made up 40% of PC shipments in North America in the first quarter of this year. I wonder if there are a lot of purchasers holding out for Windows 8? I'm not sure how else to explain non-Microsoft PC's getting so much marketshare.
If you count the iPad as a PC sale (and Microsoft has always counted a Windows tablet as a PC), then Apple and HP are virtually tied for market share. Tablet sales are roughly 20% of the market these days and that is almost entirely owned by Apple. They are certainly the only company making money in that segment except for perhaps Amazon and B&N who, interestingly enough, have a similar business model to Apple's.
Microsoft is gong to continue to make lots of money selling Windows and Office licenses, but they aren't going to be able to leverage Windows and Office to dethrone Apple as the most profitable phone maker any time soon. Their old tactics of using Windows to push products just isn't all that effective any more.
The worst thing that could happen to Apple would be for Google to give up on Android. It hasn't made them any money and the Oracle lawsuit could cost billions. If Google were to dump Android, Apple would suddenly be looking like a monopolist much like Microsoft was 12(?) years ago and their terms would suddenly cross over from simply being abusive and one-sided to being illegal.
They aren't irrelevant, but they don't have the influence they once did. XBox hasn't made them much money, but it's probably their most respected consumer product. Microsoft is really just an Office + Windows company selling to corporations these days. They are interesting in the same way that Oracle or Cisco are interesting.
They have a huge pile of cash, so you can never count them out, but I would say their bullying is over (except for patent trolling) because they have lost their best talent. They are trying to compete with a B-level team.
Here's another way to look at it. Last quarter, 73% of global phone profits went to Apple, 26% to Samsung, and 1% to HTC. All other manufacturers lost money. Lots of people make Android phones, only Samsung is making any money doing so. That isn't how Google thought it would go. I have a hard time calling Android successful when their profit share is so out of whack with their market share.
It's a flop (and I admit that's hyperbolic) because only Android's top manufacturer is making any money at it and only in phone form. Nobody has made a commercially successful Android tablet, except perhaps Amazon and B&N and most people who buy them have no idea they have a tablet running a fork of Android.
There are a phenomenal number of Android handsets sold each week, but they are sold with little or no profit and the people buying them are typically using them like feature phones. iOS users spend far more money on software and spend more time using the internet on the phone than Android users. Google has always said that the value proposition of Android to them is that the phones potentially generate a lot of signals that they can use to better deliver services. Unfortunately, it hasn't generated the value for Google that was hoped for and now Google is describing Android as important but not critical.
Because of the thin profit margins, the Android ecosystem is a bit of a mess. How many phones are stuck at 2.3? Remember the pledge that a bunch of executives made at Google IO last year to get phones updated within months of an Android release? Every single one of them has failed to deliver. I bought a Nexus S because I wanted a pure Android phone that would get updates. I chose my carrier (T-Mobile) over their competitors because they didn't preload the phone with Nascar and Blockbuster applications that can't be deleted. It shouldn't be difficult to find phones that will be supported over their 2 year life that aren't loaded up with buggy, battery killing bloatware that the end user can't delete without rooting their phone, but it is.
I want Android to succeed and I'll likely stick with it, but I wish it were better.
I saw that BBC article and what jumped out at me was the chart showing market share. Apple having only 10% of the market is the reason why their market cap has skyrocketed. There is still so much growth potential.
Samsung's profit numbers are for the entire Samsung Electronics company and includes money from phones, printers, their networking gear (LTE), televisions, electronics, etc... I believe they are the primary supplier to Apple for displays and memory, so the success of the iPhone is good for Samsung.
Samsung's net profits for all of that stuff was around 4.5 billion dollars. Apple's profits were 11.5 billion dollars. For both companies, most of their profits come from phone sales. Samsung's phone market share is more than 2.5 times that of Apple's. I think these two companies are the only ones making any money selling phones.
The icons aren't too big, your screen DPI is too low.:)
I guess I maybe don't notice clumsiness with the mouse because I rely on the keyboard to get around. Unity does very well with the keyboard. Add in screen and it's a fantastically productive environment. Plus I tend to use maybe 5 or 6 different programs and that's about it.
I personally like Unity for the keyboard bindings. I find I have to use the mouse/trackpad a lot less with it than with Gnome 2. I use Windows 7 a lot as well and having the super-1, super-2, etc... being the same is on the two operating systems is great. I used to spend more time mousing through menus than I do now hitting super and typing. If you don't know what you are looking for, it could be frustrating though.
It's such a shame that they abandoned one of the better desktop UIs (GNOME 2)
Any non-incremental change to the UI is going to be controversial with lots of loud negative commentary. People like me who learn the new UI and are negatively impacted don't take the time to find forums and mailing lists to loudly proclaim that the new UI is good enough. I like that they are pushing the boundaries like this because they might come up with something great. If they don't, then I'll just switch to a different desktop environment or operating system.
> [Android]'s now the number 1 smart phone OS and Windows phone is more or less a flop
You're right about WP7. It's a shame that it and WebOS never gained traction because they both were pretty nice.
By any measure other than units shipped, Android is a flop. Hardly anybody is making any money from it and even Google has started to downplay it's significance to them (although this might just be for the sake of the judge in the Oracle lawsuit). Due to licensing, Microsoft actually makes more money from Android handsets than from WP7.
The most successful Android device is probably the Kindle Fire and Amazon has done a good job of eradicating any signs of Android branding from the device. I suspect most owners have no idea that it's running an Android fork.
Lots of Android phones are sold, but no single Android handset has done particularly well. None have outsold any of the iPhone models (AFAIK, correct me if I'm wrong).
Why is Unity so often called a tablet UI? Is anybody actually shipping a tablet running Ubuntu + Unity? Windows 8 is definitely focused on tablets, but I don't get the same feeling from Unity.
What is compelling about Windows or OS X or Linux? These days, not much. Operating systems have pretty much become fungible. A corporation is going to pick the platform that runs the necessary software and that their staff can support. Lots of places now let employees choose the platform because often all that's really required is a modern web browser.
Individuals are going to pick what friends or salespeople recommend. I personally haven't recommended anything other than Apple hardware in the past few years just because if they call me looking for help and I can't solve their issue, they can always take their machine into the Apple store.
Instead of answering why Linux hasn't succeeded on the desktop, I'd like you to answer why it should? I don't really see anybody actively targeting desktop Linux with the goal of gaining market share. What I see is mostly people scratching their own itch without any regard to what might be useful to a very wide userbase.
Why? Isn't the value of a platform dependent on the software that it can run? I'm not saying the hardware doesn't matter, but it only matters with respect to how the software makes use of the hardware.
I think you have to consider what software you want to run before you claim the Nook Color is the best deal. If you need Windows software or some package that is only available on the iPad, then the Nook would be a waste of money.
Actually, Win7 and Unity share a bunch of keyboard short cuts. It's pretty easy to switch between the two if you take a bit of time and sort your tray items so they are in the same order. For me, super-1 opens a file explorer, super-2 = email, super-3 = chrome, super-4 = terminal, etc...
Multitasking is different under Unity. Here's a short video demoing one way to get things done.
Powerusers tend to be more keyboard than mouse centric simply because it's often the quickest way to accomplish something. Using Unity from the keyboard is actually a pretty good experience and once you develop the muscle memory, you start to miss the Unity features when using other desktops (and who doesn't have to use more than one desktop these days?).
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Desktop and mobile operating systems are such different beasts. I really think Microsoft should cut the mobile team loose and shield them from all the product groups that want special support for their project. I think it might be a way for them to attract some much needed talent to their mobile team. Give up on the Windows-everywhere dream (especially when Metro doesn't actually have anything that normal users would call a window).
Getting a UI that adapts to the device is easy. Managing the power consumption is a whole different matter and something Microsoft has never been very good at. Apple has put a lot of work into this field and the battery life they get from their iOS devices is pretty remarkable. When you watch a movie on an iPad, most of the device is sleeping. Windows can't do that very well because the interrupt and polling driven nature of the OS keeps waking up subsystems.
Marketshare is only nice if you can convert that into profits.
From this article:
That was written a year ago. They've had profitable quarters since then so they may be coming close to the break-even point.
Microsoft makes almost all of its money in Windows and Office licenses (which are still very good businesses). Everything else is just a hobby.
I think it's a mistake to judge Ballmer's suitability as CEO going forward by what he was able to do in the last era. What are the trends looking like right now if you are Microsoft? They are incredibly nervous about Windows 8 / RT. They are disappointed with WP7. Bing is for sale. Their IIS business is moribund. XBox is dominating a shrinking (or at best, stagnant) market segment. They've alienated developers by dropping major technologies and products in their prime.
Worst of all, nobody is excited about Microsoft or Windows anymore.
> Ballmer has ignored the trends and innovations of other companies until success in the marketplace forces him to mount a too-late response
I hope one day Ballmer writes a book and talks about what he was thinking.
To me, it seems like Microsoft tried to predict where Apple was heading with iOS and I think they predicted a merging of their desktop and mobile operating systems. I really think that's how Microsoft ended up developing the dog that is Windows 8 / Windows RT. Their near future strategy seems totally bizarre to me and I can't figure out what it is they think they are going to accomplish.
In my day job, I work on a large Windows desktop application and we every change we've made lately has been to decouple us from Microsoft. I've always advocated choosing the cross-platform solution to a problem even if it is the more difficult path. Up until about a year ago, I've usually lost those arguments.
Last year, I bought a T520 with the 15" 1080p matte screen. It's the first Thinkpad I've bought and I have to say, it's a bit of a dog. Battery life sucks, the fans are too noisy, the machine is too flexy, the trackpad has a weird texture on it, and it comes pre-bloated with too much crapware. I think about reformatting it every time I use it. The screen is fantastic, but I don't have many other positive things to say about it.
I wouldn't recommend Thinkpad.
No. I'm arguing that the old stuff is still relevant.
I was responding mostly to this statement:
CS from 1979 is certainly still relevant to modern computing. It doesn't encompass everything, but it is a solid foundation. If you took somebody from the class of 1979 and showed them the curriculum for CS today, it wouldn't look that alien to them. After all, lots of people teaching the class of 2012 are graduates of the 1979 era.
This is an astonishingly ignorant thing to write. What part of CS is different now than from 1979? Has O(n) suddenly become equal to O(log n)?
Regardless, recent trends have been bringing computing back to the mainframe model. Computation started out concentrated on mainframes because computers were so expensive. Microcomputers pushed computation out to the edges. Cloud and webservices are swinging the pendulum back to a centralized model, but guess what? CS has been relevant and valid though that entire spectrum.
Whether or not CS is important to the CEO of Yahoo! is arguable. I think most people are concerned about Thompson's values, not his knowledge of balancing trees.
I just found a recent market share report.
For me, the most interesting thing in this report is that tablets (mostly iPad and some Kindle Fire) made up 40% of PC shipments in North America in the first quarter of this year. I wonder if there are a lot of purchasers holding out for Windows 8? I'm not sure how else to explain non-Microsoft PC's getting so much marketshare.
If you count the iPad as a PC sale (and Microsoft has always counted a Windows tablet as a PC), then Apple and HP are virtually tied for market share. Tablet sales are roughly 20% of the market these days and that is almost entirely owned by Apple. They are certainly the only company making money in that segment except for perhaps Amazon and B&N who, interestingly enough, have a similar business model to Apple's.
Microsoft is gong to continue to make lots of money selling Windows and Office licenses, but they aren't going to be able to leverage Windows and Office to dethrone Apple as the most profitable phone maker any time soon. Their old tactics of using Windows to push products just isn't all that effective any more.
The worst thing that could happen to Apple would be for Google to give up on Android. It hasn't made them any money and the Oracle lawsuit could cost billions. If Google were to dump Android, Apple would suddenly be looking like a monopolist much like Microsoft was 12(?) years ago and their terms would suddenly cross over from simply being abusive and one-sided to being illegal.
They aren't irrelevant, but they don't have the influence they once did. XBox hasn't made them much money, but it's probably their most respected consumer product. Microsoft is really just an Office + Windows company selling to corporations these days. They are interesting in the same way that Oracle or Cisco are interesting.
They have a huge pile of cash, so you can never count them out, but I would say their bullying is over (except for patent trolling) because they have lost their best talent. They are trying to compete with a B-level team.
Here's another way to look at it. Last quarter, 73% of global phone profits went to Apple, 26% to Samsung, and 1% to HTC. All other manufacturers lost money. Lots of people make Android phones, only Samsung is making any money doing so. That isn't how Google thought it would go. I have a hard time calling Android successful when their profit share is so out of whack with their market share.
It's a flop (and I admit that's hyperbolic) because only Android's top manufacturer is making any money at it and only in phone form. Nobody has made a commercially successful Android tablet, except perhaps Amazon and B&N and most people who buy them have no idea they have a tablet running a fork of Android.
There are a phenomenal number of Android handsets sold each week, but they are sold with little or no profit and the people buying them are typically using them like feature phones. iOS users spend far more money on software and spend more time using the internet on the phone than Android users. Google has always said that the value proposition of Android to them is that the phones potentially generate a lot of signals that they can use to better deliver services. Unfortunately, it hasn't generated the value for Google that was hoped for and now Google is describing Android as important but not critical.
Because of the thin profit margins, the Android ecosystem is a bit of a mess. How many phones are stuck at 2.3? Remember the pledge that a bunch of executives made at Google IO last year to get phones updated within months of an Android release? Every single one of them has failed to deliver. I bought a Nexus S because I wanted a pure Android phone that would get updates. I chose my carrier (T-Mobile) over their competitors because they didn't preload the phone with Nascar and Blockbuster applications that can't be deleted. It shouldn't be difficult to find phones that will be supported over their 2 year life that aren't loaded up with buggy, battery killing bloatware that the end user can't delete without rooting their phone, but it is.
I want Android to succeed and I'll likely stick with it, but I wish it were better.
I saw that BBC article and what jumped out at me was the chart showing market share. Apple having only 10% of the market is the reason why their market cap has skyrocketed. There is still so much growth potential.
Samsung's profit numbers are for the entire Samsung Electronics company and includes money from phones, printers, their networking gear (LTE), televisions, electronics, etc... I believe they are the primary supplier to Apple for displays and memory, so the success of the iPhone is good for Samsung.
Samsung's net profits for all of that stuff was around 4.5 billion dollars. Apple's profits were 11.5 billion dollars. For both companies, most of their profits come from phone sales. Samsung's phone market share is more than 2.5 times that of Apple's. I think these two companies are the only ones making any money selling phones.
The icons aren't too big, your screen DPI is too low. :)
I guess I maybe don't notice clumsiness with the mouse because I rely on the keyboard to get around. Unity does very well with the keyboard. Add in screen and it's a fantastically productive environment. Plus I tend to use maybe 5 or 6 different programs and that's about it.
I personally like Unity for the keyboard bindings. I find I have to use the mouse/trackpad a lot less with it than with Gnome 2. I use Windows 7 a lot as well and having the super-1, super-2, etc... being the same is on the two operating systems is great. I used to spend more time mousing through menus than I do now hitting super and typing. If you don't know what you are looking for, it could be frustrating though.
Any non-incremental change to the UI is going to be controversial with lots of loud negative commentary. People like me who learn the new UI and are negatively impacted don't take the time to find forums and mailing lists to loudly proclaim that the new UI is good enough. I like that they are pushing the boundaries like this because they might come up with something great. If they don't, then I'll just switch to a different desktop environment or operating system.
But why is it considered a tablet GUI? I've only ever used it on desktops (and netbooks) and it's never felt that way to me.
> [Android]'s now the number 1 smart phone OS and Windows phone is more or less a flop
You're right about WP7. It's a shame that it and WebOS never gained traction because they both were pretty nice.
By any measure other than units shipped, Android is a flop. Hardly anybody is making any money from it and even Google has started to downplay it's significance to them (although this might just be for the sake of the judge in the Oracle lawsuit). Due to licensing, Microsoft actually makes more money from Android handsets than from WP7.
The most successful Android device is probably the Kindle Fire and Amazon has done a good job of eradicating any signs of Android branding from the device. I suspect most owners have no idea that it's running an Android fork.
Lots of Android phones are sold, but no single Android handset has done particularly well. None have outsold any of the iPhone models (AFAIK, correct me if I'm wrong).
Why is Unity so often called a tablet UI? Is anybody actually shipping a tablet running Ubuntu + Unity? Windows 8 is definitely focused on tablets, but I don't get the same feeling from Unity.
What is compelling about Windows or OS X or Linux? These days, not much. Operating systems have pretty much become fungible. A corporation is going to pick the platform that runs the necessary software and that their staff can support. Lots of places now let employees choose the platform because often all that's really required is a modern web browser.
Individuals are going to pick what friends or salespeople recommend. I personally haven't recommended anything other than Apple hardware in the past few years just because if they call me looking for help and I can't solve their issue, they can always take their machine into the Apple store.
Instead of answering why Linux hasn't succeeded on the desktop, I'd like you to answer why it should? I don't really see anybody actively targeting desktop Linux with the goal of gaining market share. What I see is mostly people scratching their own itch without any regard to what might be useful to a very wide userbase.
Why? Isn't the value of a platform dependent on the software that it can run? I'm not saying the hardware doesn't matter, but it only matters with respect to how the software makes use of the hardware.
I think you have to consider what software you want to run before you claim the Nook Color is the best deal. If you need Windows software or some package that is only available on the iPad, then the Nook would be a waste of money.
Bing is on Facebook's acquisition list though. Bing is just below Zombo.com.
Actually, Win7 and Unity share a bunch of keyboard short cuts. It's pretty easy to switch between the two if you take a bit of time and sort your tray items so they are in the same order. For me, super-1 opens a file explorer, super-2 = email, super-3 = chrome, super-4 = terminal, etc...
Multitasking is different under Unity. Here's a short video demoing one way to get things done.
Powerusers tend to be more keyboard than mouse centric simply because it's often the quickest way to accomplish something. Using Unity from the keyboard is actually a pretty good experience and once you develop the muscle memory, you start to miss the Unity features when using other desktops (and who doesn't have to use more than one desktop these days?).
I was look for Tor recommendations specifically, but your link has a lot of great stuff. Thanks.