Steam is already on Windows and that can be considered 'open' too, since you are referencing console lockdown. It is not perfect but it seems to be working well enough.
Now that Android, unleashed only 4 years ago, is on pocket PCs and outselling Windows units 3:2 everybody at Microsoft must be standing there stunned. None of Microsoft's partners are making good money any more. They've gone from 90% to less than half. The change has come so fast that they must be dizzy. Even two years ago if you had suggested that Android would get where it is now by now it would have been worth a good laugh.
If you want to sell your camera or other device to phone makers, you write a Linux driver. BTW: have you seen this? That desktop Linux thing may not be so far away after all. I hear China's largest cable company is going to start giving something like this away to every subscriber.
Since Nokia makes about -10% of the smartphone profits, the numbers are going to be a little skewed. Nokia is currently the champion of losing money in smartphones, at about $1B losses per quarter. And they don't make Android phones.
When the run rate increases 100% a year, the last year's sales equate to a considerable fraction of the installed base. Like half. Right now iOS and Android are about even on installed base. With Android outselling iOS 5 to 1, if it stays at that ratio then this time next year the iOS fraction of the installed base will be considerably smaller - especially since its older installed base means a larger percentage of its products are retired from use each year.
Since Microsoft is already hitting Google with everything they've got, there's no point in Google not fighting with all they've got too. For goodness sake, Microsoft is burning half a billion dollars a quarter on their online services division - almost entirely products designed to try to spoil the party for Google. The level of fail is laughable, but the attempt is there. Two billion dollars a year is a pretty significant corporate investment in sinking the other guy. And then there's collusion with Apple and Nokia. And then there are all the lawsuits against both Google and their Android partners, attempts to get products blocked in every court in the world, inside jobs in government to get Google's products blocked from adoption by governments, malicious advertising, and on and on and on.
"It's a risky move by Google" is only relevant if Microsoft isn't already doing all they can. That's a threatening thing to say, like "or Microsoft will respond negatively." Since Microsoft is already doing their worst, there is no additional risk at all.
"I bought the iPad when it first came out but found the user interface unintuitive and am appalled by the greedy accessory sellers and Jobs' "walled garden". I sold my first and second generation iPads on eBay and a Kindle Fire and netbook too so I might have the money to buy a Surface with the innovative TouchPad cover."
It was Apple and Microsoft that started this war. Google is only winning the war that was brought to them. As they always have. It was Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer who said "I'm going to fucking kill Google. I've done it before and I can do it again." Back then Google was 1/30th their current size. Today it's more of a fair fight, as the two companies are about equal in market cap, but back then it was more of an existential real threat.
Even today Google only sues back other companies that picked a fight.
Microsoft is purposefully only selling the Surface in their own sales channels - own stores and online - explicitly so others can't report data about how it's doing. They want to tell us it's "sold out". They knew they had to do this in advance, or you would buy the thing at Target and Target would tell you that it's not selling.
Apple's software is pretty lean, and they're growing some internal CPU savvy. They don't even need x86 instruction set, which is good since that cross-license with Intel might not carry over in an acquisition. Apple might pull it off. They might get serious in servers again, with GPGPU solutions. Apple likes big margins though, and it would be a while before they got that kind of return out of this investment. On the upside though AMD's market cap ($1.5B) is about 1% of Apple's ready cash, so it's not like they would be betting the farm - they could earn that back in a few years by striking a firmer deal with FedEx on shipping. That's like a sixth of what Microsoft paid for Skype - a company that had never turned a profit ever, had few patents, and so on. It's a fourth of what Microsoft paid for aQuantive, which was already totally written down. It's an eighth of what HP paid for Autonomy. All much bigger and longer bets.
Samsung is another who might benefit without the need for x86, and could use some of the graphics patents from ATI. And they're a conglomerate that has many poor-performing segments that make AMD look like the Promised Land. I could see them giving up one month's profits to acquire AMD, and another month's to rehab it. Not their usual style though. They like to make smaller acquisitions and grow businesses organically. Hard to ignore a fire sale like this one though -
Microsoft has the ready cash too and AMD is just the thing to take them into vertical integration land. I don't see Ballmer having the stones to try that one though - even though it's just nine months of the cost he's paying his OSD to pretend to compete with Google, and equal to the advertising budget for Windows 8. Server OEMs would wet their pants. Microsoft does have big server needs with their cloud effort though, and has had so much public shaming in HPC that they would budget $1.5B to subsidizing some supercompute centers that would take their money and run the LINPACK benchmark on Windows Server 2008 HPC - but the compute boffins ain't biting for some reason (cough).
Speaking of Google they have the ready cash too, and even if AMD CPUs don't have quite the grunt of their Intel counterparts, Google probably spends more than this on CPUs every year and making and designing their own (even not selling them) might give them some synergies. They make their own network gear, so why not? Although AMD's CPU patents are probably out of play, ATI's graphics patents probably aren't - and after Google went $12B for Moto Mobi, another 12% of that for ATI for more weapons in their patent fight against Apple and Microsoft doesn't seem like so much further to go. Or maybe they could just call up AMD and put in a big server CPU order - or encourage some partners to put together a Chromebook, or some combination, to ensure that competition in CPUs doesn't go away.
IBM is flush with cash as well these days and ready for a growth phase after a long conservative period. They've come almost even with Microsoft on market cap again after a very long time in their shadow. I wouldn't put it past them to go for it.
Of course a lot of venture capitalists could float a short-term highly leveraged loan to play in this game for a quick turnover. $1.5B isn't as much money as it used to be.
And then there's Facebook. Zuckerberg has the cash left from his IPO and might do it just to say "We make our own processors... bitch.
Hm... I think maybe I see a bidding war coming on.
If some court were to find that Intel abused its market dominance to count coup on AMD it would not go well for Intel. Fortunately for Intel they can be held blameless for their chief competitor becoming overburdened with debt to overpay for an acquisition like ATI that didn't provide sufficient cash flow to service that debt, leaving them unable to provide sufficient money to invest in R&D. That's an AMD strategic error Intel had nothing to do with and that seems to be AMD's undoing. It is not unfair competition to make the best products you can and charge for them all the market will bear.
They didn't have to put all their eggs in one basket with Netburst or Itanium and they could afford to dedicate a team to make low-power, low-cost Atoms that both made Intel a pretty penny and sapped AMDs strength in the low-end market.
What they can do though is invent some amazing shiny new stuff that totally demolishes their current offerings, and lock it away in a cabinet against some future day when a challenger appears, because if they put too much progress on the table at any one time it demolishes the demand for their current chips. EX: big hosting farm runs 1000 shared websites and 10 virtual hosts per physical host. If they sell Larrabee with Xeon cores on an add-in card, the hosting farm puts 2 cards in each server and bumps their numbers to 10,000 shared websites and 100 virtual hosts, and Intel sells 10% as many Xeon CPUs. From your own example, they strip most of the intelligence out of the cores on the card, rendering it more useful for HPC but less useful for virtualized servers, and get a product that doesn't "cannibalize" their server processor sales.
Intel needs a sound competitor to keep them honest.
Measuring $/core or $/CPU Cycle is not a very accurate way to gauge price/performance.
Maybe not, but when I can get 8 64bit cores in a complete system like this: delivered for $500, that gets my attention. Throw some Linux distro on there and it's good to go.
As we go into the big-money season when the dollars are harvested, they've left all their partners without compelling products for their customers to put under their tree. Again.
Typically if you have Linux, old drivers aren't deprecated ever. If they ever worked, they continue to do so. So the latest Linux always supports the oldest gear. Linux doesn't need to sell you a new copy, or a new computer.
Thanks for reminding us that Office is the least compatible software on Earth. When we put our useful information into it, we make that information less useful because we can't get it back out again.
Slashdot Mirror
Steam is already on Windows and that can be considered 'open' too, since you are referencing console lockdown. It is not perfect but it seems to be working well enough.
A megabyte is what, like a milligig, right?
May as well say "Legacy technology companies want carriers to think Android is a threat to their existence."
Now that Android, unleashed only 4 years ago, is on pocket PCs and outselling Windows units 3:2 everybody at Microsoft must be standing there stunned. None of Microsoft's partners are making good money any more. They've gone from 90% to less than half. The change has come so fast that they must be dizzy. Even two years ago if you had suggested that Android would get where it is now by now it would have been worth a good laugh.
If you want to sell your camera or other device to phone makers, you write a Linux driver. BTW: have you seen this? That desktop Linux thing may not be so far away after all. I hear China's largest cable company is going to start giving something like this away to every subscriber.
Already 90% in the biggest growth market, China. Now even Paul Thurrot is calling Android "The new Windows".
Since Nokia makes about -10% of the smartphone profits, the numbers are going to be a little skewed. Nokia is currently the champion of losing money in smartphones, at about $1B losses per quarter. And they don't make Android phones.
When the run rate increases 100% a year, the last year's sales equate to a considerable fraction of the installed base. Like half. Right now iOS and Android are about even on installed base. With Android outselling iOS 5 to 1, if it stays at that ratio then this time next year the iOS fraction of the installed base will be considerably smaller - especially since its older installed base means a larger percentage of its products are retired from use each year.
A lot of the growth is in China. For many, this will be their only computing device. Android has 90% in China.
IMO, its a risky move by Google.
Since Microsoft is already hitting Google with everything they've got, there's no point in Google not fighting with all they've got too. For goodness sake, Microsoft is burning half a billion dollars a quarter on their online services division - almost entirely products designed to try to spoil the party for Google. The level of fail is laughable, but the attempt is there. Two billion dollars a year is a pretty significant corporate investment in sinking the other guy. And then there's collusion with Apple and Nokia. And then there are all the lawsuits against both Google and their Android partners, attempts to get products blocked in every court in the world, inside jobs in government to get Google's products blocked from adoption by governments, malicious advertising, and on and on and on.
"It's a risky move by Google" is only relevant if Microsoft isn't already doing all they can. That's a threatening thing to say, like "or Microsoft will respond negatively." Since Microsoft is already doing their worst, there is no additional risk at all.
NDAs in this case are an industry standard.
"I bought the iPad when it first came out but found the user interface unintuitive and am appalled by the greedy accessory sellers and Jobs' "walled garden". I sold my first and second generation iPads on eBay and a Kindle Fire and netbook too so I might have the money to buy a Surface with the innovative TouchPad cover."
Is that what you meant to say? It rings as true.
It was Apple and Microsoft that started this war. Google is only winning the war that was brought to them. As they always have. It was Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer who said "I'm going to fucking kill Google. I've done it before and I can do it again." Back then Google was 1/30th their current size. Today it's more of a fair fight, as the two companies are about equal in market cap, but back then it was more of an existential real threat.
Even today Google only sues back other companies that picked a fight.
Microsoft is purposefully only selling the Surface in their own sales channels - own stores and online - explicitly so others can't report data about how it's doing. They want to tell us it's "sold out". They knew they had to do this in advance, or you would buy the thing at Target and Target would tell you that it's not selling.
Apple's software is pretty lean, and they're growing some internal CPU savvy. They don't even need x86 instruction set, which is good since that cross-license with Intel might not carry over in an acquisition. Apple might pull it off. They might get serious in servers again, with GPGPU solutions. Apple likes big margins though, and it would be a while before they got that kind of return out of this investment. On the upside though AMD's market cap ($1.5B) is about 1% of Apple's ready cash, so it's not like they would be betting the farm - they could earn that back in a few years by striking a firmer deal with FedEx on shipping. That's like a sixth of what Microsoft paid for Skype - a company that had never turned a profit ever, had few patents, and so on. It's a fourth of what Microsoft paid for aQuantive, which was already totally written down. It's an eighth of what HP paid for Autonomy. All much bigger and longer bets.
Samsung is another who might benefit without the need for x86, and could use some of the graphics patents from ATI. And they're a conglomerate that has many poor-performing segments that make AMD look like the Promised Land. I could see them giving up one month's profits to acquire AMD, and another month's to rehab it. Not their usual style though. They like to make smaller acquisitions and grow businesses organically. Hard to ignore a fire sale like this one though -
Microsoft has the ready cash too and AMD is just the thing to take them into vertical integration land. I don't see Ballmer having the stones to try that one though - even though it's just nine months of the cost he's paying his OSD to pretend to compete with Google, and equal to the advertising budget for Windows 8. Server OEMs would wet their pants. Microsoft does have big server needs with their cloud effort though, and has had so much public shaming in HPC that they would budget $1.5B to subsidizing some supercompute centers that would take their money and run the LINPACK benchmark on Windows Server 2008 HPC - but the compute boffins ain't biting for some reason (cough).
Speaking of Google they have the ready cash too, and even if AMD CPUs don't have quite the grunt of their Intel counterparts, Google probably spends more than this on CPUs every year and making and designing their own (even not selling them) might give them some synergies. They make their own network gear, so why not? Although AMD's CPU patents are probably out of play, ATI's graphics patents probably aren't - and after Google went $12B for Moto Mobi, another 12% of that for ATI for more weapons in their patent fight against Apple and Microsoft doesn't seem like so much further to go. Or maybe they could just call up AMD and put in a big server CPU order - or encourage some partners to put together a Chromebook, or some combination, to ensure that competition in CPUs doesn't go away.
IBM is flush with cash as well these days and ready for a growth phase after a long conservative period. They've come almost even with Microsoft on market cap again after a very long time in their shadow. I wouldn't put it past them to go for it.
Of course a lot of venture capitalists could float a short-term highly leveraged loan to play in this game for a quick turnover. $1.5B isn't as much money as it used to be.
And then there's Facebook. Zuckerberg has the cash left from his IPO and might do it just to say "We make our own processors... bitch.
Hm... I think maybe I see a bidding war coming on.
If some court were to find that Intel abused its market dominance to count coup on AMD it would not go well for Intel. Fortunately for Intel they can be held blameless for their chief competitor becoming overburdened with debt to overpay for an acquisition like ATI that didn't provide sufficient cash flow to service that debt, leaving them unable to provide sufficient money to invest in R&D. That's an AMD strategic error Intel had nothing to do with and that seems to be AMD's undoing. It is not unfair competition to make the best products you can and charge for them all the market will bear.
They didn't have to put all their eggs in one basket with Netburst or Itanium and they could afford to dedicate a team to make low-power, low-cost Atoms that both made Intel a pretty penny and sapped AMDs strength in the low-end market.
What they can do though is invent some amazing shiny new stuff that totally demolishes their current offerings, and lock it away in a cabinet against some future day when a challenger appears, because if they put too much progress on the table at any one time it demolishes the demand for their current chips. EX: big hosting farm runs 1000 shared websites and 10 virtual hosts per physical host. If they sell Larrabee with Xeon cores on an add-in card, the hosting farm puts 2 cards in each server and bumps their numbers to 10,000 shared websites and 100 virtual hosts, and Intel sells 10% as many Xeon CPUs. From your own example, they strip most of the intelligence out of the cores on the card, rendering it more useful for HPC but less useful for virtualized servers, and get a product that doesn't "cannibalize" their server processor sales.
Intel needs a sound competitor to keep them honest.
If you're doing virtualization then IOPS and network bandwidth will likely matter more.
Measuring $/core or $/CPU Cycle is not a very accurate way to gauge price/performance.
Maybe not, but when I can get 8 64bit cores in a complete system like this: delivered for $500, that gets my attention. Throw some Linux distro on there and it's good to go.
As we go into the big-money season when the dollars are harvested, they've left all their partners without compelling products for their customers to put under their tree. Again.
Typically if you have Linux, old drivers aren't deprecated ever. If they ever worked, they continue to do so. So the latest Linux always supports the oldest gear. Linux doesn't need to sell you a new copy, or a new computer.
Thanks for reminding us that Office is the least compatible software on Earth. When we put our useful information into it, we make that information less useful because we can't get it back out again.
About three years, I think. China is doing some good work with MIPS cores these days.
Here is the spin from El Reg.
They have to say that. Can't let anyone know they sent him on an Elop mission. I wonder whose board of directors is about to get a nasty surprise.