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The Next Six Months

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Re: The Next Six Months

#101

Post by maguay »

schultzor wrote: post #27
wiredfool wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll complain. The ipad is a second class browsing experience not because of the lack of flash, but the lack of cache. It's just not anywhere near as snappy reading as a Real Computer(tm) because it's constantly reloading stuff that's been purged. My usual style of reading (on the desktop) is to pop open a pile of stuff in tabs, then batch read through. Can't do that on the iPad. Safari could also use a few more cycl…

FWIW, iCab/Terra help with this style of browsing a little bit. They don't seem to cache as much and do a better job of handling more background tabs with things waiting to be read.

I'm trying Terra right now ... Hadn't heard of it yet, so thanks! I just posted a question to see what everyone's favorite iPad browser is and why - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2200302, hopefully we'll get some good discussion there about alternate browsers. I've considered buying iCab; what are your thoughts on it versus Terra?

Re: The Next Six Months

#102

Post by mechanical_fish »

Roritharr wrote: post #75

I dont get why everybody is falling for the "end of pc era" hype that is surrounding tablets and smartphones. Can someone explain to me why the ability to browse the web from the couch without sufficient text-entry possibilities is going to challenge the amount of pc's in a world where textentry is our main method of searching, sorting and creating data. Honestly, this is not a rhetorical question, i feel i'm missing…

The secret is to take a deep breath and realize that an absolute majority of people in the world go years at a time without writing so much as two paragraphs in a row.

People do write. In Twitter-sized chunks. That is why Twitter is so popular. But you can compose a Tweet on a touchscreen keyboard. I'm sure that's especially true if you have been to middle school in this century and have lived the life of the text messager.

But that's just part of the answer. The real answer is that the PC isn't going anywhere. But that's not enough to make an "era". As Bruce Sterling once said: We very likely have better flint-knife technology today than they did in the flint era, if only because the flint-knapping enthusiasts can swap secrets on the net and share a global collection of books, videos, and meetups. But that doesn't mean we are in any kind of "flint era". We have more paper and more pens available today than ever in history, but we don't speak of the pen-and-paper era. And there is more rock music being played today than in 1968 and yet we think of then, not now, as more of a "rock era".

An "era" is defined by newness, disruption, and the smell of profit. The modern PC platforms are between fifteen and twenty-five years old and have changed little in the last decade. Major parts of the industry have seen their margins shrink to near zero. Others are profitable but only for a tiny handful of big players. This doesn't mean history is over - I refuse to believe that, say, Adobe Photoshop circa 2011 is the last word in image editing for the next hundred years - but to change the PC market from within is a long hard slog. The build-out of mobile will be a lot more fun to watch.

Re: The Next Six Months

#103

Post by gojomo »

Bud wrote: post #100
gojomo wrote: post #18

Two iPads in one year is possible, and Gruber has better Apple-watching-skills than most. But I also think Apple is long overdue for a true "AppleTV", an all-in-one product with big screen , deeply integrated with everything else iOS/iTunes. That would also fit well with a late-in-year but in-time-for-Christmas release.

When was the last time Apple entered a new product space without having something fundamentally different to offer? The Xserve is the only recent example I can think of, and they discontinued that product recently. I'd be surprised if Apple makes a TV.

There were digital music players before the iPod – and despite some initial evaluations that the iPod added nothing different, it turns out it did, when considering the whole product and ecosystem.

There were smartphones before the iPhone that seemed similar (or even better) in specs/features.

There were tablets before the iPad.

Apple in entertainment takes old categories and adds a new product/platform that excels along some evaluative dimension(s) that people weren't even previously conscious of – not by simply outdoing the incumbents in the same-old dimensions.

I think there are plenty of ways an iOS/iTV could break the old moulds. Adding basic integration with the iOS ecosystem – docking ports, media sync/backup, iTunes purchases, handhelds as remotes/controllers for big-screen content and games, Facetime – would be plenty to excite the gotta-have-it Apple households for a successful v1 release.

Throw in new voice/gestural controls (as with Kinect) and app APIs that work with live and recorded TV programs – including iAds targeted to individual households. ("This episode is available for $1.99, or with 3 customized-for-you commercials.")

That'd be a new platform for digital TV, bound to Apple/iOS – "fundamentally different" enough for me!

Re: The Next Six Months

#104

Post by maguay »

One interesting thing to see will be whether newer tablets with webOS, Android, or anything else will get advanced, full-sized tablet apps like Apple's iWork apps. The iWork apps definitely are some of the very best on iPad, and it wouldn't be nearly as useful of a device without them. Docs to Go and QuickOffice are a joke in comparison (except each of them are much better at file sync and orginization...). It's the more advanced apps like these, though, that will really enable tablets to take over traditional PCs.

Re: The Next Six Months

#105

Post by mjfern »

kenjackson wrote: post #19

Microsoft AND Intel being effectively missing from the tablet race is staggering. And there are a few reasons why its staggering: 1) Both have known it was coming, maybe longer than anyone else. But got the core requirements all wrong. 2) No one really seems to care. 3) Related to (2), there is no belief that they have anything up their sleeve. 4) Their existing ecosystem, probably a billion units strong, doesn't see…

> While Intel and MS will make money hand over first for years to come, it does appear to be the end of the consumer market for these two companies. Their focus will be business class computers, workstations, and servers.

If it were just the end of the consumer market, then Intel and MS should be concerned, but at least they could take comfort in the fact that they still dominate the enterprise space. The issue is that their dominance in the enterprise space is eroding as well. For Intel, a central issue is the ascension of ARM. Smooth-Stone (a well funded startup), Dell, and NVIDIA (see Project Denver), as well as others, are now prototyping ARM-based servers for datacenters. A related issue is that Intel's latest processors now overshoot the performance needs of a majority of customers. Meanwhile, Microsoft's enterprise business is eroding due to several trends, such as cloud services (e.g., Gmail) and cloud computing (e.g., PaaS and IaaS). And both companies have to overcome some reputational issues stemming from their historical power in the PC space through the Wintel standard.

Intel and Microsoft have tremendous resources to respond to these threats, but the clock is ticking.

Re: The Next Six Months

#106

Post by lsc »

kenjackson wrote: post #19

Microsoft AND Intel being effectively missing from the tablet race is staggering. And there are a few reasons why its staggering: 1) Both have known it was coming, maybe longer than anyone else. But got the core requirements all wrong. 2) No one really seems to care. 3) Related to (2), there is no belief that they have anything up their sleeve. 4) Their existing ecosystem, probably a billion units strong, doesn't see…

>While Intel and MS will make money hand over first for years to come, it does appear to be the end of the consumer market for these two companies. Their focus will be business class computers, workstations, and servers.

the server market, for all of my career, really, has been following the consumer market. The stuff you see in a server is basically upmarket desktop kit; the primary difference being the addition of ecc in various places.

If ARM beats X86 on the desktop, within a short number of years, they will beat x86 on the server, too.

Now, arm is a /long way/ from winning the desktop market, and I'm not at all sure they will. I'm just saying... /if/ x86 loses the consumer market, they will also lose the cost-sensitive server market.

x86 only owns the server market because the r&d and economies of scale paid for by the consumer market.

Re: The Next Six Months

#107

Post by jimbokun »

mjfern wrote: post #105
kenjackson wrote: post #19

Microsoft AND Intel being effectively missing from the tablet race is staggering. And there are a few reasons why its staggering: 1) Both have known it was coming, maybe longer than anyone else. But got the core requirements all wrong. 2) No one really seems to care. 3) Related to (2), there is no belief that they have anything up their sleeve. 4) Their existing ecosystem, probably a billion units strong, doesn't see…

> While Intel and MS will make money hand over first for years to come, it does appear to be the end of the consumer market for these two companies. Their focus will be business class computers, workstations, and servers. If it were just the end of the consumer market, then Intel and MS should be concerned, but at least they could take comfort in the fact that they still dominate the enterprise space. The issue is th…

"For Intel, a central issue is the ascension of ARM. Smooth-Stone (a well funded startup), Dell, and NVIDIA (see Project Denver), as well as others, are now prototyping ARM-based servers for datacenters. A related issue is that Intel's latest processors now overshoot the performance needs of a majority of customers."

Innovator's Dilemma.

Re: The Next Six Months

#108

Post by greendestiny »

cookiecaper wrote: post #77
tesseract wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bill Gates (and with him, Microsoft) has been nigh obsessed with tablets since at least the mid-1990s. I think the trouble is more that MS entered the tablet market way too early, and got bogged down by hardware limitations of the era: the CPU etc. had to be something from the laptop world rather than from the PDA world because the latter was not capable of driving a big color display. Laptop CPUs were expensive and…

I agree, tablets have been the ultimate fixation in computing devices for a long time. We need only look at scifi -- how many shows have people carrying around pencil-thin panels and pulling up a ship's specifications while they walk and talk with the warp engineer, pounding on a glass table to engage weapons system, or other things like that? Apple hit the right combination of price and style at the right time, and…

It's all about the multitouch. Sure a windows tablet with multitouch running XP would have been massively inferior to the iPad but it would have started to realise the potential of the form. Instead years of Wacom pen tablets just made people hate the idea.

Re: The Next Six Months

#109

Post by jimbokun »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #62
pchristensen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 + 4 + 5 = classic disruption theory. The margins, cost structure, and organizations that have made them so successful so far are what's preventing them from seizing the tablet space. The CEO's are in place because they have made so much money from the old business.

Ding ding ding. MS and Intel are still aware of the disruptiveness of "Tablets" (a poor description for the phenomenon, but descriptive enough), but they are chained to their existing org-charts, ship schedules, and revenue streams. Whether or not they'll be able to pivot fast enough is still up in the air. The really interesting aspect is that the important part in market growth isn't when the disruptive technology…

"...and by the time the marketshare starts shifting it's already too late, the die has been cast."

Sounds like precisely where we are with mobile computing platforms.

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