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The Next Six Months

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Re: The Next Six Months

#111

Post by mjfern »

jimbokun wrote: post #107
mjfern wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, there are signs that the x86 architecture is in the early stages of being disrupted. Here is an article I posted in October that uses Christensen's disruptive technology framework to assess the threat posed by ARM:

The End of x86? - http://www.fernstrategy.com/2010/10/21/the-end-of-x86/

Re: The Next Six Months

#112

Post by jimbokun »

Raphael wrote: post #65
tomkarlo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can't get enough devices out in the market to make it a compelling target platform for app makers, it won't matter that they have all the pieces. That's increasingly looking like the outcome. Why would anyone develop an app for W7 before iPhone or Android, assuming they don't have incumbent knowledge of the W7 environment (and even then...)?

What if Windows Phone apps also ran on Windows proper?

This has been Microsoft's strategy all along, and it has been an abysmal failure.

A mobile app blown up for the desktop sucks as a desktop app, and a desktop app shrunk down into a mobile app will suck as a mobile app. Apple figured this out, and had the talent to invent a usable interface paradigm for mobile. Which led them to the highest market cap in the tech industry, with a lot of growth potential left.

Re: The Next Six Months

#113

Post by sinkercat »

Is it possible that the new product announced during the Fall event is actually a 7-inch retina display iPad? Apple might find it expensive to build a 9.7-inch retina display and that could explain the $3billion+ investment that Apple has put in (possibly for the 7-inch retina display screens). Yes, Steve Jobs did say that 7-inch tablets are DOA but it was the same Steve who said Apple doesn't see e-books as a big market.

Re: The Next Six Months

#114

Post by podperson »

tesseract wrote: post #53
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…

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 think the problem wasn't Microsoft entering the market too early so much as never really rethinking their approach to a platform. Their idea for PDAs/phones was a tiny version of desktop windows (compare that to Apple's Newton, with all its flaws). Their idea for tablets was a pen based version of desktop windows.

Microsoft has NEVER really originated a UI paradigm or OS, they just copied/bought/stole stuff from other people, and generally did it badly. (No question they sometimes contribute refinements.)

We're just lucky they didn't try to put a tiny version of DOS on PDAs and a pen driven version of DOS on tablets.

Re: The Next Six Months

#115

Post by YuriNiyazov »

usaar333 wrote: post #81
YuriNiyazov wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious what kind of tech stuff you do spend money on. Not into apple, and yet not a gamer, which is one of the few holdouts

Is he that unusual? I don't game much these days but I also own no Apple products. There's plenty of non-Apple desktops, laptops, phones, mp3 players, etc. to go around.

"Is he that unusual?" - well, either he is or I am. Almost all of my roommates and coworkers have apple products, most more than 1. Those that do not are still hardcore gamers.

Re: The Next Six Months

#116

Post by apress »

wiredfool wrote: post #95
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…

We're getting closer. Years ago, must have been 7 or 8 by now, I was talking with a friend @ Microsoft, and he was going on and on about how the phone was going to be the computer. "This Phone" and he'd hold up a generic GSM flip phone. My objection then was UI, both on the input and output side. In a way, wifi and bluetooth have solved a lot of that, as they can offload the heavy duty stuff to wireless sometimes con…

This is exactly the point and where the future is going because of Moore's law and all the various others ways ourt gadgetry gets cheaper and faster every year. Remember when laptops were too expensive and underpowered to serve as a geek's main machine? Now that's the norm. In a few more years, all the computing power, storage and connectivity most people will need will be inside a phone. The Motorola Atrix may be ahead of of its time but I think it is a harbinger of things to come.

Re: The Next Six Months

#117

Post by apress »

tomkarlo wrote: post #61
megablast wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first step is to build a great device, and it looks like HP might be there. It seems to be the best iPad contender yet, stealing that crown from Motorola's zoom from just a few days ago.

No credit until it ships. Everything looks great in a demo.

And gets priced!

Re: The Next Six Months

#118

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…

> Microsoft AND Intel being effectively missing from the tablet race is staggering.

The real staggering fact is that it's just not the tablet market. Both Microsoft and Intel are also absent or significantly behind in smart phones, eBook readers, portable media players, connected TVs, and almost every market that represents computing (devices) beyond the PC for consumers.

Re: The Next Six Months

#119

Post by sofuture »

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…

I'm going to -4 on this, but: it absolutely still remains to be seen whether or not tablets are worth a damn.

Seriously, people play shitty games on them, and I guess read ebooks (though I see vastly more Kindles on the subway, than iPads). I do not, at all see a compelling product yet, I see a trendy gadget that early adopters and trend followers have purchased. Sure there's great lip service to how revolutionary this concept is, but that's just talk.

I'm not saying that the iPad isn't the second coming of Christ. I am saying that it's not proven itself to be that just quite yet. I don't think the PC is (even close) to dead.

Re: The Next Six Months

#120

Post by sofuture »

YuriNiyazov wrote: post #34
naner wrote: post #20

I don't think the market for these things is huge as he suggests. Why would anyone buy a non-Apple touch or tablet device? I can see the argument for smart phones from different vendors, but not for these causal computing touch devices. And this is coming from someone who has never paid a cent to Apple. I haven't drank the kool-aid but none of these touch devices appear to really be competing with Apple. They look li…

I am curious what kind of tech stuff you do spend money on. Not into apple, and yet not a gamer, which is one of the few holdouts

Are you serious? You think the choice is between Apple or gamer?

Hi my name is Tux.... I don't make Steve Jobs rich(er) and I'm the greatest developer operating system ever made.

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