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I clicked on this story expecting the usual blatantly biased and totally pointless drivel from this guy. I wasn't disappointed. He keeps raising the bar for embarrassing tech commentary and that's why I will keep reading him knowing full well I shouldn't waste my time on that kind of trolling. Now I'm even wasting your time by commenting on it. Please vote me down to -10 or I'll have to fagellate myself for an entire…
The future of computing is going to be fragmented. Not unified by a single tablet model.
Every time something new comes up we always get the same BS: "netbooks are going to replace computers". "iPhones are going to replace computers", "ipads are going to replace computers".
Give me a break.
I'm not sure I follow Gruber's post here, which ironically points out how Microsoft's presentation this week for a tablet was incoherent and all over the map (kind of like this post.) I guess he's trying to assess Microsoft's position in the market by comparing their product announcement presentation skills to Apple's. Really, when will the likes of Gruber learn that consumers will decide if they like those products,…
I thought Gruber's point was very clear: Consumer expectations have shifted such that companies which survive (read: profit) are those which make money from reasonably priced hardware while the software is sold at low, low prices. The phenomenal, decades-long profitability of Microsoft has been based on consumers behaving in an opposite way: paying bare-minimum prices for hardware but a premium for software.
The computer hardware industry is lined up to favor the hardware makers. They can also make the software (like Apple does with iOS) or they can acquire it at low cost (like Samsung using Android), but the profits come from hardware. The Surface, no matter how good it may or may not be since no can reasonably evaluate it yet, is a testament to Microsoft recognizing this shift.
Really, the details of the market shift are irrelevant. The point is that the market is moving away from what has made Microsoft profitable, and the company has publicly (if in some ways indirectly) shown it understands this. The Surface (and Windows 8), despite how important it may be to the future of Microsoft, is most notable for the change it represents Microsoft making in its approach to profitability.
> Skepticism about these things doesn’t require knee-jerk Apple fandom. It simply requires an open set of eyeballs. This is why I don't read Daring Fireball regularly. It's a blog solely focused on being skeptical about everything. The whole premise seems to be to find flaws in products/services and tell the world about them. I don't mind skepticism, but there's a difference between "it has these cool concepts, but i…
I'm not saying I'm a big fan of Gruber's (I never listened to his Talk Show, and removed him from my "daily" reading list because I consider what he did to 5by5 unethical, but I read him every few days because he's a fan of Kubrick, and finds great links). I just don't want to be represented with spec sheets and charts over and over and over again. Tech blogs and columns mostly repeat the same thing (what you almost always know), and when they tell you about their feelings, they're usually really narrow-minded and most of the time fail to understand their use cases (them being some sort of "journalist") differs dramatically with most people's ("iPad's gonna fail because it doesn't have hardware keyboards, which means I have to bring a keyboard with me when I'm going to conferences 6-7 times a month").
> So Microsoft faces a dilemma. Their business model of expensive software on cheap hardware is not sustainable. The future is nearly free software integrated into moderately priced hardware. Apple, for all that's said about their software being excellent (and maybe it is) is a hardware maker. As such, they try to commoditize software: make complements to their own products as cheap as possible, so that the overall c…
Microsoft this week showed itself willing to do what was once unthinkable: design and sell its own computer hardware What about the Zune, Kin and Xbox. Two of them might have been disasters, but clearly MS has a history of designing hardware. They are giving too much choice (1). To me, the real issue is availability. They shouldn't have had the press conference until the device was available on the same day. They _al…
And you can see how they have done what they can in order to not screw over the hardware manufacturers, by promising to only sell the device through their retails stores.
..and now HP and Mark Hurds initial strategy with WebOS doesn't seem so stupid after all.
These stories about the "post-PC future" always make me laugh, I still dont see people working on iPads in real offices where you do REAL work. The future of computing is going to be fragmented. Not unified by a single tablet model. Every time something new comes up we always get the same BS: "netbooks are going to replace computers". "iPhones are going to replace computers", "ipads are going to replace computers". G…
In my work for a digital agency we have a lot of projects going with tablets (well let's be honest it's all iPads) to work as replacement for laptops for certain processes and situations. There are so many real-life processes happening today where toting a laptop around is really not ideal and tablets have some awesome characteristics which make them a great second or third device for some job descriptions, but also a first device for others.
For pump installers for instance a laptop is a pain in the ass. They all have one, but they never bring it out of the car with them because it's heavy, has poor battery life and is really impractical when you're working in a dusty, dark environment. A tablet on the other hand serves them well. They can bring it with them. Hang it on a pipe somewhere and watch that installation video or look up that manual that they are needing. Battery life is so that they don't have to charge it all week. Everybody wins.
Don't mean to get carried away, but the world is really full of people doing "real work" where laptops and desktops are just not the best solution.
"Surface is a bold move, and classic Microsoft. If the OEMs don’t like it — and they do not — what are they going to do? Turn to Linux (which no one wants) ... ?" I want Linux over Mac OSX and Windows 7. Imagine how fast Linux would grow if they got the OEMs's support.
I would love to buy laptops et al. with good Linux support. In fact, I once bought a glorious Dell XPS M1330 ... with a horribly outdated Ubuntu install.
> So Microsoft faces a dilemma. Their business model of expensive software on cheap hardware is not sustainable. The future is nearly free software integrated into moderately priced hardware. Apple, for all that's said about their software being excellent (and maybe it is) is a hardware maker. As such, they try to commoditize software: make complements to their own products as cheap as possible, so that the overall c…
Plus, Windows RT/Metro has no ecosystem yet, whatsoever. Even if Android has only a few thousand or whatever tablet apps, it still has all the other 500,000 phone apps, and most of them should work on tablets.