You're completely missing the enterprise side of the equation, which is still a booming part of MSFTs business right now. And they are still a goliath in Enterprise (Windows Server, Exchange, SQL Server, etc).
You also speak of their 'downfall' in the past tense, as if it's already happened. They still push 90% of desktop market share, rule enterprise, rule the Office suite business, and have some nifty things going on in the entertainment side (not profitable, but nifty nonetheless).
Lending on the Kindle has worked pretty well for me. Can you clarify why it's lame?
Also, can you name a device that Amazon doesn't support, apart from the Nook? I frequently read my Kindle content on the Kindle itself, my two PCs and my Mac, and my Droidx. I could also do it on any tablet (if I owned one), or my wife's iPhone.
Not to mention, you can read any non-DRM content you want on the Kindle.
And it's not that more utility == more freedom. It's that easier-to-self-publish is going to lower the barrier for people to create niche content by bypassing the big publishing houses. It's also going to create lower priced books overall, as well as more and better free content.
I also personally think it's only a matter of time before the publishers realize what the music industry has mostly realized after a decade: DRM doesn't work. I think it will slowly phase itself out. Just a guess, though, YMMV.
That's not a valid comparison. The iPad with 3G does not include the cost of the data connection. This includes a 100MB/month connection with the cost of the subscription.
Is it just me, or does this guy have his definitions swapped. That, or I've been wrong this whole time: I've always thought of hackers as more freewheeling, possibly with less formal training (or possibly not) who like to play with new technologies and learn by getting their hand dirty.
And I've thought of coders as closer to the traditional definition of 'software engineer'. More formalized education (or possibly not), more formal approach to the process of writing code (planning meetings, standards and practices, etc).
I'm not saying either one is better (both have a lot they bring to the table, and few people are all one or the other, we're usually somewhere on a sliding scale between the two).
It sounds to me that he may be thinking more in terms of the difference between say an accountant and a bookkeeper. In other words, a hacker is someone who looks at the high level big picture while a coder is someone who just dives in the code and makes changes (possibly under the direction of a hacker).
I've always thought that a "hacker" operates at a higher level of abstraction and/or with a broader base of knowledge to draw upon (especially from unrelated fields) than does a mere "doer".
I think there's a need for both types of people in any large team, so one type isn't necessarily better than another in all circumstances.
However, in a small team (or startup) I think hackers are much more valuable due to their generalist nature. You can always hire code monkeys later to patch edge-case bugs and polish things up :-)
Per your point #3: I spend a lot of time in both Windows 7/VS2010 AND OSX/XCode (along with a smidgen of time in Ubuntu as well) and crashes are just about a thing of the past in all three environments. That said, Xcode/OSX gives me the spinning beach ball of death at least as much as I get a crash to desktop in W7 and far, far more often than I get a BSOD in W7. The idea that windows crashes a lot is a myth hanging around from before they went to the NT kernel in XP. Granted, it's a myth that was well earned in the Win 3.1/9x days, but still.
The reality is all the major OS vendors (I'm including Canonical here) have reduced crashes to maybe a once a week occurrence or better. Hardly an issue anymore.
As for the polish comment, it's really a matter of what you're used to and strictly a matter of opinion, but I find Xcode a nightmare to navigate compared to VS2010. Sure, Xcode is shinier and looks better, but the UX is far superior in VS2010 (again, just my opinion). I'm very much looking forward to a single window interface in Xcode 4.3.
As a developer, the killer aspect of OSX to me is the full blown *nix environment paired with high level commercial apps (like Xcode, photoshop, garage band, etc.). Not to mention I don't have to worry about my display card or wireless card working in OSX (like I still have to do with Linux).
As for the polish comment, it's really a matter of what you're used to and strictly a matter of opinion, but I find Xcode a nightmare to navigate compared to VS2010. Sure, Xcode is shinier and looks better, but the UX is far superior in VS2010 (again, just my opinion). I'm very much looking forward to a single window interface in Xcode 4.3.
Oh dear - you haven't been using the multiple-window layout in Xcode 3, have you? The single window layout is the only way to be productive.
Update: wow - I got downvoted for saying that? Someone must really like the multiwindow layout. If that's you, and you don't want to pay the $5 for version 4, have a look in View->Layout in Xcode 3. Try the single window layout. You'll like it. Really.
I'm definitely going to give it a look. For some reason I thought the single window layout wasn't coming till this version.
The multiwindow layout wouldn't be so awful if OSX were better at windows management && I had more than one monitor to work with on my iMac. As it is, it's a struggle for me.
Oh, and who knows about the downvotes. I thought for sure I'd get nuked for defending VS. Have an upvote.
I didn't downvote you, I can't downvote, but I like the multiwindow layout because then it's very easy to use an external editor in place of the Xcode editor. I liked using MacVim or TextMate when I first got into iOS development.
Xcode 4's single window interface is a huge improvement, IMO, even though I haven't been able to get my old project to package up yet... "schemes" and "run destinations", oh my.
But I know once I figure it out, it will be better.
Quality is in the eye of the beholder. That being said, my Windows 7 workstation crashes at least once a week, as does Visual Studio 2010. I just checked my uptime in my OSX workstation and it has been up for 52 days and I've just had one instance where Xcode crashed. In my eyes (and in my experience), Windows is just not as stable as an OS for development, although it's a lot better than the past crap they've released.
UI wise, I hate VS2010. In my head I cannot fathom why you would say it's UX is better than Xcode, but once again that's personal preference and opinion, which is - of course - respected. I always say: "Use whatever you need to get the job done..."
I do agree completely on what the actual allure of OSX is. My past platform of choice has been Debian, and I always thought it was painful to have to dualboot to be able to do my work (specially when on the move). Enter OSX, which gave me all my unix tools and also runs Photoshop.
I usually don't defend Microsoft, but I don't think your unstable workstation is the fault of Windows 7. Most likely it's a problem with one of the drivers, or maybe even a hardware issue.
Well, my other coworkers (some are windows fans, linux fans, osx fans, and one is a total freeBSD nazi) all agree that out of all our workstations, the Windows machines fail the most. Even the Windows fans acknowledge this. All other operating systems almost every time recover from errors (be them our errors or random errors on the OS side) without much trouble, while the Windows machines generally just blow up and need to be re-started.
Don't get me wrong, I do almost all my programming these days in VS2010 and I think it's a pretty decent piece of software (as is Windows 7), but it crashes more than any IDE I've ever used and the UI is just totally subpar. Windows 7 is a huge step up from Vista an XP, but I find it's nowhere near as stable as XP was. Our situation is not a hardware or driver issue, everyone had their preferences on which machines to buy, so they're all different machines.
Yeah sure free beats it. Most times. I mean sometimes people don't see the value when they are getting it for free. Example: Guy finds a bug in a free software and thinks 'what doesn't cost nothing can't be anything'. But these people are mostly end users not developers.
Long story short: I don't have a clue why Apple is selling XCode 4 BUT when I look at Microsoft you are getting a hell of a software for just 5 bucks. (Visual Studio costs 1500 bucks I think, to be fair there is also a Express (free) edition)
Anyway, I love the new XCode one window interface!
Even though $5 is pretty cheap. There is a lot of power in 'free' (As Dan Ariely would say), and I'm sure there will be some bad consequences for apple here, but not that many and maybe it's worth it for their new strategy for developers. What that strategy is, I have no clue.
I'm not saying it will succeed (that remains to be seen) but:
1. Not if you don't have the money for a computer in the first place. My grandparents would really like to get online, and the difference between a $400 laptop and a $200 netbook is significant.
2. Not if all you need is the basic functionality this device offers.
3. This is just all sort of wrong if you don't live in a metropolitan area.
4. That's your opinion, and a valid one, but I love the cloud. I'm moving everything I can to it. Of course, I don't personally concern myself too much with security, but I still think it's a great tool for a lot of casual computer users.
1 > I think the number of people in that position is relatively few. Specifically: the number of people who, when buying a new computer once in four years will consider a $100 difference in price significant, is small.
2 > Maybe, but there's also a question of the quality of that functionality. The cloud equivalents of almost any piece of software are significantly more limited even for non-power users.
3 > Meh? Do people in rural areas lack wifi? Do they take their laptops out of their houses to places without wifi but with 3G signal much more often than people in urban areas? I doubt it, but maybe there is something about rural people that I am not aware of. :)
4 > I think the cloud has a lot of potential, but as it is right now I believe it has been oversold. But you're right, there are many valid opinions on this one.
3. Yup. I'm exclusively accessing internet through 3G right now, and I'm only 15 minutes from town. No DSL or cable options for me.
4. I agree it's been totally oversold. Those "To the cloud!" emails make me roll my eyes, even if that one does have April Oneal from TMNT in it.
I think price is the real key. If it's around the $200 mark, I'll probably even pick one up for surfing while sitting on the couch or toilet.
My grandparents need/want a laptop, and literally all they'll ever use it for is to google stuff. They'll possibly want to upload pictures from their digital camera they never use, but if that's made simple via USB and some cloud based service (existing or otherwise), then this device would be perfect for them. <$300 and I'd get them a chrome laptop. >$300 and I'd get them a cheap windows laptop. My wife is using a $349 toshiba full sized laptop right now, and it does everything she needs. But if I could save them $100 or so on one of these, that would definitely be the way I'd go.
Another important feature if you or your non-techie friends and family value your time is the protection from malware recovery and other sysadmin tasks.
But you could likely get a cheap Windows netbook for nearly the same price, as OEM Windows 7 Starter will cost ~$40 OEM. So rather than $200 you pay pay $240, but you also get the ability to run Office, iTunes, FireFox, hook up printers, scanners, cameras. etc...
Is this worth an extra $40? It feels like it is, even if I rarely use any of these features. But there's probably also some value in being able to say, "This device is only for the cloud, period". But I feel like I'd rather get a tablet device (the Nook Color is already a mere $249).
It's hard to believe a stateless box can be hard to manage. There isn't much to go wrong in it. At least, not when compared to a barebones Windows netbook.
Support and managing state are two different things.
For friends and family, the support I provide is almost never about state or ramifications of state. The most common set of questions are actually around printing (why does it print the webpage name at the bottom of the page? I don't want that. Or the computer says it's out of ink, but I just put new ink in it). Chrome just complicates this.
The next biggest set of issues is hooking up the laptop to TVs. Nobody did this a year ago, and this holiday season I've already gotten like three calls on how to do this.
Windows and MacOS have gotten sufficiently mature that a lot of the old issues just don't come up any more (or we've past that stage where there were a lot of adult complete computer neophytes... even my parents are decade old computer users now).
Why would ChromeOS complicate tasks like page setup? It seems printing is somewhat different (not sure - I haven't used a Cr-48 yet) but it can't possibly be so complicated my mother (an archetypal 75 year-old lady) would have problems. About a month ago, I set her up with a USB printer (I took away my networked printer), Ubuntu detected it immediately when plugged. No driver download, no nothing. It all just worked.
Anyway, if page setup and connecting external screens are your worst problems, consider yourself very lucky. Most of us have to deal with the occasional malware infection (luckily, I don't). The horror stories are often amusing.
Fortunatley, I've only had one malware infection amongst friends and family, and it was on the Amiga -- where I'd inadvertantly infected my neighborhood with an infected disk. Felt like a jerk.
I ran w/o any virus protection until about 2005 on a PC and never got any malware. Lucky? Maybe, but I see so little malware amongst "my users" that I wonder where the ruckus comes from. In any case, I do now have everyone on MS Security Essentials.
ChromeOS doesn't complicate page setup, but it printing. With printing you need to have a "server" computer hooked up to the printer. Now there are issues around the other computer being turned on, and diagnosing issues at the host computer rather than at the machine their doing the print job from. Basically take every problem you have today, but then add another computer in the middle.
In my extended social circle there are two groups with observably higher computer problem frequency: the teens and the seniors. The teens are heavy gamers, prefer Windows and frequent all the worst places of the net. The seniors exchange an astonishing volume of PowerPoint presentations and click on every link they get by e-mail. Both groups have their computers rebuilt ever 6 months or so. Not only because of malware, but performance issues that appear to make the machines unbearably slow (maybe due to installing two or three smiley-making extensions to their IM clients)
Actually, I have, and it's perfectly adequate if you're using a netbook as a netbook. (The biggest number of Windows complaints I see on the eeeuser.com forums involve people who have 64-bit driver problems, for example.)
I mean, if you're comparing running a Chrome browser under Windows 7 Starter with running the Chrome "OS" on top of Linux, it seems to me the biggest difference will be the option of persistent storage, not the polish of the user experience.
That said, I have two netbooks and both are dual-booting Windows 7 Starter and Ubuntu 10.10 desktop.
Agreed: and I think the ultimate target market is the enterprise space (rather than the grandparents) where a company wants to get a lot of employees mobile and online quick and cheap without security risk or proprietary software costs
I agree on the price point, although it's not clear how you could get to that price point -- ditching the Windows tax doesn't buy you that much.
I think the biggest problem I have with it is that -- barring a revolutionary cheap price point -- there seems to be no Unique Selling Proposition or compelling use case that distinguishes it from the capabilities of existing netbooks.
The hardware will be cheaper. These things run on ARM processors and a free Linux kernel / firmware. With a few OEMs on board, I think that it's absolutely feasible to see these things around $99 - (perhaps free if paired with Wireless carrier and a data contract)
Think about that for a second: A $99 'laptop' that you don't need to worry about upgrading or going out of date like a regular PC, that has a much longer battery life, is lighter, smaller, and 'just works' for it's intended purpose better than a PC.
It sounds nuts, but after having used one of these for the last week, I am more convinced than ever that Microsoft/Intel is in big trouble unless they do something pretty radical and perhaps painful to their immediate existing business.
*edit -- I've just read that Cr-48 runs Atom. I was told it was an ARM chip. Certainly the chipset requirements factor into my argument here.
Yep, from the beta samples it appears they're using commodity hardware, so the only savings will be the Windows tax. Basically, if you took the original Asus 701 netbook and made some upgrades (7" -> 12" screen; 600 MHz Centrino -> 1.6 GHz Atom; 500 MB -> 2 GB RAM; 4 GB -> 16 GB flash drive) you'd have the Cr-48 specs.
Asus differentiates its wide range of netbooks with price point variations based on different battery specs, hard drive size, Bluetooth, etc.
The only variation I can see for commercial roll-out would be in, say, the 3G module added by a particular service provider. Given what has happened with the added "features" of some Android devices, I'm not sure that a Verizon-specific Chromebook would be a big seller. A vendor-specific would seem to lead to contracts and account personalization details that would kill the anonymity focus of the device.
But, How are they going to reach that price point? Specially since they are not going to produce them, and at least this model is pretty ordinary hardware(runs an Atom, not an ARM CPU). And, why manufacturers would want to canibalize their already tight margins on netbooks?
Besides, most people I know, would pay 100$ for the ability of running a "real" OS.
Because it needs 3G connectivity to be usefull.
The people charging you $40/month (really $100) for a 3year contract will be happy to subsidize a $200 unit
WP7 may have been late to the table and turn into a total failure, but it's certainly innovative.
Hell, even the Zune device + Zune software + Zune service is the best music provider out there, imho.
I guess you can argue that Windows 7, .NET 4.0 and ASP/MVC are derivative, but they're certainly moving their core products forward.
Microsoft has plenty of hits and plenty of misses, but everyone acts like they're being left behind by Google, Apple, Facebook and Twitter. They still make a ton of money and put out a lot of new, fresh products. Some are great (.NET 4, Kinect), some crappy (IE 8), and some meh (Office 2010), but would you argue Google has any better of a track record? Remember Wave and Buzz?.
You also speak of their 'downfall' in the past tense, as if it's already happened. They still push 90% of desktop market share, rule enterprise, rule the Office suite business, and have some nifty things going on in the entertainment side (not profitable, but nifty nonetheless).