Microsoft: Surface Tablet May Alienate OEM Partners 164
HangingChad sends this excerpt from PCMag:
"Microsoft this week admitted that its upcoming Surface tablet might hurt its relationships with PC maker partners. As first noted by the New York Times, Redmond said in a Thursday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that 'our Surface devices will compete with products made by our OEM partners, which may affect their commitment to our platform.'"
The filing also made note of the difficulties in building up another app marketplace: "In order to compete, we must successfully enlist developers to write applications for our marketplace and ensure that these applications have high quality, customer appeal and value. Efforts to compete with these application marketplaces may increase our cost of revenue and lower our operating margins."
They're Concluding Microsoft Wants to Be Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Of course it will... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:They're Concluding Microsoft Wants to Be Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
OEMs key to Microsoft success story (Score:5, Insightful)
doing what MS does best (Score:5, Insightful)
It'll be second rate and fail. It's not because MS is bad at this sort of thing, it's because it can't concentrate of the user, and UI consistency, it doesn't need to be distracted by hardware design. There are still stupid differences in the way the parts of the Office suit work, and the UI should work the same way. An MS made tablet will be second rate because it isn't new, it isn't wanted. Just supply the software and let people who know how to build hardware do their job, MS has been doing it this way from the beginning, why change now?
Re:They're Concluding Microsoft Wants to Be Apple (Score:2, Insightful)
Linux has already won. It has won the server and the mobile market.
I agree with you in a way. But a full blown win will be when you can ask any guy on the street what Linux is and get an answer..
Re:OEMs key to Microsoft success story (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes. Have you not seen the long sting of crappy tablets coming from the OEMs the past decade?
Re:They're Concluding Microsoft Wants to Be Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, that answer is brilliant!
Re:They're Concluding Microsoft Wants to Be Apple (Score:2, Insightful)
What a pathetic little Microsoft shill you are.
OEMs have done a great job of making appealing hardware for Windows. That's the only reason Windows even exists today. Otherwise MS-DOS would just be some obscure thing from the 80's that you never heard about.
Tablets are a sticky wicket because consumer price points require using a microprocessor architecture that Windows doesn't support. Even if you do port Windows to ARM, you will have nothing to run on it.
Re:They're Concluding Microsoft Wants to Be Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux has already won. It has won the server and the mobile market.
I agree with you in a way. But a full blown win will be when you can ask any guy on the street what Linux is and get an answer..
You can't ask any guy on the street what electricity is and get an answer.
Re:They're Concluding Microsoft Wants to Be Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Until they buy Office and say "Why the fuck won't this just work?"
How many consumers buy Office? And why would they when LibreOffice comes with their Linux install?
Re:They're Concluding Microsoft Wants to Be Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
If OEMs can't bundle crapware to offset the price of Windows, either Windows systems cost more or Microsoft will have to cut the cost of Windows to the OEMs.
Re:They're Concluding Microsoft Wants to Be Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Just wait till Microsoft comes out with their own phone.
They pretty much are. They've effectively turned Nokia into their "Windows Phone division".