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:They're Concluding Microsoft Wants to Be Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
What is at issue is the hardware, not the OS.
Microsoft wants to develop their own hardware, that is fine. But who controls the UEFI restrictions? What club do hardware and OEM manufacturers have to belong to now to conform?
With Windows 8's added requirement to conform to this standard, hardware will have to go through testing with MS, which historically has not been that great.
Well now, MS holds the reigns on competitor hardware as well as its own. So... where does that lead the industry?
They can either conform and deal with what is dealt, or find alternatives.
We already see that Apples Developers are leaving due to this "controlled" approach, so what will happen to hardware?
Personally, i think the next 10 years of computing will be very interesting or very depressing.
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Doesn't getting an OEM price for Windows 8 require UEFI?
Re:They're Concluding Microsoft Wants to Be Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
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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: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: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.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Most people say they use "Google", although most are also easy to admit they do not know what a browser is, according to this little investigation by Google: http://youtu.be/o4MwTvtyrUQ [youtu.be]
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The average guy on the street will almost certainly be using linux regularly in one capacity or another, and simply doesn't realise it... Phones, routers, televisions, set top boxes etc, many of these things run linux. Even those who do, usually don't realise that linux can be installed on regular computers.
What's really needed is a marketing campaign to raise awareness and promote the advantages and differences linux has. OEMs should really get in on this, as their current business model being 100% depende
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I discovered my router ran Linux when I discovered it had an SSH server running - on the WAN interface - with no way to disable it. Strangely no SSH service on the LAN interface though.
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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..
No. A full-blown win would be when Linux-based systems take an overwhelming share of the computing device market (mobile and otherwise) without significant fragmentation, and with a uniform user experience (uniform not necessarily being the best), and with people transparently using them without giving a shit what OS/software stack runs on them.
The important thing is not whether it is Linux or whatever that takes over, but the consumer's experience.
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Hooray for Pyrrhic victories!
I don't think many people realize that Android is Linux. Not one of the people I work with could tell you what version they have on their phones. The only thing they can tell you is which applications they can or can't get compared to the iPhone. Of the people that have the iPhone that I work with, one of them is a fanboi and the others can barely operate their own computers.
If MS can get their store in order and have decent hardware, they'll do just fine. You'll still have
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I think you'll find most people don't give a flying fuck about the 4 Freedoms. You'll also find that the aforementioned "most people" is actually a subset of people who give a shit about how "important" it is to call Linux "GNU/Linux" to ensure that Stallman gets the ego-stroking he believes he so richly deserves.
And you know what? There's nothing wrong with that. Users shouldn't have to read a doctorate thesis on how "libre" a piece of software is to decide whether it's "ethical" to run it.
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It shouldn't make any difference to me if someone else wants to run a different OS as long as we can both conform to open standards. The big issue with Microsoft is their abuse of closed standards to deliberately disadvantage other OSes and poison how peopl
Re:They're Concluding Microsoft Wants to Be Apple (Score:5, Informative)
I just read this article on Forbes. It looks like they've come to the same conclusion I have.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/06/21/microsoft-first-branded-tablets-next-their-own-cell-phone/ [forbes.com]
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I just read this article on Forbes. It looks like they've come to the same conclusion I have.
If they're going to continue their tradition of trying to do what Apple is doing, then it's pretty much the only logical step.
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".
Ballmertine (Score:2)
By now you must know that Nokia can never be turned...
Ehm, not really (Score:3)
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Just wait till Microsoft comes out with their own phone.
They pretty much are. They've effectively turned Nokia into their "Windows Phone division".
Or possibly their "Windows Boat Anchor division" , judging from the way that Nokia's sales are sinking.
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If Google would button up Chrome or throw behind Red Hat or Ubuntu brands they might gain something. Personally, Google should put together an Android environment that runs on a regular Linux in a sandbox. That way phone and tablet devs could port to that environment and media like Amazon could slip their media stuff (books, video, music, etc) in too. it would allow the normal distros to keep all the core Linux Desktop Apps in their repos too.
Of course it's everything the OSS gurus freak and dread, but wit
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And how would that make them, or anyone else, money?
Most of the non-nerds I know are inherently biased against Linux (if they have even heard of it in the first place). It's hard to use. Its overly nerdy. Nothing runs on it. Its ugly and intuitive. "Hackers" use it. I can't learn it. I don't want to use command lines for everything. Etc... I'm sure we're all familiar with these statements or preconceptions. If Google made the best Android/desktop killer app in the world, it probably wouldn't get
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Google has its own phone and tablet. They haven't driven OEMs away... Microsoft need not either, so long as they are careful.
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What about Google? I mean Google has created a bunch of hardware they call as "reference" which can disrupt the market. You think any of the 7" tablet makers are happy w
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Compare that to the "I'm a PC and I'm a Mac" ads.
The Lauren ad [youtube.com] was quite successful. Microsoft has tremendous brand awareness. The problem is people used lockdown or poorly maintained windows machines at work and associated their work machine with what Windows is capable of. To get out of that they would need to do something that would alienate corporate customers, like the Dude you're getting a Dell [youtube.com].
Windows Phone is good,
The Windows Phone is good, what it is not is compelling. To get someone to swi
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Glad you agree.
But at least Microsoft has shown that it can design good hardware. Their mice and keyboards are terrific so maybe the Slate has a chance. Time will tell.
I think with the Slate it is going to come down to pricing. How aggressively do they want to price these devices? If they lose $50 each and move 100m units then they start to change the culture and but they are only out $5b. If they only sell a few million they may not have any impact. On the ARM side, the use of the term "Windows RT"
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I bought an HP 7510 as my secondary printer they threw a mini touchpad in as the UI. :) Its fallen, though I do like it.
Wooing developers is going to very hard. Give them 100% cut of the app store and that won't matter. Heck make it 110% it still won't matter. If Microsoft moves tens or hundreds of millions the customer base will do the wooing, a tablet is all about software. If Microsoft moves a few million nothing will work
Re:They're Concluding Microsoft Wants to Be Apple (Score:5, Informative)
Consumers can run Linux and not even be aware of it.
It's step onto this side of the 90s timewarp you appear to be posting from.
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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?
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Because LibreOffice is terrible. Seriously, I've tried using it.
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Some might say that Google Docs doesn't suck... well they'd be pretty far off. There are in fact dozens of Office like packages out there and all of them are fairly bad. Google Docs is 5-10 years behing MS
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If Google ported the Android environment to generic Linux instead of ChromeOS, they might have a shot. The ability to run phone and tablet apps on your old PC and share all the stuff from mobile App Stores would be the angle to play.
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When the iPad first came out I had to explain, repeatedly and at length, to some photographers that no, they couldn't run PhotoShop on it.
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Why would they buy msoffice?
Put it this way, how many users buy msoffice and then complain it wont run on their ipad?
This old "users will buy boxed software and be annoyed when it doesn't work" fud is ridiculous, as such a model is simply rendered obsolete by a repository / app store model. Why would anyone waste their time going to a store when they can just select what they want from a menu and have it installed and updated automatically?
Buying software on physical media is not what the average consumer w
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These newfangled cars are all a pile of shit. I gently shift forward and nothing happens. So I cracked the whip and it didn't even pay attention. I finally gave it the spurs, but still nothing. I think it's dead.
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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.
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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.
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It is often more than the price of Windows. Both Sony and Dell have put it in the $50-75 range.
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Microsoft should invest in getting a small form tablet which can run an x86 architecture. This is the only way they will compete with anyone else on the market, especially those that use their (normal) Windows OSes with ease on their tablet/convertible laptops.
What the hell are you thinking, Microsoft? Nobody wants Windows 8, with your goofy-ass MetroUI boxes on some obscure(even if it's ARM) architecture. Please, just make a NORMAL WINDOWS TABLET if you are going to trip into that market. When I start my t
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There have been windows tablets for many years...
They are expensive, bulky, and generally slow compared to full size laptops, and the speed is directly comparable because they run the same software.
The interface of windows is simply not suited to use on a tablet... They are trying to address this with metro, albeit in a stupid way... Touchscreens and mouse/keyboard are totally different, and therefore should have different interfaces. Forcing a touchscreen interface on keyboard/mouse users is just as bad as
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Before January of this year my last two laptops were tablets and they were by no means slow compared to full sized laptops. My last one (a Lenovo x220t) had a dual-core i7 processor and ran every bit as fast as a desktop.
The thing is that the Windows tablets were never designed to be full on touch - or even pen - driven devices. You could exclusively use the pen if you wanted, but the real utility is in using the pen digitizer with MS Office. Once you start using it, that one feature justifies the added cos
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Rather, OEMs are stuck in a race to the Bottom fueled by Microsoft and Intel themselves. If any OEM like say, Apple, gets a design too popular, One of those tries to make it "cheaper for everybody". It's right there in the OEM license agreements that Intel/Microsoft OEMS basically sign away any really unique ideas to the "herd".
Needless to say, there is no incentive for R&D, they just wait for intel and MS to tell them what to do. OEMs already tried innovating to make netbooks and both Intel and Microso
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Their.
They're is they are
There is a place.
Really? (Score:4, Informative)
You have to mention everything that could be a potential threat to your business in SEC filings. Not particularly interesting since this is "may do this, may do that."
Bears (Score:5, Funny)
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?
Market Caps (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft's Market Cap
http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/market_cap [ycharts.com]
Apple's Market Cap
http://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/market_cap [ycharts.com]
At one time Microsoft could have eaten Apple's lunch. They even bailed them out with a loan. Now look how things have changed. Microsft can clearly see where Apple has been a success and they think they can emulate it. A little envy?
If the DOJ now gives Apple a pass on this business model, why wouldn't they do the same for Microsoft?
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Not the first time Microsoft emulated Apple. First time I laid hands on Windows 95, I had to doublecheck that I wasn't sitting at a Mac. With the trashcan, "create shortcut to desktop", shutdown procedure, and "it is now safe to turn off" screen..... it all felt like the Mac Finder.
Oh and Bill Gates is probably thinking that Apple loan was the best thing he did. Jobs says he was only 60 days from bankruptcy. With the failure of MS competitors Atari, Commodore, and Apple in the span of just five years,
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The downfall of America will be its corporations and their influence on politics. The downfall of corporations will be the government's over regulation of their business. The public suffers from both.
The only one winning in America right now is the fucking politicians. Think it's time for a change...
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The public has much more control over government than it does over business. And while there is some over regulation right now, I'd say you are screaming fire during a flood.
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One has to wonder though, was Microsoft ever in competition with Apple? In those days, Microsoft's OS and Apple's OS wouldn't even run on each others platforms anyway. And with Apple selling hardware, it seems IBM and the like were more of a competitor for them.
yeah, (Score:2)
What If Microsoft Then Buys AMD? (Score:2)
Here is an apocalypse. First Microsoft kills all the other OEM's that were buying Intel CPU's to make PCs, notebooks and tablets. Then they buy AMD. What do they get? Radeon graphics and control of their CPU destiny. Then Apple buys Intel and Nvidia. Then many of the surviving OEM's buy ARM and Via processors to run Linux. I know it sounds unlikely. But it could happen.
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If the OEM's making stuff with Intel CPU's are killed, Intel's market will decline. Thnn they would be ripe for the picking.
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Apple has already jumped to another processor, the Samsung-produced A5X.
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Doesn't Apple require a Mac for iPhone/iPad development?
Microsoft, "So ... ?" (Score:2)
I believe Microsoft's stance on the topic is "So." It's not like the OEMs have anywhere else to go, with any significant product sales that compare to Windows based sales.
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It's not like the OEMs have anywhere else to go, with any significant product sales that compare to Windows based sales.
True. Windows tablet sales are massively outpacing Android sales.
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OEMs key to Microsoft success story (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes. Have you not seen the long sting of crappy tablets coming from the OEMs the past decade?
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Not really. I've seen awesome tablets from Fuji and Lenevo for the last decade and Microsoft One Note. What I haven't seen was a commitment on the OEM's part to driving down the cost of crucial components like the hinge.
But those types of tablets and the iOS / Android tablets which are touched based are fundamentally different in intent.
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Hardly. OEMs are leaches. They put together a product that any tech savvy 12 year old can do for less. What they offered was tech support, warranties and speed.
Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Nvidia and others were the real innovators. All of the OEMs just put it in a box and labeled it.
What's replaceable is the OEM, not Microsoft. What's replaceable is the OEM not Intel. If HP were to evaporate--another would simply take its place in a day. IBM was smart enough to see this--and took a swift exit.
We're a
Re:Of course it will... (Score:4, Interesting)
In the entire history of IBM PC clones, none have innovated. They usually copied the innovations from the Atari and Commodore machines..... and then the PC makers caught-up 5-10 years later to turn a boring business machine into one with sound/graphic cards. Or into integrated one-piece units like the iMac. THIS model has worked for them since the mid-80s so it's doubtful they'll suddenly change. It's cheaper to just copy.
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Nonsense.
Compaq was a huge innovator, they brought down the size and weight of portables and arguably invented the laptop.
Zeos was an innovator in micro electronics and pen based computing a decade before the OS had any support for it.
Micron was a huge innovator in memory technology.
Dell was an innovator in the manufacturing process and brought a degree of customization never seen before to electronics at good prices.
Packard Bell developed all sorts of ease of use features like: color coded cabling systems
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>>>Atari and Commodore were vastly vastly inferior to the PCs of the early 1980s
Okay.
Give me an example of an IBM home PC that could play music-quality sound in 1979 (like Atari) or 1982 (Commodore). Or an example that could show full-screen in 1985 (both Atari & Commodore) or 1988 (Apple Mac).
Or 4000 colors in 1985 (Commodore). Or an example of an IBM home PC that could do preemptive tasking in 1985 (Commodore).
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Give me an example of an IBM home PC that could play music-quality sound in 1979 (like Atari) or 1982 (Commodore)
The IBM PC wasn't released until 1981, so no they didn't have a good model to compete in '79. And with this any many other things I suspect you are reading spec sheets. In '79 if you wanted to use a computer for music you used analog computers not digital. Digital computers, except for extremely expensive ones, were worse than basic music equipment. Midi wasn't even untl about '85. Around
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I meant full-screen VIDEO but left out the word. Atari ST and Amigas could do it in 1985, but certainly not IBM PC or the Microsoft OS.
>>>Commodore did not do preemptive multitasking in 1985.
Of course it did. It wasn't the rather lame cooperative multitasking we saw on Mac OS7 or Windows 3, but genuine preemptive tasking where the CPU stopped the current process and moved on to the next process.
And no I wasn't reading amiga propaganda... I actually owned one. I routinely ran 3-4 programs at the
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Lets assume I am an uniformed sales guy. And lets further assume you weren't approx a high school age kid in the around 94 who had an Amiga 2000 or 3000 and was unhappy when the system died... but that you were really around to talk about what was happening in '79 or 85. So we'll ignore the nonsense about what was happening in the 70s and 80s, and focus on the stuff you do remember.
The Amiga did cooperative not pre-emptive multitasking. The hardware didn't support the kinds of memory protection and proce
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As Microsoft doesn't make any of their own hardware for PCs, I fail to see how OEMs have failed them, since their entire Windows line rests exclusively on OEM hardware, running on a third-party architecture. Without OEMs, there probably wouldn't even be Microsoft, or they'd probably be a 50-employee banking software company in rural Michigan.
I agree, though, that ASUS is the only company pushing the boundaries of conventional 'laptop shaped computer' design. There are a few nice leaps from Lenovo as well, b
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dude, you're stupid. the appstore model is actually a copy of debian's "apt-get". apt-get is basically a "free appstore". you know the convenience of "apt-get install xyzapp" and it works automagically? well that's the convenience the appstore brings. also since the appstore takes care of your bandwidth costs and hosts promotional content and puts you in a place where costumers can actually find you i don't think 30% is very expensive at all. that's the problem with geeks, they have no clue about how to run
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And deals with payment processing and identification and fraud. Those are an extraordinary burden on the small developer. A 30% fixed and predictable cost is a big win.
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I just checked my statements. Apparently, I (a small developer) am only being charged 2% fixed costs on each transaction, and have a fraud rate of zero. Yes, a 28% increase in fixed costs is definitely a "big win" for me. Where do I sign up?!?
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If you mean the iPhone app store, Apple doesn't want serious apps. They want the iOS devices to be secondary devices. And as secondary devices there are tons of applications that allow for viewing, editing and replying to data. QlikView (an end user business intelligence layer) iPhone client for example.
If you mean for OSX. there's little advantage to expensive apps through the app store, except for anti-piracy. And that might be enough.
The Microsoft Phone (Score:2)
There already was a Microsoft branded phone. It was a failure called the Kin. I don't know anybody that ever bought one of those. But MS usually does better the second time around. Now they have been putting their hope in Nokia. Nokia has hit an iceberg and is rapidly sinking. But this time Microsoft will swallow them if for no other reason than patents.
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You're right, it is Zune 2.0.
1) Microsoft Debuts play for sure.
2) Everybody makes horrendous, terrible, clunky devices with bad battery life and shit for UI w/o a single good music store.
3) Microsoft attempts to salvage it by releasing Zune, which in both of its generations received glowing reviews and was widely regarded as superior to the iPod.
Unfortunately for Microsoft it was too little too late. But they did create a great product that had the potential to succeed.
Microsoft sees the same thing happeni
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I don't see Microsoft offering anything in the Surface that any of them couldn't have (but didn't) offer.
This line is exactly the point - and Google does the same thing too. They both provide a platform which has the potential to do awesome stuff, and then OEMs take it and just release the same old shit. Not one of them thinks "hmm, I think I can do some cool stuff with this". Surface and the Nexus 7 are both examples of the First Parties getting sick to death of their platforms being flogged in boring devices without a single second of thought being put in.
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I was under the impression that the Galaxy range outsells the Nexus range at a similar price point. I've not used either extensively, but I'm not sure what features Nexus is supposed to have over Galaxy. The only things I've heard that Nexus beats Galaxy on are ease of rooting and re-flashing and other such geeky treats- all good, but not exactly marks of great innovation; just marks of a different philosophy towards the end user.
Other than the fact that Google like to have a flagship model under their own
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Dell. HP. Gateway. And all their fucking crapware.
My HP G60-630US doesn't have any crapware on it. Well, not in the Linux partition.
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Why would anyone want to depend on a "strategic" OS from Microsoft?