Much of the lock-in to Wintel is in the form of applications that are only available on that platform: depend on the app – depend on the platform.
There is a news item about a medium-sized business finding that Wintel did not scale for them. They were using Excel spreadsheets to micromanage everything and it did not scale. It was not that they could not build a big enough spreadsheet or that a PC could not run the spreadsheet but it was true that the application itself was a bottleneck. They needed 100+ people to interact with the data from everywhere. That was their business model. M$’s business model was that features would be added to Excel ad nauseam to keep users locked-in to Wintel.
At the same time that a web interface was contemplated it was realized that the IT department was already congested. It made sense to shop around for a cloudy solution and it did not have to come from M$.
Other businesses likely have similar situations. It does not pay to re-invent the wheel. If a cloud solution works and streamlines the organization businesses and other organizations will adopt it. Even individuals may find cloud works. It all comes down to there being less reason to stay locked-in to M$. Other equally valid solutions could involve changing to GNU/Linux with private clouds and, whatever ends up on the servers, the client systems can be small, cheaper and simpler with GNU/Linux. A business should seek to maximize its bottom line, not M$’s.
x86 still has performance advantages but improvements in storage going to SSD and the need for battery life in portable units makes a shift to ARM very likely. Intel’s recent announcement of a new transistor is adaptable to ARM so that is only a temporary advantage. x86 to ARM migration is a permanent advantage in battery-life.
UPDATE
Ars Technica has a post on this topic, throwing cold water on the rumour.
“pushing ARM processors to Core2 Duo-like performance would erase most, if not all, of ARM’s low-power benefits, and would suck juice from a laptop’s battery about as quickly as comparable x86 processors.”
Begging the question? ARM does not need to increase performance of processors to be very useful as we can see in smartphones. Smartphones are giving adequate performance even on single-core 1gHz processors from ARM. The software and instruction set matters as well as the CPU performance. On identical tasks x86 will always use more power than ARM because of the instruction set. It just takes less energy to execute a given set of operations just as it takes more energy to make one revolution of a V8 compared to a V4 engine. Intel’s new transistor reduces the power consumption per transistor but does not change the fact that an x86 CPU needs an order of magnitude more transistors than an ARM CPU. Further, CPUs are idling most of the time and the performance of the CPU is held back by the same bottlenecks like network and storage as ARM experiences. I can put a V12 engine in my car but it won’t travel any faster.
On the other hand, the advantages of Apple controlling every aspect of its hardware and being independent of Intel is real and will not be diminished by the performance of the CPU.
A reader brought this to my attention. An organization has developed a prototype of a small cheap computer on a USB stick that could bring back the enthusiasm of young people for IT that they had in the 1980s with the Ohio Scientific Superboard, and other inexpensive PCs for ordinary people. In those days, there were many who could afford a PC that cost a few hundred dollars but not the commercial stuff costing $thousands. Today there are still children who can be stimulated by smaller cheaper computers.
This video describes the device and the goals. ICT is “Information and Communications Technology”, a current theme in education, basically “using a PC”. The speaker wants to encourage youth to create programmes and content rather than just using a PC.
The speaker makes the point that “using a PC” stifles the creativity of young people who are curious and want to understand how things work rather than what others want you them to do with a PC. A lot of the vitriol on this blog is about that. Some folks think it is just fine to use M$’s software and no other. Others think we should cast off such limitations. In education ICT is a big step forward in making use of ICT universal but it does not encourage the mastery I have seen in “Information Processing” courses where computer programming and servers and networking and other content creation is taught/learned. Many high school students are turned off by “keyboarding” when they could be stimulated by solution of real problems and understanding the basics of computer science and pushing the limits of what a PC can do.
One of my most interesting lessons involves getting students to do a measurable amount of computation to see how fast a PC is. It is amazing to them that an 8 year old PC can do millions of calculations per second and yet be sluggish with XP… I also love to teach what kinds of things brute force attacks can do, like cracking passwords or graphing or searching. Comparing a binary search to a linear search is mind-blowing for some students. One of the tasks I loved to do in a computer lab was taking some large project and dispatching parts of it to every PC in a lab so that it is done N times faster. Simple ideas like that are immediately useful for students who are not afraid to look under the hood and use the hardware for what it can do and not just what some business lets them do. GNU/Linux and ARM has a role to play in making this kind of technology more available.
RaspberryPiThe Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity (Registration Number 1129409) which exists to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing.
We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. We expect this computer to have many other applications both in the developed and the developing world.
Our first product is about the size of a USB key, and is designed to plug into a TV or be combined with a touch screen for a low cost tablet. The expected price is $25 for a fully-configured system.
My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.
My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.
I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.
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