Robert Pogson

SJVN on M$’s latest vapourware:

“In the days since Microsoft announced its hybrid tablet/laptop I’ve talked to most of the major PC original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). None of them would go on the record with me on their reaction to the Surface. What I can tell you though is that every last one of them is as angry at Microsoft as a Boston Red Sox fan is at the New York Yankees after being swept at home.
Most of them, with reluctance, had decided that they were going to ship Windows 8 tablets. A few were going to try Windows RT tablets. Now, the OEMs must throw all their tablet plans out the window. With the Surface announcement, Microsoft has done to them exactly what Microsoft used to do all the time to its enemies: frozen the market by announcing something that sounds much better than what the OEMs had been planning on shipping.”

This is not the good old days of monopoly. M$ can no longer dictate to OEMs. OEMs have choices now, like Android/Linux, GNU/Linux and ARM. All it would take is the OEMs getting together and shifting the world to FLOSS and M$’s house of cards will collapse. Even a tiny revolt will hurt the bottom line enough for the shareholders to revole. Is this the last straw? We shall see.

I expect this latest salvo in the OEM wars will result in more OEMs openly shipping GNU/Linux and possibly no longer “recommending” that other OS. I expect to see lots of GNU/Linux on retail shelves by Christmas. OEMs can surprise M$ as well. Cooperation is a two-way street.

see SJVN – Microsoft poisons its partners | ZDNet.

Small cheap computers are taking over in Asia. Web stats seen in North America are no where near the same as what are reported in Asia. This probably means the Wintel monopoly has already died in Asia. Good. It’s about time.

I expect the same will happen elsewhere within a year or two. This is not to say that the bulky PCs will disappear. They just will not be the standard of comparison except perhaps in office use on a fixed desk. Typists/secretaries/writers, etc. will always prefer a keyboard if production actually matters. Extended use will always require a large monitor. There’s no reason a tablet cannot do the job with a keyboard/mouse attached. It’s all good.

“74 percent of searches in Singapore (CIA: 5.3 million people) are now done on mobile gadgets while in Indonesia (CIA: 248 million) 78 percent of Internet users go online with a tablet or smartphone.”

Wintel is trying to stay relevant with new releases of software and smaller/faster CPUs but Wintel is so encumbered by its legacy that it cannot possibly keep up except for that segment of IT that cannot/will not change. Asia and other parts of the world are full of people new to IT and adopting the new paradigm is taking a year or two rather than a decade. They are not locked in to Wintel. Never have been. Never will be if this trend continues. “8″ and Atom are too little and too late. While M$ struggles to release “8″, the world has available hundreds of distros of GNU/Linux and several flavours of Android/Linux that can be deployed in weeks on the new devices.

China, for example, has four times the population of the US but half live in rural areas compared to 3/4 in USA. The Chinese are moving to cities at double the rate of USA. The Chinese love small cheap computers. Wintel does not work on small cheap computers. The premium on the OS and CPU and the bloat of the software and bulk of the PCs running Wintel just don’t fit the life-style of Asians in many cases. It’s a whole new market that Wintel cannot serve.

see Mobiles surge in Asia, to overtake PCs: Google – Yahoo! News.