Greedy telcos

Telco's did not loose to Netflix because of technology but because of the outrageous pricing of their pay per view.

In the same way that tobacco substitute companies have gorged themselves for years by selling their much less taxed products at the same price as a pack of cigarettes, they are now finally getting destroyed by e-cigarette companies with a more decent pricing.

Lunch time

Reminds me of google's cars illegally snoopping WiFi information. All it took was a good lunch with downing street - problem solved (for google)

Inevitable

Not to lessen Job's brilliance but the smartphone revolution began before him - he did accelerate it - and it was inevitable that Smartphones would overtake computers as most people need a phone whereas only some of them need a computer. This is especially true in developping countries and/or low earning families where arbitrage has to be made between a phone and a computer.

Also machine Learning and even self driving cars were certainly not invented by Google and voice recognition has been working well for many many years. It's just that computing power and computing power / watt are at a point where many projects can really take off.

Those theories and predictions really aren't very interesting. Wintel has been pronounced dead for 20 years, now it's Apple turn and tomorrow it will be Google & ARM. Is it any true and does it help envision new waves, I'm not so sure.

Strong-arm mafia-like tactics

Flash became obsolete because it really was a crap.

Acrobat became history because of outrageous pricing, it was much cheaper to upgrade people to office 2010 and produce pdfs with it than licensing Acrobat. I suspect Office 2013 directly opening pdfs will make Acrobat even more relevant.

Now Adobe is strong-arming us into subscription instead of license purchase, at the outrageous price of about 5x Office 2013. We say no and continue using CS6 in the hope that alternative products will appear, and wish Adobe a good travel into Oblivion.

USA at its best

It's really not ok to play with a bottle, it's almost an act of terrorism.

On the other hand it's much better to belong to a firearm's club at 5 and get a customized for children gun, it's a patriotic constitutional right and of course there is no risk whatsoever to blow your sister's head.

A politician 's promise

Buying intentions are as reliable as a politician's promise, in the same way Obama did close Guantanamo bay.

Interesting but post people have uplinks 20x slower than their uplink & I don't see any sign that ISPs want to reverse the trend.

They are perhaps thinking of the awesome free xxGB/s lines that link a few privileged universities.

The younger generation only knows music as mp3 with too low bitrate, autotuned 'singers', music with 0 dynamic to win radio's loudness war, and too much sugaring (reverb & co)listened on crappy laptop loudspeakers or 50 cents mobile headphones. Within these parameters an over expensive piece of 'pro' headphones must sound reassuring. They would probably hate true neutral monitor headphones, accusing them of too thin bass.

Hardware is the best Trojan for servives

Hardware is still the best Trojan for services and visibility. If IBM sells its server business I guess soon nobody under 30 will will know who it is. And why trust a company for IT integration & architecture when it has been disintegrating for the last 20 years and architecture-free? This time around no Linux will save it and mainframe revenues will not last forever and IBM is a cloud nobody.

Overdose

Why would people buy android laptops when they already have android phones and tablets and apparently see no need for a PC for the time being? What's the value proposition for android tablet owners?

The only good coming from these Android profit delusions (Samsung excepted) is that after android notebooks tank their manufacturers will have to ask themselves if by any chance their super crappy products are not more responsible for the failure than the OS they wear.

The economy

Surely the economy is one of the biggest reason for the PC decline in many countries.

It's not the only product too just look at the bloodbath in the car industry.

Also much to blame are PC makers delivering crap product, with 0 innovation, 0 progress/research (e.g batteries), abyssimal component selection - why in the world can't consumers take decent screens or keyboards or trackpad for granted), rushed out products that are overheating and do more noise than a Ferrari at 200mph.

While Windows 8 may be a factor it's all too easy to put the blame on Microsoft when incapable of offering decent attractive devices.

It's enough protection for most people

Windows defender is enough for most 'standard' computer users. For the higher risk population defender + Customized host file + peerblock = free win. For SMEs I had good experiences with an additional ISP antivirus gateway + Symantec Endpoint Protection on premises (interestingly enough as Symantec customer solutions only caused pain & misery, not that it was much better with McAffee)

The ring, symbol of love and slavery.

Too much cash

Apple already sits on a pile of cash which by any financial standard is wasteful and would be better given back to shareholders, invested in short term Financial instruments or else.

A building while not necessarily the best return is a better investment than piles of cash sleeping under a mattress and will probably contribute to employee satisfaction as well as reinforce fanbois/customers association of Apple and exclusivity/design/uniqueness.

Any progress on quality

Has Amazon done any progress on quality?

Downloading files from AWS has got to be the most painful downloading experience I've had in years with super low speeds and no restart. Haven't had to use it since last december though.

Walking down a public street

Privacy is not silly. When walking down a public street one has privacy rights in most countries and the recorder can show his street filming without individual permissions only in very limited scenario e.g. nobody is singled out and crowd is the subject, it has high news value for the public.

I sure hope that many places and organizations will ban the use of glasses within their boundaries the same way cameras or phones are today.

Voice control fashionable again

Strange that voice control is fashionable again.

It has so many known and experimented limitations and is useful in so few scenarii.

There has been perfectly working voice control on computers and phones for many years, mostly never used because it is generally neither practical nor productive.

Shouldn't glasses be yet another 'dumb screen' controlled by smartphones, ultrabooks and car computers?

USP

Hurd's unique selling point is as a sexual predator willing to shortterm his way into a bonus by destroying r&d, e.g. a company's medium term viability.

Dell needs him the same way women executive do.

Nothing new under the sun

I can remember reading an article in The Economist more than 2 decades ago making the case that such collisions were the most dangerous threat to life on earth and how an affordable investment in countermeasures would make sense.

Pension funds & shareholders advisors not doing their job

To think that for many decades HP was a beloved & admired company whose innovations were only equaled by product quality & tank-like durability.

Nowadays it is a company with no direction with overpriced products such as large format printers that break after a year at the most, a management that thinks acquiring companies will miraculously boost overall profits, and a cosy yes-ma'am board with a 100% success rates in crappy acquisitions.

It is a remarkable illustration of pension funds mot doing their jobs as shareholders and shareholders consultancies either mot being heard or providing inane recommendations.

Most of all though it shows board members with no decency and no self-respect. They should have recognized by themselves the utter failures of acquisitions they championed and resigned.

Silverlight abandoned too soon

Silverlight was abandoned way too soon, it was very interesting in many different areas including business presentation layer as well as massively bandwidth-adaptative streaming.

Microsoft has made the same mistake as Facebook, going all-in in HTML 5 too soon, at a point where it doesn't bring anything to the customer, which is still using crappy flash btw instead of HTML 5, where Silverlight/WMV9 provided in many case a better streaming experience with non constant bandwidth. And tested in the biggest scenarii possible such as the olympics.

I don't understand why Microsoft didn't us this know how for teleconferencing/ instant video messaging. It could have tried to get the industry standardize on WMV/Silverlight, perhaps even open source it, I'm sure many hardware partners would have been thrilled, after having invested non-trivial sums to support MS codecs.

QNX ain't enough

Buying QNX was BB's smartest decision. QNX is a super OS highly respected in many industries.

Still it's not enough to day dream about being a mobile service company. BB has a very limited experience in this space, the email premium service is no good proof with highly public outages and no support in BB's 2 newest phones.

In addition everybody wants in: other manufacturers such as Samsung or Nokia, all network providers and the is devs, be it google or Microsoft or apple.

No reason for RT

The Surface RT, which really should have been called the ARM Surface should not even exist.

People wanting good battery life are better off with Atom based tablets, which as a big bonus is fully compatible with Windows 8, not Windows Light.

If Microsoft wants to offer an entry model, it should offer an Atom-based Surface.

No magic one size fits all resolution

There are no magic one size fits all resolutions. 2560-by-1700 may make sense for graphic artists, but I highly doubt it does for compiling and frankly it's a super dumb idea to think "retina" is always better than fhd.

One can find many real-life scenarios where "retina" is actually worse than fhd: browsing will offer much laggier and jitterier scrolling than on fullHD for example, and it will do so while consuming more power which isn't ideal for laptops.

Many apps don't work well at all with very high res (adobe cs6 before the special patch for example), although I hope that Microsoft and Apple will work on much better scaling algorithms in their next releases of Windows and OSX, which would help in most situations.

Where I do agree with the Great Swearing Dictator is that PC manufacturers mostly produce crap today.

They should stop whining and start producing good PCs for a change. If they think their me-too 0-innovation (TM) let's assemble-crappy-components(R) attitude will suddenly produce miracle profits just because they are now selling tablets, they are in for a rude awakening.

TCO

It goes both ways, open-source doesn't change the laws of physics either.

Free software always sounds good, and makes sense often but still one has to see the big picture, including maintenance, support, ease of integration, training, specialist availability as well a programming environment, e.g. can programmers get more work done faster because of Superior dev ide and goodies.

So in many cases also commercial software does make lots of sense.

Also there are many different price points in both open-source and commercial offerings it's not a binary decision. I have no idea what's a Fairtrade Malbec is but to pursue your wine analogy, what's great with wine is that there are many choices in between a $90 bottle and a $1 bottle, and after a bit of (pleasant) research you can find the cheapest one that is still deemed enjoyable or highly enjoyable by all your guests.

Absolutely not exxagerated

Just love those estimates directly coming out of their a.., just like poor Elon Musk and his $100m newspaper article.

Small fine

The fine should really be small. During these 17 months the competition had no trouble taking huge market shares away from IE, showing that the commission should have analyzed other anticompetitive behaviors such as tool bundling as far a msdos 6, a market killing behavior unfortunately shared by many, such as the chocolate factory. As well as abuse of dominant position in the case of monopoly iTunes.

Having glasses drowning you in video ads all day long and probably recording your positions if not what you see 24/7 a la Google street car may be even more emasculating.

Setec Astronomy

btw the fact that the coke recipe is still secret gives hope that some simple strictly enforced policies are still of enormous value securitywise.

What to do next

If Shamir is right I don't know what you can do to make the situation better.

Also I don't understand his coke example. The coke recipe in a probabilities can be accurately described on a letter/A4 page. Making it 1tb (with what if not some kind of encryption tech) is useless if your system is compromised and the apt can retransform it to 1k.

And if In effect, even the most secure locations and most isolated computer systems have been penetrated over the last couple of years by a variety of APTs and other advanced attacks, is there a single instance where no gross human error has been done that could have been avoided. Or are the APTs really so good that it could penetrate 0-error facilities with 0-error staff with ease? That would be pretty scarry.

Mechanical it is

After years of typing on soft keyboards I treated myself to a mechanical keyboard and boy I don't want to type on everything else. Kudos to the first company that will integrate mechanical keyboards to notebooks!

So hard to change habits

I have been very satisfied with my HTC Titan from the start (except for the non-upgradability to WP8) and I still think integration with social networks and practicality of use of WP is second to none, with a fantastic bing search, notably local search, almost always right on) and absolutely great free applications such as bing translator, which frankly is a jewel, not even counting that you do indeed need very few "general apps" as WP7.8/8 is absolutely sufficient for many tasks.

Now an acquaintance needed a new smartphone and based on her budget and excellent reviews, I recommended her a Nokia 620. But in the end she chose to go with a similarly priced HTC android phone because she feared it would be too hard to learn WP (of course the salesman in the phone shop didn't even care to demo WP8) and because she was told by the salesman Android had much more apps (she uses a single store app, a game which is indeed also available on WP8 for the same price).

That's how hard it is to get people to even consider or try your product. So as you wrote I think that without a very big marketing push, and huge financial incentives for salesmen, it will be very hard for the WP ecosystem to grow, despite outstanding products availability, and despite perfectly competitive prices.

Only 465m in public funding

Poor Guy who only got $465m in public funding which of course did not in any way increase his wealth.

Isn't he sure the NYT article did not cost him $10bn or even $100bn according to super calculations made in the Cayman islands?

too small to win

Whereas defrauding the American people of trillions of dollars by selling crappy bundled mortgage debt to customers then shortselling them does warrant neither investigation nor charges against bank execs too big to fail, it's perfectly ok to waste tax money on months of investigation for poor old teenagers who had probably endangered themselves for years on youporn & sexting.

Logical

When you tell to anybody that will listen that you don't care for pcs and want to only do high margin enterprise stuff, same as HP btw, don't expect customers to continue to purchase your pcs.

Add a very badly run buyers' dep, see the 2-months long or more delivery time for the xps 12, a 0 goodwill gesture policy for consumers with high end laptops in need of repair or replacement, overpriced upgrades such as 200-300$ for a full hd screen on an xps 13, as well as a non existing marketing department and you have a recipe for disaster.

As a long time loyal customer for both work and personal I am very disappointed.

Regarding Windows app

I'm using the Register's Windows Phone app everyday but I uninstalled the Windows 8 version which was very disappointing. At the very least please add options for type size, the possibility to get black text on white background.

For any demanding work ( 200+ document with tons of photos), big presentation, very large spreadsheet gdocs or libreoffice just don't cut it.

In addition it is so much easier to use office when all your customers, suppliers and partners are using it.

Re the 2013 version I didn't use it enough to make up my mind about upgrading, I'm waiting for the new business contact manager as the bcm 2010 isn't compatible with Outlook 2013 so I'm still using Outlook 2010. Btw BCM is quite the hidden gem, a great crm for small scale deployments.

Outstanding article

Outstanding article, looking forward to reading more articles on how businesses are using technology, what feedback they get from the field.

What would have interested me is why use iPhones when some of the development was done for Windows 8. Was the choice made when WP8 wasn't available? Was the promise of write for Windows 8, run on WP8 not held? Was this a strategically motivated decision not to put all eggs in the same basket?