Posts by CFWhitman
4 posts • joined Tuesday 20th March 2012 21:18 GMT
It's a rather simplistic analysis of a rather complex set of information. "White box PCs are more likely to crash." That's quite possible, but it's also overly general. There could be certain white box makers that build PCs that crash all the time and others that crash less often than most large PC makers. When you lump all smaller companies together you are asking for misleading data.
Android for Intel Already Exists
I'm afraid that Windows for x86 architecture tablets doesn't really have a leg up on other tablet operating systems, since Android for x86 already exists. With both operating systems the same software will work on both x86 and ARM because they both use a virtual machine (or something like it) to run applications (Dalvik for Android, and WinRT for Windows 8).
One thing Windows for x86 tablets might have going for it is the ability to run conventional Windows applications if necessary, although a mouse/keyboard UI design being operated with tablet hardware is generally not the most pleasant experience.
They Miss the Proper Cause to Effect
It's not really exactly that Android users are less willing to pay for software. It's that users who can't afford to spend a lot of money are more likely to have an Android device. A higher percentage of iOS users have already shown themselves willing to splurge on the hardware. I also suspect that there might be more Android phone users who aren't really aware of their phone's full capabilities, since you can end up with an Android phone almost incidentally.
Re: So is this like the Unix® story?
No, it's not like the Unix story at all. That's why using the word "fragmentation" is pretty misleading. People remember Unix and what Unix fragmentation was. Android is pretty much like Windows, except that it's slightly less "fragmented" than Windows used to be because the same code will run on different processor architectures (which wasn't true of Windows back when there were versions for multiple architectures before; Windows 8 will be more like Android).
The so-called "fragmentation" in Android is mostly about different hardware, and a little bit about how many updates to the operating system exist concurrently on recent hardware. Similar issues have always been with Windows, and yet somehow developers learned to deal with it. It's funny though that even though the situation with Android is very like that with Windows we never really heard people accusing Windows of being "fragmented."
