Why not move all the Metro stuff to Windows Phone and be done with it? What is this mutant for?

10 hours ago,Ray7 wrote

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And there's the answer right there.

MS has come to believe that the only way it can succeed is by leveraging their existing monopoly into other markets. This is why refuse to look at doing anything that isn't tied to Windows in some way. 

But if you look at their track record then it's probably true. I can't think of much else that has worked outside of Windows other than the XBox. The problem is that it took years and billions for the XBox to make a profit, and Balmer probably doesn't believe he has enough time to make that happen again.

So the best thing is to try and shoehorn the monopoly into a smaller form factor. Keep the whole thing together and hopefully keep the whole thing turning a profit.

Spot on Ray. The only problem with their dream is that Win8 on Intel is just like laptops of today -- poor battery life. They say they have/are fixing that but they are fooling themselves in thinking the can get more than small incremental gains. There only hope is Win8 on ARM but then you end up being limited to WinRT/Metro unless devs port their apps to ARM. It's like they're only willing to look at small parts of the strategy and history rather than as a whole.

16 minutes ago,DeathBy​VisualStudio wrote

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Spot on Ray. The only problem with their dream is that Win8 on Intel is just like laptops of today -- poor battery life. They say they have/are fixing that but they are fooling themselves in thinking the can get more than small incremental gains. There only hope is Win8 on ARM but then you end up being limited to WinRT/Metro unless devs port their apps to ARM. It's like they're only willing to look at small parts of the strategy and history rather than as a whole.

My regular work computer is a ginormous 17" desktop replacement notebook. This thing probably has like 1 hour battery life, and that's not exaggerating. The cr@ppy battery life is not because it's necessarily so power hungry. It's because with a Blu-Ray writer, 2 hard drive bays, a PC card slot, an ExpressCard slot, an S-Video out, an HDMI out, a VGA out, a FireWire port, an SD card slot, a Memory Stick slot, an Ethernet port, an RJ11 port, 3 USB ports, and 3 audio jacks, Sony had to use one of puniest batteries in existence in this thing. There just isn't any room for anything bigger, and get this. It's a 5200 mAh battery.

For comparison, one of my smartphones is a tiny 3.3" Samsung S8500, and it has a 1500 mAh. That's right. My beast desktop replacement with a 17" ultra-bright WUXGA display and practically every damn peripheral port you can think of is powered by a battery with a capacity of 3.5 smartphone batteries.

Despite it being mandatory for this notebook to be corded, I regularly use this while lying down on the couch. Power strips and extension cords are amazing technologies, and I'm sure that they'll work great with x86-based tablets as well. If I could get even two hours on such a tablet, I'd probably take it out to lunch on occasion. I don't need to be hanging out at a coffee shop for 10 hours straight.

7 hours ago,wastingtime​withforums wrote

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Doubt it. Metro IE doesn't support any plugins, no Flash, Silverlight, Adobe Reader for you. Compatability with IE6 is also pretty nil.

It doesn't support "plug ins", but what I suspect we might see is something similar to the way Youtube videos and PDF viewing works on WP7, whereby the page will display a placeholder that can be clicked to launch a separate Flash (or whatever) player application. Adobe have already indicated that they expect Flash apps will still be usable from Metro IE via Adobe Air, for instance.

21 hours ago,Royal​Schrubber wrote

@Ray7:I have stated multiple times that WP7 route would be a mistake. Once good Win8 tablets start shipping I bet iPad and Android will quickly lose attractiveness. iPad and Android tablets do not ship with desktop OS, which means customers have to have another machine. Having two computers does not make an economical sense to a large class of customers, who will go with Windows 8 because with Microsoft they could combine the role of iPads (mostly media consumption devices) with the role of laptop or desktop computers into a single hardware product.

The problem I have with this argument is that we've been here so many times before and the result is always the same: a massive swell of excitement from geeks followed by an almost universal shunning by consumers.

What consumers want is thin, light, simple, reliable. Microsoft has gone in completely the opposite direction, as far as I can tell, by once again trying to force two operating systems into a tablet.

So, Microsoft has decided the same old plan but with a slightly different twist. Instead of giving users the option of two tailored systems, they are just going to force this thing down their their throats, whether they like it or not. If nothing else that means they can at least say 'look how many more Metro installations there than iPads' even if no one uses it. 

This isn't really about what customers want; it's about what Microsoft needs them to want.

If they limited themselves to WP7 and media consumption role for tablets then they couldn't differentiate themselves successfully from the competition, somethin WP7 currently has difficulties with.

The problem with WP7 is far simpler than that: it costs more than Android without enough benefits to make it worthwhile. This is why the OEMs have been reluctant to push it over their Android models. I don't see this changing with Windows8 which will be the most expensive component installed on a tablet. What this will lead to is an immediate race to the bottom: manufacturers trying to compete by producing the cheapest machines they can. 

They would also expose themselves to the danger or a competitor (probably Android) figuring that desktop OS is a selling point and making WP7 tablets irrelevant in the future. Remember that full Linux desktop ecosystem has more applications than WP7 currently has. 

That is exactly my point. This is not what the market wants; it's what Microsoft needs to happen. Not a particularly encouraging strategy.

5 minutes ago,Ray7 wrote

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What consumers want is thin, light, simple, reliable. Microsoft has gone in completely the opposite direction, as far as I can tell, by once again trying to force two operating systems into a tablet.

Once again? The problem they've had in the past has been to try and bend the existing UI to work in the tablet form factor. Which it does up to a point, that being the moment you put the stylus down and try to work without it.

If Microsoft were to release a tablet only OS tommorrow, it'd look exactly like the new Metro UI, would run apps like the new Metro UI and have a similar developer story to the new Metro UI. So, aside from the fact youcan run old apps if you want to, what benefit would there be to producing a tablet only OS?

Just using WP7 as is isn't good enough, a tablet is not a phone any more than a laptop is a phone. If you try doing anything more than very passively consume information on an iPad you'll soon start to hit limitations of thinking like that. Something as simple as the side by side view enables an enormous amount of incredibly compelling scenarios that you couldn't (and wouldn't particularly want to) accomplish on a small screen device like a phone.

18 hours ago,wastingtime​withforums wrote

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[Metro IE] Compatability with IE6 is also pretty nil.

Source? Is the IE backwrd compatibility turned off? 

14 minutes ago,AndyC wrote

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Once again? The problem they've had in the past has been to try and bend the existing UI to work in the tablet form factor. Which it does up to a point, that being the moment you put the stylus down and try to work without it.

This wasn't the case with Origami, and it still bombed. Given the choice between developing several UIs or just one, developers will take the path of least expense, which will mean staying with their existing codebase and just saying, 'Hey, it runs on a tablet anyway, so why develop a new UI?'

Apple got around this problem simply by offering developers no choice but to build apps suited to the tablet environment. 

If Microsoft were to release a tablet only OS tommorrow, it'd look exactly like the new Metro UI, would run apps like the new Metro UI and have a similar developer story to the new Metro UI. So, aside from the fact youcanrun old apps if you want to, what benefit would there be to producing a tablet only OS?

What, aside from the size, the weight, the noise and the ability to run it for several hours without burning your hands?

15 minutes ago,Ray7 wrote

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Apple got around this problem simply by offering developers no choice but to build apps suited to the tablet environment. 

Cunningly so have Microsoft, as I entirely expect the majority of tablet devices will be ARM based, which will necessitate a move to WinRT for application developers who see a benefit from tablet using customers.

17 minutes ago,AndyC wrote

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Cunningly so have Microsoft, as I entirely expect the majority of tablet devices will be ARM based,

I suspect otherwise.

MS does not want to focus on ARM because it wouldn't offer them any advantage at all over iOS or Android (you have said as much yourself). This does explain why they're not pushing the ARM solution anywhere near as much as the Intel one. MS needs the desktop/tablet fusion thing to work, otherwise they'd have to face the competition head on, and they're not so keen to do that. As I've said, this is about trying to force the tablet market to become part of their existing monopoly, and for that to work, MS has to convince people that the iPad is not powerful enough for their requirements. The problem with this line of thinking is the odd assumption that the iPad isn't going to get any more powerful, and that there is this *huge* untapped customer group that wants to run Photoshop, in full, on a tablet.

@Ray7:If that were the case, they'd not have bothered with ARM at all, so I'm not sure that argument holds.

OEMs will like ARM for the consumer space, consumers have less ties to running old versions of software and will be more inclined to opt for the system with better battery life and weight. For any OEM already producing an Android tablet, it'll also be relatively simple to offer a Windows 8 version. We may later see ARM laptops, but I wouldn't expect that unless applications like Word make it over to WinRT in some form. I'm sure Intel would love to see x86 being big here, but they need to make significant power lifespan improvements without sacrificing performance to really compete.

x86 tablets and touchable laptops will be far more likely to succeed in the business space (especially the vertical segments where tablet PC's already fill a niche) because of the need to run more legacy applications. Power users and gamers will probably also tend towards x86 powered equipment for the ability to run power hungry games and applications. Laptop usage will continue to be more important to the business sector, with VDI style setups largely replacing fixed full function desktops in large corporate systems due to the cost/management benefits.

Desktop PCs will continue to be x86 based, of course, but will continue to decline in popularity. If there is any sort of penetration of ARM Windows in this space it will be in all-in-one devices intended to largely function as terminal service clients, I would expect.

6 hours ago,AndyC wrote

@Ray7:If that were the case, they'd not have bothered with ARM at all, so I'm not sure that argument holds.

Sorry, but MS has an incredibly long list of stuff they've started and never finished. A lot of it has gotten much further than this. I have a vague recollection of a Sidekick-type thing that went nowhere. The problem seems to be that unless it is tied to WinTel, Microsoft just doesn't seem to have much staying power.

OEMs will like ARM for the consumer space, consumers have less ties to running old versions of software and will be more inclined to opt for the system with better battery life and weight. For any OEM already producing an Android tablet, it'll also be relatively simple to offer a Windows 8 version. We may later see ARM laptops, but I wouldn't expect that unless applications like Word make it over to WinRT in some form. I'm sure Intel would love to see x86 being big here, but they need to make significant power lifespan improvements without sacrificing performance to really compete.

But that's the problem. Why should the OEM's produce a Windows ARM tablet if they can produce an Android tablet for a lot less money?

If MS couldn't make WP7 fly, then I don't really see how they can make Windows ARM fly because they'll face the same problems: OEMS that aren't interested, and Apple.

x86 tablets and touchable laptops will be far more likely to succeed in the business space (especially the vertical segments where tablet PC's already fill a niche) because of the need to run more legacy applications. Power users and gamers will probably also tend towards x86 powered equipment for the ability to run power hungry games and applications. Laptop usage will continue to be more important to the business sector, with VDI style setups largely replacing fixed full function desktops in large corporate systems due to the cost/management benefits.

I agree with this, though I am seeing a lot more iPads than laptops on trains these days.

 This is why the OEMs have been reluctant to push it over their Android models. I don't see this changing with Windows8 which will be the most expensive component installed on a tablet. What this will lead to is an immediate race to the bottom: manufacturers trying to compete by producing the cheapest machines they can. 

Do you know how much cost Windows to OEMS, last i heard is practically nothing, in fact with all the patents problems it seems that Android is more expensive.

2 minutes ago,JuanZamudio wrote

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Do you know how much cost Windows to OEMS, last i heard is practically nothing, in fact with all the patents problems it seems that Android is more expensive.

And what's YOUR opinion on that, Juan? Should Android manufacturers pay Microsoft? You know, recently Microsoft sued android based on browser patents, like loading a background image while the page is loading. Yes, no doubt about it, it's Microsoft that's doing all the innovation in this field (the web). A has-been

I think we could use a couple more sensationalist threads on exactly the same subject over here.

2 hours ago,JuanZamudio wrote

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Do you know how much cost Windows to OEMS, last i heard is practically nothing, in fact with all the patents problems it seems that Android is more expensive.

Mmmm. Last I heard, Windows was a little more expensive than that.

@fanbaby:Everybody is suing everybody for stupid things, sucks but that is how the system works.

@Ray7:OK, lets assume the cost of Windows is 50 per machine, do you think that's the most expensive thing in a tablet?.

And do you remember netbooks?, do you remember how they were cheaper because you did not had to pay the Microsoft tax?, do you remember how netbooks will be the rise of Linux?, but nothing happened, nobody care and people wanted Windows on their netbooks even if it cost more.

The same is true with Apple, people pay premium just to satisfy a need not because the machine is worth it(they are nice machines but damn expensive).

If Microsoft can create the need it will succeed.

1 hour ago,JuanZamudio wrote

@fanbaby:Everybody is suing everybody for stupid things, sucks but that is how the system works. 

Oh, silly me, I thought it's about stifling competition, about trying to give WP7 traction against android. hahaha, boy do i feel embarrassed.

It's a defensive move!!!