Displaying items by tag: PC

If current trends continue, by 2016, Microsoft will no longer be the dominant operating system in the world. That title will go to Android, as more and more mobile devices are sold, and the PC market stagnates further. Or, so says a research firm known as Gartner.

After they announced that they will bring groundbreaking Windows 8 devices in an invitation for their event, Samsung finally revealed what they have made. The new line of so called Smart PCs will include Windows 8 ultrabooks, notebooks, tablet's and all-in-one PC'. This new line will be branded ATIV to separate them from Samsung’s Android based line. The two models are named Pro 700 T and 500 T; they will be a hybrid of tablets and notebooks. “A new category has arisen; the smart PC which is a combination of a PC and a tablet and Windows 8 is the linchpin,” Tim Baxter, Samsung’s American President, stated.

“They've got the big screen, now give them the big picture.” is a good parable for Valve's new project. The Big Picture is basically Steam for TV and controllers. Users will be able to plug a PC into their TV and enjoy gaming on a big screen instead of pc monitor. You are probably wondering what has stopping you from doing that now, and the answer is nothing really, but dont you hate when you have to use keyboard and mouse to navigate, or when you transfer from a 20-something inch monitor to a bigger TV the icons seems too small? For many the overall experience feels a lot worse than just staying on PC.

It seems that Gabe Newell formerly from Microsoft and also of Valve fame is not a fan of the direction that Microsoft is taking. In a recent interview he was quoted as saying; “I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space.” This is something that we have been saying for a while now and for apparently some of the same reasons that Newell has; Microsoft’s recent moves to the cloud (forcing the use of Microsoft services) and also with locking out and competing with OEMs and partners. These decisions on the part of Steve Ballmer are the way to ruin the open platform that the PC was for gamers.

Since the rebirth of Apple in 1997 the PC market has had to listen to the constant drone of analysts foretelling the “post PC” world is upon us. It is a common statement made by Analysts that really do not even know what a “PC” is anymore. Well to help some of them do their jobs a little better let’s go back and define some of this for them and then take a look at where the market is and why claims of a post PC era are quite simply a falsehood.

Apple and their supporters love to have fun with numbers and statistics. One of the recent ones that has caught our eye is that ratio of Macs to PCs. I have seen titles that claim the PC is dead (again) and that the new numbers are “killing” Microsoft and a ton of other crap that is as ridiculous as the titles are fantastic. However, this is nothing new for Apple (or really any company, but Apple is the king of this type of spin). They love to work the numbers in any direction they can. They take the terms median, mean, and mode to a new level (all of those are methods of finding an “average”).

After hearing a few rumors that Apple and Valve were going to collaborate on a new enhanced reality gaming product Valve’s CEO Gabe Newell has set the record straight saying “No one here was meeting with Tim Cook or with anybody at Apple that day.” As part of a recent Pod Cast interview with the site Seven Day Cooldown. This news will probably crush both Apple and (some)gaming fans who might have been hoping for some extraordinary to come from these two companies.

As I made my rounds this morning (checking out what the rest of the world thinks is going on in technology) I stumbled across a couple of articles that had my laughing. One of them was just more of what I have been hearing since 1997, the PC is going away. I honestly do not know how some analyst firms can even print this any longer. The PC has been a fixture in the home and work place for so long and it is such an integrated fixture in how people do work that it is very unlikely you will see the PC go away. Still we see this almost every quarter despite both many “PC” related companies posting record quarters and PC sales actually being up between 2-4%.

If there is one constant in the world or IT (in indeed the world) it is change. I remember learning that back in physics class many, many years ago. Change is not stoppable it is not something that you can run from and it is a law that seems to be the driving force behind so much. Where am I going with all of this? Well I talking about the way the consumer electronic markets and the PC markets are moving. When I first started tinkering around with hardware resolutions were laughable compared to what your average smartphone can pull off. I am talking about 192 x 160 with 8-bit color and this was considered cutting edge!

There are many things that bother me about the way the media portrays things and how this portrayal develops corporate myths that are then bought into by the consumer market. One of these has always been the superiority of Apple products over the rest of the competition. The myth all started many years ago when Apple manufactured everything they made here in the US pretty much by hand. They were a boutique dealer and could afford to take the extra time and effort to get all of the details right. However, all of that changed when Tim Cook arrived on the scene.