5,642 karma · joined September 24, 2012
Whether they take off or not will depend on many factors besides LTE. Those include size, weight, battery life, performance, Win32 compatibility, marketing, advertising, availability and price.
And Google just tried to get me to sign up for Google Assistant. Ditto.
One of the facts of the case is that Microsoft got as close to the standards bodies as it could, and part of its marketing was that it was making IE more standards compliant than Netscape. This is actually very common in computer history (the market leader does whatever it wants to innovate, while the losers band together around standards).
In the end, of course, it didn't matter. Microsoft out-programmed Netscape and then Netscape made several disastrous decisions that amounted to browsercide.
As I said, if you've got any evidence, I'm interested. Specifically, what did Microsoft add that was non-standard and that Netscape couldn't have added?
As far as I know, not even ActiveX qualifies. I discussed this with Mitchell Baker, and she clearly said that Mozilla could have implemented ActiveX if they had wanted to.
That works in China because Google is relatively weak there. It also works for Amazon, which has its own store for Fire products.
Microsoft was much more co-operative than Netscape in the early days. It was one of Microsoft's advantages when Netscape was winning and running on pure arrogance. See How the Web Was Won, High Stakes No Prisoners and a few other books for details.
Microsoft did introduce ActiveX, which Mozilla considered supporting, and then decided not to.
I'd be interested to see the evidence for that....
There is some debate inside Vivaldi about making it open source and it would be easy enough to do. I'd guess that it probably doesn't make economic sense while it has such a small market share, but I don't know if that's true.
I did a few roll-backs to test the system and they worked perfectly. However, if you're upgrading 400 million PCs, there will inevitably be some errors.
This is why we have backups ;-)
> evidenced by the sheer number of people fooled into it.
How many do you think there were, and what's the percentage error over 400 million or more upgrades?
The fact that people claim -- or journalists report -- forced updates doesn't make their claims true. Everybody who deals with real users knows how unaware they are.
Having said that, I agree that the "dark patterns" were a really bad idea. Microsoft actually does know how unaware real users are, and its upgrade offers should have reflected that.
Whether it was worth turning off security updates is another matter, and would depend on the circumstances. For most users, my opinion is that it was stupid.
However, the stacks (ecosystems) need not be mutually exclusive. For example, Microsoft's ecosystem includes dozens of apps for iOS and Android, and it has supported Macs for as long as Apple. It also has Linux options for Windows 10 and Azure.
Apple mainly supports Apple hardware, but it still has iTunes and iCloud support for Windows.
True, though IBM may now have spent too long coasting by in mediocrity...
Also, for the record, I never saw any attempt at a forced upgrade across three different machines... even though I made no attempt to block them. This makes me doubtful about "forced upgrade" stories.
Hoever, even if someone correctly claimed that they were forced to upgrade and didn't, along the way, accept the Windows 10 terms and conditions, it was dead easy to roll back to the previous OS. Far easier, in fact, than coping with a ransomware attack.
Otherwise I go to Twitter, HN and The Guardian every day, plus Reddit, Amazon and Facebook every few days (often it's to wish someone a happy birthday).
I also like The Wirecutter for reviews, Authority Nutrition https://authoritynutrition.com/ for food info, Dilbert and xkcd for cartoons, and YouAre Not So Smart https://youarenotsosmart.com/ for essays.
Incidentally, Yahoo Finance reckons The Vanguard Group owns 525,395,707 Microsoft shares. The Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund is just one of its funds.
YF doesn't mention Ballmer so presumably he sold off his 333 million shares without it making news. It's a while since I looked....
Gates isn't hoarding anything, and in any case, all his wealth is going to charity.
It's billed as a handheld gaming system but you don't have to play games on it.
Runs Windows 10 on a 5.9-inch 1920 x 1080 screen. Atom processor.
Whether it will lever get made is another matter (it's an ex-Kickstarter project now taking pre-orders), but the approach is interesting.
(2) There's no reason why Samsung or one of the Chinese manufacturers couldn't make a Windows 10 phablet. Microsoft made Windows free on small-screen devices, so I assume it will continue to be free, or at worst, "zero paid".
[Microsoft had a Windows offering where OEMs paid $10 for the OS but got a $10 rebate for setting Bing as the default search engine. So technically, Windows wasn't free, but OEMs didn't pay anything to use it.]
However, US private spending is much higher, so the total cost of healthcare is higher.
The OECD numbers for 2013 put US per capita spending at $9,086 compared with Swiss spending of $6,325. The OECD median is $3,661.
It would be better to compare the USA with Canada, which has a universal healthcare system at a lower cost to the state ($3,974 vs $4,197).
Google also produced a knock-off of Facebook -- Google Plus -- which is still going but ultimately failed.
In both cases, Google got the technology wrong. However, getting the technology right is still no guarantee of success. There's more to it than that....
It might have a hypocrisy problem. People will typically claim to like certain things (high-status cultural artifacts) while mostly consuming other things (trash TV, fast food etc). However, it doesn't benefit from driving people away.
UWP apps run in sandboxes under Windows Runtime, not in Win32.
Presumably there are some benefits from this, but it depends how many parts of Windows itself use Win32. For example, the new Settings app runs in Windows Runtime but it still hands some things off to the old Control Panel, which is a Win32 program.
I'd assume the eventual goal is to move everything to Windows Runtime, leaving Win32 to wither and eventually die, at least in the consumer market. I suspect enterprises are too slow to change for that to happen in business market.
Bear in mind that UWP apps will run very happily on the ARM-based Windows laptops that will arrive late this year, whereas Win32 programs will use a Rosetta-type emulation.
If you cover the whole market from thumbdrives to server farms, you're obviously going to make different versions to fit different usage scenarios. People do that with Linux, too.
Windows 10S is just a new version of Windows 10 Pro that addresses certain needs in the education market in particular.
If you don't want it, don't buy it. If you buy it and decide you don't like it, you can upgrade it to Windows 10 Pro. No big deal.
It's frankly insane to have hissy fits about it destroying civilization as we know it. It's not.
Windows 10S is much more flexible and requires no set-up and no maintenance. If it's in the Windows Store, you can install it.
Bear in mind that schools run fleets of PCs and children do not have their own. They get whichever comes off the trolley. The Windows store installs whichever apps they use when they log on.