Comments

• twitter

  2009-06-11 05:14:50

  M$ has been trying to kill off portable computing for nearly a decade but far too many people know the capability of portable devices. $100 computing platforms will Kill M$ Dead, so M$ has done what they can to delay the market. Technical, social and legal barriers have been put in place. Apple's iPod and iTouch have swept in and demonstrated a small portion of what ultramobile computers can do. Though iTouch is limited, it's more than a match for Windows and it can eat the desktop market whole.
  
  Victim #1, Palm. I remember M$ breaking sync with Outlook back in 2001. They did it with "security" patches, and this basically terminated the corporate market for hand held computing. There were lawsuits over graffiti, and many other problems for every part of the supply chain. Social obstacles have been erected in the corporate market in the name of "data security" so that only centrally controlled devices like Blackberry are tollerated.
  
  Innovators like Sharp were also punished in the US market. Zaurus was an introduction to what GNU/Linux could do with ARM back in 2001. M$ flooded the market with inferior Windows mobile devices, noise and FUD. The experience was so bad that Sharp never returned, despite the death of M$ partners like CompUSA.
  
  BN has is covering the attack against netbooks and we can all see the end of M$. They may have killed the EEE PC, but they they can't touch the iPhone and iTouch. More importantly, the world has changed in a way that completely removes M$'s power. People no longer buy a computer so that they can write things they print, paper publishing is all but dead. People buy a computer so they can communicate, research and publish online. All the tools people need are redilly available and M$'s old strongholds are powerless to interfere. M$'s war against Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo and the entire non M$ social network world is hopeless. They might as well move their headquarters below the Puget Sound and try to bribe the water. There's no money in software licenses for devices that cost $100 or less. Devices like that are already more than capable enough and everyone knows it. In five years, people will come to expect persistent communications from devices the size of a credit card and won't need a desktop for more than a larger monitor, storage, power and a few other io devices.

• aeshna23

  2009-06-11 06:35:34

  Both Roy's post and Twitter's comment are excellent and well worth reading. So excellent that I just needed to post about their excellence!

• Yggdrasil

  2009-06-11 06:58:02

  Naturally, you'll want to blame Microsoft rather than Palm, but I suspect the real culprits were the morons working at Palm. I purchased a Palm TX back in 2006. While I did not use any Outlook features, just getting the Palm Desktop software to work was a real challenge. After a month or so of normal operation the program would suddenly begin to hang on the splash screen and refuse to start. The only solution was to purge the install directory and re-install the software. I can't even remember the last time I had to do that to keep a program working, so it really doesn't look very good for Palm.
  
  I became further disgusted when the power button on the TX quit working just a few days after the one year warranty expired. I've learned to put up with it and just about pitched it in the garbage until Palm finally released a new version of Palm Desktop about the same time I purchased my new Vista machine. Somehow Palm did it right and it has worked flawlessly since I installed it in August of 2007. It installed faster and boots quicker, though some functionality (app installation) isn't supported, I don't care. I'm just happy it works as expected.