We have this to go by
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/03/28/ms_vista_shipments_claims/
Apparently declaring victory early is a Windows tradition.
2643 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2008
It must. Who hasn't looked at a laptop and said: "This is really neat, but I wish it didn't have this keyboard. I would totally pay twice as much if they would take that off."
Why, the CES Windows Tablet storms of the past few years have yielded an amazing outpouring of innovative designs that have conquered the tablet market. A shame Microsoft isn't even going this year, to finally show off their own-brand hardware. That would be awesome.
Whenever these objections about Planetary Resources come up I feel it's important to remind the author: it's their money. They don't tell you how to spend your money. Some of the richest guys on the planet are behind this thing, and they're not in it for giggles. As long as they don't ask you for your money, let them do what they will.
It's not like they just spent 11 billion retirement fund investor dollars on Autonomy, 8 billion on Skype, or two billion dollars a year maintaining their web presence like some fools have been up to.
This is actually what they're about as they themselves have said. The metals thing is just a byproduct. LH2/LO2 FOB LEO is quite the valuable product and the addressable market may one day be in the kilotons. Other materials on orbit may also have good value. Bringing an object down from orbit considerably depreciates it.
When NASA's Dawn mission gets to Ceres it will definitely discover an essentially unlimited water resource. There's good potential for Xenon ice as well at the poles, which would be outstanding. The capture and processing of near-earth asteroids for fuel to accelerate the robotic recovery and exploitation of this resource is essential.
Who would have thunk it? Our 21st century spacecraft will be primarily steam powered. Sorta.
Supermicro makes a 4U 72HDD server chassis for $2500. Dell could probably slim that down to 3U and 96HDDs by rotating the backplanes 45 degrees. Stuff in some 500GB SSD drives for the price/performance/density sweet spot, lay in a server MB and some I/O. Now it's off to their own software guys to turn this into a 10M IOPs 40TB RAID6 storage screamer with quad 10Gbps iSCSI or some infiniband and network redundancy. Mark it up 3x and make some nice margins. Done and sorted for 0.04 billion dollars.
They bought IBM's PC business right before the Vista launch and turned that lemon into lemonade - taking themselves to top dog in the PC client biz. There's scant profit in it, but they're driving units and spoiling the fun for all the other Windows-only PC vendors - and that's a win for China and Lenovo to break the monopoly by driving the profit out of it. HP should have parted with their Windows PC business too before Windows 8 launch as Apothaker said, if there were a buyer; now it is too late.
But the growth is in smart mobile devices - especially in China where most people don't even have PCs and never did. Android has 90% of the China mobile phone market now, and nearly as much in tablets. Most of those people who never had traditional PCs now never will. Lenovo is ready to make a profit now, and they've found a way. When they leverage their homegrown MIPS technology chips and software development prowess they should surpass the West in the general availability of technology in about five years. But five years from now in the West an entire K-16 education will be something we just assume everybody over the age of 8 has on their person so, meh.
Lenovo and China will continue to export this of course using the "thousand paths" model, and make good money that Western methods of Intellectual Property war cannot stop. Battalions of lawyers cannot stop 100,000 vendors and eBay.
It helps the Chinese citizen that this stuff is battery powered and can be charged with a solar cell. Their power infrastructure isn't the best. India is in the same boat there. India is going whole hog on the Android tablets also, subsidizing the Aakash II tablet to $20 for students, and their target is a half billion students in the next few years.
There is a cost in the availability of technology. An uncensored copy of Wikipedia in English is about 10GB. It fits on an SDHC card that can be hidden under a postage stamp, in a bar of chocolate, in a battery, and so on. That can be uncompressed, viewed, copied on any one of these devices. The proliferation of these devices means that the Chinese government is about to lose their control of the flow of information. They will find themselves forced to move into our dynamic world of communications whether they want to or not. There will be change and they need to find the smoothest possible way to embrace it - a challenge I don't envy.
We've been hearing that about Windows Phone for two years. Guess what. After two years it's "late days". Two years is about three generations of mobile.
Last quarter non-Windows mobile smart clients moved 2x as many devices as Windows clients both classic and mobile. This quarter it will be 3x, as nobody wants to find a Windows device under their tree - mobile or classic. The last Microsoft Windows-phone exclusive OEM - Nokia - is losing over a billion dollars a quarter selling 88% of all the Windows Phones sold. Everybody else is standing up a false WP front to get Microsoft off their backs about patents, but not moving any significant units.
For a while there the question was, "well why aren't Android OEMs earning profits?" The answer is "because they were sinking their Android profits into the Windows Phone money pit." Now that they have stopped doing that, all but one has turned around. Even Sony has seen reason, and that's saying something.
These mobile devices drive many times more margin and profit dollars EACH than Windows laptops and desktops do on average - which amplifies the difference into many multiples of profits for the OEM. Lenovo just won the top spot in Windows PCs units shipped at an operating margin of 2%, meaning that on that $400 Lenovo laptop they made eight bucks. Apple laughs at this earning $160 profit on an iPad Mini, and Samsung finds it equally hilarious earning $200 or more on each SGS III. Lenovo would have to ship 20 laptops to match the profits on one iPad Mini, or 25 laptops to match the profits on one SGS III. The FedEx guy who delivers it probably earns more profit than that. And Lenovo is not shipping even as many laptop units as Apple is moving iPad Minis or Samsung is moving SGS III devices, let alone 20 or 25 times as many.
The world changed. The money is in mobile. Everybody needs to get with the program, or go away.
Intel has a singular linguistic problem. The word "cannibalize" is seen as an argument against any new technology, as in "we could do that, but it would cannibalize our (desktop/laptop/server) sales." Guess what: if you don't do it, somebody else will. Intel needs to embrace the Fine Young Cannibals that bring progress by eating the slow-moving ill members of their pack. They need to take up cannibalism as a core corporate ethic.
Intel needs to find some Young Turks and tell them: Kill a business group if you can. Count coup and you will be the boss of that realm until another younger, faster, hungrier Turk comes to supplant you.
Especially Gen 8. Dual LOM 10Gbps FCoE, and all the 1U server goodies, 16 core/32 thread servers with up to 512GB RAM, Terabytes of Fusion IO storage if you need it. FDR Infiniband and 16Gbps FC if you want it. Good, stable management that's now got Android and iOS apps. Huge RAM full-height quad socket blades for when the software licensing costs more than the server.
There are some new architectures that challenge it in the non-x86 realm but for the general use case this is still good stuff with a long leg on the road ahead. In the blade space I can engineer you a solution from any major blades vendor but if you ask me - HP is the way to go in blades. I don't just engineer the solutions - I fix 'em too - and HP is a rock-solid member of the blade uptime club.
I'm not a fan of their Windows obsession in the client space but that's a different thing. If anybody deserves props in the blade space, HP does. HP still have AMD blades too and I like those for certain use cases. Most others have let AMD go because they don't move enough units to sustain that much choice, or never took it up.
Long story short if you want x86 blades, HP is still my first recommend.
The home for Linux is Kernel.org. It is not intended to be much more than a kernel, drivers and filesystems. The kernel is the thing that allocates resources and provides an api for apps. All the rest you see on a modern Linux system is GNU. Even the terminal window that gives you your preferred command shell.
There is nothing UN-Linux about Android. They are using it in a way it was intended to be used, though in a use case that was less popular five years ago. Today however, this has become the default use case by sheer weight of numbers. And that is a good thing for everybody except gnu.
HP has been a friend of Linux just about forever. A bipolar friend with multiple personality disorder ("HP recommends Microsoft Windows" on their Linux landing page for example), but a friend. As I've put on here before, HP has always donated servers to Kernel.org for example. They support multiple distros. They contribute to the kernel. Except for a short period with laptop wireless chipsets they pay attention to component driver availability in their build designs. Printer driver support is huge and they've got that covered with over 1,000 models of printer.
Life first appeared on Earth about 15 minutes after the environment was stable enough to support it. The combined notions that it originated here so soon, and yet requires some miraculously special environment to do so requires a leap of faith. I ain't jumping. It's easier to believe space is littered with life and it sprouts in every fertile ground.