Posts by Robert E A Harvey 3010 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2006
I reckon 1440x900 would still be a piss-take at this price. We have 5 inch phones at 1,920 x 1,080 on the horizon.
The best product differentiation Lenovo could come up with is a decent resolution screen, though I reckon Torben Mogensen is right - a nipple mouse is a Lenovo must.
>Unfortunately there is no real competition for desktop users who *gasp* WANT A DESKTOP OS.
This is a terrible condemnation of companies like HP, really. They've known for over a year that W8 was going to be a turkey, and 18 months ago HP was going to be supplying WinOS on every machine they shipped. if they'd had some guts, and were not being run by witless beancounters, there would be a real pre-installed alternative by now.
I think that Linux and OSX are decent alternatives personally, but 90% of customers want a 300 quid PC that works out of the the box. And the box shifters have wasted a year in which they could have been planning to break the monopoly that sees M$ designing their products for them.
Greed, short-termism, lost opportunity.
>Microsoft found to their cost that their biggest competitor for O/S's was .... themselves.
This reminds me of Vauxhall.
Me: "I want a set of brake pads for a 2004 Astra please"
Spares dept: "Sorry, we don't stock parts for cars over 5 years old"
Me: "Why would I need parts for a car less than 5 years old?"
So the USA has trumped up a non-tarrif trade barrier. That leaves Europe as a market. So Europe will need a barrier, dumping looks like a convenient hook to hang it on.
I suspect that if the 80s & 90s were the era of GATT, globalisation, & the free marketr, the teens & twenties will be the reversal.
Once things are obvious enough that you can hit politicians over the head with them, things change.
Well, there are 7.05 Billion of us, according to various sources. According to indexmundi 26% are under 14 years old. and 8% are over 65. So lets call that a potential world market of 7.05 * 0.66 = 4.65 Billion economicaly active adults. [1]
The suggestion is therefore that 23% of the adults in the world have a smart phone. Wow. And if it /does/ double, as they suggest, that will be getting on for half of us. [2]
I wonder what else has achieved market penetration like that? The ball point pen, perhaps. Certainly the knife. Shoes. If you include plain phone phones, how close to 100% do we get?
http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/facts/2011/material/ICTFactsFigures2011.pdf says there are 6 billion mobile phone subscriptions, that's 87% of the whole world population and 129% of my rough-and-ready count of world adults.
Now, look. This is something done by Science, not religion or governments. It has changed the world very profoundly, which is what technology has done since the stone age. religion and government is dedicated to the status quo, Engineers to tearing it down. I rather think I know who is winning.
[1] I am aware that in some countries schoolkids have smartphones.
[2] But not me.
Bill - do you suffer from mild nominative determinism?
Sticking PE10 9NE [1] into OpenSignalMaps reveals two things:
1. It's a map of user locations, not coverage. Where coverage is sparse it's pretty much a map of individuals.
2. What the hell is going on in Auster Wood? [2]
[1] Lloyds bank. I use their postcode instead of mine, for privacy reasons. I don't care if minor criminals stalk PE10 9NE, they are already outclassed.
[2] more likely to be poaching than dogging. It does make me wonder about a pikey logging site.
[2'] Auster wood: http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1290138
$MEGACORP has a retention policy - it is up to us to retain it in .pst files on our local hard disks.
There is also a retention policy about what should and should not be kept, and an email subject line policy about naming things for the same reasons. It's a big document. I've put it in a .pst file on my local hard disk.
<-- now, where was I?
>Microsoft have come a LONG way in a short time
short time? short?
Windows Embedded Compact (as it was then) was launched in 1996, and only received the most desultory support ever since. One PLC maker had to wait 3 years for a fix to the networking that condemned their touch panels to a daily reboot to keep working.
>Windows CE was god awful.
was? is! a lot of people are stuck with it on embedded systems, with no sign of a future.
It's also why HP purchased Palm. (Hmm, just had a thought. Was it pressure from M$ that caused that to go so badly?)
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