Dell is selling Ubuntu equipped stuff now as an alternative OS .....

China/Germany/France is swinging the marketplace to some degree by insisting that the MS Win 8 not be used for government data, period.    

This trips a tipping point as Linux has always said they could never vie for being the predominant OS until PC makers would be willing to put Linux OS on brand new machines at retail .....

HP is doing this now, as is Acer and Dell.

Dell is a big 'un in business, too.



Ballmer's replacement sure has a LOT of housekeeping tasks to take care of.    Governments and entire countries are not trusting MS any more.    Sure, they are European, but still -- governments saying that Win 8 is untrustworthy and has been cracked by the Chinese (and NSA) is pretty stinky.

MS's firing of Sinofsky and Ballmer, then not being able to name anybody internally for CEO says that MS has a very weak bench .... having to go look at CAR companies says they feel they need something they feel they can't get in Silicon Valley or Cupernio at all, period.

Shopping for a turn around guru is what they are doing ....

Still, pay attention guys.  Screw around for another six months and the issues will just gets deeper and stinkier (and fewer folks will be willing to try to take it on).

Book all the rest of your losses and get your books cleaned up and maybe somebody will try to help you -- nobody is going to sign up for the last HUGE quarter of Ballmer's big Surface losses and the other Ballmer/Sinofsky messes that haven't been booked yet.

Yeah..You can buy a laptop in the mid $300 range at walmart with a 3ghz processor, and it will have a monitor and keyboard. You can always dump the windows and put your preferred software on it.

Sorry, most of those laptops are refurbished... most of the deals this week are all 1.5 to 1.7 bundles tho... you get the laptop, case and a printer for under $300

I hate when they say it's intuitive...
It never is... ...

This is kinda funny ....

My daughter is a Mac user who has quit her engineering manager's job to go back to college full time to finish her Masters Degree in Engineering Communications.   She plans for advancement, she does.

However, she needed a laptop to carry to school and her current laptop is too huge and bulky (was fine when it was new as nothing better existed).

So she buys a super slim laptop, a HP unit on Black Friday sale as it was about a third the price of an Apple unit.

She hit the Windows 8 that was loaded on it and told her husband "Please put Linux on it, honey.  Windows 8 sux very very badly".

I asked her why she killed the "latest and greatest from Microsoft"?

She replies "It takes 2-3 times the amount of finger motions or mouse clicks to DO anything and it uses funny stuff for the normal everything".

Why Ubuntu?   She's a Mac lover.  Why not a OSx lookalike distro (of which there are several).?

"Ubuntu is fine, our main PC runs it and everything just works OK so I might as well use it on the new laptop too."


So ---------------  people "like" what they already know how to use.  Chromebooks will begin to take market share now that they are fully featured for off line word processing and spreadsheet work and because people know how to use them.  


You DO really already know how to run a Chromebook, really you do.

You do not know how to run Windows 8 when you first hit it .....



====================



Speaking of Allwinner and new announced chipsets, folks have been noticing that Allwinner has been saying they would have a laptop grade chipset in 2014-2015.   Many assumed the next generation ARM 64 bit chipsets were what was planned.

Nope, 2014 release, Octa core A15 based, all bigs, no littles, no sweating the power usage because a full sized laptop battery will last nearly forever using the modern ARM switching tech and ranking up through the chain of 8 each 2 ghz A15 cores.  

Example, use 1 core all the time at low power levels for background tasks, only use all 8 when doing a massive recalc or a OS recompilation or a big graphics item.

Your screen is the biggest energy consumer on a laptop now-a-days .....

This will also be a low end desktop capable chipset.

Graphics are the biggest/fastest of the new Mali GPU series, so you get to toss 8-16 graphics cores on top of the 8 main CPU cores as Mali does computational work sharing on the most modern types.

Get it all working together good and Intel will have to do a shrink and bump to some Core I-5 designs to keep up with the cheapie ARMs in 2015.

Once again, the fast little Chinese guys are lapping the big dogs using old generation tech they already paid royalty rights for and fully understand.  

They shrink it, fiddle with it, and speed it up ....

Samsung is having a hard time staying ahead of the Chinese Cheapie Guys as they are getting lapped right now too.

Microsoft does not have to throw in the towel -- they are fully capable of competing technology-wise should they choose to do so.  

What they can't seem to get past is their "rent you the software on my terms" business model.  
And their arrogance that they run the computing world, not you, the user base.

Microsoft is STILL tossing out Windows versions that people don't like and saying "That's it for the next 7 years".

Then after 2 years of miserable failure putting out a slightly fixed version of the same failed stuff as "new and improved".

Root problem with MS is that they make so much money off Office and the people upgrading old office products that they don't HAVE to change, not just yet anyway.