More stuff about Intel & MS is coming out along with the newest Chromebook talk.  

Gist is Intel is functionally giving up on the entire lower end of laptop/tablet space because of the dumping off of the Atom line of chipsets.   What is really being missed right now by users is the extreme levels of price supports and contra-revenue $$$ that Intel and MS used to drop in our pockets when we bought their Wintel products in this segment area.    The real true pricing is coming through now, and it isn't pretty.

Chromebook and Android own all that bottom end PC segment by default now.  

Mid-to-low end space has Windows 10 and Chromebooks/Android squaring up for a duke off during the rest of this year, with Chromebooks swinging upgraded specs and a slightly higher price point as people are asking for more storage memory since they are holding on to more local loaded & stored stuff than before.   SD cards can do this duty, but SD cards tend to run slower than main systems memory or SSD drives.   People want that SSD storage.

Windows and Apple are both down slightly again in new unit laptop sales, but Win 10 is running around Borging millions & millions of new users abruptly right now whether they want to be Borg or not.    Many users are uninformed and uncaring, but some users are right irritated at the moment because of driver issues making their old favorite softwares not work right (the old softwares MS didn't trash outright as "unapproved" during the upgrade process, that is).  

Breaking your old computer in order to prompt you to go buy a new one is a really really harsh marketing plan, don't you think?

Now that MS will be charging normal prices for Win 10 going forward, this puts a price drag on all Windows machines which will affect sell through in all markets other than professional.

Seeing Win 10 heading towards the business world makes me wonder what Win 10 has to offer the IT world that Win 7 doesn't already offer to them?     Most of the gimcrack stuff won't be turned on or enabled by IT, nor would the gimcrack stuff really be wanted by business users in general.

Intel is "de-emphasizing" PC and tablet and laptop -- main focus is now on Internet of Things and rackspace/mainframe style large computing.   In other words. Intel hopes to "own" IoT and make their normal large profit margins in rackspace/mainframe as they see themselves as owning that right now too.

Intel's big new directional moves are too late again.   Qualcomm and the other phone boys are supplying IoT devices right now with various cheap light and fast ARM Cortex M derivative chipsets and they are the ones that really do currently "own" that IoT market.   Intel will fail in attempts to own IoT for the same exact reasons they failed at mobile.   Too slow, too large, too expensive with poor energy use characteristics and poor battery life.

The move to rackspace finds the largest customers (Google, Facebook, Amazon and the like) are busy designing and building their very own highly customized rack chipsets to go along with their very own cut down speeded up customized Linux softwares.  



Where/who are all of those big deep pocket "high margin" customers again, Intel?  
Remember, Itanium runs x86 code, while rackspace runs on Linux ......

In short, Intel is a many times loser lately that is making yet another set of frantic moves that are going absolutely nowhere yet again.   They cannot design a good chipset for any rapidly changing needs and they certainly cannot make anything at a low cost posture, even if given whole years to do it in.  

Intel is a huge, out of date dinosaur and the new post impact climate is starting to snow on them .......

Extinction is Intel's eventual real game plan.   We will get to watch them shrink and squirm and shrink again and flail around wildly yet one or two more times before they collapse and finally die.

Actually, this is the latest of a long series of computerish tech posts going back to single core ARM chipsets.    I predict the next competition and predict the next winner of that competition and then we all see how well I did when reality rolls past.

This thread is actually about 3/4 done now, Intel is leaving the playing field and MS is busy backing away from what was its grand plan of Win 10 world conquest by allowing Win 7 to continue to exist for business.  But also note that MS is still busy Borging all the little user people over to Win 10 because the the little guys can't fight back effectively (and show signs of not caring all that much anyway).

Android still hasn't picked up its full package of full OS features yet and with Oracle suing Google yet again (MS may have had a finger in this repeated suing) over Java I think Google is leaving open the option of backing Chromebook OS as their "future pathway" if they are told by the court to remove all hints and traces of Java from Android.  

Google can do this if they need to, you know.   Change the few remaining API calls over to something else .....

To MS, anything that can interrupt, derail or simply slow Google down is a good thing, because Google is taking over the bottom end of the laptop market starting this year.   MS must have the time to finish their Win 10 roll out all the way to business before Google takes over low end laptops, or they could lose a critical mass of units on the low end of things.

Other than Oracle's and MS's intentionally muddying up the Android waters yet again with clouds of FUD, a open minded user finds that the developing Android as an OS already has a full market test package out there in Jide Windowing Android.  

The Oriental suppliers are all prepping full bore Android laptops as we speak.   Everyone is watching to see what this effort actually does sales-wise as the Orient is Windowing Android's natural best market and if it is accepted at all it will be accepted first in the Orient.

This is Google at its natural best, seeking to grow Android organically based off of what the marketplace wants as reflected by the little guy vendors seeking out naturally occurring competitive advantages.

Chromebook OS is about complete now and is going to be market driven to expand its "hard drive" memory with some more SSD memory, or else Google may try to refine their Playstore trick where you download the app in the background and use it, then let it go back to the Play Store cloud servers between uses.

Both Google and MS do this trick now, with MS actually not even being able to put all of its needed major OS pieces on to the little bitty SSD drives of some of the sub-spec'd Chromekillers that they sold over the last few years.  Instead MS was constantly moving parts of the OS itself back and forth to cloud storage all the time just so you could do all of Windows 10.  

Can you say "MS runs interrupted, slow, & kludgy on these machines"?

The Win 10 OS porky size exceeded both the Chromekiller's SSD drive's capacity and systems memory at times, in other words.   This means very slow execution while the user waits for chunks of the Windows OS go up & down from the cloud.

Google's OS's are much smaller and will still fit well on the existing smaller system memory & SSD drives, but the trick would still be very useful to ferry an occasionally used app back and forth automatically, keeping it in cloud storage until it was needed.  Phones would benefit from this trick as well as the Android laptops.   Expect to see more mention of fast, locally run cloud apps in the future as phones are going to get 3-4 gigs of RAM memory later on this year, then the cloud up & down trick will be used for any future increased needs.

Look to see Android pick up some other AI driven ChromeOS type tricks, like background updates and hopefully those most excellent anti-virus/trojan sandboxing tricks that are used by ChromeOS too.

 
Today, noon.

Microsoft put their most current largest most powerful Continuum capable Lumia phone on sale, and to complement that sale they also laid off 1,350 of the folks who support Win 10 mobile software.

What do you think it means?    Whatever it is, it is BIG and it isn't completed yet by a long shot.

That's just plain tricky nasty.   So is this .....

http://liliputing.com/2016/05/microsoft-streamlines-smartphone-hardware-busin...

On the same day that the 1,350 software people associated with creating and upkeeping Win 10 Mobile software and Window 10 for Phone got their pink slips, then an additional 1,850 of the guys who work on the Microsoft Mobile Hardware side abruptly got the axe too.

That is a whole bunch of people gone from Microsoft's phone side in just one day, they are being "streamlined" alright, in the very worst sort of way.  

3,200 people gone in just one day while MS is also booking a brand new inventory adjustment charge of 8 Billion Dollars in addition to what was booked at the end of last year.    

This new firesale being done right now in an effort to MOVE the now dead phones in advance of most people realizing MS is already really completely out of the phone business is already anticipated to cost MS 8 billion more dollars.    

       

So it’s not surprising that Microsoft is still making changes in their company, getting drastically smaller in the process. The company has announced it’s eliminating about 1,850 jobs in its smartphone hardware business, taking a $950 million restructuring charge for this portion of the changes, and shifting the company's focus yet again.

Moving forward, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says the company will focus “phone efforts where we have differentiation — with enterprises that value security, manageability, and our Continuum capability, and consumers who value the same.”



The announcement comes a week after Microsoft announced it was outright selling its feature phone business, and just a month after the company revealed that it sold only 2.3 million Lumia phones in the previous quarter (down from 8.6 million a year earlier), and less than a year after cutting 7,800 jobs in the phone division and taking an impairment charge of around $8 billion.

In other words, this whole phone thing hasn’t been working out too well for Microsoft.

                   

Last week MS was tallied as holding  only 1% of the smartphone worldwide business ---- I betcha they would be kinda hard pressed to claim a half of a percent right now.

Loyal MS fans are saying that folks will follow MS up the price scale to buy replacement stuff running Win 10 and this is just a price move.

I don't think it is a simple price move, the under $300 market is still going to be there and it will be populated by Google products ASAP.

Chromebooks are preferred by those that use them, MS has lost those people permanently.   And any kid that has gone past high school lately understands how to use a Chromebook really really well -- finds a Windows machine sorta bulky and slow but knows how to use them because of GAMES.

Steam may steam roller out this GAMES bump when they get all situated to run on the new more powerful modern touch screen chromebooks.

Why Win 10 is so durn slow ......

MS sells 6-10 ads max per loaded opening page.

Each ad comes from somewhere .....

Each and EVERY ad has to load before the page can complete itself ....

You are only as fast as the slowest ad's load time    .....  

and

    this

       can

             be

                  very

                       very

                               slow

Which is why I use Linux Mint Mate 17.3 and I run Chrome browser with Adblock Plus turned on.

-- I wait for no durn ad man, not no how ......