Windows 8, Intel Atom SoC Will Be iPad Killer

Informationweek ^ | June 04, 2012 | George Ou

[kevkrom]

iTunes does not automatically sort by track number

Since when? It sorts on track number for me, always has by default when sorting by album, and I can confirm again that this is true as I've just done a clean import into a new iMac within the last month.

[ctdonath2]

With WiFi getting integrated into everything, IR isn’t needed. To the contrary, I find IR a pain because one IR device may influence multiple devices at once: using the TV’s “universal” remote, I end up activating things on both the TV and BluRay player; using the Apple IR remote, controlling the Apple TV often sets off apps on my wife’s MacBook. HOWEVER, on my iPod & iPad there are remote-control apps for the BluRay player and the Apple TV, and they don’t suffer from inappropriate activation of other devices ... AND the apps allow better interfaces, such as typing in search terms or getting additional info on what’s playing.

[Durus]

Track numbers aren’t included as a sort field unless specifically added.

[kevkrom]

I can’t speak to your experience, but I’ve never seen album tracks out of order unless I manually change the primary sort (such as by song title). When I have the library sorted by Artist/Album or by Genre (my two most common sorts), I always see the tracks in proper order.

[itsahoot]

I was in the Auto Parts business a life time ago and 30% was a pretty standard markup. I should think a wholesaler would be thrilled to get their product exposed to hundreds of millions of users rather than have their product packaged and setting in the bottom shelf behind the TV’s in any number of big box stores.

[kevkrom]

Dunno about retail software, but in the book publishing biz, the publisher generally only gets 30-40% of the cover prices from the distributor, who then sells to retailers at about 60-65% of cover price. A rough, but not too inaccurate, breakdown is 1/3 publisher, 1/3 distributor, 1/3 retailer.

The specific terms vary based on size and reputation of the publisher, can unsold copies be returned, etc.

Digital publishing, at least that which I’ve been involved in pricing, expects the digital version to be 50% of the price of the dead tree version, with the publisher getting about 70% of that (roughly the same amount per sale as print distribution).

[af_vet_rr]

IPad killer? Maybe not, but Windows 8 and the innovative Windows 8 tablets we just saw at Comuptex 2012 in Taiwan is going to put Microsoft firmly in the tablet game.

The problem with that thinking is that Microsoft was in the tablet game.

Hell, they were the tablet game for many years.

Many of the same people making the decisions when Microsoft pissed away their tablet and smartphone markets are the very same people still making decisions.

Until you have a product guy running the company, MS is going to have issues in a lot of markets. Ballmer is a marketing kind of guy, not a product guy, and his tenure at Microsoft proves it. Gates and Jobs were product guys.

You need Gates back in there. Just as Jobs did his best work after a long absence from Apple, I think Gates could do the same for Microsoft. Maybe somebody should tell him that they spotted a mosquito with malaria in Redmond or something.

[SmokingJoe]

“The problem with that thinking is that Microsoft was in the tablet game. “

Yeah..running on the older power hungry, battery consuming, thicker form factor Intel chips. Read the article again. Not great for tablets.
These new Intel chips can hang with the best ARM chips in terms of power consumption. Plus there is an ARM version of Windows 8 as well.

“Many of the same people making the decisions when Microsoft pissed away their tablet and smartphone markets are the very same people still making decisions”

The XBOX 360(apart from the initial RROD issues, which still didn't stop sales) has been very successful, and has been the top selling video game console in this country for over a year(regularly besting the Wii and PS3), not to mention the superb XBOX Live, which is simply unmatched in terms of online play/features for video game consoles.

[af_vet_rr]

Yeah..running on the older power hungry, battery consuming, thicker form factor Intel chips. Read the article again. Not great for tablets.

Doesn't matter whether the hardware was good or not, the point was that Microsoft owned that market and they pissed it away. They owned the tablet market in 1991 when Windows for Pen Computing came out. They owned the tablet market a decade later when Windows XP Tablet PC Edition came out in 2002. Whether they didn't lean on Intel hard enough to make better chips or they weren't willing to invest in hardware or hardware makers to make a better tablet is a moot issue.

You can't get much more of a headstart than 15 years in the computer industry, yet Microsoft somehow gave a market that they owned for 15+ years away. It wasn't like they didn't have the resources or experience - by the time the iPad came out, Microsoft had nearly 20 years of experience with tablet/touch computing, and they had nearly 20 years of Windows running on non-x86 hardware or running in embedded environments. They dropped the ball, plain and simple.

The XBOX 360(apart from the initial RROD issues, which still didn't stop sales) has been very successful, and has been the top selling video game console in this country for over a year(regularly besting the Wii and PS3), not to mention the superb XBOX Live, which is simply unmatched in terms of online play/features for video game consoles.

It would be sad if the Xbox is Microsoft's biggest current success, but maybe the people running the Xbox division should have been moved up the ladder since they were able to effectively bring software and hardware together and they sound like product guys, unlike Ballmer.

I read what Ballmer has said, and he just has no clue about why Apple has done so well, and why Android was beating out Windows on smartphones. He's a sales guy through and through, and that's not somebody you want running a company like Microsoft. You need a Bill Gates who is going to have a heavy interest in the product itself from start to finish.