I need to talk to you about computers.... and the end of Wintel.

Macrobius Thursday 6 Jan 2011

Two fine articles -- one a year old, the other about CES yesterday.

http://stevenf.tumblr.com/post/359224392/i-need-to-talk-to-you-about-computers-ive-been

I need to talk to you about computers. I’ve been on a veritable roller-coaster of “how I feel” about the iPad announcement, and trying not to write about it until I had at least an inkling of what was at the root of that.

Before we begin, a reminder: On this blog, I speak only for myself, not for my company or my co-workers.

The thing is, to talk about specific hardware (like the iPad or iPhone or Nexus One or Droid) is to miss entirely the point I’m about to try to make. This is more important than USB ports, GPS modules, or front-facing cameras. Gigabytes, gigahertz, megapixels, screen resolution, physical dimensions, form factors, in fact hardware in general — these are all irrelevant to the following discussion. So, I’m going to try to completely avoid talking about those sorts of things.

Let’s instead establish some new terminology: Old World and New World computing.

Introduction

Personal computing — having a computer in your house (or your pocket) — as a whole is young. As we know it today, it’s less than a half-century old. It’s younger than TV, younger than radio, younger than cars and airplanes, younger than quite a few living people in fact.
...

http://www.asymco.com/2011/01/06/this-is-the-most-exciting-ces-ever/#idc-cover

At this year’s CES [Consumer Electronics Show -ed. ] two unthinkable things happened:

The abandonment of Windows exclusivity by practically all of Microsoft’s OEM customers.

The abandonment of Intel exclusivity by Microsoft for the next generation of Windows.

Many of Microsoft’s customers chose to use an OS product from Microsoft’s arch enemy. Some chose to roll their own. Microsoft, in turn, chose to port its OS to an architecture from Intel’s arch enemy.

These actions confirm the end of the PC era. Although most people would characterize the era as exemplified by a particular form factor or market, for me the definition of that era is the way the value chain was structured and hence how profits were captured.

That era was marked by the condensation of profits around two companies, Intel and Microsoft, with the simultaneous evaporation of profits from all other participants in the value chain.
To achieve this, Microsoft maintained a monopoly on the distribution of operating systems and Intel maintained a monopoly as the single supplier of chip architectures for that operating system.
These monopolies are both over. And they both ended at the same time. And it happened this week.

Who says CES is boring this year?

Interesting comments too, at the link.

Broseph Saturday 8 Jan 2011

The support of ARM and not just x86 is good news for MS.

The shift from Windows to other platforms could be a source of major headaches, and a source of joy.

I need to talk to you about computers.... and the end of Wintel.

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