Quote:
Originally Posted by mobilesalesman
[COLOR="royalblue"]Rwood, you are absolutely right, computer companies have been blind mice cowering to MS with no creativity. MS came out with the UMPC spec and used their influence to eliminate any creativity. After over a year the UMPC has been a dud, with only 350K sales worldwide according to a Dec 07 Forbes article.
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The UMPC spec was a collaboration between MS and Intel, based on MS's "Origami" project.
MS and Intel both had problems. MS was facing slowing growth. The market for Windows and Office was largely saturated, with just about everything that could run them doing so. Vista wasn't out, MS hadn't had much luck on cracking the Indian and Chinese markets, and efforts in gaming (the X-Box) and online services (MSN) hadn't been home runs either. Intel was also facing challenges, losing market share to AMD.
What to do? A whole new platform that would run a flavor of Windows and use Intel processors.
Note who makes them: VIA, ASUS, Samsung, Future. Note who
doesn't make them: Dell, Toshiba -- anyone with an existing laptop line.
And the UMPCs were rather carefully speced so that they would be poor candidates to
replace a laptop.
What MS and Intel
haven't been able to do is provide a compelling use case. Just what are we supposed to
do with these UMPCs?
My use would be to
replace a laptop, with a smaller, lighter, easier to carry device, but that's the last thing MS and Intel want.
The UMPC has problems because it's based on the needs of MS and Intel for new revenue sources, and not on the needs of the market.
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Dennis