Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
It's a good point... Ballmer may lump UMPCs in with PCs, and UMPCs are perfectly good for e-book reading: Light, portable, longer battery life than a PC (though not as long as a cellphone, PDA or dedicated device), and color screens to-boot. And, of course, if they are running Windows, they have the advantage of accepting screen readers for most of the available formats out there. That would be acceptable to many people, me included.
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Speaking personally, I was (and am) cynical about UMPCs.
The original crop were based on Microsoft's Origami project, which in turn was a collaboration with Intel. Both companies had problems.
Microsoft wanted to maintain and increase sales of Windows and Office, when the market was already largely saturated, and just about everything that could run Windows and Office, did. Without more success selling into Europe, and opening the Indian and Chinese markets, it would have a hard time maintaining growth and keeping a stock price in the stratosphere.
Intel was losing market share to AMD and in the process of restructuring and looking for new markets.
What to do? The UMPC, a whole new platform that would use Intel chips and run Windows and Office. One thing to note is who was responsible for the early entries: Samsung, Via ... companies known for components, not complete systems. Also noteworthy was who
didn't make them: Dell, Toshiba, Fujitsu ... companies with existing laptop lines the UMPC might cannibalize.
And what Microsoft and Intel never provided that I saw was a compelling use case. What would I
do with a UMPC if I bought one? Frankly, I had no mission a UMPC would fulfill, so I didn't buy one.
ASUS turned the market topsy turvy with the eee netbook, and created a category others are jumping into, but that's a rather different matter.
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Dennis