if your plan is to strong-arm customers into offering your products
exclusively, you had better give them something people want to buy.
With Microsoft and Windows Vista, such is not the case, and
Hewlett-Packard isn't taking it lying down.
HP, the world's number one PC supplier in terms of volume sales,
appears to be leading a new anti-Vista revolution, of a sort. In an
interesting article yesterday in BusinessWeek, Aaron Ricadela reports
about "HP's 'End Run' Around Windows," and what a team inside the company is doing to improve the appeal of Vista by making it easier to use.
Known inside HP as the "Customer Experience Group," the team is
developing technology that will allow users to access their digital
photos and movies, as well as other common features using a
touch-sensitive screen. In the article, Ricadela quotes Phil McKinney,
chief technology officer in HP's personal systems group: "Our customers
are looking for insanely simple technology where they don't have to
fight with the technology to get the task done." Could he mean that
Vista isn't insanely simple to use? "For us, it's about innovating on
top of Vista." So it would appear.
This would not be the first time HP sought to improve Microsoft's user
interface. The company through the 1990s included software that ran on
top of the Windows versions of the day and presented a super-simplified
interface to which the user could launch their applications with
buttons. The term "topware" comes to mind for this type of software;
maybe someone could help me out with that.
And a Windows succession of sorts has been attempted before. Also back
in the mid-1990s, when Linux started coming into wide prominence,
companies like Dell and Gateway wanted to start offering a Linux option
on their server-level systems. Microsoft balked, threatening to cut off
the supply of Windows licenses to those companies if they didn't halt
the practice. Unethical, yes. But effective. There's also news that
Linux is at the heart of an new HP operating system strategy. Would
Microsoft dare such a tactic today?
From : http://www.daniweb.com/
exclusively, you had better give them something people want to buy.
With Microsoft and Windows Vista, such is not the case, and
Hewlett-Packard isn't taking it lying down.
HP, the world's number one PC supplier in terms of volume sales,
appears to be leading a new anti-Vista revolution, of a sort. In an
interesting article yesterday in BusinessWeek, Aaron Ricadela reports
about "HP's 'End Run' Around Windows," and what a team inside the company is doing to improve the appeal of Vista by making it easier to use.
Known inside HP as the "Customer Experience Group," the team is
developing technology that will allow users to access their digital
photos and movies, as well as other common features using a
touch-sensitive screen. In the article, Ricadela quotes Phil McKinney,
chief technology officer in HP's personal systems group: "Our customers
are looking for insanely simple technology where they don't have to
fight with the technology to get the task done." Could he mean that
Vista isn't insanely simple to use? "For us, it's about innovating on
top of Vista." So it would appear.
This would not be the first time HP sought to improve Microsoft's user
interface. The company through the 1990s included software that ran on
top of the Windows versions of the day and presented a super-simplified
interface to which the user could launch their applications with
buttons. The term "topware" comes to mind for this type of software;
maybe someone could help me out with that.
And a Windows succession of sorts has been attempted before. Also back
in the mid-1990s, when Linux started coming into wide prominence,
companies like Dell and Gateway wanted to start offering a Linux option
on their server-level systems. Microsoft balked, threatening to cut off
the supply of Windows licenses to those companies if they didn't halt
the practice. Unethical, yes. But effective. There's also news that
Linux is at the heart of an new HP operating system strategy. Would
Microsoft dare such a tactic today?
From : http://www.daniweb.com/
