The ASUS sneak attack. The most interesting story the media is downplaying is the ASUS announcement that it will have a ROM boot chip on all its motherboards, which will boot Linux instantly on start-up. When you flick the switch the machine is instantly on. (It's about time.) Of course, you will have to press another button for the machine to load Windows.
This development is important, since 90 percent of the time all a user wants to do is surf the Web. Often when leaving for a trip, I forget to check the weather. To do so, I would have to start up my computer, wait forever for it to boot, then go online. This way, I just flip it on, and boom—I get a browser and the info and I'm done.
It's an extremely subversive ploy for a number of reasons. First of all, it gets people used to Linux, gives them a pain-free experience, and provides quick rewards. Second, it shows users that—most of the time—this is all they need. And finally, it makes Windows look like a subsystem not much different from a program that you run under Windows. The psychological effect of this is profound, and the results could be devastating for Microsoft.
What will develop naturally from such a new architecture will be Linux replacement apps for the usual Windows apps. One at a time they will come. Windows will boot only for those laggard apps, such as Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. The rest of the time, users will remain in Linux, which will be perceived as very snappy and responsive—something missing from Windows.
It's obvious to me that ASUS is doing this to help people get familiar enough with Linux so that the company's ultraportable EeePC can further expand its market share. The EeePC runs Linux.
What's interesting is that the other motherboard makers are going to have to offer something similar. Since Linux is basically free, the additional cost of this feature is minimal—probably a dollar. This is the single biggest threat to Microsoft since the company went public. It's a bigger threat than Google, that's for sure. It's not overt, it's insidious. The only way to prevent this is for Microsoft to develop an instant-on mechanism itself.
The Google dilemma. While Microsoft frets about Google, Google is still under attack for copyright infringement regarding the Viacom content that was posted on YouTube. Viacom wants a billion dollars. Google could easily afford the billion if it lost this case, but that would open the floodgates and the company would be forever in court over this sort of suit. Google now thinks that if it loses, the whole Net will become a mess. Buying YouTube was not a great idea methinks, no matter what the outcome.
Meanwhile, after talking with Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive (www.archive.org), I realize that Google's high-profile book-scanning project seems sketchy at best, with Google ending up with all sorts of weird ownerships. The libraries themselves have to license back the scans of their own scanned books, according to Kahle. But what is more interesting and sad is the fact that some months back Microsoft took up the same gauntlet and started its own scanning project without the possibly onerous contract deals with the libraries. Then after doing 300,000 books Microsoft threw in the towel. It's canceling the project and releasing the scans to the libraries and, in the case of public-domain books, to the public.
Microsoft's project was cooler than Google's because it had better search tools, so users could easily rampage through the collection for research and quotes. For old books, you could download PDFs. Few people knew of the project, since it was an obscure, underpublicized offshoot of Microsoft's search engine.
Microsoft is letting the big libraries keep its scanning equipment, too. It costs about $30 to fully scan and OCR a 300-page book, so Microsoft spent almost $10 million. I guess when they got to that point nobody at the company could remember why they were doing this in the first place. Sad indeed.
Vista lament. So after saying that I will not move to Vista until the bugs are fixed, I have been seriously playing with Vista and only now understand in hindsight the weird comments made when it was first released. The PC users familiar with Vista hated it, but the Mac users said it was great. I've now concluded that the Mac users were just playing with it and enjoyed its fancy look-and-feel. They never really used it.
Vista isn't completely unusable; it's simply hard to use. Menus have been reorganized for no apparent reason, features of XP appear to be missing or need to be turned on from some remote directory, and basic functions are now obfuscated. It's as if Microsoft believed all the rubbish about how computers should be appliances that users can't really control.
In a nutshell, Vista manages to be more complicated than XP, performs more poorly than XP, and is more expensive than XP. Everyone is shocked that it is not a big success. Meanwhile, Microsoft, which is more enamored of the online business than the software business, plans to roll out Windows 7 in 2009, if we are lucky.
The business could be in ruins by then.
From :
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