Why Microsoft May Desire the Netbook to Decease
Published January 21, 2012 | 
Microsoft thinks it might be. In reporting record revenues, the software giant sunk this nugget: netbooks represented 8 pct of the company’s PC sales a year ago. Now, it’s down to 2 percent.
That casts a dim light on Microsoft’s Windows 7 Starter Edition, the low-cost version of Windows 7 that effectively killed exit the Linux-based netbook. Merely isn’t it in Microsoft’s best stake to see the netbook fade away, regardless?
Patrick Moorhead, a former corporate fellow with AMD and straightaway master at Moor Insights and Strategy, has watched the traditional netbook an Atom-based, small-form-factor notebook that costs almost $399 vanish from shop shelves. Netbooks get been relegated to Best Buy’s online shelves, for example, while higher-margin, recurring-revenue products similar smartphones dominate its floors. Desktops are a thing of the past.
You could forgive Moorhead for thinking that the AMD Brazos platform, combined with a 10.6-inch screen and a good keyboard “crushed” the netbook market. Simply what’s make is that consumers loved the cost point, but wanted more for their money.
“In the end, and I receive been very make on this since daytime one, is that netbooks are only inexpensive notebooks that went popular,” Moorhead said. “They got replaced by higher-quality notebooks that were fulfilled by a identical similar price and position in the market.”
According to Moorhead, the succeeding of the netbook isn’t the tablet, as Acer seemed to imply with its decision to throw its chapeau into the tablet market finally year. Instead, the future is something similar the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime, which oscillates between a tablet and a notebook, depending on whether it’s in a docked or undocked configuration.
Microsoft: We will not update others’ Windows apps
Published November 16, 2011 | Microsoft on Tuesday slammed the threshold on updating third-party software via Windows Update in the upcoming Windows 8.
One security expert said the company was missing a large opportunity to meliorate the overall security of Windows PCs.
The young operating system will not update non-Microsoft software, pronounced Farzana Rahman, the grouping program manager for Windows Update, in a blog post.
“The broad sort of delivery mechanisms, installation tools, and overall approaches to updates across the total breadth of applications makes it impossible to button totally updates through [the Windows Update] mechanism,” articulated Rahman said. “As frustrating equally this might be, it is besides an important percentage of the ecosystem that we cannot simply revisit for the installed base of software.”
Rahman’s command was the clearest ever by Microsoft that it would not take other applications under its update wing.
Currently, the companionship offers customers updates to Windows drivers — third-party files required to run the Os — via Windows Update, and occasionally disables third-party ActiveX controls in Internet Explorer (IE) at vendors’ requests. And that’s how it’s locomoting to stay, Rahman said.
She did add that Microsoft feels its customers’ pain.
“People clearly notice the receive with multiple updaters on the system less than optimal, and we agree,” Rahman said. “Each application updater gives you a different experience, you have to remember to decease visit each updater to install updates, you never know when or how updaters will fed and what they might do, and hence on. People would similar one updater for the intact system.”
Yes, they would, said Wolfgang Kandek, head technology policeman for Qualys, and an advocate for Microsoft’s updating other companies’ Windows software.
“I understand the thinking,” enunciated Kandek of Microsoft’s reasons for not pushing third-party updates, “but at the same time, it’s a short disappointing. Microsoft could garner a huge amount of goodwill by doing this, and it would be a brobdingnagian leap for security.”
Kandek argued that although eve Microsoft doesn’t get the resources to validate every application’s update, it could certainly focus on the nearly important vendors whose products motivation to exist perpetually updated. His examples: Adobe’s Lector and Flash Player.
“I would argue that there are certain organizations, and Adobe is one of them, where [Microsoft taking on updating duties] would be possible,” Kandek continued. “There are only a match of [vendors] that they would motive to address, and they’re mature companies with well-tested updates.”
Both Flash Player and Adobe Lector have been patched multiple times this year: Adobe has issued nine security updates for the Flash Player and five for the Lector so far in 2011.