Microsoft thinks it might be. In reporting record revenues, the software giant sunk this nugget: netbooks represented 8 percent of the company’s PC sales a twelvemonth 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 away the Linux-based netbook. Just isn’t it in Microsoft’s best interest to see the netbook fade away, regardless?
Patrick Moorhead, a former corporate fellow with AMD and instantly main 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 experience been relegated to Best Buy’s online shelves, for example, while higher-margin, recurring-revenue productions like smartphones dominate its floors. Desktops are a thing of the past.
You may forgive Moorhead for thinking that the AMD Brazos platform, combined with a 10.6-inch screen and a good keyboard “crushed” the netbook market. But what’s gain is that consumers loved the price point, just wanted more for their money.
“In the end, and I receive been very gain on this since daytime one, is that netbooks are but inexpensive notebooks that went popular,” Moorhead said. “They went replaced by higher-quality notebooks that were fulfilled by a selfsame similar cost and post in the market.”
According to Moorhead, the future of the netbook isn’t the tablet, equally Acer seemed to imply with its decision to throw its chapeau into the tablet market lastly year. Instead, the next is something alike 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 on Tuesday slammed the threshold on updating third-party software via Windows Update in the upcoming Windows 8.
One security expert enounced the company was missing a large opportunity to better the overall security of Windows PCs.
The young operating organization will not update non-Microsoft software, enunciated Farzana Rahman, the group programme manager for Windows Update, in a blog post.
“The wide kind of pitch mechanisms, installation tools, and overall approaches to updates across the total breadth of applications makes it impossible to push totally updates through [the Windows Update] mechanism,” said Rahman said. “As frustrating equally this might be, it is also an important portion of the ecosystem that we cannot only revisit for the installed mean of software.”
Rahman’s command was the clearest ever by Microsoft that it would not have other applications under its update wing.
Currently, the companionship offers customers updates to Windows drivers — third-party files demanded to coursed the Bone — via Windows Update, and occasionally disables third-party ActiveX controls in Internet Explorer (IE) at vendors’ requests. And that’s how it’s travelling to stay, Rahman said.
She did add that Microsoft feels its customers’ pain.
“People understandably notice the have with multiple updaters on the organisation less than optimal, and we agree,” Rahman said. “Each application updater gives you a different experience, you get to remember to die visit each updater to install updates, you never know when or how updaters will coursed and what they might do, and therefore on. People would like one updater for the integral system.”
Yes, they would, pronounced Wolfgang Kandek, head technology policeman for Qualys, and an advocate for Microsoft’s updating other companies’ Windows software.
“I understand the thinking,” articulated Kandek of Microsoft’s reasons for not pushing third-party updates, “but at the same time, it’s a short disappointing. Microsoft could gather a brobdingnagian total of goodwill by doing this, and it would exist a immense leap for security.”
Kandek argued that although even Microsoft doesn’t receive the resources to validate every application’s update, it could sure focus on the nigh important vendors whose products motivation to exist always updated. His examples: Adobe’s Reader 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 alone a mates of [vendors] that they would need to address, and they’re mature companies with well-tested updates.”
Both Flash Player and Adobe Lector receive been patched multiple times this year: Adobe has issued nine security updates for the Flash Player and five for the Reader hence far in 2011.