Cortex A15 - 5x faster.

[Yannick]

An interesting future prediction, but I'm honestly not sure on this part. Am I correct in reading the "web hosted software" part as referring to word processors and other such stuff (such as other business software and the like, perhaps?) which would usually be on a person's machine instead?


If so; I don't think most people really trust this sort of thing - at least in my experience. I can't account for anyone else, but I personally know nobody who does (and I certainly wouldn't myself).


Is there really a significant proportion of the population who would trust their information to web-based software (of the sort that would otherwise be on one's computer), that would make the "90%" part of the speculation possible? :blink:

with 90% i mean the general population, those that don't *need* a computer


see it like this: you see a cool looking device, it should check your e-mails, watch youtube vids, run facebook games and edit the occasional document/spreadsheet. you want to buy it, do you really want to bother that every device in your household is compatible with SoftwareX you know? Your browser already runs fine on every device in existence and you can do most every task with simple web-apps. Do you want to know 5 different applications, to view/edit the same file on different devices?


Obviously, most of the visitors on these forums don't fit in that category, but most the people i know want "It just works" and if that means using google docs/mail on every device ... mostly they switch after how i show them they can access all their documents from everywhere. I keep hearing things like: "yay, no more carrying usb sticks"


Microsoft will fight to keep the small businesses, i have no doubt they will succeed, so *medium-advanced* computing tasks will stick to windows. don't count this in with *the general population* the momentum will carry far.


Advanced computing tasks are already highly specialized and will stay that way


<political>


Give the European Union another 5 years to wake up, then they will regulate the clouds in the same way they regulated windows (EU residents: remember that annoying windows update screen that forces you to choose a browser even tough you are happy with IE)

 

[Tor]

Are desktops even that relevant anymore? Do people still buy them in great numbers?

Well, at work we definitely buy desktops, but more than that, we buy servers. In great numbers (relative to the size of our company). And some of our customers are buying servers in even greater numbers, they fill up rack after rack with blades and clusters and whatnot. There's a hunger for more processing power. And it's about 64-bit systems, and they run Linux (well, more and more of them). Most of this is not very noticable by the common market analysist.. they tend not to look there.


For my personal needs I see it this way:


1: For a desktop, give me Intel x86-64, small, fast, multi-core, fanless nvidia, lots of memory, power consumption is totally a non-issue. And that's what I'm looking at on my table.


2: For anything battery powered, give me ARM.

 

[Batou456]

with 90% i mean the general population, those that don't *need* a computer
see it like this: you see a cool looking device, it should check your e-mails, watch youtube vids, run facebook games and edit the occasional document/spreadsheet. you want to buy it, do you really want to bother that every device in your household is compatible with SoftwareX you know? Your browser already runs fine on every device in existence and you can do most every task with simple web-apps. Do you want to know 5 different applications, to view/edit the same file on different devices?

To be fair if we take Linux based software, assuming that it actually had a proper marketing campaign, as a counter example:

-For Office applications I know a lot of people who simply did not like MS Office 2007's new interface verse the classic one Oracle's Open Office mimics. This and other aspects reduce barrier to entry and standardized file formats are standardized file formats. Incidentally due to the nature of the Open Office license, there's no reason for company X to not take advantage of it, and its competitors, existence.


-That pretty much leaves having decoders able to handle various standard media and web formats, which have been opened up, for basic operations. These type of programs tend to be very similar so have a small learning curve.


The limitation comes in for backwards compatibility with pre-existing software that isn't open source and which the owner will not, or cannot due to ceasing to exist, recompile. Hence Pandora's inherent flexibility.