A Private Dell is a Stronger Dell

In one of the worst kept secrets out there over the last few weeks, Dell announced this morning that it will go private in a deal dell logowith Silver Lake Partners, Microsoft, Michael Dell’s investment company, and Michael Dell himself.  The question is, is this better or worse for Dell?  Based on the way Wall Street views Dell, its competitive position, and its enterprise growth ambitions, this is the right move for Dell.  I want to break down some of the reasons why a private Dell is a better Dell, starting with secrecy.

Secrecy

Public companies are bound by SEC disclosure regulations that say they must make material changes to the company public within a reasonable amount of time.  Literally, any time public companies makes a material investment, an officer or director buys or sells stock, a layoff happens, misses quarterly guidance, etc., all must be disclosed.

It also has annual and quarterly disclosure obligations as well in the forms of 10-K (annual) and 10-Qs (quarterly).  These 10-Xs aren’t unimportant as they give insights into profits margin structures, product costs, net pricing, discounts, major suppliers, major customers, major contractual commitments, business risks, legal risks, etc.  Having run competitive analysis teams, the first place the teams would start with were the SEC disclosures as you can pickup 75% of the needed information there.  The information is accurate, too, because if it’s not, companies can be subject to fines and even imprisonment of officers.  This risk is why these documents are left to the CFO and chief legal counsel, signed by the CEO, and not left to the marketing.

A private Dell could fly literally under the radar screen of competitors.

Speed

In addition to being secret, private companies are faster, as SEC regulations described above slow a company down.  Public companies spend a lot of time asking for permission and insights from stakeholders like the SEC, directors, shareholders, accountants and a lot of lawyers.  Lots of lawyers….

Private companies still have boards, lawyers, and accountants, but there are a whole lot less of them. There are a lot less steps, too, as you don’t have to deal with the SEC.  One good example are acquisitions.  It literally takes 5X the time as a public company to make a najor acquisition as it does a private one. Divestitures are another good example.  The market typically needs months of pre-conditioning before major moves can be made.  Otherwise, the market could hammer you.  This means months and months of hints, planned leaks, etc. to get people ready for a major move.  If Dell decided to exit or sell the PC business, for example, they would need to pre-condition everyone.  Look at HP and what happened to what they needed to disclose that they were “exploring options” with PSG.

A private Dell would be a faster Dell.

Business Flexibility

Publicly-traded companies are under the minute, hourly, daily, monthly and annual scrutiny of the Wall Street trading machine.  Financial analysts set expectations on nearly financial vector and make these expectations public. After earnings disclosure, the press machine kicks in where you see headlines ranging from “beat”, “meet” and “fell short” of expectations.

In response to going through the Wall Street wringer, companies pander to them by doing everything they can to “market” to them.  Companies many times make bad long-term business decisions to meet those expectations.

Hitting revenue is a great example. If a company is short on revenue going into the end of the quarter, the CEO, COO and CEO ensue to hammer the business units and sales to hit their numbers.  This makes sense as commitments need to be made, but many times those end of quarter deals aren’t the best deals financially.  Customers are trained by the cycle and know they can get better deals by doing business at the end of the month.  To get the business, companies will do anything from cutting prices, pay for shipping, extend payment terms and stuffing the channel with more product than it needs. This may be good to make the quarter, but not necessarily good for long term profits.

Another example is layoffs.  Many times companies will plan, announce, and execute layoffs just to show Wall Street they are serious.  Wall Street loves layoffs… just ask your CFO. The problems is, many times the layoffs weren’t really needed and the people normally cut are those working on future products and initiatives, the future life-blood of the company.  The first people to go in a layoff are anyone not directly tied to today’s revenue, which limits future growth, not to mention the personal toll it takes on families and employees.

A private Dell will have a lot more business flexibility.

Final Thoughts

There is a lot of upside for a private Dell, namely increased secrecy, speed and business flexibility.  It’s not all wine and roses, though.  Private companies need to spend more on marketing if they want to continue to be top of mind in awareness, familiarity, and even to drive preference.  Sure, it’s great not to be in everyone’s face every second of trading hours, but you can’t fall off a cliff either.  Incenting employees become a challenge as well, as you can’t pump publicly-traded stock options out.  Like Twitter does today, there can be an internal “brokerage” but the process is just so much more complex.  Dell stock hasn’t done well in a decade so it’s not all downside for employees, but they will need to compensate differently for the employees to share in the upside.

Net-net, this is a really good move for Dell.  Given the lost love with Wall Street and the public markets, there’s little downside.  A private Dell will be better able to complete their enterprise transition, do it faster, and compete more fiercely with HP, IBM and Cisco.  To smooth the transition, they need to make some very quick announcements regarding their PC business and their commitment level, otherwise their competitors will pick them apart.

AMD SurRoundhouse Concept: Future Cure for the CE Industry Woes?

For a run of at least 30 years, the “classic” consumer electronics industry successfully transitioned from one technologyWP_20130110_037 to another.  TVs are a good example.  TVs went from big color tubes to rear projection to flat panels and HD projection to HD panels.  We can’t forget laser disc to Beta to VHS to DVD either.  Consumers ate it up, too, and were pleased to roll the old iron out of the living room into another room and roll the new gear in.

Then things changed with 3D TVs, which were an unmitigated disaster for the industry.  I call it a disaster because for the most part, consumers were not willing to pay more for 3D and in some cases flat out didn’t want it.  HDTV margins collapsed and are still in a funk for many CE markets.  4K TV and Smart TV is NOT the solution either as research I have seen indicates general consumers won’t pay a premium.  There are a few things going on here.  First, already-installed generic 1080P flat panels at 10” will be a very good solution for many years to come.  No one quite knows how long the installed base of displays will last, but it could be 10 years.

Smart TV’s, while valued more than 3D by consumers, isn’t valued at a lot either.  Consumers are getting conditioned, too, to know you can add “smarts” for as low as $50 with the external add-on of a Roku, Apple TV, or DVD player.  So what is the answer to revitalize the “classic” CE industry?  You really need to understand the problem, and the problem is lack of immersiveness and too many constraints.

Certainly,  3D HDTV was more immersive than HDTV, but not enough so for us to spend hundreds more to replace our current 1080P TVs.  Also, 3DTV had too many constraints, or what I like to call “if-thens”. Everyone in the room had to wear 3D glasses to enjoy the content and without it, the content is a blur.  3D glasses aren’t cheap, either, as active glasses were $50-$100 a pair.  Then there is the hassle of charging and making sure every one of them is ready for the big movie. Then there is the nausea some people feel when watching 3D videos.  There are 2.6M results from a Google search result from “3D” and “nausea.”  Passive 3D like LG showed at this and last year’s CES will significantly lower the glasses cost and a few manufacturers showed prototypes of glasses-less 3D TVs, but are many years off and are not very high quality.  3D may not the answer, but what is?

Consumers are looking for immersiveness without constraints which is affordable.  One example of this is a concept AMD showed off at CES.  AMD showed off its “SurRoundhouse” proof of concept which is quite expensive and complex now, but takes the industry in the correct, general direction.  The SurRound house is a “theater” room with 10, 55” HDTVs looking like windows in a house, 32 speakers, and four subwoofers.  The ten LG 1080P HDTVs displayed more than 600 Mp per second at 10,800 x 1,920 resolution, which is 3X the resolution of 4K (UltraHD), albeit spread around the room.  Driving the video and audio was one PC with an AMD FX 8150 8-core Black Edition processor with three FirePro 8000 graphics cards with Digital Multipoint Audio which was amplified by eight AV receivers.

AMD plays what looks like a hostage rescue scene from a video game and shifts audio from stereo to 32 speakers to show the value of high quality, multi-channel, positional audio. Each shift of the audio takes your eye to different windows of the house and as helicopters are flying, crashing, and as multiple machine gun melees erupt, you really feel like you are in a different and very real place.  The content was entirely custom and to it takes work to get games and movies to take advantage of a setup like this.   This is a different class of entertainment, one that could actually motivate to invest, maybe over-invest in new CE gear.

Here is a smartphone video I took of AMD’s SurRoundhouse.  Of course you don’t get the same experience as as the real thing, but you can get somewhat of a sense of the experience below.  Make sure you select 1080P and full screen:

AMD could have improved the experience even more by improving the quality of the graphics in the scenes.  They looked more cartoony than life-like.  AMD says that the goal of the demonstration was to show the experiential difference in the audio, but I’d still like to see max graphics to turn it into a reality show.

So how is a $35,000, 10 display, 8 receiver, 36 speaker setup requiring custom content “without constraints” and “affordable”?  It’s not right now, but if you look ahead to new technologies, the cost curve, and need for CE and entertainment businesses to create radically different experiences, it could very well become affordable and relatively simple.  Let me explain.

First challenge is content.  The entertainment industry has shown that it will make changes if it sees potential extinction or at least a major depression in business.  The film industry started shooting in 4K well before 1080P had mass adoption so the big question would be “if” they see the opportunity to shoot in multi-“frame” and multi-“angle” dimensions to be surround or at least convex.  The next challenge is cabling, but possibly already has a video solution with multi-channel, 60Ghz wireless display technology.  Lower frequency wireless speakers are already available, but the challenge would be to solve amplification at the current frequencies.  The great thing about wireless audio is that you wouldn’t need eight receivers to send the right audio to the right speaker.  Theoretically, you would only need one with a bunch of broadcast antennas.

Then there are the displays…. The current monitor sweet spot this year will be at around 30,” priced around $300.  I can imagine in 5 years that that $300 display becomes 40-50” for a full room display build out around $3,000.  This seems reasonable when you think that LG sells their 89” 4K TV today for $22,000.   Yes, 4K displays will lower in price, but how many years before it gets down to $3,000?

AMD’s SurRoundhouse gives the industry a potential scenario for the entertainment or theater room of the future.  While it doesn’t pass the tests for mass industry adoption today in media rooms, it could, and is certainly more interesting than the same boring, flat experience.  Neither 4K or SmartTV is the solution to the woes of the traditional CE market and I hope they are looking at AMD’s glimpse of the future.

NVIDIA’s Project SHIELD Connects Disparate Gaming Worlds

Even before CES 2013 officially began, NVIDIA announced a new product that rocked the gaming world.  NVIDIA announced Project SHIELD, an NVIDIA-branded mobile gaming device that connects different world of gaming, across modes, displays and content.

My first visual impression of SHIELD when I saw it was that it looked like a high end portable game controller used with an XBOX with a 5”, fold out display. The user holds it with both hands, pistol-grip style, with access to all the different kinds of buttons you would expect.  While the controller does look very cool, what is most interesting is the gaming flexibility it provides.

Connects Small and Large Display Gaming

Gamers can display their games on two displays, the integrated display and to an HDTV.  The integrated display is 5”, 1,280×720 resolution, and is adjustable for optimal viewing angle.  When not gaming, it folds down to protect itself.  Gamers can also display on the big screen, too, up to a 4K display.  This can be done wirelessly or via an HDMI cable.  Wireless display is accomplished via a dongle that connects into the HDMI port of the HDTV.  Essentially, the gameplay is encoded into a an H.264 video stream and sent to the TV in a similar fashion as Apple  AirPlay.

Connects Android and Windows PC Gaming

One of the biggest differentiators in gaming is that players can play Android and Windows PC games.  Android gaming is very straight-forward.  Just download a game from Google Play and you play it.  If you ever had an Android device like a Nexus 7 or HTC One X+ Android phone and purchased a game there, you can also play that same game on SHIELD.

SHIELD also plays Windows PC games, too, which is very distinct, something no other portable game device can do.  NVIDIA’s desired PC experience is straight-forward, while the technology behind the scenes is complex. In SHIELD-mode, the gamer slides the carousel to “PC” games where they are presented with a list of PC games.  They click the game and they play it, it’s that simple. The user never sees Windows Metro or the start screen or anything that resembles a PC.

Behind the scenes, the game is actually being played on a remote PC in the house and images are being transmitted to SHIELD or the HDTV.  It uses technology similar to that used on remote desktop applications, where the image is encoded into an H.264 video. The games are screened by Nvidia to make sure that they work well on the HDTV so the quality of service is better.  Small text could be a bit of a challenge in some games, but as devs realize they can expand their gameplay to SHIELD, they will accomodate by scaling the text to be used on the 5″ display.

I very much hope that the experience is as smoothe as NVIDIA desires, because if there are a few hiccups, gamers will stop using the Windows PC gaming function, one of SHIELD’s biggest differentiators.

Connects Portable and Console Gaming   

Finally, when you add up the fact that SHIELD can operate on the small screen, big screen, can be used as comfortably in the living room as it is in the car, it really is as, as NVIDIA’s Jen-Hsung says, a “portable console.”  While first designed as a portable gaming device, it really does beg the question on why you would need a gaming console as long as SHIELD works as planned and has access to the best titles.  Many hard core gamers will have both SHIELD and a gaming console, but where money is tight or consumers want just one device, they may choose SHIELD.

NVIDIA’s SHIELD a Success?

SHIELD is undoubtedly a major disruptor, but there are many things we don’t know yet, like price and distribution, to yield a market verdict.  What I can say is that if the experience is as good as presented, there will be very high levels of interest across “gamers” and consumers who really like to play games.  Nvidia plans to ship SHIELD in Q2 of this year and as soon as I get my hands on one, I will let you know about the quality of the experience.

A Few of My Favorite and Significant Products of 2012

One great thing about a tech industry in transition is that manufacturers amp up the amount and breadth of the products they announce. 2012 was a transition year for PCs, smartphones, and tablets, and there were so very many great options to choose from.

My selection criteria for my favorite, significant products was simple:

  • I personally used for extended periods of time as my prime device.
  • It brought something significantly new or better variable to the table.
  • It delivered a good or great experience.

Google Nexus 7 Tablet

The Nexus 7 tablet was announced at Google I/O 2012 at $199 when the going rate of a 10″ tablet was $399. The Nexus 7 sported a 7″ display, NVIDIA quad core Tegra 3 silicon, and Jelly Bean. The tablet leveraged Android’s phone ecosystem, not Android’s anemic 10″ ecosystem. The most significant thing the Nexus 7 brought to the table was “feel.” It felt great, almost as good as iOS, through the “Butter” enhancements, and that is something Apple had the advantage on for literally years over Android. I still use my Nexus 7 on an almost daily basis.

Apple iPad 3 Tablet with HumanToolz iPad Stand

I was a daily user of my iPad 1 and iPad 2 so it made sense to explore the iPad 3. Even though it was thicker and heavier than the iPad 2, I bought one because of the Retina Display. The display was simply awesome, particularly for a near-sighted person as I. The iPad 3 also ushered in the beginning of the public “graphics wars”, where Apple mistakenly went after NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 using some synthetic graphics benchmarks. This made Apple look weak and defensive and NVIDIA look strong.

My kids are now the primary users of the iPad 3.

The best stand for the iPad 3 was the HumanToolz iPad Stand, which equaled the iPad in design and mechanical craftsmanship. The forged aluminum stand fits like a glove through a combination of connectors, magnets and pads, and enables the user to use the iPad in about any angle or configuration.

Dell XPS 12 Touch Ultrabook

I was an advocate for hybrids and convertibles way before it was cool 🙂 and am still one today. The Dell XPS 12 is a touch Ultrabook whose display swivels to become a tablet. Make no mistake, as in the name, the XPS 12 is an Ultrabook, tablet second. Mine sports an Intel Core i7, 8GB RAM and 256MB of flash drive storage, so it’s no lightweight on performance and, like any Macbook, it’s a bit heavy, between an Air and Pro. As a tablet, it is heavier of course than a tablet-only device or Microsoft Surface, but until 2013 and Intel Haswell, you can’t have everything.

Motorola Razr I Smartphone

The Razr I is the first big-brand phone with Intel-inside and with a unique industrial design. The phone was fast and got really good if not great battery life. Some of the unique things I noticed was just how fast the phone was on basic tasks and just how precise it was on speech to text and web browsing, things that are important to me.

The Razr I proved many things for Intel:

  • X86 can be power-efficient for phones and tablets. In fact, tests at Anandtech show the Intel besting ARM-based silicon in power.
  • X86 at low power can deliver the required performance
  • Intel’s risky strategy of cloud recompiling or on-the-fly translations of ARM-based apps worked
  • Intel can effectively design, develop and manufacture mobile SOCs with third part IP (Silicon Hive and Imagination)
  • Respected, global brands will engage with Intel on phones

The Razr I wasn’t perfect as it supported 4G HSPA+ (not LTE), did not yet have Jelly bean but is on its way (up to Motorola), and I’d like a little better camera. The Razr I is one of three phones I carry.

Nokia Lumia 920

I got this late in the season so I’ve only had a few weeks with it. The reason it makes the list is its camera and overall experience. The camera, quite frankly, is the absolute best I have used so far. Low light really is amazing, and unlike my iPhone 4S pics, doesn’t white out while using a flash. Its physical optical image stabilization is part of the magic, the other part is finely tuned software connected to its sensor and ISP. The overall experience is elegant, and in my opinion, more elegant than on iOS, but then again more limiting, too. True multitasking is somthing of a black box as you’re not quite sure what is happening or can happen in the background. I never noticed a single lag which I will attribute to Qualcomm silicon, Windows Phone 8 integration, and the minimal allowable multitasking.

The only major downside is the absence of some of my “front-page apps” without replacements like TWC TV, WatchESPN, Instagram, Pulse, Sugarsync, TripCase, and Expedia. The Lumia 920 is one of three phones I carry.

HTC One X+ Smartphone

Like the 920, I got HTC One X+ late in the season, but it deserves to go on this list because it “feels” like the fastest phone I’ve ever used and it has really good battery life. If the phone sounds familiar, it is. It’s basically the HTC One X with NVIDIA quad core Tegra 3 clocked at 1.7ghz instead of a Qualcomm Snapdragon. Ironically in a chip sense, it does include Qualcomm LTE wireless.

What do I mean by fast? If you’ve used Android, you know that more things you allow in the background, more widgets used, your phone starts to bog down. I loaded the HTC One X+ to the absolute max and it didn’t skip a beat. Very impressive. With LTE in Austin, I got 53Mbps down on AT&T, which blew me away, too. With all the speed came good battery life, too. HTC claims on their web site that it actually gets “up to 50% better battery life than the HTC One X”. I am skeptical about sweeping claims like that as I want to see the details, but the phone did deliver very good battery life. The HTC One X+is one of three phones I carry.

Honorable Mention: ASUS VivoBook U38N Ultrathin

This ultrathin came in last week, so I haven’t been able to take it through its full paces, but I am initially so impressed that it makes it on my list. Why? Think brushed aluminum, thin, light, AMD Trinity quad core APU, AMD discrete graphics, 1080P IPS touch-display with Windows 8, gesture touchpad, back-lit keyboard…. low price. You get the idea. I will drill down into this the more time I spend with it, but this is a very nice laptop.

So these are my favorite, most significant products that I have used in 2012. Products that brought something entirely new to the table and ones that provided a good or great experience. I would love to hear your comments below.

 

How To Make Windows 8 Great

Del XPS Duo 12 Convertible
There has been a lot of discussion here lately, both in posts such as Why IT buyers are Excited About Convertibles and Hybrids and Microsoft Surface: How Relevant Are Legacy Apps and Hardware? about the failings and the potential of Windows 8. So inspired by these posts, and even more so by readers’ comments on them, here is a radical if only partially baked idea: How about a hybrid operating system for hybrid devices?

In Metro (I’m going to go on calling it that until Microsoft comes up with a real alternative), Microsoft has designed a very good user interface for tablets and touch-based apps. The legacy Windows Desktop is still an excellent UI for a traditional mouse-and-keyboard PC. But in bolting the two together in Windows 8 and, to a lesser extent, Windows RT, Microsoft has created a very ugly two-headed calf. The tendency of Metro to pop up while you are working in Desktop, and for Desktop to be necessary for some tasks even while in touch mode, renders both interfaces far from optimal.

Microsoft should do three things. The easiest is to get Metro out of Desktop by allowing booting into Desktop and restoring traditional UI elements, such as a start menu, that were removed from Windows 8.  Fixing Metro is harder. Basically, Microsoft has to finish the job by creating features, utilities, and apps that allow the user to do everything in the touch interface. The toughest challenge is Metrofying Office. It would be extremely difficult to recreate all the functionality of Word, Excel, and the rest in a tablet app and almost certainly unwise to try. Instead, Microsoft has to pick a core feature set that can work in a touch interface on relatively small screens and build the applications around these. (If reports are to be believed, Microsoft is doing this for iOS and Android anyway; why not Windows?)

But the really cool thing would be hybrid Windows for hybrids, a shape-shifting operating system designed for a new generation of devices that can convert from traditional PCs to tablets (the forthcoming Surface Pro probably belongs in this class.) Why not an OS that presents the traditional Desktop UI when the device is being used with a keyboard and touchpad or mouse, then converts instantly and automatically to a touch-first Metro-type UI when the device transforms?

The key to making this work is the use of solid state storage, which allows for very fast saving and restoration of state. I envision a system where you could be editing a Word file in Desktop, then switch to tablet mode, where you make some changes to the file in the touch version of Word. When you switch back to Desktop, Word would still be open with your file, but it would include the edits made in tablet. I suspect that the Desktop and Metro versions of programs would still have to be different applications and this would require closing and reopening of files when switching modes. But SSDs can make this happen so quickly that the user will barely notice.

I’m not suggesting this is at all a trivial job or that in can be done very quickly. The Office project alone is a very large undertaking, one that I can only presume is already underway, although Microsoft has been totally silent about it. There is a great deal of work beyond that, and third-party software vendors would have to get on board with mode-switchable versions of their applications.  But the result would be new and exciting computing experience.

Microsoft Surface: How Relevant Are Legacy Apps and Hardware?

Microsoft Surface has been on sale for a while now and reviews  are out where reviewers tell the public what they thought about their experiences. The reviews varied widely as I illustrate below, but I wanted to spend some time digging into one of the more controversial topics, Surface’s backward compatibility with legacy hardware and software.

Early Reviews Mixed
The headlines and results for the early reviews were mixed, ranging from ZDNet’s Ed Bott “enthusiastically recommended” to Gizmodo’s Sam Biddle “this is technological heartbreak” and everything in-between. Why the big disparity?

The big disparity comes from the different way reviewers approach their personal experiences, their projected experiences and the time frames in mind. Most of the positive review comments are coming from today’s sophisticated hardware and the potential for an improved software experience in future. The more negative comments involve the here and now software experience, primarily around the kind and numbers of apps in the Windows Store. Those reviewers who didn’t find the apps they wanted also pointed out that Surface cannot run legacy Windows apps. Some of those reviewers made it sound somewhat like Microsoft will make no future improvements down the line. This is a bit unfair in that Microsoft will improve the software experience, but, if a consumer does order a Surface today, this is what they are getting today. Thus we see the importance of having everything in place on day one of the reviews.

Product reviews reflect a snapshot in time of the reviewer’s personal experiences, sophistication levels, favorite software, preferred ecosystem and usage patterns. If you are like the reviewer, then it should work out well for you. Better yet, choose a friend you know who has the product and ask them what they think about it.

Is Windows Desktop Software Important?
One important thing for consumers to ask when considering Surface is whether they want to load any of the current Windows desktop apps they own today or if they will want to buy and install new Windows desktop apps in the future. Surface owners must select and buy all their “Metro-style” apps from the Microsoft store but cannot buy or load Windows “Desktop-style” apps.

Surface comes pre-loaded with full (not trial) versions of high quality Microsoft productivity apps Word, Excel and Powerpoint, so the basics of productivity are covered. Will consumers miss loading their older Windows software or buying new Windows desktop software? It depends. It’s not as simple as asking snarky questions like, “do iPad users miss this,” and moving on. It really comes down to perception and reality of what consumers will want to do with the tablet.

Shopper sophistication will run the gamut and the more sophisticated users will make a more surgical decision tree. All things equal, they will ask, “what programs do I run today and want tomorrow on my Windows 7 PC that I would want to run on my Surface tablet?”

All things equal like price, weight, brand and battery life, I want my tablet to run a few key apps that aren’t in the Microsoft Store or I just prefer in a desktop mode. For me, I want the following desktop apps to run on my tablet: Wizard101 and Pirate101 games for my son, Google Chrome web browser, and Evernote. Other consumers may want to run apps like World of Warcraft, iTunes, Microsoft Outlook, Picasa, VLC PLayer or Quicken.

The biggest challenge comes down to naming, unfortunately. When some uneducated consumers hear “Windows”, they could think they can load Windows software and “Windows”, albeit “RT”, will be splashed across every piece of marketing collateral. I believe some consumers will see “Windows” and buy Surface thinking it runs their older Windows desktop apps. Other consumers will view Surface more like an iPad or Kindle Fire and not care at all. I think this will be a short-term challenge until the entire ecosystem gets educated on the differences between Windows 8 and RT and consumer’s favorite apps become available in the Windows Store.

Is Legacy Hardware Important?
Another important thing consumers need to consider is whether they want to “fully” run all their currently-owned peripherals with Surface. These are peripherals like webcams, mice, printer-scanners, game controllers, label makers, receipt scanners, etc. At this point, no one publicly knows which legacy peripherals will work perfectly, work without special capabilities provided by desktop software, or not run at all. There will be new devices or relabeling of older devices as “Windows RT” compatible, but for other devices, it isn’t a known entity.

Let me use a personal example to illustrate my point. I have an HP printer/scanner/fax machine and a Neat sheet scanner for receipts, business cards and documents. On my HP today, I can scan a document in and it magically shows up as a PDF file in “My Documents” folder. Also, when I am printing I can set quality levels and the paper tray. My Neat scanner uses software where I repeatedly change features like color-BxW, dual sided, ignore blank sheets and collated scanning. Will these features work with Surface? I don’t know and I don’t know when or if I will know unless I have a Surface to use. For the record, neither my iPad or Nexus tablets support any of these special features.

Will this become an issue? The answer is the same as the one above on desktop software. It will depend on the user, their knowledge, their expectations of a device with a Windows brand and their experiences with other tablet devices. For those users who equate Windows with backwards peripheral connectivity, it will be an issue as they won’t know until they buy it and something doesn’t work as expected. Like legacy software, legacy hardware is a short term issue and should work itself over time.

What’s the Impact?
I believe even with all the Surface goodness, its lack of support for legacy Windows desktop software and legacy peripherals will continue to subtract from reviews and perceptions on the consumer side and particularly on the enterprise side. Enterprises use more of their head and less of their heart as IT is about business, not new and shiny objects. However, the legacy objections will die down on the consumer side over the next year as more high quality apps get added to the Windows Store and everyone gets proper expectations set. Right or wrong, given enterprise’s fixation on legacy everything, I can see a more protracted time-frame for them to get comfortable with Surface. I’m very interested to see the reviews in a few days on Intel’s Clover Trail-based Windows 8 tablets that compare the experience to Surface and other Windows RT-based devices.

As for impact to sales, that is a much more complex question which I will address in another column.

Note: This column previously appeared on Forbes.com.

Evernote and Sugarsync: Headed in Reverse Windows 8 Gear

Two of the apps that changed the way I work are Evernote and Sugarsync.  Evernote allowed me to go paperless and Sugarsync allowed me to have access to all my data accessible by any device.  Both of the apps have very robust Windows 7, OSX, Android and iOS capability.  Robustness stops, though, at Windows 8, where Evernote and Sugarsync are the biggest disappointment I have yet to encounter with the new OS.  It has been 15 months since Microsoft’s BUILD event, more than enough time to architect, design, develop and test any application, particularly one with robust Windows 7 functionality.

Evernote for Windows 8 Metro

For the last few years I have infrequently used a pen or pencil to take a note in a meeting or at home.  I take all notes with Evernote.  Even if someone hands me a piece of paper, I will take a picture and import into Evernote.  Business card?  Import into Evernote and throw it away.  Whiteboard?  Take a picture and import into Evernote.  The great thing is that every image imported into Evernote is searchable, too.  This experience gracefully (relatively) scales across my PC, Mac, iPhone, Motorola RAZR I, Nexus 7, and iPad.  But falls miserably apart on Windows RT and 8.

homescreen_ipad_iphone_large
Evernote for iOS

Evernote for Windows 8 looks kind of similar, but falls down immeasurably.

Screenshot.789.1000002
Evernote for Windows 8 Metro

For the first few weeks, Evernote would not sync.  It pulled in one note from each month, then stopped.  Windows RT-based systems would just crash.  About a week ago, the sync feature started working on Windows 8 but still to this day, will not sync and just crashes after a few minutes of sync.

Here is the delta list of what I can do on Windows, OSX, Android and iOS that I cannot do on Windows 8:

  • Sync on opening app
  • Edit a note with any rich text.  Will only append.
  • Adding attachment
  • Edit text font, size, color, bold, italics, strike-through, alignment, bullet, number
  • Adding check-boxes and grids
  • Voice notes
  • View attachments (ie pdf, doc, ppt, xls).  You can see the file and it looks like you can touch it and open, but you cannot.
  • Sync in background (cannot on iOS either)
  • Save searches
  • View by pictures
  • Auto-subject by calendar
  • Paper image clean up
  • View by place (geo-positioned)

As you can see, the list of unsupported features is immense and keeps it from doing anything other than viewing or making very basic notes.  The continued crashed with the Windows RT app is inexcusable.  Judging by the mass of one and two start ratings in the app store, I’d say I’m not alone.  Stay away from Evernote and Windows 8 Metro; they don’t mix well.  Use the desktop app with Windows 8 desktop.

Now, onto Sugarsync.

Sugarsync for Windows 8 Metro

Sugarsync for Windows 7, OSX, Android and iOS enable you to keep your files in sync across devices.  On PC, Mac, and Android, files can be automatically synced in the background, too.  Therefore, every file you have on every device can automatically in sync to view and edit.  This all breaks down on Windows 8.

Sugarsync for iPad
Sugarsync for Windows 8

The Sugarsync experience is equally weak as Evernote.  Again, Sugarsync is multi-platform just like Evernote, but for some reason, they have decided to support a narrower subset than even iOS or Android.  Here is the Windows 8 delta list:

  • Search (no, you cannot search your files, online or offline)
  • Offline access to synced files (you must be connected to have access to documents)
  • Background sync
  • Select all devices synced to Sugarsync
  • Look for recent documents
  • Sort files by date

Finding what you are looking for is nearly impossible as there is not search, sort by date, or recent documents.  I cannot recommend any alternatives because none are better.  Literally, with Windows 8, you are landlocked.

Where to Next?

Evernote and Sugarsync need significant improvement or users will simply not use these apps.   Ironically on Evernote, this type of behavior reminds me how they treated Blackberry OS, which they do not support anymore.  While I don’t believe Evernote will discontinue Windows 8 support, they need to improve quickly and substantially to keep it from becoming naturally extinct.  With Sugarsync, the story is a bit different.  Even Microsoft hasn’t enabled Windows 8 offline storage with SkyDrive and at least with some of their messaging, they are trying to help the user learn how to do some sort of offline updating.  Sugarsync prompts the user to, “If you make changes to this file, please open Sugarsync again to automatically save your updated file to Sugarsync.  This way your updated file will be available across all your other decives [their misspelling] with Sugarsync”.  Very kludgy but at least it’s a way to keep files fresh.

Both companies have had over a year to plan, code and test for Windows 8 and there’s really no explanation other than lack of belief and priority in Windows 8 that explains this.  For the sake of users, I hope the situation is remedied quickly.  At a minimum, can you at least call them “preview”, alpha” or “beta”?

Dell XPS 12: Windows 8 Ultrabook Re-imagined

With the advent of Microsoft’s Windows 8, computer makers developed different form factors to take advantage of the new operating system.  Most of these new Windows 8 form factors were shown for the first time at Computex in Taipei and then at the official Windows 8 launch event in New York.  The new PC form factors extend the functionality by taking advantage of touch screen and the Windows 8 Metro interface.  Consumers and businesses can now choose from a myriad of innovative form factors: hybrids where the tablet disconnects from the keyboard, convertible flippers, convertibles that flip 360 degrees and large, portable displays that are carried from room to room.

One of the best of these new devices is Dell’s XPS 12 Convertible Touch Ultrabook.  I have been using it for nearly a month as my primary notebook and wanted to share my experiences.

Ultrabook First, Tablet Second
The XPS 12 is an Ultrabook first and a tablet second.  This is important to understand, otherwise you may fall into the trap of comparing this to a tablet-only device, which would be a big mistake.  The XPS 12 operates as a tablet secondarily through the use of a very innovative flipping hinge, which allows the display to swivel back when you want to use it as a tablet, and swivel back when you want to use it as an Ultrabook. It also enables what I like to call “movie-mode” where the display is at the front and the keyboard is hidden but acts as a great stand.
The swivel display frame is very durable, regardless of what you may read elsewhere.  When you swivel the display into place, it emits a very robust “click”, which comes from magnets all around the frame. One thing that impresses the engineering side of me is that ability to deliver power, display and touch signals signals over a moving swivel mechanism.  Dell has added a few other details to improve use as a tablet.  Dell changed the power button from a bezel button to a side slider which enables the user to turn on the device in any form factor, Ultrabook or tablet, and keeps it from accidentally getting pressed when used as a tablet.  One other comfort feature that I only noticed after a week of use was that the rubberized “feet” act as great place to put your fingers when using as a tablet.
Industrial Design
The XPS 12 pulls from the design language of the entire XPS line, which looks premium but also very functional and durable.  The lid and bottom are both made from carbon fiber, which is not only durable and very light, but cool to the touch. The metal frame is machined aluminum, which is very sturdy and looks great.  The palmrest is made from magnesium, covered with black, rubberized material that is gentle on the eyes but also keeps your palms from slipping like mine does on my MacBook Air (MBA).  Like other notebooks made with machined aluminum, the XPS 12 is a bit heavier than some other Ultrabooks, but I personally like that trade-off  And at 3.35 lbs, it’s lighter than the MacBook Pro (MBP) 13″.
Beautiful 1080P Display
The XPS 12’s display is gorgeous.  It is 12.5″ with brightness up to 400 nits and at 1,920 x 1,080 resolution.  It’s made from bonded Gorilla Glass and therefore bright and durable.  Pictures and movies looked incredible.  This delivers a much higher PPI (176) than a standard 13″ MBA  (127) and less than a 13″ MBP with Retina Display (227).
Base Specifications
While thin and light, my XPS 12 came with relatively robust features:
  • Intel Core i7 3667U operating at 2.0Ghz up to 3.2Ghz in Turbo Boost
  • Windows 8 Pro 64-bit
  • 256 GB SSD/8 GB RAM
  • Intel HD 4000 GPU and mini DisplayPort out
  • Over 5 hours battery life (per reviews) with 47 wHR battery
  • 802.11 a/g/n, USB-3.0 with with PowerShare, eSATA/USB-3.0, BlueTooth 3.0, and WiDi 3.0
  • Intel RapidStart and Smart Connect Technology
  • 3.35 lbs/1.52kg
 All of these specs were very solid, but I would have appreciated an option for discrete AMD or NVIDIA graphics to play some higher level games and take advantage of programs that use GPU compute.
Apple MacBook or Dell XPS 12?
Ultimately, consumers must make a choice and in many cases, Apple and Windows Ultrabooks will be in the consideration set. If, and I mean “IF” the consumer is neutral on an Apple versus Windows 8 ecosystem and purchase experience, here are the things they should consider:
  • how important is touch?  The XPS 12 has it, Macs do not.  Apple may say that reaching across the keyboard to touch the display is bad ergonomics.
  • how important is being able to use the laptop as a tablet? The XPS 12 can, the Mac cannot.  Apple may say buy an iPad because it performs better as a tablet.
  • how important is having the highest resolution and PPI? Apple has the highest.  Dell may say look at the price penalty you pay for the Retina Display.
  • how important are discrete graphics?  Apple offers Nvidia’s latest graphics on the MBP, Dell does not.  Dell may say with such a thin and light design starting at $1,199, it’s not practical.
  • how important is price?  The XPS 12 starts at $1,199 with 1080P display, the MBP with Retina starts at $1,699.  Apple may say the XPS 12 isn’t retina, 500 MHz. more CPU, ThunderBolt and discrete graphics. Or Apple may say look to the MBA 13″, which starts at $1,199.
 Net-net, it is great consumers have such great choices with laptops and Ultrabooks.
Dell XPS 12: Windows 8 Ultrabook Re-imagined
As an industry analyst, I don’t publicly publish many product evaluations, but with the Dell XPS 12, I thought it was important, given its unique design and new usage models it enables.  As an Ultrabook, the XPS 12 was one of the most solid devices I have ever used.  It’s fast, light, thin, sturdy and Dell has paid great attention to details in form and function. As a tablet, I enjoyed it a lot better than I ever expected, and this is coming from a long-time iPad user.  I found myself using the XPS 12 on the couch propping it on my lap and even in bed in “movie-mode” where I historically used my iPad.  It doesn’t replace my iPad or Nexus 7, but I could see using my Surface a lot less.
Dell has a real winner with the XPS 12 and I applaud their courage for developing and productizing such a unique convertible, shape-shifting Windows 8 device during such turbulent times in the PC industry.

Windows 8: Tepid Marketing–>Slow Sales

Win 8 display at Microcenter

Kind of sad, isn’t it? This sorry attempt at a festive display of new PCs at a Micro Center store in Rockville, MD, says a lot about the thud with which Windows 8 seems to have landed.

Windows guru Paul Thurrott recently reported that Win 8 sales are running below Microsoft’s expectations. Microsoft executives, Thurrott says, put much of the blame on OEM partners for being late to market with exciting hardware. But much of the problem may be closer to home. Neither Microsoft nor its retail partners seem to be making all that great an effort to sell new systems, especially compared to past efforts.

This week, I stopped by several big box retailers, the sort that generate most of the sales of Windows PCs, and what I saw was dispiriting. Instead of the end caps, banners, ceiling-high stacks of boxed software, and the occasional brass band that accompanied past Windows launches, I saw a distinctly low key effort. Windows 8 has only a modest presence on TV–most of Microsoft’s ad buy is dedicated to Surface, which is sold only online and in Microsoft’s own sparse retail outlets–and I saw no sign of any Microsoft promotional effort at my local Best Buy, Staples, Microcenter, or H.H. Gregg. In fact, the display below, at Staples, was about as flashy as it got:

Now it is a fact of life in retailing that vendors literally get what they pay for in terms of shelf position, end-cap displays, store advertising, and other promotion. It appears Microsoft isn’t paying much this time around. It doesn’t help that Microsoft is not, at least at this point, selling Windows 8 as physical media, so there are no in-store displays of the software itself. Still, it’s telling that Windows is missing from this row of promotional posters at the Micro Center entrance:

Micro Center poster display

On the shelves, things are just as bad. The main selling point for Windows 8 is touch, but most of the new touch models have yet to come to market. Laptops are generally grouped by price, sometimes by size. In no case did I see touch models grouped together or in any way featured. Best Buy at least had little tags on some non-touch models proclaiming their lack of touch screens, but otherwise, you had to figure it out for yourself, either by reading the detailed product descriptions or by touching the screen and seeing whether anything happened. (A clue: If it costs less than $1,000, it probably doesn’t has a touch screen.) In most stores, there are some Windows 7 machines mixed in among the newer models, and I wouldn’t be surprised if few shoppers managed to figure out just what was supposed to be superior about Windows 8.

Unless Microsoft is going to open a whole lot more of its own stores (there is only one full-fledged Microsoft Store in the Washington area–in Arlington, Va.,–and just two pop-up stores, really glorified mall kiosks, in the entire state of Maryland), it should work with OEMs and retailers to do something to improve a horrible shopping experience. Most of the machines I saw on shelves made it impossible to get any sort of meaningful Windows 8 experience. Many of the machines were dead, or were locked into demo screen shows. Of those that were running Windows 8, almost none were both connected to the internet and linked to a Microsoft account, two features necessary to understanding what the new OS is all about. And while I understand the need of retailers to keep stock from walking off, their approach to theft prevention is lethal to sales. For example, it’s impossible to get a real sense of the sleekness of this Hewlett-Packard Spectre XT Ultrabrook at Staples with that horrible anti-theft clamp and cable device on its side:

HP Spectre

 

Even worse was a similar clamp (at Best Buy) that prevented a Lenovo Yoga convertible notebook/tablet from going through its agile tricks.

I only ran into one true Windows tablet in my shopping tour, a $600 Asus Vivo Tab RT. To my complete lack of surprise, the display was free of any information on the differences between its Windows RT software and the full Windows 8 on the systems surrounding it, another bit of consumer education that Microsoft is sorely ignoring.

 

 

Things I Prefer to do on my iPad versus my Surface

Last week, I covered areas and usage models where I preferred to use Microsoft Surface over my Apple iPad(s). I was actually surprised I would like Surface in so many areas given it is such a new device and ecosystem.   This week, I will reverse gears and discuss areas where I still prefer my iPad.

Games

I prefer genres of games like action, shooter, and racing.  With the iPad, I get choices like Infinity Blade, Real Racing, Metal Storm, Modern Combat, Zombie Gunship, and Need for Speed.  The Windows Store is starting to have some decent titles like Hydro Thunder Hurricane that show the potential, but for right now that’s what it is, potential.  With the performance NVIDIA Tegra 3, I hope that the store starts to get filled with good games.

Podcasts

Since Apple added its own podcast app, they have been so simple and reliable.  On the iPad, I can simply subscribe and auto sync with the bare minimum toggles to manage everything.  Slapdash is a decent start for Surface, but it doesn’t auto sync and gets some nasty errors or crashes if I wasn’t connected.

Heavy Social Media

The iPad literally has a social media app for everything and more times than not, they offer the first native apps for a new service.  Also, the best apps like Tweetbot are on the iPad, too.

On Surface, the apps are OK for some casual social media, but not heavy duty.  They are a bit sluggish and lack key features.  One, for instance, is a very simple one, where you can pin a Twitter list to your start screen.  I can do this on multiple Android and iOS apps but not a single Windows RT app.

Viewing Photos 

I still prefer viewing and editing photos on the iPad.  It’s fast to open the app, open pictures, view and edit.  The editing tools are more sophisticated, too, with auto enhance and redeye.  While the Surface display is nice, I do notice a big improvement on the Retina display on the iPad 3.  One other pet-peeve I had with the Surface was when I wanted to sync photos.  It never asked me if I wanted to delete the photos on the iPhone.  Therefore, to delete the photos off the iPhone, I needed to add one more step.

Taking Notes

I take a ton of notes with my iPads using Evernote, unless it becomes unreliable and crashy where I then switch to the Notes app. The Evernote on Windows RT is the biggest disappointment of any app I have used so far.  I consider it Alpha as it either won’t sync, is slow to sync, or cannot view attachments without being connected.  Even though the app has access to the file system, you cannot add attachments other than photos.  Emailing notes works have the time and the other time crashes or displays the following error: “We’re having problems connecting to verify your info. Try signing in again.”  I tried OneNote for the tenth time. Incredibly confusing. OneNote then notes are displayed as “Personal (Web)>Quick Notes”. I’m sure if I used OneNote for years I would know what all that meant but I don’t.

Business Collaboration

While the iPad is primarily a consumer device, it has support for tools like Webex and GoToMeeting.  As an industry analyst, I get briefed a lot and these tools are invaluable for doing these.  Unfortunately, Surface does not currently have support for these and does not support them via the web browser, either.

Wireless Video Mirroring

This may sound uber-geeky, but I routinely mirror my iPad to my Apple TV to my HDTV.  I do this for many reasons, including to show off a web site, play a game, show off a new or funny app.  While the PlayTo functionality for non-DRMd video and audio is appreciated over the Xbox, it does not currently mirror the entire device.

Managing Contacts

I can very quickly and accurately view, open and edit contacts with my iPad.  I really do appreciate the linking of contacts on the Surface, but unfortunately, it is excruciatingly slow.  If I need to edit over 5 contacts, I usually just give up and go use Outlook instead.

Cloud Storage

iCloud storage for Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for the iPad is nothing short of awesome.  Now, if the apps were more compatible with Office, I’d switch over right now.  Surface does not make it easy to automatically store and update Office documents.  You see, there is no SkyDrive for Windows Desktop, only for Metro.  There is an Office Upload utility in Desktop, but it only works if you pulled the document from SkyDrive or created a document or saved once to SkyDrive.  Therefore, if you created a document offline, there is no way to have it autosave once you are connected again.  Neither Box nor SugarSync have Windows RT desktop handlers, either, which is very disappointing.

Where does this Leave Us?

Surface and the iPad are very good tablets.  What is most surprising is that Surface is brand new and it can do many things better than the iPad, now on its fourth generation.   I was surprised just how well Surface did “tablet-only” usages like video playback and even surfing the web.There is room for both these devices as they take two very different tacks.  Surface is a PC that’s also wanting to be a tablet.  The iPad is trying to be a tablet, not a PC (or Mac).   Surface will be good for those consumers like me who want it all and are willing to deal with the idiosyncrasies of the PC or have another tablet for 100% content consumption.   This battle is just getting started at a time when many pundits thought it was a closed and shut case for Apple.

In Praise of Old-fashioned PCs

.Photo of IBM PC (Wikipedia)

I’m a big fan of tablets, especially the iPad. Altrhough I find myself spending more and more time with a tablet and less and less with a traditional computer, I can’t imagine getting by without a Windows PC or a Mac. And that is why, though the market for traditional computers will shrink, they aren’t going away.

The tablet is the only computer a lot of people will ever need. If the iPad or an Android tablet isn’t quite up to the job, the new, more PC-like Microsoft Surface might well be (See Patrick Moorhead’s post on Surface’s advantages.) But a lot of people falls well short of all people.

When he introduced the iPad in2010, Steve Jobs famously observed that that PC was like a truck and the iPad was a car, and most people don’t need trucks. He was right, but seriously underestimated the importance of trucks. Nearly half of all vehicles sold in the United States are light trucks. Even if you eliminate the more car-like crossover SUVs (maybe those are the Surfaces), trucks still account for about a quarter of the sales.

I’m writing this on a Windows desktop PC (for a change; I usually work at my iMac  when I’m at home.) Because I can. I’ve done WordPress posts entirely on the iPad (with a Zagg keyboard) and while it is quite possible, it isn’t much fun. I regularly work with multiple windows open and often cut and paste material from one app to another. You cannot easily do that on a tablet.

There are three activities that keep me on the traditional PC. I do a lot of technical writing and editing, which generally involves large (100-pages plus), highly formatted Word documents. There is no alternative to Word, and often Excel and PowerPoint for collateral material. A lot of tech pundits who keep predicting the imminent demise of PCs and heavyweight Microsoft Office applications underestimate how deeply these are ingrained into enterprise workflows.At the recent Apple product announcement, the thing I found myself lusting for was not the featured iPad mini but the new 27-in. iMac with a Fusion drive.

I also do some video editing. Not a large amount but enough to know that I want the fastest, most capable system I can lay my hands on. Even simple editing is taxing on a system and transcoding and rendering video can get really time consuming. Also the process of capturing an hour of live video and editing it down to a five- or ten-minute cut can generate many gigabytes of files.

Finally, there’s photo editing. I love the hands-on aspect of photo editing on a tablet and iPhoto for iOS is a fun tool. But for serious work, whether it is preparing graphics for Tech.pinions posts or processing my own photos, I turn to Photoshop.

While we are talking about threes, there are three things that PCs have and tablets lack. First is processing power. Today’s tablets have plenty of power for the tasks they are intended to do, including rendering HD video. But to achieve 10 hours of battery life in a very thin, light tablet, thingsa have to go, and one of those things is raw computational power. There’s no way an ARM chip or even an Intel Clover Trail Atom is going to match the performance of an Intel Core i5 or i7 with Intel’s latest integrated graphics, let alone with a discrete graphics system.

Second is a big display. Some tasks, especially those involving multiple windows, want all the display real estate you can throw at them. I generally work with 27-in. displays and am thinking of going to dual monitors if I can figure out how to make them fit. A tablet limits you to one smallish window (one and a half, sort of, on the Surface.)

Finally there’s storage. I haven’t taken an inventory lately of how much storage I have connected to my local area network, but it’s more than five terabytes, with a terabyte of local storage on my two main desktops. A tablet offers 64 GB, max. Yes, there is all but unlimited storage in the cloud, and I keep a lot of stuff in the cloud. But I want local copies of my important content, and that includes lots of music and photos, as well as thousands of documents.

For all these reasons, my PCs aren’t going to disappear. And neither, I suspect, are an awful lot of others. (On the other hand, I do find that I am using my Mac and Windows laptops less and less, as tablets take over the mobile chores.) Many business users are going to continue to need full-bore PCs as well, although there too we may see fewer laptops and a return to desktops.

At the recent Apple product announcement, the thing I found myself lusting for was not the featured iPad mini but the new 27-in. iMac with a Fusion drive. I love the super-portability of the tablet, but I still need the heavy iron too.

Ten Things I prefer to do on Microsoft Surface versus my Apple iPad

My primary tablet of choice for years has been Apple’s iPad. The iPad, iPad 2, and the New (now old) iPad (3). This is after trying at least 20 other tablets with Android phone, Android tablet, Kindle Android, Windows 7, webOS, and QNX operating systems. Before Surface, I used my iPad 2 primarily in productivity mode with a Logitech keyboard in “fridge toaster mode” and used my iPad 3 as my primary entertainment device when paired with the HumanToolz stand. I find that combination suited my distinct needs.

After all of the contextual “research”, I have finally found a device that could make me leave the iPad at home, that is, after some improvements. After using Microsoft’s Surface for about a week, there are some usage models that I prefer to do on the Surface over the iPad. Before you decide to go directly to the comments section and flame me without reading the article, my next column will be on where I still prefer the iPad in specific usage models, which are many.

Email

I have been critical of Windows 8 email earlier versions, but in the final throes of pre-launch, Microsoft redeemed themselves with a very solid Mail update. The email client is fast enough, is threaded, pulls in avatars from other services that personalizes the experience and easily handles attachments in a way that I am familiar with Windows. Emails are very quick with Surface’s keyboard, too. It’s not perfect as I want a unified inbox, in-message web links, and shortcuts like “add to calendar”, but given this is only version 1.0, I am certain Microsoft could enable it if they wanted to. Question is, how good will they make it until it pulls business from Outlook?

Random, Unplanned Web Browsing

Internet Explorer on Surface is a full, PC-grade browser, unlike Safari on my iPad, but it feels as fast as a tablet browser. While I run into sites that are just ugly on the iPad, Internet Explorer just works as it doesn’t need to cut corners. I never get a down-featured mobile site either, which I routinely get on iPad Safari. Like Mail, it’s not perfect either as it doesn’t even have synced bookmarks. For planned browsing where I go down my favorites list I still prefer the iPad, but I have to think Microsoft will add this or lose many customers to Google Chrome, which works very well on X86-based Windows 8 tablets. In fact, on my Intel Clover Trail-based tablet, I’ve already shifted to Chrome because of the lack of IE bookmarks.

The other thing that is, quite frankly, emancipating is being able to interact fully with a web site or service. I am very disappointed with the lack of Metro-based social media apps, but overjoyed that I can do EVERYTHING on my tablet with a social media site I can do with my full PC. Literally, upload, download, post, reply to every and any site without worrying about if that app has connected with that API or not. IE supports every Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest feature. Why? It’s simple, because it is full-featured PC browser with access to the system’s file system and peripherals. That, paired with Nvidia’s quad core Tegra 3 that accelerates HTML 5 drives a complete web experience.

Does this mean I don’t want apps? No way. I want apps for speed too, but want the web when I want the whole experience. I want it all.

Writing Research and Blogs

On my iPad, my blog workflow today moves from iPad Evernote to WordPress on the iPad and then final edit on a PC. If you have ever worked with iOS WordPress and photos, you understand why. With Surface, I start with Word then publish inside the app to WordPress. One app, one device; what could be simpler? And it is so, so much easier with the type cover with a trackpad to pound out a 1,000 word piece of work. For research papers, there is no substitute for Word. It’s just the gold standard of productivity. Enough said.

Wireless Printing

While not that sexy, I have appreciated the consistency of Surface’s wireless printing. Like web browsing, it just works. When printing from my iPad, half the time it prints garbage or ten pages when I really only wanted the first page. This has come in handy for my kid’s school projects and when printing out contracts to sign and scan. For the record, no, Surface doesn’t support my HP or Neat scanner and I do that on a full PC.

Task Switching

It seemed for the longest time, Apple was “holding out” for easy task switching. Then came the very much appreciated two finger gesture for the iPad. I thanked Apple profusely for this. Microsoft and the Surface take this a few steps forward with the simple left thumb flick, which allows the user to keep both hands on the device and task switch. When I am showing friends and family the Surface, they are all “gee whiz” on this very simple feature. I liked webOS and QNX task switching better than Windows 8, but must say, I have warmed up to Windows RT and 8 task switching, and certainly prefer over my iPad.

Instant Access to Information without Opening Apps

If you want to get an Apple fan boy riled up, just start a discussion about Live Tiles or Android panes. You can just see the blood pressure rising and the next hour of conversation is around ease of use and what normal consumers want. Well, I like Live Tiles because it saves me time and some don’t because they are “confusing”. Without even touching the Surface display I can see emails, calendar, and weather, stocks, Tweets, breaking news, updated podcasts and about 100 other pieces of information. I think other consumers will prefer, too, after some time as icons are so 1980’s. I believe Microsoft jumped ahead of the curve on this tile concept and Apple will follow at some point.

As the industry moves to large surface usage models and environments for full rooms, kitchens, bathrooms, etc., live tiles will be commonplace. And, yes, I had PointCast and Yahoo widgets and stopped using them because they became a hindrance over time, but these tiles are different, as they are the experience, not an add-on.

Rental Videos

I watch a lot of rental movies and TV from the Apple Store on my iPad. I do this a lot while crashing on the couch or in bed. I use the HumanToolz stand to prop up the iPad 3 on my chest so I didn’t have to hold it. When Amazon Prime came to iPad, I still used the iPad, but switched to Prime. It wasn’t about the deals, it was that Prime enables streaming and the Apple Store does not on the iPad. I sometimes had to wait over an hour for an Apple Store video to download. I get the QOS challenges with streaming, but somehow Amazon and Netflix deals with those. Plus, Apple deals with streaming on my Apple TV just fine, so it’s just frustrating. With Surface, I use the Xbox movie store where I can stream or download and play. This is a lot more convenient than the iPad.

One broadcast channel app that was quite good was the ABC Player. My wife and I watched “Revenge” together and Surface provided a better quality and stable video experience than the iPad. I haven’t had the chance to test every service, but I also thought the Netflix and Hulu+ experiences were also very solid.

Anything that Really Requires a Mouse

As I use my iPad for productivity in addition to entertainment, I attempted presentations with Keynote and spreadsheets with Numbers. I tried for years to love these on the iPad but ended up abandoning them after each new release. Pages was fine but spreadsheets and presentations were nightmares even for editing files I created first on a PC. The lack of a mouse was the biggest issue for me as I had to learn a bunch of new gestures on a small 9.7” screen. With Surface, I have a keyboard, trackpad, optional mouse, Excel and PowerPoint. If you’ve done spreadsheets and presentations, you know how much easier this is and can relate. As in web browsing, this is an area where the four Nvidia Tegra 3 cores are making an impact.

Group Music Listening

I still prefer personal listening of music on the iPad as it’s faster and simpler, but in a group environment, Surface is just all that better. Microsoft essentially took the Xbox music experience and put it on Surface. If you’ve never experienced it, you should, as it’s as much about the video as it is the music. As you play a song, you are fed some incredible transitions that go way above cover art.

Sharing Anything

With my iPad, it’s up to Apple to determine what app or service I can directly share to. Like rental movies, this is Apple simplifying for the consumer and ensuring QOS. Also, if all apps had access to all Apple APIs, Apple couldn’t fully monetize its connections. Microsoft has chosen a different another route, one that is more partner-friendly and inclusive. This isn’t Microsoft jut being the good citizen, it’s part of their business model of monetizing the OS and they are years behind in the tablet war.

In Metro, I literally click on the “Share” charm and any, and I mean, any app that has a “contract” to share, I can share with. Let me use sharing pictures as an example. On my iPad from the Camera Roll, I can share a picture to 2 non-Apple apps, Facebook and Twitter. On Surface, I can share that same picture to 6 different non-Microsoft services and apps and that’s only two weeks in before many social media apps even surface.

Hate my iPads?

I love my iPad and it has been the “chosen one” for many years, for basic productivity and for fun. I cannot tell you just now many times I received flak years ago, before the iPad, for forecasting three years ago that the tablet would be the primary content consumption device for the home by 2015. I think there are many more believers now. I am here to say that the iPad finally has some authentic competition, stiff competition, and that’s from Microsoft Surface and from other Windows RT and 8 devices. Holistically, the iPad has it more together, but then again, it doesn’t do as much, either, and has a multi-year head start. Surface is far from perfect, has its flaws, but also delivers a much better experience than expected, and selectively delivers a preferred experience in certain usage models.

Next week, I will outline usage scenarios where I still prefer my iPad.

Microsoft Pulls it Together (Almost) for Windows 8 Launch

I attended Microsoft’s launch last week for Windows 8, Windows RT, and Surface. While launch day is only one milestonephoto 1 (3) in a string of milestones, launch day is the one day that everything must come together, the day where some make their final judgment. So how did Microsoft do?

Importance of Launch Day

Launch days is one day in many important days that a product or service goes through in its lifecycle. I believe it is one of the most important days, though, as it pulls together all the hard work of the previous years into just a few hours. The value of launches differ between consumer and commercial products, too. In the commercial world, buyers like IT managers don’t expect and quite frankly don’t believe that everything would be together on day one. They’re a skeptical bunch, due in part to just how many times they have seen products and services not live up to their promises in the past. Maybe they even lost their job or got reprimanded for making what ended up being a tech mistake that cost their company time or money.

Consumer product launches are different, in that those product and services get measured by press and reviewers based upon what it can do on launch day, not at some point in the future. There are some exceptions that consumers make, where if they trust a brand and they make a future promises the company is believed, but for the most part, what is launched on that one day sticks for a very long time.

One final important piece about launch day is “permanence”. What gets written by press and analysts on launch day is rarely updated if something changes. With most consumers checking out the internet before they buy, this is vitally important. So how did Microsoft do?

Windows 8 Launch Day Plusses

Looking holistically at the day, I have to give credit where it is due. Microsoft did a very good job pulling everything togetherimage on game day. Microsoft made a good case that Windows 8 was the best Windows yet, good for older and the newest systems. On almost every metric, Microsoft showed that Windows 8 is better than Windows 7. They didn’t address the lack of a Start button or the potential confusion, but I don’t think this was the right place to do that. That is best demonstrated in the marketplace.

The demos were some of the best I’ve ever seen from Microsoft as Mike Angiulo and Julie Larson-Green did their magic. They made a pretty good case for why consumers would want Windows 8, particularly on touch-based devices. I particularly thought they did a good job showing and talking about how Windows 8 works with other Microsoft-based properties. Angiulo and Larsen-Green also did a very good job in showing the absolute breadth of designs supporting Windows 8 and Windows RT. The device onslaught was impressive, from notebooks, to hybrids, tablets, convertible flippers, convertible swivelers, to all in ones. They showed devices from all the big brands at prices ranging from $499 to $2,499.

Steve Ballmer was in rare form too, with a good balance of his famous passion and facts. He was there to put the final stamp on the event by showing just how committed Microsoft is to the Windows 8 ecosystem and experience by outlining just how many Microsoft apps and services have been developed to support a seamless Windows experience.

The launch wasn’t perfect, though.

What I Wanted to Hear More About

Microsoft demonstrated their best launch I have ever seen, but it could have been better, had they made a stronger case on a few items.

I have been a bit critical previously on how Microsoft has handled the rollout of Metro-based apps in the store. Without having enough high-quality apps, Windows 8 could have been compared to the webOS Touchpad or 10” Android tablet ecosystem, which would have been disastrous. Microsoft definitely came through on video streaming services by adding Netflix and Hulu within weeks of launch. They also showed up with many key new site apps, even though CNN is still MIA. What Microsoft missed at launch were key social media apps. While I understand that the People app has some good connections to services, it does not replace a native social media app for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or Google+. One example is Twitter. I, like many, have Twitter lists they want on their primary start screen. Not a single Metro Twitter app supports this. I would have at least liked for Microsoft to address this head-on and give a date when some of these apps are committed. In Surface reviews, the number of high quality apps was on key criticism in every single one of them. It didn’t have to be like that and was avoidable.

I would have also liked for Microsoft to address any hardware incompatibilities with Windows RT as opposed for users to find out on their own. Microsoft stated that Windows RT “works with 420,000,000 devices” but how do I know if that one Neat scanner or HP scanner that is so important to me works well? Microsoft has done a ton of work testing, but I would have at least liked to see accessible resources for consumers to check if their special peripheral works well. By not disclosing this, it made them appear to be hiding something.

Finally, there is the commercial PC and tablet market. Enterprises are currently shifting from Windows XP to Windows 7 on standard form factors like notebooks and desktops and therefore Windows 8 for the most part is irrelevant to them. Tablets are another matter altogether. Tim Cook routinely announces the extremely high per cent of enterprises rolling out or evaluating iPads, the latest figure pegged at 92%. Given Microsoft makes 75% of their profit from the commercial market, this seemed like an oversight. Given the competitiveness of the Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro tablets, many enterprise IT people would be hard pressed to justify an iPad purchase, Microsoft should have at least given a tip of the hat to Windows 8’s applicability to the commercial market.

Where We Go From Here

Many consumer reviews have been written and there will be many, many more in the future for Windows 8 and Windows RT. For the most part, the die has been cast and the Microsoft marketing and ad machine are in full swing, all which will make a difference on perception. The Windows 8 launch was the best Microsoft launch I have ever seen or attended, and I have personally attended many. While Microsoft didn’t address everything they needed to in order to seal the deal, they absolutely got Windows 8 and RT off to a solid start. Now it’s time to see if that translates to sales.

Windows, iOS, and Android All Have Something to Prove This Week

Prior to Apple developing iOS and over the last 25 years, there had never been much of a threat to the Windowsecolove ecosystem. With iOS, Apple proved many things, including the value of a holistic experience delivered through purpose-built combinations of hardware, software and content. Now in mobile, it’s Microsoft looking into the window wanting to get inside. After iOS came Google’s Android, which was focused on the same areas as iOS. This week, with multiple announcements, Windows, iOS and Android all have some things to prove and I wanted to dive a bit deeper into some areas.

Windows 8 Launch

For decades Microsoft has been the uncontested PC market share leader. Macs made a little bit of a dent, but for the most part, Microsoft ruled and for years it looked like Microsoft would have uncontested dominance. That was until the iPad. While the iPad isn’t trying to be a PC, it did provide an optimal experience for specific usage models the PC once delivered. Sure, you can surf the web on your PC, but when kicking back on the couch is it the best way to do this? Not for me and not for 100s of millions of other people. I still must have my PC, but I prefer my iPad for certain tasks my PC previously performed.

With Windows 8, Microsoft hopes to bridge the gap between PC and tablet. They will attempt to do this by releasing Windows 8 on about every conceivable form factor possible and seeing what sticks. This is a huge risk in that they are also sub-optimizing the experience for desktop-only experience by adding the Metro layer and removing the start button. The Windows 8 experience is optimized for devices with touch and an accessible keyboard, turning the devices into a Swiss Army device. I have used my iPads for years with an extended keyboard, so I absolutely see the value here. This week, Microsoft must prove that flexibility of Windows 8 trumps the purpose-built focus of an iPad.

Windows RT adds another proving ground. For decades, Windows equated to compatibility with the past, which is inextricable linked to Microsoft’s IT roots and the fact that many consumers are peeved about wasting a prior, large investment. I am not saying that consumers care less about backward compatibility, but they care more about what the device does today and in the future then the past. Unlike Windows 8, Windows RT will not run all the older Windows 7 desktop applications. Microsoft bridges the gap with some key Office apps, but forget about loading up iTunes or Quicken that you have. Hardware compatibility with USB devices is an unknown as well. This has never been an issue with the iPad, but then again, neither iPad or Apple stands for backwards compatibility.

Finally, we have Microsoft Surface, the first Microsoft-branded PC that directly competes with its ecosystem. This test will take a long time to play out but rarely do these examples of suppliers competing with customers work out well. While we don’t know exactly how pricing and features will work out over time, few premium-branded Windows tablet makers are excited about this. If Ballmer’s email to its stakeholders wasn’t clear enough, future Microsoft does two things: devices and services, and those devices that its customers currently provide.

While we will need to wait months and some cases years to fully understand how all these play out, the official launch for Windows 8, Windows RT and Surface this week will give better indications on where Windows is headed.

Windows Phone 8 Launch

Windows Phone was very respectable in the early days of smartphones and was one of the few phones until RIM’s Blackberry to be accepted by businesses. Then came the iPhone and iOS, which undoubtedly changed Microsoft’s mobile fortunes for the foreseeable future. Instead of a commanding 90-95%% OS market share like it does in PCs, in mobile, Microsoft is looking right now, at best, 3% share of the mobile market. Given how Windows Phone 7.X has done, there must be some huge change for Microsoft to start gaining share.

Microsoft’s biggest challenge in smartphones is consumer apathy. Metro is differentiated, the maps are good and Nokia has some really good imaging but consumers are not yet all that excited about Windows Phone. Microsoft needs more black and white, differentiated, and demonstrable features to break consumers out of their addiction to iOS and Android phones if they are to make big progress.

With the launch of Windows Phone 8, Microsoft could start to reverse its fortunes. If Microsoft can show that a Windows Phone 8 is a must-have device to pair with a Windows 8/RT PC or tablet and an Xbox, I do believe they can start to make faster traction with those audiences.

iPad Mini Launch

Apple, plain and simple, invented a new category with the iPad. Sure, there were previous Windows Tablets, but the biggest issues were a lack of apps, pen requirement and very high prices. Tablets , particularly iPads have started to eat into the PC market. It’s not that an iPad can replace a PC, but some consumers are choosing to buy the new category (and shiny thing) instead of buying a replacement PC.

The iPad Mini will be interesting for Apple. Apple has always been able to command a price premium in, quite frankly, all devices. Whether it’s an MP3-playing iPod, iPhone, iPad, or Mac, consumers are willing to pay more. The iPad Mini will test this pricing elasticity more than ever. I believe to hit its profit goals, Apple will need to be priced at least at $299, which puts it into that 30-40% gross profit range. They could margin blend on the rest of the iPad line to get the price even lower, but that’s pushing it.

With Amazon Kindle Fire at $149, a $299-349 price will be pushing the pricing power farther than I have seen in a long time. I do expect an iPad Mini to have a much better experience than a $149 Kindle Fire, but with many consumers just glad to be able to have an affordable tablet, many will opt for the Fire. Apple will sell truckloads of the iPad Mini this holiday season, but not nearly as many as they could have if the Nexus 7 or Kindle Fire didn’t exist.

Google Nexus 10” Android Tablet Launch

While Android has done well on smartphones and 7” tablets, anything above 7” has been a business and marketing disaster. Google had clearly deprioritized the 10” category as the smartphone market eclipses the size of the tablet market. At some point though, Google needs to bring their “A” game to large tablets and incent developers to create high quality tablet apps. Right now, Google does not allow anyone to easily count the tablet-specific apps as they number in the 100’s. Not 100’s of thousands, I am saying hundreds.

Google is rumored to announce this week a Google Nexus 10” tablet with Samsung. Price is almost inconsequential in that without more native Android tablet apps, a new Nexus tablet could be worse than bad. I expect 10″ Android tablets this holiday to be relegated to the bottom of the pricing barrel below Windows 8 and iOS. Unless Google can pull off something completely amazing and unexpected, this Nexus 10” will sell as well as all the other Android 10” tablets, not well.

An Amazing Week

Yes, this week will be one that all the ecosystems will have something to prove. When I step back a bit, I marvel at the amount of innovation and competition that is happening and just know this will be great for consumers this year and five years into the future. Competition and innovation are important as evidenced more than ever by this week’s announcements.

Without Metro Apps, Innovative Touch-based Windows 8 Consumer Hardware is Meaningless

Last week at IFA in Berlin, Germany, HP, Dell, Samsung, and Sony announced some very unique hardware designs for Windows 8.  They included touch notebooks, convertibles, sliders, flippers, hybrids, and tablets that can take advantage of Microsoft’s Metro touch-based UI. The hardware was very impressive and it was obvious that a lot of thought and effort went into the design.  Will these be successful?  It’s impossible to say at this point because two huge questions have yet to be answered: device price and the number of high quality Metro applications.  Device prices will be announced by Windows 8 launch on October 26, but I want to dive into the applications question.  Without many high-quality Metro-based application details on the horizon, it’s hard to get excited about the hardware.

Let’s first look at the diversity of products.

Touch-based Hardware for Windows 8

There were many innovative devices launched at IFA to take advantage of Windows 8 touch for the Metro environment.  Here are a few that appeared innovative:

  • HP SpectreXT TouchSmart– Premium 15.6″ HD touch display Ultrabook with Intel Thunderbolt technology.
  • HP ENVY x2– Ultrathin notebook whose 11.6″ HD display can be removed and used as a tablet.
  • Dell XPS Duo12– Premium Ultrabook  with 12″ touch whose screen flips around to be used as a tablet while in Metro-mode.  The design includes use of machined aluminum, carbon fiber, and Gorilla Glass.
  • Dell XPS One 27–  Premium All In One with a 10-point touch enabled, Quad HD (2560×1440) 27″ display.  The all in one will lay flat as well, enabling multiple users to use it at the same time.
  • Sony VAIO Duo 11– Slider with an 11″ display that operates as a notebook and a tablet when the HD display is slid onto the keyboard.
  • Samsung ATIV Tab– Windows RT tablet with 10″ touch display.  It’s thin at 8.9 mm and light at 570 grams

As you can see, the diversity of Windows 8-based touch devices was very wide, which, given a wide variety of high quality apps, would usually mean that something would stick.  The problem is, few really know the true state of Metro-based touch apps, including most PC and chip makers.

Ecosystem Losing Confidence in Metro Application Delivery Timing

Nearly ten months ago, Microsoft held its BUILD conference for Windows 8 software and hardware ecosystem partners.  Microsoft also launched their development platform for Windows 8, called Visual Studio 11.  Every attendee went home with a robust Samsung developer tablet and keyboard with Visual Studio Express Beta, intended to spur development of Metro-based applications.  As of April 2012, six months later, 99 applications were available.  As I outlined here, this was way behind where Apple was but far ahead of where Android was.

So where does that leave the state of Metro apps?  Microsoft is now seven weeks away from launch and virtually no one has much of a sense for how many compelling Metro apps will be available at launch.  Here were some key milestones that Microsoft has anounced:

  • April 18, announces developer submission locales from 5 to 38 markets, but limited to select partners; app catalog at 21 markets
  • May 31, “hundreds of preview apps in the catalog-including the first desktop app listings”; app catalog increases to 25 markets; Share contract added
  • July 20, Microsoft outlines how to monetize and get paid for apps
  • August 1, RTM Windows store opens; “qualifying businesses can submit apps”; 54 new markets and 24 app languages added

As of today with my version of Windoes RTM, I can only see 844 Desktop + Metro apps in the Windows 8 store.  I do not see most of my favorite apps, including Facebook, Path, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, Netflix, Hulu+, Amazon Video, HBO Go, ESPN Video, Time Warner Video, CNN, Flipboard, Pulse, Nike Running, MyFitnessPal, Pandora, Flixter, or E*trade.  I am concerned and many ecosystem executives are telling me that they are very concerned with the state of Metro-based applications.  Should we really care about how many Metro applications will be available at launch given Windows 8 is a five year investment?

Why Should We Care About Apps at Launch?

Having microscopically observed and participated in the launch of the Motorola XOOM, HP TouchPad and the BlackBerry PlayBook, there were some common threads that led to their failed launches and quick retreat.  These issues included:

  1. Incomplete hardware: hardware features did not work or were not available, including SD cards, and LTE support.
  2. Incomplete paid content: lack of support for paid movies, music, games and books.
  3. Sluggish and buggy: experience was slower than expected and/or included many bugs
  4. Lack of high quality apps: few applications were available that consumers recognized or were compelling.  In some cases, basic apps were missing like calendar, mail and contacts.
  5. Priced at iPad: tablets even with issues above were priced on top of the iPad, an already known and successful product with a great consumer brand

Many of these issues were addressed shortly after launch, but it didn’t make a difference.  The damage was done and in most cases, irreparable.  What developer wants to write apps for an ecosystem or platform that just got slaughtered by the press, analysts and consumers?

What about post-launch? Some issues still exist even for 10″ Android tablets.  Android 10″ tablets have come a long way with ICS, Jelly Bean and paid content, but still suffer from a lack of high quality apps, which still number in the 100’s.  Remember, part of the the success of the Google Nexus is that it leverages the Android phone applications, not those designed for tablets. And, let’s not forget it is priced at half of the iPad. I believe Windows 8 will launch with #1 complete hardware via PC makers, #2 paid content via XBOX Live, Netflix and Kindle and so far it looks that even #3 Windows RT will have acceptable performance.  As for #4 and #5, well no one know yet and if we can learn anything from Android tablets, a robust supply of touch-based applications are required for success, which eludes them almost 2 years later.

I’ll say it again…… innovative consumer hardware for touch-based products is meaningless without thousands of high quality, compelling and popular apps.

How Significant is the Synaptics ThinTouch, ForcePad and ClearPad Technology?

As I have cited previously, human computer interface (HCI) changes have defined the winners of the last decade in the phone, tablet, and premium PC and game console markets. I believe this will continue into the future. As important as the singular technologies are the way that different kinds of controls come together as a system to deliver multi-modal input methods. This is why I am so excited about Synaptics three new technologies, ThinTouch, ForcePad and ClearPad. They have the chance to revolutionize the way notebooks, convertibles and tablets will be used in the future. Over the last few months, I got an insider’s view of the technologies, talked with the designers and HCI experts, and of course, got my hands on the technologies. I’d like to share some insights I’ve gained on the technologies.

Multi-Modal is the Future of HCI

The future of all device interaction will not be governed by a single way of interaction, but via multi-modal interactions. Essentially, devices will take inputs in a myriad of ways, whether they are via keyboard, direct touch, voice, and even through machine vision. To not confuse the user, they will all need to work as a cohesive “system” and therefore need extensive systems integration and software work. In the next few years, this will be especially true on notebooks, convertibles and tablets. Synaptics has some incredible smartphone technologies with its InCell and TDDI (touch display integration), but I want to focus on HCI for notebooks and tablets. Let’s dive into the technologies.

ForcePad Technology

Over the last ten years, Synaptics and Apple have driven the biggest advancements in touchpads. Just look at how theforcepad touchpad has morphed from a small, three button touchpad to a large, button-less touchpad seen today’s premium Ultrabooks and Apple Macbooks.

ForcePad technology removes all moving parts, is pressure sensitive, and at less than 2.8mm, is thinner than a slice of cheese. ForcePad has the ability to perform all the functions users can perform with a ClickPad, even without knowing there is pressure sensitivity, thus reducing any adjustment period or learning curve. Synaptics usability research scientists (with whom I met) have tested this and observed that on average a user with a ForcePad easily adapts to this hingeless touchpad and quickly prefers this experience over the majority of hinged PC designs on the market today. The “gesture continuation” capabilities that the ForcePad pressure sensitivity offers, provides a smoother and easier method to perform the core functions from pointing to scrolling and zooming.

By adding pressure sensing, this enables consistent interactions on any part of the touchpad and it never wears out, making it much more reliable. There’s even an auto-calibration feature that has several benefits. For the OEM it enables a consistent OEM branded feel & behavior across models, that is something that is not in PC notebooks today as the hinge mechanism in today’s ClickPad is developed by the OEM’s choice of ODM, using several ODMs, and OEM may have different feels for the ClickPad even if using the same supplier because the ODM designs the hinge. Next the auto-calibration feature has the ability to compensate for chassis-flex, with thin and light notebooks, some can flex and activate a click just by picking the notebook up with one hand, ForcePad can detect this behavior and reduce accidental clicks. Lastly, while the OEM can pre-select the desired feel, this auto-calibration feature can enable a user to personalize their response, adjusting if for how firm or light they may want.

Its ability to “feel the force” also opens up new usage models where by adding a third, relative dimension, a user could conceivably replace a joystick to play a game, eliminate the need to choose new brush sizes in a paint program, or even eliminate annoying, slow scrolling on long web pages or documents.

The ForcePad, codenamed “Jedeye” in the a User Interface Software and Technology conference (UIST) competition was selected for the student software development and is expected to look at innovative methods to provide innovative methods to HCI through the addition of pressure sensitivity.

The benefits of making the touchpad 40% thinner by eliminating the hinge are straight forward. By making the touchpad thinner, the PC maker has the ability to use that volume to make the device notebook chassis thinner or even use that space for extra battery.

Users will need to get used to the lack of a clicking sound and feel, but as the entire industry learned, clicking is optional. As we learned from Apple and BlackBerry phones, what many thought would be an issue wasn’t at all, and those who sat in the past learned to regret it. Now on to the keyboard.

ThinTouch Technology

There hasn’t been a whole lot of innovation on keyboards over the last 20 years. Even while some of the best OEMthintouch-edge companies like Lenovo and their customers pride themselves with the ThinkPad keyboard performance, it is open to the same issues as all scissor-based mechanisms. That is to say, they are more open to break and become full of gunk. Have you ever had a key pop off and have to replace the entire keyboard due to a scissor mechanism?

ThinTouch removes the entire mechanism and replaces it with a capacitive touch enabled mechanism that is 40% thinner and brings several benefits. First, by removing the scissor mechanism, they keyboard should be lighter, thinner, and backlit keyboards should be more effective, brighter and require less battery draw due to the design without a scissor mechanism and also more reliable and manufacturable according to Synaptics. Secondly, keys are capacitive, there is the potential to enable personalization and turn on pressure based controls and even near-field “air gestures” into the mix. Imagine if you had a gesture to “fling” an image from your laptop to the TV by gesturing a certain way without even touching the keys. Reading a book, air swipe to turn the page. Once you make the keyboard, capacitive, the sky is the limit. Now onto the touchscreen.

ClearPad Technology

Synaptics got a bit of a late start in the touch display controller market but they are making up for it by expanding their controller line that supports windows 8 touch specifications from 12” now up to include the13.3, 14.1, 15 and 17” displays. And, in the future, but evidenced today in the smartphones up to 5”, tablets and convertibles could move to InCell, which removes and entire discrete sensor, thinning the product, improving the optical qualities and increasing performance. The ClearPad Series 4, TDDI smartphone technology, shrinks the number of controller from two to one; integrating Touch with the actual Display Driver IC this will significantly improve responsiveness while lowering cost.

For now, Synaptics biggest advantage in tablet and convertible touch display controllers as it marries up perfectly with ForcePad and ThinTouch. And that happens to be one of Synaptics’ biggest advantage, which is they don’t stop at the hardware. Their offering is the system and total HCI experience that is the blend of hardware, firmware, software, and the test tools to deliver this multi-modal interface solution.

Will PC Manufacturers Spend an Extra Dollar?

Unfortunately for PC makers over the last few years, Apple has run away with the premium-priced notebook and premium-priced all in one market. Ultrabooks could change this, but we won’t know until after the holiday selling season. Ironically, some Ultrabooks still come with cheap touchpads and uninteresting keyboards.

I believe that many PC makers will quickly adopt these Synaptics technologies to differentiate themselves from Apple and from each other, and some will even drive them across mid-range product lines, too. Unfortunately, some OEMs will continue to count pennies as they lose dollars, as the price between high quality touchpads and mediocre quality is around one dollar. When Apple comes out with their next generation of HCI, they will wish they had invested that dollar.

Microsoft Office 2013’s Biggest Risk Could be its Visual Design

Microsoft Office has been the staple of productivity for years, particularly for businesses. Therefore, whenever big changes happen to the product, it’s a big deal. Literally millions of IT departments and users shoulder the burden to learn every new version in hopes of squeaking out every ounce of corporate productivity. Microsoft’s latest version is in preview, out for testing millions of current and some potential users, too. There has been a lot written about the risks on potential pricing and its cloud-first method, but I believe the biggest risk is in its visual design, which looks more like a free Google product than a rich app buyers pay $399 for.

clip_image002Whether the industry accepts it or not, Apple is leading the latest design wave as measured by what looks premium. Physically, Apple design is all about minimalism with brushed aluminum, blacks, whites and sweeping angles with as few connectors and buttons as possible. The software design language is connected to the hardware language as that same brushed aluminum and minimalism is brought to OSX and apps like Mail and Calendar. Some apps take on a style of real world objects like Contacts, Notes, Pages, Find Friends, Newsstand and Photo Booth with elements of paper, leather, wood and even fabric. I cannot say I am a huge fan of the real-life designs, but it hasn’t stopped me or millions from buying Apple products. Microsoft’s Metro is distinctly different.

Metro design is a sharp departure from Windows 7 and also very different from Apple. Being different is a good thing as long as it attracts who you are targeting. Metro is direct touch, air gesture and speech control first, mouse and keyboard second. It focuses on the content by adding a ton of white space, 90 degree angles, and multiple, bright colors. There are no ties to real-life metaphors in color, shape, or texture. Like many, I like Metro for phones, tablets and even the XBOX. Now Office, in Office  2013 adopts the Metro design, a sharp departure from Office 2010. After using Office 2013 for a week, this is unfortunately where my Metro design admiration stops. The interesting part is that I thought it looked fine in screen shots, but as I used it on my 23” display for a week, it felt lifeless and drab. It was hard to even sit in front of and use for a few hours and I believe many other users will have this challenge as well.

I must point out that the industry has lived through many Office design changes, and there has always been a lot of uproar.  This is nothing new.  Remember when the ribbon first came out?  Many said that would be the thing that drove people to the alternatives which didn’t happen.  I think this case could very well be different as many alternatives exist, primarily Apple and Google and with such a drastic design departure, users will need to relearn or become comfortable with something new.  At no time has Apple’s and Google’s office tools been such a viable alternative.  I do not bring bias into this conversation as I have been a committed Office user since its existence.  In fact, I bend over backwards to use it in that I pay a monthly fee to Google just so I can sync my Google contacts and calendar to Outlook.  Based on the design changes and the alternatives, I am considering the switch and am looking at Apple and Google right now.  While mine and other’s purchase criteria incorporate more than just design, I think it is vital as it’s what you will be staring at eight hours a day.

The Google Apps for Business design language is more similar to Office 2013 than to Office 2010. It is minimal and very blocky with few shadows and lines.  In some ways, it’s more minimal than even Office 2013 that still sports the full ribbon.

Apple’s Mail and Calendar are more like Office 2013, with depth and shadows but with a very minimal ribbon or header and has seamless connections to Google Mail and Calendar without a monthly fee.

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So what does this mean to the success of Office 2013?  I believe Microsoft’s risk in enterprise is primarily with Google Apps for Business, but until Google can develop more robust spreadsheet scripting, increase presentation design  sophistication, and implement a more robust offline capabilities, it won’t make too big a dent in white collar professionals.  Employees who just need mail and calendar, Google is a big risk.  At $499-349 retail price, why would IT even think of doing this? And look at the Google design…. looks so similar now with Office 2013.  For small businesses, I believe Apple is the big risk to Microsoft Office 2013.  Included with every Mac, a user gets a full-fledged and robust email and calendar program and can users buy decent spreadsheet, presentation and word processors for  $19.99 a piece.  add to that they’re already  synced with iCloud and have optimized apps for the iPhone and iPad. Like me, users with Apple can also eliminate the monthly fee I pay for the Google Connector for Outlook.

It is a good time for consumers and businesses as even more choices are available than ever.  Now that the design has changed so much, now is the time to explore your options.

Human-Computer Interface Transitions will Continue to Drive Market Changes

As a former executive and product manager for end consumer products and technologies, I have planned and conducted extensive primary research on Human-Computer Interfaces (HCI) or Human Machine Interface (HMI). A lot of this research was for the industrial design of consumer products and their mice, keyboards, and even buttons. I conducted other research for software and web properties, too. Research was one input that was mixed with gut instinct and experience which led to final decisions, and in those times and companies for which I worked, were #1 in their markets. Only recently have innovations in HCI come to the forefront of the discussion as the iPhone, iPad and XBOX Kinect have led in HCI and in market leadership. I believe there is a connection between HCI and market leadership which needs more exploration.

For years, the keyboard and mouse dominated in HCI. For the previous deskbound compute paradigm, the keyboard was the best way to input text and perform certain shortcuts. The mouse was the best way to open programs, files and also move objects around the desktop. This metaphor even impacted phones. Early texting was done on 12 keys where users either forced it with one, two, or three strikes of a key to represent a different letter which was then improved with T9 text prediction. Thankfully, Blackberry popularized the QWERTY phone keyboard for much improved texting and of course, mobile email. Nokia smartphones then popularized the “joystick”, which served as a mini omni-directional pointer, once the industry shifted to an iconic, smartphone metaphor.

Then Apple changed everything with the iPhone. They both scrapped the physical keyboard and the physical pointer and replaced it with the finger. We can debate all day long if it were the capacitive touch screen, the app ecosystem, or something else that drove Apple to its successful heights, but we can all agree that Apple needed both to make a winner. Just use on of those $99 tablets with a resistive touch screen and you will know what I’m talking about.

The touchpad has gone through many noticeable changes as well. Remember when every notebook had a touchpad and two, sometimes three buttons? Now look at Dell’s XPS 13, the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro. We are now looking at a world with giant trackpads that can recognize the multitudes of gestures with minimal effort.

Then Microsoft changed the game with the XBOX Kinect. Interestingly enough, like Apple, Microsoft eliminated physical peripherals and replaced with a body part or multiple body parts. Nintendo reinvented gaming with the Wii and its bevvy of physical controllers, and then Microsoft removed them and replaced them with major limbs of the body. In the future, Microsoft could remove the gaming headset microphone, too, once Kinect can differentiate between and separate different player’s voices.

Voice is of course one of the most recent battlegrounds. Microsoft has shipped voice command, control and dictation standard with Windows PC for nearly a decade but has never become mainstream. They do provide a very good “small dictionary” experience on the XBOX Kinect, though. Apple has Siri, of course, and Google has Voice. Microsoft may look like the laggard here based upon what they’ve produced on PCs and phones, but I am not counting them out. They have mountains of IP on voice and I wouldn’t doubt it if the industry ends up paying them a toll for many voice controlled system in a similar way OEMs are paying Microsoft every time they ship Android. This is just one reason Apple licenses Nuance for the front-end of Siri.

We are far from done with physical touch innovations. Just look at Windows 8 notebooks. Windows 8 notebooks are experiencing a dramatic shift, too, with their multiple gestures using multiple fingers. Just look at all the innovations Synaptics is driving for Windows 8. Their Gesture Suite for Windows 8 “modern touchpads” adds supports for the eight core gesture interactions introduced with Windows 8 touch, specifically supporting the new edge swipes to navigate the fundamentals of Windows 8 Metro experience. Interestingly, with the addition of all of the Windows 8 gestures on the trackpad, for certain usage models, the external mouse actually starts to get in the way of the experience. I can see as touch displays and advanced touchpads become commonplace, this could eliminate the need for a mouse. This would be interesting as in previous HCI shifts, it resulted in the elimination of a physical device to improve the experience.

The long-term future holds many, many innovations, too. I attended this year’s annual SIGCHI Conference in Austin, TX, which I like to describe as the “SIGGRAPH for HCI” and it is truly amazing what our future holds. Multiple companies and universities are working on virtual keyboards, near field air touch using stereopsis (2+ cameras), improved audio beam forming for better far-field and a bevy of other HCI techniques that you have to see to believe.

What can we take away from all of this? One very important takeaway here is to realize that those companies I cited who led with major HCI changes ended up leading in their associated market spaces. This was true for Blackberry and Nokia during their haydays, and now it is Apple, Microsoft and maybe Google’s turn. It doesn’t always stand true, though in commercial markets, but in many cases, stands true for consumer companies. Just look at SAP. In the future, it is important to keep your eyes on companies investing heavily in HCI technologies; companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, and innovators and enablers like Synaptics who I believe will continue to surprise us with advanced HCI techniques which will lead to market shifts.

HSA Foundation: for Show or for Real?

I recently spent a few days at AMD’s Fusion Developer Summit in Seattle, Washington.  Among many of the announcements was one to introduce the HSA Foundation, an organization  currently including AMD, ARM,  Imagination, MediaTek, and Texas Instruments.  The HSA Foundation was announced to “make it easy to program for parallel computing.”  That sounds a bit like an oxymoron as parallel programming has been the realm of “ninja programmers” according to Adobe’s Chief Software Architect, Tom Malloy at AMD’s event.  Given today’s parallel programming challenge, lots of work needs to be done to make this happen, and in the case of the companies above, it comes in the form of a foundation.  I spent over 20 years planning, developing, and marketing products and when you first hear the word “foundation” or “consortium” it conjures up visions of very long and bureaucratic meetings where little gets done and there is a lot of infighting.  The fact is, some foundations are like that but some are extremely effective   like the Linux Foundation. So which path will the HSA Foundation go down?  Let’s drill in.

The Parallel/GPU Challenge

The first thing I must point out is that if CPUs and GPUs keep increasing compute performance at their current pace, the GPU will continue to maintain a raw compute performance advantage over the CPU, so it is very important that the theoretical performance is turned into a real advantage.  The first thing we must do is distinguish is between serial and parallel processing.  Don’t take these as absolutes, as both CPUs and GPUs can both run serially and in parallel.  Generally speaking, CPUs do a better job on serial, out of order code, and GPUs do a better job on parallel, in-order code.   I know there are 100’s of dependencies but work with me here.  This is why GPUs do so much better on games and CPUs do so well on things like pattern matching. The reality is, few tasks just use the CPU and few just use the GPU; both are required to work together and at the same level to get the parallel processing gains.  By working at the same level I mean getting the same access to memory, unlike today where the CPU really dictates who gets what and when.  A related problem today is that coding for the GPU is very difficult, given the state of the languages and tools.  The other challenge is the numbers of programmers who can write GPU versus CPU code.  According to IDC, over 10M CPU coders exist compared to 100K GPU coders.  Adobe calls GPU coders  “ninja” developers because it is just so difficult, even with tools like OpenCL and CUDA given they are such low level languages.  That’s OK for markets like HPC (high performance computing) and workstations, but not for making tablet, phone and PC applications that could use development environments such as the Android SDK or even Apple’s XCode.  Net-net there are many challenges for a typical programmer to code an GPU-accelerated app for a phone, tablet, or a PC.

End User Problem/Opportunity

Without the need to solve an end user or business problem, any foundation is dead in the water.  Today NVIDIA  is using CUDA (C, C++, C#,), OpenCL, and OpenACC and AMD supports OpenCL to solve the most complex industrial workloads in existence.  As an example, NVIDIA simulated at their GTC developer conference what the galaxy would look like 3.8B years in the future.  Intel is using MIC, or Many Integrated Cores to tackle these huge tasks.  These technologies are for high-performance computing, not for phones, tablets or PCs. The HSA Foundation is focused on solving the next generation problems and uncovering opportunities in areas like the natural user interface with a multi-modal voice, touch and gesture inputs, bio-metric recognition for multi-modal security, augmented reality and managing all of the visual content at work and at home.  ARM also talked on-stage and in the Q&A about the power-savings they believed they could attain from a shared memory, parallel compute architecture, which surprised me.  Considering ARM powers almost 100% of today’s smartphones and tablets around the world, I want to highlight what they said.  Programming for these levels of apps at low power and enabling 100’s of thousands of programmers ultimately requires very simple tools which don’t exist today to create these apps.

The HSA Foundation Solution

The HSA Foundation goal, as stated above, was to “make it easy to program for parallel computing.” What does this mean?  The HSA Foundation will agree on hardware and software standards.  That’s unique in that most initiatives are just focused on the hardware or the software.  The goal of the foundation is to literally bend the hardware to fit the software.  On the hardware side this first means agreement on the hardware architectural definition of the shared memory architecture between CPU and GPU.  This is required for the CPU and GPU to be at the same level and not be restricted by buses today like PCI Express.  The second version of that memory specification can be found here.  The software architecture spec and the programmer reference manual are still in the working group.  Ultimately, simple development environments like the Google Android SDK, Apple’s XCode and Microsoft’s Visual Studio would need to holistically support this to get the support of the more mainstream, non-ninja programmer.  This will be a multi-year effort and will need to be measured on a quarterly basis to really see the progress the foundation is making.

Foundations are Tricky

The HSA Foundation will encounter issues every other foundation encounters at one time in its life.  First is the challenge of founding members changing their minds or getting goal-misaligned.  This happens a lot where someone who joins stops buying into the premise of the group or staunchly believes it isn’t valuable anymore.  Typically that member stops contributing but could even become a drag on the initiative and needs to be voted off.  The good news is that today, AMD, ARM, TI, MediaTek and Imagination have a need as they all need to accelerate parallel processing.  The founding members need to make this work for their future businesses to be as successful as they would like. Second challenge is the foundation is missing key players in GPUs.  NVIDIA is the discrete GPU PC and GPU-compute market share leader, Intel is the PC integrated GPU market share leader, and Qualcomm is the smartphone GPU market share leader.  How far can the HSA Foundation get without them?  This will ultimately be up to guys like Microsoft, Google and Apple with their development environments.  One wild-card here is SOC companies with standard ARM licenses.  To get agreement on a shared memory architecture, the CPU portion of ARM SOC would need to be HSA-compliant too, which means that every standard ARM license derived product would be HSA-compliant.  If you had an ARM architecture license like Qualcomm has then it wouldn’t need to be HSA-compliant.  The third challenge is speed.  Committees are guaranteed to be slower than a partnership between two companies and obviously slower than one company.  I will be looking for quarterly updates on specifications, standards and tools.

For Show or for Real?

The HSA Foundation is definitely for real and formed to make a real difference.  The hardware is planned to be literally bent to fit the software, and that’s unique.  The founding members have a business and technical need, solving the problem means solving huge end user and business problems so there is demand, and the problem will be difficult to solve without many companies agreeing on an approach.  I believe over time, the foundation will need to get partial or full support from Intel, NVIDIA, and/or Qualcomm to make this initiative as successful as it will need to be to accelerate the benefits of parallel processing on the GPU.

 

 

Ultrabooks: Progress a Year Later?

One year ago almost to the day at Computex 2011, Intel introduced Ultrabooks to the world.  The first generation of Ultrabooks was nice, but they were also homogeneous (exception Dell XPS 13) and very expensive, limiting  access to many demographics. So are things any different a year later? After seeing what Intel’s Ultrabook partners launched so far at Computex, it’s only fair to characterize it as impressive. Design wins and choice don’t guarantee sales, but you cannot have sales without it.  OEMs at Computex launched some serious innovation with new form factors and usage models while lowering price points which I think deserves a deeper look.  It also gives us a good indication how far Intel has come and where this is all going.

Display Size

First generation Ultrabooks came with 13” displays.  Display size is one of the most important purchase criteria and the fact is, consumers like varying display sizes to match their primary use case.  Generally speaking, those who want to travel prefer smaller displays and those who want to replace desktops or do more content creation prefer the larger screens.    Here are a few examples:

  • HP ENVY 6t– 15.6” display, .78” thick and up to 9 hours battery life
  • Gigabyte U2440– 14″ display, 22mm thick
  • Dell XPS 13– 13″ display in a 12″ chassis, 18mm, up to 9 hours battery life
  • Sony Vaio T– 11.6” display, .71” thick, and up to 7.5 hours battery life

Display Resolution

Most Gen 1 Ultrabooks came with a 13″ display with 1,366 x 768 display resolutions.  That is still the case today on average, but if consumers want more, they can get HD resolutions.  As a reference, the highest supported MacBook Air resolution is 1,440 x 900, 48% less detail than full HD.

Weight

Even though the first Ultrabooks were light, OEMs are even challenging each other on weight.  This is a good thing because in the future because when Windows 8 and convertibles arrive, these systems need to be a lot lighter as to operate as decent tablets.  Here is the lightest, or at least the lightest claimed:

  • Gigabyte X11– at 34.3 oz. with an 11.6″ display, claim to be the lightest (10% lighter than 11.6″ MacBook Air)
  • NEC LaVie Z- 35.2 oz., with a 13.3″ display (26% lighter than 13.3″ MacBook Air)

New Materials

Machined aluminum is nice, but it also exactly what Apple uses.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing because it looks upscale, but in some ways unoriginal and also expensive and heavy.  OEMs have gone out of their way to be different in this with chassis materials.  Here are just a few that I think deserve highlighting:

Touch Interfaces and Convertibles

Touch didn’t make a lot of sense with Windows 7, but Windows 8 changes all this.  As I am an avid tablet + dock user, I am constantly trying to touch my Ultrabook display.  As long as the display doesn’t push back as it is being touched, I think it will work well.  Even better will be convertible designs.

  • Acer Aspire S7– the 11.6″ or 13.1″ display folds back 180 degrees
  • ASUS Transformer Book– the 11.6″, 13″, or 14″ display detaches from the keyboard to use as a tablet
  • Lenovo IdeaPad YOGA– the 13.1″ 1,600 x 900 display bends back 360 degrees to use as a tablet
While manufacturers aren’t indicating these are officially Ultrabooks, they are very exciting:
  • ASUS TAICHI– dual sided HD display in 11.6″ and 13″ form factors.  Open the clamshell and it’s a notebook.  Close it and it’s a tablet.

Discrete Graphics

Original Ultrabooks came with Intel HD 3000 graphics.  Second generation Ultrabooks come with HD 4000 graphics which, while improved, just won’t cut it for everyone.  Discrete graphics attach rates in Western Europe, China, and Russia are all above 50%, so the need is there, and the new Ultrabooks deliver.  With Nvidia launching the GeForce GTX 680M yesterday, things will be getting even more interesting.  Discrete graphics are not available on the Apple MacBoook Air.  Here’s what consumers can order today:

Target Audience

First generation Ultrabooks were 100% consumer-focused.  As we are one year into the Ultrabook initiative, commercial and even enterprise-grade solutions are available:

  • Dell XPS 13– supports TPM security chip, custom factory integration, and worldwide Dell ProSupport
  • HP EliteBook Folio– supports TPM security chip, smart card reader, and worldwide commercial services
  • Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon–  supports 3G connectivity, worldwide service and support

Price Points

Premium price points aren’t necessarily a bad thing; just look at Apple.  BUT, if you don’t have Apple’s brand, then as an OEM in the short-term you will need to live with lower volumes.  Generally, the opening price point for the first gen Ultrabooks was $999 and for second generation, this will be much lower.  Intel and their partners invested in alternative chassis designs, hybrid hard drives, display technology and the inclusion of Core i3 processors to lower opening price points. One important point to keep in mind is that these same, lower-priced Ultrabooks still provide the minimum acceptable bar of experience on vectors like battery life, responsiveness, fast resume, and built-in security features. Here are just a few:

  • Lenovo U310 – starting at $749 with 13.3″ display,  500GB hybrid hard drive, 3rd Gen Intel Core i3 Processors, unknown case material (42% less than MacBook Air)
  • Sony VAIO T– starting at $769 with 13.3″ display,  3rd Gen Intel Core i5 processor, 320GB hybrid hard drive, magnesium/aluminum case, (41% less than MacBook Air)

Wrapping Up

So have Intel and its partners come a long way in a year?  Absolutely. In one year everything has changed; from design diversity and differentiation, user interfaces, improved usage models and price points.  These are all good future indicators for solid sales, because in the end, this is exactly what consumers really want. To be clear, design wins don’t guarantee sales but you cannot have sales without them.  The traditional notebook market will continue to grow but I believe many consumers will choose to pay a bit more for an Ultrabook as they are looking at a better experience for a $100-200 increased investment. In many regions and demographics, that isn’t a lot to ask for, but in many, it’s not.  For those who need a new notebook, want a tablet, but cannot afford both, I believe many more will choose an Ultrabook than ever before.   As touch and convertibles become more pervasive and more affordable given many of the huge Intel touch investments, even more consumers who want it all will choose a touch Ultrabook.  This will be an interesting 12 months, that’s for sure.

 

AMD’s “Trinity” APU Delivers Impressive Multimedia

AMD officially launched its “Trinity” line of second-generation AMD A-Series APUs for notebooks two weeks ago and systems will be hitting the store shelves in a few weeks; desktops are expected later this summer. Reviews are showing that AMD significantly increased its performance per watt over its predecessor, “Llano,” and as a result, Trinity is competitive with Intel on battery life as well. One set of special hardware and software features AMD collectively refers to as the AMD HD Media Accelerator relates to a visibly enhanced and faster multimedia experience, which I think deserves a closer look as mainstream and techies users alike can benefit significantly from their use. It is also good indicator that chip makers are focusing even more on the end user experience and ways to improve it.

Smooth out shaky videos

All of us reading this column have taken a shaky video on our smartphone, palmcorder or camcorder. Whether it’s soccer games, track meets, or the first time our babies run, we all take shaky video. And all of us have watched a shaky video, too, and people relate differently. Some have no issues, but many do and won’t even watch the video. My wife actually feels sick watching any video like this and I’m sure she isn’t alone.

To smooth out these videos and remove the “shakes”, AMD developed AMD Steady Video technology. When run on a Trinity-APU system, AMD Steady Video technology significantly reduces the amount of jitter the user experiences when watching these videos. It is also done automatically without user intervention when video is displayed on supported browsers and media players. AMD Steady Video works with the top web browsers and media players. AMD Steady Video web browsing is supported by Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox. The feature is also supported in Windows Media Player, VLC Player, and ArcSoft and Cyberlink media players, too. This covers an incredibly wide swath of global users.

Improve video quality on any device

One of the technologies more sophisticated users can appreciate is the AMD Accelerated Video Converter. This technology significantly accelerates the recoding and transcoding of video. Recoding means changing the format and size of a video. This helps when users capture video in a very high quality format that is very dense, but want to put the video on their phones, tablets or even upload to YouTube. Recoding the video makes it smaller or places it into a different format where it can be better viewed, shared or edited. Transcoding means recoding and playing back the output in real-time versus storing and sharing. This is the area where the AMD Accelerated Video Converter significantly improves the experience because it cleans up that same video at the same time as it’s recoding the video.

Transcoding comes in handy when you have devices spread out all over the house with video files on them and you want to watch those videos on a myriad of devices from TVs to PCs to game consoles to tablets to smartphones. Transcoding optimizes the video specifically for the playback device as every device prefers different kind of video. A “Trinity”-based notebook using the Accelerated Video Converter with a program like ArcSoft Link+ acts as a “media server” and transcodes the video and sends it to the playback device. The source file doesn’t have to be on the “Trinity” notebook; it can be on any device in the home and if it supports the latest DLNA protocol and if on the same LAN. DLNA isn’t niched anymore as it is supported on virtually every new major consumer electronics device and will even be the basis for all future set top boxes that will stream protected content around the home.

As a final benefit, AMD Perfect Picture technology is a video post-processing capability that works in concert with AMD Steady Video such that all the video that passes through the Trinity-based notebook is cleaned up to look sharper and have richer, more accurate colors. As a result, users can playback better looking video on their companion devices regardless of where they are in the home. This usage model may be for the more sophisticated users, but through features like Apple’s AirPlay and iTunes Share, consumers are getting much more comfortable playing back content from remote devices

Speed up file downloads

Today on a Windows-based PC, there isn’t a QOS (quality of service) arbiter to determine which application gets bandwidth. Users can be downloading a gigantic file like a movie, game, or app and the rest of the system is useless for anything like web browsing and video conferencing. With data density increasing at a faster pace than bandwidth, this will become a larger issue in the future. This is where AMD Quick Stream assists.

AMD Quick Stream adds the QOS feature that Windows lacks. The concept is simple; it provides equal access to each download. If four apps are downloading content, each app gets 25% of the available bandwidth. With three apps, each would get 33%. I found this feature useful as I was downloading a game in the background, looking up stuff on the web, and doing a Skype call. The system just felt more responsive.

Wrapping up

By adding the AMD HD Media Accelerator to all Trinity APUs, AMD is in many ways bucking the tech hardware industry rut of feeds and speeds that don’t demonstrably improve the end user experience. This is neither a minor investment nor a desire to load systems with bloat-ware; these are expensive technologies designed to improve user’s expressed areas of pain while fitting into very small resource footprints. The multimedia features are also comprehensively released and supported for multiple web browsers, media players, and home data protocols which ensure widespread deployment and regular updates. What AMD has done with AMD Steady Video and AMD Quick Stream is undoubtedly positive for end but also a positive message for the ecosystem, too.

Why Apple is Wrong About Convertibles

On Apple’s last earnings call, CEO Tim Cook responded to a question on Windows 8 convertibles by saying, “You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those aren’t going to be pleasing to the user.” At first glance, this makes total sense, and from the company that brought us iPod, iPhone and iPad, this has wisdom. But as we peel back the onion and dig deeper, I do not believe Apple is correct in their assessment. As I wrote here, I have long-believed that convertibles would be popular in 2013 and I still believe convertibles will be a thriving future market, albeit not as large as notebooks or tablets.

Mashups between two devices are rarely successful, particularly in mature markets like PCs. I have researched, planned and delivered 100’s of products in my career, and very rarely have I seen two purpose-built products combined to create something real good. The problem becomes that by combining two products, the result becomes good for no one. The primary reason this becomes the case is that you have to make tradeoffs to make the combined product. By combining most products, you are sub-optimizing the separate product and what they uniquely deliver to their target markets. Convertibles have that possibility, but if designed appropriately as I outlined previously, this won’t happen.

Cars give us a few examples to work from. As the car industry matures, we see more and more specialization. There are now sedans, coupes, mini-vans, SUVs, mini-sedans, sports cars, trucks, truck-hybrids, etc. Specialization is the sure sign of a mature market as consumer’s tastes have gotten to a point where they know exactly what they want and the industry can profitably support the proliferation of models. Industry support is a very important in the industry must be able to afford all this proliferation. The auto industry supports this through common parts that are shared like chassis, engines, and electronics.

What does this have to do with convertibles? Ask yourself this question: If my SUV could perform like a Cayman Porsche, would I like it? Of course you would; it is called a Porsche Cayenne. The problem is, you could pay up to $100,000 for it. Want your sedan to drive like a Cayman? Just get a Porsche Panamera. The problem, again, is that is around $95,000. The expense isn’t just about the brand. Porsche invested real R&D and provides the expensive technology to make these “convertibles” perform well.

There are similarities and differences between the Porsche Panamera and Windows 8 convertibles:

  • Price: Buyers will only need to spend an extra $100-200 more than a tablet to get a convertible. Many will make that choice to have the best of both worlds. The average U.S. car is around $33,000 while the Panamera is around $100,000, three times the average. One argument Apple could have is that if future, full-featured tablets become $299, the added price could be too much to pay for the added convertible functionality.
  • Low “Sacrifice Differential”: This is Apple’s strongest point, as in many mashups, combining two products results in something that isn’t good for any usage model. “Fixed” designs will need to be less than 13mm thick and the “flexible” designs (ie Transformer Prime) need to be less than 18mm thick with keyboard. Otherwise, the convertibles will be too thick to serve as a decent tablet at 13mm or thicker than an Ultrabook over 18mm.
  • Transformation capabilities: Convertible form factors like the Transformer Prime can convert into a “notebook” with an add-on peripheral, but cars cannot. I wish there were a 30-second add on kit that could turn my Yukon into a 911 Porsche but there isn’t. Related to PC convertibles, if you have ever used the Asus Transformer Prime, you know what I am talking about. It is one of the thinnest tablets, and when paired with its keyboard, is only 19mm thick. One of the great features of the Prime is that the keyboard provides an extra 40-50% battery life boost that actually adds utility. Windows 8 for the first time supports the lean-forward and lean-back usage models. As a tablet, the users uses it with Metro. As a “notebook” clamshell form factor, the users can use Metro and then use Windows 8 Desktop with the trackpad and keyboard. This has never existed before and Apple doesn’t have this capability in iOS or OSX.
I do believe that convertibles ultimately will have space in the market as they serve to eliminate, for some users and usage models, redundancy of having two devices. OEMs must be particularly careful in how thick they make them. The original iPad was around 10mm and that was pushing some of the boundaries, particularly with reading books. The thicker the designs, the less desriable they become as they will not make a very good tablet. Flexible designs like today’s Asus Transformer Prime, when connected with Windows 8, could be a lethal market combination as it combines a thin tablet and a keyboard when you want it. Gauging by how much shelf-space is devoted to iPad keyboards, I must conclude that consumers are snatching these up in high volume.
I believe Apple is wrong about convertibles, but on the positive side, Apple’s warning gave the entire industry pause for thought. Interestingly, it provided the opposite effect of what I believe Apple intended, which was to freeze the market. Instead, it indicated that Apple was not going to do it, which motivated more OEMs to build, given they wouldn’t have to worry about Apple. While the volumes for convertibles won’t be as large as tablets or notebooks, I do believe they have a place in the market in the mid-term.

Immersive Social Games Bringing Families Together

The big discussion on social games recently is centered around games like Farmville and companies like Zynga, whose recent IPO generated a lot of attention. I see a much more interesting phenomenon taking place where new, cross-generational and immersive social games are bringing families like mine closer together. It’s an interesting phenomenon that goes back to family baseball and Monopoly. KingsIsle Entertainment, developer for the successful Wizard101 game launched Pirate101 this week. This is the second in cross-generational and social game which puts an exclamation point on the growth and value these kinds of games provide to families, including mine.

My Personal Experience

My son, his five cousins, his uncles and I all play KingsIsle’s Wizard101 MMO game. Most times my son plays and initiates a conference call. Sometimes he even uses Skype. Did I mention he was ten years old too? I really enjoy Wizard101’s ability to cater to my needs as well as my son’s. The characters and situations even harken back to 70’s comedies I grew up on. There are typically two levels to the dialogue, one for adults and one for my son. The game is deep, and according to KingsIsle, there are about 30 hours of spoken audio and hundreds of hours of gameplay in the main quest lines alone.

My son talks to me about Wizard101 at least twice a day about new levels, characters, spells, minions, and even new houses and furniture. He is fully vested. It’s even to the point where I pay him his weekly allowance in Wizard101’s virtual currency called crowns. Is my and my son’s story unique and different? Maybe fanatical but not unique when you look at the numbers.

The Country of Wizard101

My son is not alone in his fanaticism for the game. Wizard101 has 25M registered users, which, if it were a country, would be larger than population of Australia or replace Texas as the second largest state in the US. That is a large reach. Frequency is impressive, too with 14M monthly unique visitors to Wizard101. That’s larger than Sony Online Entertainment’s Freerealms.com, Nickelodeon’s nick.com, EA.com and popcam.com. According to KingsIsle, users have racked up 22.3B minutes of gameplay and have acquired 2B items in their quests. Independent research gives us an insight into why the game is so popular.

Trinity University Research Study

Trinity University surveyed 30,000 Wizard101 players last year and came back with some very interesting results. The study hasn’t been officially released, but I wanted to share a few things I thought were most interesting:

  • 60% of responding children play Wizard101 with other family members. One-third of those children play with their parents or grandparents.
  • 68% of responding adults play Wizard101 with other family members. Approximately two-thirds of those adults play with their children or grandchildren.

KingsIsle gets feedback all the time from its players about how families are experiencing the game together. Players tell stories about grandparents playing with their grandchildren, distant relatives playing with each other, Dads playing with their kids on business trips. There are also stories of older gamers finally finding a sense of community they had always longed for. Gaming can be more than just about having fun, it can be about the core of relationships and life

Jedi Lessons at Hogwarts

The research-based fact that kids and adults can enjoy the same kind of entertainment together makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Look at some of the biggest entertainment phenomenons of our time and it starts to gel. Cross-generational movies music and games are big. Look at Star Wars, Harry Potter, and most of the Pixar movies. Kids, adults and families all enjoy and watch these movies together as the content pleases different generations. KingsIsle isn’t done at Wizard101. There’s more.

Second KingsIsle Cross-Gen Game This Week

KingsIsle announced a new cross generational MMO game this week, called Pirate101. It’s all about pirate adventures and while similar in some ways to Wizard101, it’s quite different, too. I got early access to Pirate 101 and played with my son. He took right to the controls and I enjoyed it even more as the combat is more mature and quite frankly I enjoy the better visual effects. OK, I also enjoyed flying pirate ships around space too.

The game is more mature, but not too mature, to keep my son in the game as he gets older. Pirate101 will be a winner in the Moorhead household and I’m sure in the marketplace as it takes the winning Wizard101 formula and adds more mature themes and gameplay.

Conclusion

Social games are huge in numbers right now, but cross generational games that are very social could be even bigger. I have personally seen it, the reach and usage stats show it, and research tells us why this is the case. The new Pirate101 will tell all of us just how big it can actually get. Between now and then, I will continue to pay my son’s allowance with crowns!

Two Sides of the Consumer Coin to Windows RT

Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled via a blog the different Windows 8 editions and comparing the different features and functionalities.  There are three versions, Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro, and Windows RT.  One of the biggest changes in Windows 8 versus previous editions is the support for the ARM architecture with NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments, and the new naming reflects it.  The Windows 8 on ARM, or WOA for short, gets its own name, called “Windows RT”.  I believe that this naming cuts both ways, some positive and some challenging for the ARM camp, but can be mitigated with marketing spend and education.

Windows RT (ARM) versus Windows 8 (X86)

Windows RT and Windows 8 are very similar but in other ways very different, and in some ways reflect Windows RT’s shedding of legacy…. but not completely.  The Microsoft blog had a lengthy line listing of differences, but here are the ones I feel are the most significant to the general, non-geeky consumer.

The following reflects relevant typical features Windows 8 provides over Windows RT:

  • Installation of X86 desktop software
  • Windows Media Player

The following reflects relevant typical consumer features Windows RT provides over Windows 8:

  • Pre-installed Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote
  • Device encryption

Again, this isn’t the complete list and I urge you to check out the long listing, but these are the features most relevant to the non-geeky consumer.

What isn’t Addressed

What I would have like to seen discussed at length and in detail was support for hardware peripherals.   I will use a personal example to illustrate this.   Last week, I bought for $149 a new HP Photosmart 7510 printer, scanner and fax machine.  Will I am confident I will be able to do a basic print with a Windows RT machine, will I be able to use the advanced printer features and be able to scan and fax?  We won’t know these details until closer to launch, but this needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.

Next, I would have also liked to see some specifics on battery life and any specific height restrictions for Windows RT tablets.  If these devices are intended to be better than an iPad, they will need some experiential consistency to provide consumers with confidence, unlike Android.  As I address below, this wasn’t overt, but a little covert.

The Plusses with what Microsoft Disclosed with Windows RT

There are some positive items for the ARM camp that came from Microsoft’s blog post that covered Windows RT.  Windows RT does support the primary secondary tablet-based needs a general consumer would desire.  In the detailed blog posts, Windows RT supports many features.   This comes to light specifically when you put yourself in the shoes of the general consumer, who doesn’t need features like Group Policy, Domain Join, and Remote Desktop Host.  Also,  I don’t see the absence of Storage Spaces or Windows Media Player as major issues for different reasons.  Storage Spaces is very geeky and I do not believe the typical consumer would do much with it.  I believe Windows RT will have many, many methods of playing video as we see on the iPad and Android tablets, so the absence of Windows media Player isn’t a killer, specifically for tablets.

Windows RT also contains Office, specifically Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote which sells for $99 today. Finally, while details are sketchy, Windows RT supports complete device encryption.  I can only speculate that all data, storage and memory operations are encrypted.  This can potentially leveraged with the consumer, but it’s not something that has kept the iPad from selling.

A final,  important note, is the consistent experience I expect Windows RT to deliver.  By definition, all Windows RT systems will be lightweight with impressive battery life. While this doesn’t come out as clearly in the blog post, I do read between the lines and see where this is headed.  I believe Microsoft wants to deliver the most consistency with Windows RT and leave the experience variability to Windows 8.

There will be challenges, though.

The Risks with what Microsoft Disclosed with Windows RT

While there are positives in what Microsoft disclosed on Windows RT, there are risks and potential downsides, too.  First of all and primarily is the absence of the “8”.  Regardless of how much Microsoft may attempt to downplay the “8”, consumers fixate on generational modifiers to add value to something.  Consumers do this because it makes it easy for them.  When a consumer walks into a store and sees Windows 8 and Windows RT, I expect them to ask about the difference.  What will the answer be from the Best Buy “blue shirt”?  Without a tremendous amount of training on “RT” I would expect them to say, “RT has MS Office, but won’t run older programs.  8 runs all your old programs but doesn’t come with Office.” With that said, the street price adder for Office isn’t public knowledge, but I know that it does add at least $50 to the street price.  This is a discount to $99, but then again, I don’t miss not having Office on my iPad.

As I discussed above, Microsoft needs to disclose more on backward hardware compatibility.  Every day that ensues without a more definitive statement, Microsoft draws in the skeptics.  What wasn’t discussed in the industry 6 months ago is being discussed now.  Finally, how can the lack of X86 desktop software be turned into a positive?  The basic consumer, if offered something more in their minds for the same price, will always choose more, unless they see a corresponding behavior to give up something.  Apple has done a fine job with this on the iPad.  When the iPad first launched, many focused on what it didn’t have, namely USB ports, SD cards, or the ability to print.  The iPad can print in limited fashion, still has no USB or SD card slot and is still selling great.  Windows RT needs a distinct value proposition related to Windows 8 but different too.

What Needs to Be Done Next

If I were in the ARM camp, I would plead with Microsoft to reconsider the naming.  Even adding an “8” to the naming to render “Windows 8 RT” would at least recognize it’s in the same family.  Without it, Windows RT looks like part of the Windows family, but not “new Windows” table. This can be overcome by spend on a unique value proposition.  This distinct value proposition may be that all RT units are thin and light weight and provide a consistent experience, something that Windows 8 cannot guarantee.  The ecosystem then would need to fill “RT” with value and meaning which will be expensive. Finally, the Windows RT ecosystem needs to start better communicating about peripheral compatibility, as every day passes, the broader ecosystem gets more nervous.  With six months to go, there’s a whole lot of work to do, and a lot more in the Windows RT camp than the Windows 8 camp.

 

NVIDIA Solved the Ultrabook Discrete Graphics Problem with Kepler

When Intel released their first Ultrabook specification, one of the first component implications I thought of were the impact 633882_NVLogo_3D_DarkTypeto discrete graphics.  My thought process was simple; based on the Intel specifications for battery life, weight and thickness, designing-in discrete graphics that were additive to Intel’s own graphics would be difficult, but not impossible. By additive, I mean really making a demonstrable difference to the experience versus just a spec bump.  While I respect OEMs need to add discrete graphics for line logic and perception, sometimes it doesn’t make an experiential difference.  This is why I was so surprised and pleased to see NVIDIA’s latest discrete graphics solutions inside Ultrabooks. NVIDIA’s new GPUs based on the “Kepler” architecture not only provide an OEM differentiator, but they also provide a demonstrable, experiential bump to games and video.

Today’s Ultrabooks share similar specs

Today’s field of Ultrabooks is impressive but lack a sense of differentiated hardware specification and usage models. I deeply respect differentiation in design as I point out in my assessment of the Dell XPS 13, but on the whole, I can do very similar things and run very similar apps with the current top crop of Ultrabooks.

As an example, let’s take a look at the offerings at Best Buy.   Of the 13 Ultrabooks, all offer roughly the same or similar specifications: processor (Intel Core I-Series), graphics (Intel HD), operating system (Windows 7 64-bit), display size (13-14″), display resolution (1,366×768), memory (4GB RAM), and storage (128 GB).

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Of these specifications, the level of the Intel Core CPU primarily determines the differential in what a user can actually do with their Ultrabook.  As Ultrabooks have matured a full cycle, differentiating with graphics makes a lot of sense, particularly in the consumer space.

NVIDIA’s Kepler-based GeForce GT 640M Mobile Graphics

Today, NVIDIA launched the first of their latest and greatest GeForce 600M graphics family, the GeForce GT 640M. This GPU features a new architecture code-named “Kepler” which is destined for desktops, notebooks, Ultrabooks, and workstations.  Designed to be incredibly powerful and efficient and created on TSMC’s lower-power HP 28nm process, test results I’ve seen show these new GPUs deliver twice the performance per watt of the prior generation.  Anandtech has thoroughly reviewed the desktop variant, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680, and have given NVIDIA the single card graphics performance crown.

NVIDIAs Kepler differentiates the Acer Timeline Ultra M3

acer m3With the NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M, users can now get the new graphics and the Ultrabook benefits of thin, light, responsive and great battery life. Consumers can actually buy this capability today in Acer’s new Timeline Ultra M3.  The M3 can play all the greatest game titles like Battlefield 3 at Ultra settings, is only 20mm thin and gets 8 hours of battery life.  NVIDIA suggests that this new combination of Ultrabook and Kepler-based graphics equates to the “World’s First True Ultrabook”. I need to test this for myself, but they have a point here given that it provides between a 2X and 10x bump in the most demand gaming titles over the Intel HD graphics.

How NVIDIA’s Kepler-based GPU fits in an Ultrabook

As I said earlier, when I saw the Ultrabook specification, I thought it would be very difficult to get decent discrete graphics into an Ultrabook. My concerns were around power draw to achieve minimum battery requirements and chassis height in 13 and 14″ form factors to include a proper cooling solution.

Between NVIDIA and their OEMs, many different factors played into enabling this capability:

  • NVIDIA Kepler architecture is twice as efficient as the prior SM architecture. The inverse of this is that at half the power, you can provide the same performance. For instance, the GT 640M reportedly provides the same performance as the previous GTX 460M enthusiast class GPU, at around half the power consumption.
  • NVIDIA Optimus technology automatically shifts between the lower power/performance of the Intel HD graphics and the higher power/performance NVIDIA discrete graphics. When the user is doing email, the Intel graphics are operating and the GeForce GPU is consuming zero power.  When the consumer is playing Battlefield 3, Optimus automatically turns on GeForce GPU to provide the best possible performance.
  • New and better power management allows GeForce GPUs to maximize performance by intelligently utilizing the full potential of the notebook’s power and thermal budget. For example, if the notebook’s heat sink assembly has spare thermal headroom, the GeForce GPU can dynamically increase frequency to provide the best possible performance without adversely effecting operating temperature or stability.

I was correct earlier in that this was very challenging and between NVIDIA and its OEMs. It’s clear they stepped up and made it happen.

Ecosystem and NVIDIA Implications

Having NVIDIA’s new high performance graphics inside Ultrabooks is good for the entire ecosystem of consumers, channel partners, OEMs, ODMs, game ISVs and of course, NVIDIA:

  • Consumers get between 2-10X the gaming performance plus all the other Ultrabook attributes.
  • Channel partners, OEMs, and ODMs can now offer a much more differentiated and profitable line of Ultrabooks.
  • Game ISVs and their distribution partners can now participate more fully in the Ultrabook ecosystem.

And, of course, NVIDIA has a big potential win here, too.  According to GFK, over the past two quarters NVIDIA has picked up nearly 10 points of market share inside Intel-based notebooks. NVIDIA’s Kepler only enables them to further increase this share, particularly with Intel Ivy Bridge-based Ultrabooks.  AMD hasn’t yet played their full mobile cards yet, but given AMD’s known GCN architecture and TSMC’s 28nm; they have limited weapons to pull out of their 2012 arsenal in Ultrabooks. The graphics world is a very dynamic market, so you never can be certain what each player is holding back.  AMD held the discrete graphics leadership position for a while, but 2012 looks very good for NVIDIA.