Author: Tim Bajarin

About five years ago, I was talking with an Intel executive who said that one of the companies he had his eye on was Nvidia. At the time Intel was creating their own integrated GPU’s, but he thought there were occasions when it might have made sense for them to be able to have a discrete GPU of their own. Indeed, recently Intel did a deal with AMD to add some of their GPU’s to some of Intel’s higher-end chipsets.

Unfortunately for Intel, an acquisition of nVida was not in the cards. Interestingly, about this same time we started hearing from some investors that they too thought nVidia would be a good acquisition target since Nvidia was struggling with their mobile chip strategy and their high end computing vision had not been solidified at that time. Intel could have probably bought them at a reasonable price and who knows, an Intel and Nvidia marriage could have given Intel even more firepower for their computing arsenal today.

Today, Nvidia’s market cap is $136 billion and has become a powerhouse in supercomputing, AI and Machine learning, high-end graphics and ray tracing and is the #1 supplier of technology for autonomous vehicles. I spent the day at Nvidia’s GTC users conference this week and sat through their CEO Jensen Huang ’s keynote as he shared the incredible advancement’s the company has made just in the last year. He introduced the most powerful GPU ever created, showed how their new high power processors are driving higher levels of AI and Machine learning and how their ecosystem of high-end processors and sensors are making it possible for the auto industry and the world of tech create autonomous vehicles that by 2030, will be the preferred vehicles for most people.

I won’t share details on the keynote as there have been many articles already written on it, and here are some links if you want more details on some of the keynote announcements.

Most Powerful Graphics Card

Quadro GV 100

Autonomous Vehicles

An Interview with Nvidia’s CEO on AI and Machine Learning

Every one of the new products and programs nVidia Introduced at GTC 2018 this week is a game changer and will have a huge impact on many industries that use them and will help make Nvidia customers in multiple industries more competitive and help them differentiate themselves from their competitors.

During the keynote, It became much clearer to me that in hindsight I am really glad Intel did not buy Nvidia. While I am sure it would have been a good acquisition for Intel and it would have given them a better position in discrete GPU’s, they would have probably lost much of Nvidia’s major talent, and I am not sure Intel would have integrated nVidia into Intel’s culture properly. Even worse, Intel might have kept Nvidia from continuing the kind of innovative research that has made nVidia the powerful company it is today.

Over the last five years, Nvidia turned up the heat on their research towards supercomputing and high-end GPUs’ that are now used in Hollywood, gaming, visualization apps and high-end medical imaging. They also put serious investments and R&D into technology that will drive the future of autonomous vehicles, as well as AI and machine learning. By doing this, Nvidia reinvented themselves. Today they are one of the most important companies in semiconductors with a broad reach of products that will only help them grow even more in the future.

Led by Mr. Haung and some of the most talented teams of engineers in the industry, I expect that Nvidia will continue to innovate and keep Moore’s law alive in their own way.

Like many of my tech friends who are over 55 but started in the world of technology when we were in our early 20’s or 30’s, technology is second nature to us. For those of us who grew up with tech, we often forget that the large majority of people in the US and around the world (especially in the over 50 age bracket) have not been as fortunate as we have been. In most cases, they have only embraced a technology if it can make their lives easier or provides new forms of services such as mobile telephony, instant messaging, and in much older demographics, a lifeline line to emergency services should they need them.

I have been reading a fascinating book entitled “The Longevity Economy-Unlocking the World’s Fastest Growing, Most Misunderstood Market” by Joseph F Coughlin, who is the Founder and Director of the MIT Agelab.

Mr. Coughlin states in his book that business leaders need to take more seriously the need to serve the growing older market, which he defines as a “vast, diverse group of consumers representing every possible level of health and wealth, worth about $8 trillion in the United States alone and climbing.”

The book is a fascinating read the delves into the fact that with modern medicine people are living much longer and in a lot of cases are more active and becoming more interested in the role technology could play in their lifestyles.

The Chart below shows that about 55% of folks over 50 in America have a smartphone, but I think that number is low. I have been inside some senior citizen facilities and most of the folks there have a cell phone and, in many cases, a smartphone. The chart also shows that about 56% have laptops and that also may be too low as we have seen laptops gain more acceptance in this age group too. Even tablets have become of interest to those over 50, and in a lot of instances, the tablet is the personal computer for people in this age bracket.

The other area that the over 50 crowd has embraced is social media. 65% of them are on Facebook, 21% on Instagram and 24% on Linked In while 19% are on Twitter.

As Mr. Coughlin points on in his book on “The Longevity Economy” this demographic also has money to spend. The 50-65 demographic is in all likelihood still working and has more dispensable income during these years as kids have left the nest and many are getting close to the end of 30 years of house payments. The over 65 crowd are starting to move to retirement, and they often have extra income to spend on tech if it meets a particular need.

Even armed with this information and knowing that an older demographic could buy their tech products, most PC makers and tech vendors design and market their products for a demographic of 18-45. While some vendors do place ads in publications like AARP and others mags aimed at an older demographic, ads placed there are an after-thought and not really part of a focused marketing push.

That is a mistake. This older generation needs technology more than ever as part of their aging lifestyle. This is especially true of things like smartwatches and fitness trackers with their added health tracking features, as well as dedicated devices like the ones from AliveCor who has an EKG watchband for the Apple Watch and a mobile EKG device. Other vendors have connected blood pressure readers and various connected tools for monitoring blood sugars for diabetics and other diseases.

This market is too large to ignore and all tech companies need to reassess this market that could be very lucrative for them.

In late February, I started writing a piece entitled “Why Apple should buy Texture.” For months I had been studying Apple’s need to acquire more content and original programming. In my main Techpinions column on Monday, I laid out the challenge they have in this area given the strong investments competitors like Netflix and Amazon are making, especially in video content.

I did not add Texture to Monday’s column as I was mainly focusing on video, but last month, when I was researching this topic, I concluded that Apple needed to be more aggressive with their books and magazine services as they had been languishing way behind Amazon and Texture.

So I was not surprised when Apple SVP of Internet Software and Services, Eddie Cue, during a session at SXSW on Monday, stated that Apple had bought Texture. In the column I was writing about this back in February, I reasoned that “Texture already had done the kind of legwork that would give Apple an edge in the publishing business and that this service would make them more competitive in the world of magazine publishing. It would also give them more content to add to their overall services offerings.” BTW, the reason I did not finish the article at that time was that so many other major tech news and issues came up that took precedence over this article and I held it with the goal of publishing it later this month.

I am a big fan of Texture and have used it since it first came to market. It has close to 200 magazines that I can read for a price of $9.99 a month. While I subscribe to only 20% of what is available, the magazines I do get are of real interest to me. As a self-described foodie, I subscribe to all food magazines and read all of them each month. It has two specialty mags on Diabetes that I also read religiously. I subscribe to a couple of car magazines to keep up with another area of interest and download each month or week most tech and business pubs such as PC Mag, Fast Company, Bloomberg Businessweek, MacWorld, Wired, Fortune. I also subscribe to news and commentary magazines like Time, The New Yorker and The Atlantic, as well as a few sports mags such as ESPN and Golf Magazine.

What is unique in almost all of these magazines is that they subscribe to high levels of journalism and I have much more trust in what I read in them than I do from items being posted on Facebook and Twitter, in which so much of it is “fake news.”

From my experience, when I am in Texture I feel like I am in a “safe zone” and while some of the more opinionated magazines could have some fake news in their commentary, for the most part, I find the articles are written to be well researched and representative of the old school journalism that I have grown up with and admired for decades.

Apple may not understand this “safe zone’ concept that Texture provides and most likely purchased Texture to bolster their desire to be a bigger player in the publishing business. But for many Texture fanatics like myself, this is one of the real reasons I go to the mags in Texture on a daily basis, besides the fact that it has publications of real interest to me.

Fake news on social media sites is not going away-ever. These sites are now abused in ways nobody imagined until recently. At the same time, people do want to read well written and researched content that they can trust, and the magazines in Texture, for the most part, delivers on that promise. While the strategic goal for Apple will be to bulk up their publishing business and add more content for customers to broaden their ecosystem, I believe for millions of people, Texture delivers one of the best “safe haven’s” for quality journalism. And if Apple can control the quality of their magazine offerings, it will have another hit on its hands.

Most established businesses have grown up with Microsoft tools when it comes to business productivity. However, a younger generation of users seems to be using Google’s G-Suite offerings almost exclusively when it comes to creating documents, collaboration and many other forms of productivity in school and their early business lives.

My youngest granddaughter is in a public school that uses Chromebooks and not one of Microsoft’s tools are used when it comes to doing her assignments or homework. All of their tasks are being done in G-Suite. As of now, she would not even know how to use Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. While she currently uses Snapchat to collaborate with schoolmates on joint assignments, Google’s newest chat tools will make it easier for her to use these tools so she can stay in G-Suite when working with other classmates on a project, instead of jumping off to SnapChat to handle that part of the collaboration process.

I recently attended a G-Suite briefing at Google that shared the three new updates to Microsoft’s Office alternative, in which the number one thing asked for by users was the integration of this chat feature to become part of the total G Suite Solution. At this briefing, they highlighted their recent partnership with Salesforce.com and pointed out that Salesforce, along with other major customers in the enterprise and education, drove this demand for chat to be integrated into the G-Suite collaboration tools.

This was the first time I got a chance to hear and talk to the team behind G-Suite and saw how well this product was designed and how much Google pays close attention to their customer’s interests and demands when it comes to adding new features and functions. While I had read about the Google/Salesforce deal, I was not aware of how encompassing it is when it comes to how Salesforce will use Analytics 360 and G-Suite within their overall application.

I had a conversation with a high ranking exec recently whose daughter also uses a Chromebook in her school, and he pointed out that his daughter recently asked him to look at a doc she was working on and needed his input. He mostly uses Microsoft Office in his work and expected her to show him a Word document. But she pulled up Google’s G-Suite and showed him the doc in this application and a light went off in his head. At that moment he realized that this younger generation is growing up entirely without using any traditional Windows apps and by using Chromebooks in their schools, they are being programmed to use these tools as they grow up and most likely, will be using G-Suite when they eventually enter the business world.

After I left the Google briefing on new additions to G-Suite, I realized just how serious Google is when it comes to not only going after eduction but also business markets. G-Suite is already a real competitor to Microsoft’s Office and is the primary tool used in education today, especially where Chromebooks are being used. And, we are hearing that by this fall, Google will have a massive marketing campaign pushing Chromebooks to business users and consumers.

Along with that push will come many new models from the top three PC makers who are becoming more bullish on Chromebooks within their education programs. However, we see these PC makers willing to be more aggressive in designing new versions of the Chromebooks for business users too. In fact, don’t be surprised if at least one or two significant vendors become big proponents of Chromebooks and Chrome OS for business over the next few years as they are seeing more interest in these types of laptops by IT departments who, like Salesforce.com, are starting to see the value of these Chromebooks for their workforce.

That is why I also expect Microsoft to become even more aggressive with their Surface laptops and 2-in-1 products. The Surface has always been Microsoft’s way to try and compete with Chromebooks, and their Windows 10S software initially was explicitly focused on education. However, Windows 10S is being morphed into a broader version of Windows OS and is on track to become the core OS for Microsoft across all PC products in the future.

Given Google’s stronger focus on Chromebooks and advancing GSuite to meet the demands of consumers and business users, Google has emerged as a compelling alternative to what Microsoft has provided the PC world for decades. While Google has a long way to go to catch up with Microsoft regarding broad worldwide reach, I no longer think of Google as just another player who has an alternative PC OS and Office competitor. Thanks to serious attention from the major PC makers and Google’s own efforts to make their software applications better for business and education, Google has emerged as a force to reckoned with.

Microsoft should be worried about Google’s ability to challenge them in markets around the world and be more aggressive with both their Surface products, Office and Windows OS evolutions to stay competitive. Google is in this for the long run and at the very least will keep Microsoft on their toes and pushing them to innovate. But I also see Google gaining ground on Microsoft and becoming a solid competitor to them in education, consumer and business markets going forward.

Not long after Apple introduced the Newton in 1991, their first personal digital assistant (PDA), it became pretty clear that this product’s life would be a short one. While the concept of the Newton got real attention, its design and functions were weak and in the end did not work as stated by Apple. Its most significant problem was its handwriting recognition technology that was deeply flawed. It did not work for a lot of reasons, the key one being the mobile processors available at that time were incapable of handling this task with any level of accuracy or precision. And the software Apple used for this was inferior in its execution.

I remember flying to Chicago for the launch of the Newton at the request of then Apple CEO John Scully, who drove this project from the beginning. He introduced the concept of the PDA to a very broad audience and tried to make Newton Apple’s next big hit.

But at that event, when it was demoed, the handwriting recognition failed continually, and even though we were told it was an early version of this software, I had a strong feeling that this was a product that Apple overpromised and unfortunately would under deliver.

Newton had a short life but during its early years Jeff Hawkins, who I had met when he was at Grid computing, began working on his own version of a PDA that he called the Palm Pilot. In the early development stages of his PDA, Jeff invited me over to his office to see his mockup, which was a wooden block sculpted to look like what eventually became the first Palm Pilot.

During that time we talked about Apple’s Newton, and I asked him why he thought it had failed. He stated that while he was at Grid Computers, who introduced the first real pen computing laptop in 1988 called the GridPad, he learned that when it came to pen input and character recognition, one needed to follow an exact formula and write the characters as stated in the manual.

At the time the GridPad came out, it too had a low-level CPU and was not able to handle accurate character recognition. He said that Apple was overly optimistic about Newton’s ability to manage real character recognition and with so many writing variables, it was doomed to fail.

That is why when he introduced the Palm Pilot he also introduced the Graffiti writing system which taught a user how to write a number, letter of the alphabet or specific characters like #, $, etc., in ways the technology in the Palm Pilot could recognize these inputs.

I was one of the first to test a Palm Pilot. I found that Graffiti was very intuitive and within a couple of days, I had mastered its characters as long as I used the prescribed ways to write these letters, numbers or characters. By doing that it was translated into digital information on the screen in real time. One could call this a form of reverse programming as in this case; the machine was teaching me how to use it in the language it understands.

Fast forward to today, and I believe we have a similar thing going on with digital assistants whether they are delivered on a PC, smartphone, smart speaker, or smart TV. One big difference this time around is that the processing power, along with AI and machine learning, is making these digital assistants much smarter, but not always accurate.

In what I think of as a Graffiti-like move, Amazon sends me weekly emails that include over a dozen new questions Alexa can answer. This too is a reverse programming example, and by teaching me to ask Alexa the proper questions, I am assured of getting highly accurate answers.

Here are some of the new things Alexa can respond to that came in an email from Amazon last week:

* “Alexa, what’s on your mind?”
* “Alexa, what are you doing for Black History Month?”
* “Alexa, give me a presidential speech.”
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* “Alexa, what’s another word for ‘happy?'”
* “Alexa, who is hosting the Oscars?”
* “Alexa, play the Long Weekend Indie playlist from Amazon Music.”
* “Alexa, give me a quiz for Black History Month.”
* “Alexa, what can I make with chicken and spinach?”
* “Alexa, tell me a President’s Day fact.”
* “Alexa, call Mom.”
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* “Alexa, test my spelling skills.”
* “Alexa, wake me up in the morning.”
* “Alexa, how long is the movie Black Panther?”
* “Alexa, speak in iambic pentameter.”
* “Alexa, how many days until Memorial Day?”

These types of prompts that I get every week allow me or any user to begin to understand the proper way to ask Alexa a question and has the bonus of giving users a set of questions that may be of interest to them to get an accurate answer. Doing this builds up a users confidence in using, in this case, the Alexa smart assistant.

I have no doubt that as faster processors, machine learning and AI are applied to digital assistants, they will get smarter. I suspect that more and more companies who create digital assistants will also start using Amazon’s model of teaching people how to ask questions that are more in line with how their digital assistants want a query to be stated. It will also give us more ideas of things to ask so that it teaches people how to use them so that they can get more accurate answers to their questions in the future.

One of the most important markets for the tech industry is the connected home. Connected thermostats, televisions, lights, appliances, security cameras, door locks, etc. have gained strong consumer interest around the world and is at the heart of making homes and even offices smarter.
I have been studying the connected home since 2002 and wrote one of the first reports on this idea in 2004 about having a home with devices connected to the Internet. In that report, I stated that while I saw the potential of connected devices, I believed that they would only gain real traction when they had more processing power behind them, better connectivity, and were controlled centrally.

In 2004, we did not have smartphones, smart speakers or even any standardized wireless protocols that could deliver on the concept of the smart home but I proposed that once they did have this capability, it would need some hub that served as a control center. The device I suggested that could serve as this hub should be the television. We were working with a semiconductor company who specialized in television processors at the time and had a vision for making the TV more intelligent. As I looked at their processor roadmap I could see a glimpse of where they could go with these chips to deliver a TV that could be connected to the Internet and putting two and two together, I surmised that a TV, with the right intelligence and connectivity, just might be able to serve as control hub of a connected home.

Fast forward to today and TV’s indeed have become smarter with greater levels of connectivity. While they are placed in most homes in a central location that could serve as a smart hub, none of the TV vendors have designed them to be connected smart home control centers. Interestingly, I believe that this was the thinking behind Steve’s Job’s desire to create a TV. While Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson that his vision for the TV was focused on user interfaces and ease of use, I believe his vision was more Trojan Horse in that it could also become a smart hub for a connected home. Now, this is pure conjecture on my part, but I’ve spent enough time following Steve Jobs and tracking his motives and could easily see that he had more in mind than just a better UI for a TV.

The idea of a hub that sits at the center of controlling a smart home is more relevant today than ever. While I thought that a TV was the most logical device to serve as that hub, it is clear now that a smart speaker has become the right device that can serve that purpose now. With a voice interface, connectivity and placed at the center of a home’s activity, such as a kitchen or a den, it is quickly becoming the best way to interact with, and control, the multitude of smart devices people are employing in their homes these days.

But let’s be clear, we are still at the early stages of making homes smart and the very early stages of making smart speakers in one form or another the primary hub that controls the smart home.

The chart below puts this fact into perspective.

As stated above, this chart only shows the market before Apple entered the smart speaker market. It also shows that there is a lot of room to grow this market in the US.

The chart below shows the pricing of these speakers and shows Apple has some real headwinds when it comes to the Homepod’s ability to gain market share in the smart speaker market. However, If Apple can sell a projected 5-6 million in calendar 2018, they could end the year making the most money and profit in this market segment.

As I have mentioned above, the real purpose of smart speakers, besides giving us information on demand, is really to serve as the control center of a smart home and this will become much more important as a plethora of smart devices flood homes around the world in the next few years.

In my home I have been using Amazon’s Echo and Echo Dots, the Google Mini and Apple’s New Homepod for getting information, playing music on demand, ordering stuff online and controlling lights and other connected devices around the house. By far the best device I have is Apple’s Homepod since it provides superior sound quality compared to the others I use and I have found Siri to be surprisingly quite accurate since I started using it a few weeks back. And as a hub, it works flawlessly with the made for Apple Home devices too. But so has the Echo and Mini when it comes to controlling connected devices in their respective eco-systems.

Given what I believe was Steve Jobs’ Trojan Horse thinking about the TV as a control hub and my belief that Apple has made the Homepod an extension of Jobs’ TV vision, I think Apple also needs to follow what Amazon and Google have done and created mini versions of their larger speaker models. The fact is that a hub of this type needs to reside in other places of the home, not just one central location like the kitchen or the den. In my home, the larger speakers are in the Kitchen, but I have the Google Mini’s and Echo Dot’s in our bedroom, my study, and even our master bathroom.

For Apple to make the Homepod a whole home hub they eventually need to do what I would call a Mini-Homepod, but with better quality speakers that are in the Echo Dot and the Google Mini. While the Google Mini and Echo Dot are $49.99, I would be willing to pay $99 for a Homepod mini if the speaker quality was at least four times better than what is on the Mini and Dot today.

I believe the battle to control the smart home will go through the smart speaker since it will serve as the central control system of the connected home. In that sense, it also becomes a real eco-system battle. But it starts with the quality and functionality of the smart speaker and the accuracy of its intelligence and controlling functions. The smart speaker is much more than an intelligent speaker. It is on track to become the central controller of the smart home and serve a much greater purpose than just being a speaker and smart agent.

I have been spending a lot of time with clients and people in the industry lately about Qualcomm and Microsoft’s push to create an ARM-based platform for Windows-based laptops. Although these two companies launched a Windows on ARM program four years ago, that initiative failed due to the underpowered ARM processor available at that time and the version of Windows used on these laptops that did not work well on these early ARM based laptops.

The new program launched by Qualcomm and Microsoft in early December is called the Connected PC initiative and uses Qualcomm’s 835 and 845 Snapdragon processors along with a new version of Windows 10S that is optimized for use on these ARM-based laptops. As I have written recently, while the connected portion of this program is interesting, our research shows that actual demand for connectivity in a notebook was #6 on a list of preferred features when we surveyed people who were interested in buying new laptops.

Number #1 on this list was battery life. The good news for Qualcomm and Microsoft is that their Connected PC program also stresses long battery life and Qualcomm expects that laptops using the Snapdragon 835 and 845 will provide at least 22 hours of continuous use. My own belief is that instead of touting Always Connected and Always On as their tagline they should reverse the order and Always On and Always connected alternatively.

I also see this push towards all-day computing to be a potential game-changer for the PC industry and, if done right, could spur new demand for laptop refresh rates that could last at least three years.

While this push for all-day computing looks to be important to Qualcomm and Microsoft, it should be equally important to Intel if the concept of an all-day laptop has the potential to drive a lot of new laptops sales in the future. But here lies the big question. Intel’s PC processors have never really been optimized for long battery life because performance has been at the heart of their CPU mantra. Indeed, as semiconductor mfg processes have gone from 22 nm to Intel’s current 10 nm process, better battery life and more power do happen. But performance has always topped battery life in their strategy.

The processor Intel would be pushing into this all day computing genre most likely will be Lakefield and its future iterations. This is a very important mobile chip for Intel in that while delivering solid performance; its second goal is to deliver longer battery life.
But here lies the billion-dollar question for Intel and the industry. Can Intel compete at the long battery life level with Qualcomm’s 835 and 845 processor that they state can deliver at least 22 hours of continuous use and Qualcomm belief’s that with new chips in the works, could get to well over 30 hours by mid-2019?

Sources I have talked to who have tested the current Lakefield processor say at best it can get perhaps 18-20 hours of continuous use if the conditions are just right. But when I asked these sources if they believe Intel could ever get the kind of battery life like Qualcomm can deliver, they say they doubt it. Of course, Intel would argue that they will still have the edge in performance and might even say that in a real world people plug their laptops in overnight and nobody uses a PC for 22+ hours continually.

While Intel’s argument has merit, their ability to compete in the all-day computing thrust that I believe will jumpstart a new refresh cycle for the PC industry will depend on the answers to these following questions-

1.How much battery life does a user want? Is 18 hours enough, 22 hours enough, etc.?

2-Will Qualcomm’s long life processor has enough power to meet users basic computing needs, i.e., video, web browsing, etc.? Or do they need more processing power to handle advanced graphics, extensive numerical calculations, etc.?

3-Will a 22-30+ hour battery life in a laptop be enough to cause people to want to refresh their older models that in most cases get less than 10 hours of battery life today? Is the prospect of heading off for the day and not thinking about even needing to carry a charging cable appealing enough to get people to start replacing their current laptops in large numbers?

4-How will long-life batteries in laptops influence design?

5-Microsoft’s significant endorsement of Qualcomm’s Windows on ARM speaks volumes about what seems to be a processor-neutral position Microsoft is taking when it comes to CPU support. Intel is where it is today in PCs because of Microsoft. Could Qualcomm ride this support from Microsoft and the Always On, Always Connected initiative to become a serious threat to Intel’s PC future?

These and other critical questions about the future of laptops are part of our research, and as we get answers to these questions, we will report back. My take is that Intel will be challenged by this Microsoft and Qualcomm initiative, and they could see their dominant role as the main CPU suppliers be challenged by Qualcomm shortly.

One of the big questions we at Creative Strategies get asked about by all of the big PC and semiconductor companies who have much skin in the PC game is whether the PC market could ever grow again. If you look at the Gartner chart below, you see that starting in 2012; the PC industry has been in decline significantly. Since 2011, the PC market shrank by 32%, and while 2017 numbers are not in yet, we believe it was down to 3-4% last year. That is a huge drop in PC sales that has had a major impact on just about everyone in the PC ecosystem today.

For the last seven years, when asked about the PC market ever growing again, our answer was always no. But recently, we have seen some significant technology becoming more available that can be applied to PC’s that, at least for a few years, could reverse the negative decline in PC’s and cause millions of users to upgrade there PC’s even if they are only two years old.

At the heart of this new technology, push is Qualcomm’s “Connected PC” design that they launched in Maui last December. Touting a more powerful Snapdragon processor with a cellular radio built into the overall chip design, and making it always connected as well as powerful enough to run Windows 10S. Qualcomm and Microsoft hope to entice people to upgrade their PC’s faster using the “Connected PC” idea and promising them a better overall experience since their PC, like a smartphone, would always be connected.

However, as I pointed out in my Techpinions Column on Monday, our research shows that what people really want is longer battery life and this was the #1 requested feature in our recent survey on what features people want when they buy a new laptop. But interest in adding a cellular modem to their laptop came out at #6 in this survey.

The good news for Qualcomm and Microsoft is that the other part of the “Connected PC” program is Snapdragon’s ability to deliver long battery life in these new laptops. At the event, they stated that a “Connected PC” could deliver at least 22 hours of continuous use and sources tell me that QQ is working on more advanced processors that could give users closer to 30+ hours by early next year.

I see two major things that will happen that could impact a greater demand for laptops by mid to late 2018. That means that perhaps by 2019, we could see new demand for PC’s rise as people want a laptop that delivers all-day computing. If so, this is something that I believe could be a catalyst for a major three-year refresh cycle for portable PC’s and see the PC market grow again.

The first thing that will be in play is a major battle between Qualcomm and Intel to become the one who delivers the ultra-long battery life that people want if they are to upgrade their PC. This is where I see Qualcomm having a major advantage over Intel. From what sources tell me, Intel’s most advanced mobile processors that will be available mid-year and, at best, can deliver only 18-20 hours of continues use. Qualcomm has already guaranteed 22 hours with their current 835/845 Snapdragon processors, and I do not doubt that by late 2018 they could deliver potentially up to at least 30 hours of continuous use.

That said, Intel will have an advantage from the performance standpoint since all Windows operating systems and apps can run natively on their X 86 processors. Microsoft is working very closely with Qualcomm to make a version of Windows 10S work very well on Snapdragon with minimal emulation. If Microsoft can deliver on this promise, it could help Qualcomm make significant inroads with PC vendors, who already know that the #1 thing their customers want is longer battery life and need to make that a part of their product roadmaps by years end.

The second thing I see happening could be a huge market push by Qualcomm, Intel, Microsoft and all PC vendors to launch and brand a new category of laptops, loosely called “All-Day, Always-On” laptops. As I stated in Mondays Techpinions column, I felt that Qualcomm’s emphasis on the connected PC idea was, from a marketing viewpoint, off the mark and felt they should have lead with all day computing message first and tied always connected to their overall design messaging.

If Qualcomm and Intel, along with Microsoft and PC vendors create all day laptops and market the dickens out of these new systems, I suspect it will resonate well with business and consumers users who have told us battery life is the most important feature they want in a new laptop. More importantly, all day computers could be the real motivation for people to start upgrading their PC’s faster than normal and get the demand for PC’s in positive territory at least through 2021-2022.

If you know your computer history, you know that the one product that put the PC on the radar of potential business users was a product called Visicalc. Created by two brilliant people, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston in Boston in the late 1970’s, it was the first spreadsheet designed for a PC. In this case, it was created for the Apple II, and it changed the way people did accounting projects. More importantly, while it was designed for the Apple II, which at the time was viewed as a hobbyist computer, an Apple II with Visicalc found its ways into the accounting offices of Fortune 500 companies and became an indispensable tool.

It was VisiCalc that caused IBM to kick off their PC project, which resulted in the birth of the IBM PC in 1981. IBM was highly interested in what Visicalc could to on a desktop computer like the Apple II because IBM’s history and DNA were rooted in computational calculating machines that were used in the late 30’s and most of the 40’s to manage things like the US Census as well as IRS related tabulations.

The real value of VisiCalc and subsequent spreadsheets like Lotus 123, and Microsoft’s Excel is that it introduced the “what if” concept to numerical data applications. As these spreadsheets became more powerful, asking the “what if” question has now gone well beyond just numerical equations and has become more important to all types of data-driven projects where using the “what if” questions is important to gaining insight to all types of questions.

Over the years I have been fascinated with the role computers play in answering the “what If” query since much of what is done in business productivity is focused on asking this vital question about all types of productivity projects people may be working on. As I thought about the “what if” question as it relates to today’s age of computing, it became clear to me that AR and VR technology is now being applied in many types of applications to answer this question in very new ways.

I recently met with a Prague based company called VRG vrgineers.com who showed me what is one of the most powerful VR headsets I have seen to date. More importantly, they showed me various VR apps used by auto designers, architects, and individuals that were creating products and wanted to see them in various forms or dimensions before they created the final product. The architectural example they showed me was great in that a person can add various wall types or colors to a blank wall or floor designs to a virtual room in a virtual house home and work with with the architect in advance of building the home to their customer’s desires.

What was interesting about what VRG has is that they have licensed the hand gesture technology from Magic Leap and this is by far the best way to interact with data as the current joy stick like hand devices are less precise.

From an AR perspective, you get that same “What If” concept with AR apps like the one from Ikea. With this app you can go into a room and point at it an empty room and then, using a side menu that has furniture, lights, etc., you can drop them into the empty room to see what they would look like in that room should you buy these products from Ikea.

To be fair, we have 2D apps that can do some of this now, but with AR you get new forms of visualization added to various “what if” scenarios and with VR you can be in the virtual house or virtual car being designed to see a final product or solution. In fact, I think of VR in this case as a WYSIWYG What if a solution that adds more accuracy and new dimensions to the many “what if” scenarios for both business and consumers.

Computers are essential for helping with “what if’ questions and PC’s were and still are key tools for working with “what if” scenarios. However, I see AR and VR being the next generation of technology to deliver even greater ways to answering new forms of “what if” questions in the next two decades.

One of the most important leaders in tech today is Dr. Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD. Lisa Su became CEO three years ago, and since then she has turned the company around in big ways and made AMD a formidable competitor to Intel in the PC CPU space and made AMD a force to be reckoned with in server chips.

At CES I had a chance to sit down and talk to Dr. Su and ask her about the last three years of her leadership at AMD and why AMD has now become an even stronger force in PC CPU’s, GPU’s and Server processors. If you follow AMD, you know that before Lisa took over, AMD had some serious financial challenges. While it stabilized under former CEO Rory Read, AMD’s strategy for the future was not clear, and the company was often guilty of overpromising and under delivering.

Dr. Su told me that when she first took over as CEO, her mantra to the team was “don’t worry about the financials. Just focus on delivering great products.”
At the strategic level, she worked with her teams to create a product roadmap that reflected future trends and coalesced around their core competencies and told her team to “put all of your energy into building those products and concentrate on executing this visionary roadmap.”

She also made an important strategic decision that said: “AMD would concentrate on being a high performance computing company” which meant anything that did not meet this criterion would not pass muster with her.

One detour the company took during Mr. Read’s leadership is that AMD decided to pursue, what at the time, seemed like a safe bet. They added development around a processor for tablets, and as you know, that market just did not develop like some had thought it would. Now, under Dr. Su’s guidance, all work is focused on high-performance computing, designs, and platforms that demand more computing power to operate.

Another observation she shared with me is that when she took over as CEO, the industry thinking was that demand for discrete graphics would decline and the graphics functions integrated into the core CPU’s would increase. But as she pointed out, that has not happened, and demand for discrete graphics chips and graphics cards are on the rise. This is driven by the higher demand for performance PC’s that are used in gaming and, shortly, will be needed in PC’s and laptops that support 4K and eventually 8K graphics screens.

One factoid from our research is that we see more and more millennial’s whom, in the past, were satisfied with gaming consoles, move over to high-performance gaming PC’s in droves.

This trend has helped AMD grow their market in gaming PC’s and, given the interest in higher resolution screens, this should continue to help AMD drive higher sales in the gaming and high-performance PC space.

Three of their most recent products have already had a significant impact on AMD’s bottom line, and more importantly, has helped them rise in both stature and acceptance in the eyes of their OEM’s and business partners. AMD’s EPYC server chips are world class in power and functionality and, as Dr. Su told me, “the network guys are jumping in with two feet” to buy them and use them in their server operations.

Their Ryzen CPU’s compete head-on with Intel and every week they get new design wins from most of the top PC makers who are adding Ryzen processors to their PC and laptop product mixes. In fact, I spoke with two of the top PC makers about AMD, and for the first time in many years they were extremely bullish about AMD and pleased with the new CPU’s they are making available to them.

Add to that their new Radeon Graphics chips and cards and AMD now has a trifecta of products that are competitive and industry leading in their scope and reach.

Intel will always be the dominant player in PC CPU’s and server Chips, but AMD has now become a world-class competitor to them. This type of competition is not only good for Intel in that it keeps them on their toes, but it also is excellent for consumers who now have new powerful alternatives when they shop for PCs.

As an analyst, I have covered AMD since its early days and often dealt with their colorful founder Dr. Jerry Sanders while he was CEO. AMD has always had great potential and promise, although subsequent leaders who followed Dr. Sanders have taken AMD on many bumpy rides in the past. My sense is Dr. Lisa Su has now brought a great deal of vision and discipline to the company and has set it on a path for steady growth in the future. She has also emerged as one of the top spokespeople for our industry, and her leadership role in the tech industry will only grow as she guides AMD in the coming years.

One last thought about AMD-

The fact that AMD has come back strong as a competitor to Intel can’t be underestimated. Intel is always aggressive with their roadmaps, but serious competition from AMD will only help them become more competitive themselves. Also, the recent partnership Intel developed with AMD to include AMD’s graphics processor in a co-designed chip could be a precursor of a more tighter relationship with the two companies in the future. AMD’s graphics chips are very powerful, and Intel does not need to reinvent these graphics chips on their own given the other irons in the fire in areas such as 5 G and autonomous vehicles that are even more important to their future.

Last week I was in Las Vegas to attend my 43rd Las Vegas CES. The show had 2.5 million sq feet of exhibit space, and over 180,000 people attended this show to see the latest and greatest in technology. CES is one of the largest trades shows in the world, and for most of us in tech, we have to go for many reasons. In my case, I have multiple meetings with clients and potential clients and, since I do my homework, I pre-select key products I want to see in person.

The reason I can pre-select the products I really want to see is that as a member of the analyst and press community I received over 2500 meeting requests that started showing up in my email in early Sept. While I just can’t read all of them I do look at each subject line, and if the product in that message is of interest to me, I briefly look at it and then put it on a watch list.

As I get closer to CES, I whittle down my watch list to the ones I want to see in person and add that to my actual meeting schedule.

Ironically, once I set my daily schedule at the show it is pretty much taken up with meetings, and this year I only got to on the LVCC show floor for 30 minutes, and at the Sands Convention Center, I only had about 90 minutes to check out the actual exhibits. However, the show is so expansive now, and with exhibits placed in two major venues and six satellite hotels, even if I spent 100% of my time on the show floor I would not have seen it all in the four days the show was live.

One other issue about being on the show floor itself is that at any given time at least 75-80% of the 180,000 attendees are in the LVCC or Sands and the aisles are packed like sardines so even walking from one exhibit to the other is a challenge. As I tried to walk the aisles at LVCC, the Yogi Berra line of “it’s so crowded nobody goes there anymore” kept ringing in my ears. CES is no longer just about consumer electronics, and as it has diversified and grown, the show itself has become difficult for most people to see the show and especially check out all of the things that would be of interest to them.

While CES will always have a place as a trade show, I believe that key technology that was shown at CES in 2014 will push this show and many others in the direction of what will be called virtual trade shows. This is the year Oculus Rift launched at CES. The concept of virtual trade shows has been around for some time, but the technology has not available to create the kind of experience one must have that replicates being at the show and walking through the exhibit as if you were there.

Thanks to virtual reality goggles and platforms like Oculus, Vive and others in the works, I could envision that within the next 6-8 years, it will be possible for every vendor to create a VR based 360 degrees exhibit that anyone could go to on demand and experience the product or service they want to see as if they were at any given trade show.

Imagine a virtual CES. Using VR glasses, you would be able to walk through LG’s video canyon as thousands of us did at CES and marvel at the technology behind it. Or you could stand in front of Sony’s new 146 Inch 8K TV and see and explore it as if you were at the show itself.
Indeed, every vendor could use VR tools and 3D cameras as well as perhaps a dedicated Pagemaker like software solution one might call “TradeShow Maker” that would work with all VR glasses. These types of virtual VR exhibits could be tied to a virtual show, or the vendor could just create a special exhibit that they use and update it multiple times during the year as they launch their products. I suspect for more professional VR exhibits, professional grade tools and services might be employed.

The economics of this is also interesting. If you were at CES and saw the huge exhibits from companies like Sony, Samsung, and LG you might have wondered how much this cost them? While I don’t know the exact amount, I do know that just creating the giant exhibits as well as staffing them is well over $5 million and I have been told that this number might be very conservative. Add the booth space costs, hotels, travel expenses and wear and tear on exhibit staff and these costs are nothing to laugh about.

On the other hand, the cost of creating a virtual exhibit, using VR tools and even professional media services to produce them would probably cost no more than 20% the cost of doing these large booths, paying for space and staffing them. And the fundamental designs of these virtual booths could be modified and thus reusable. Even more interesting to the vendor is that instead of showing their wares to 180,000 and hoping the media can get the word out about their products, VR booths could now become available to millions of people who would like to see an actual demo of their products before they buy them.

I became convinced that the idea of a virtual or VR based trade shows was in our future after I was shown how Cirque Du Soleil used VR to put a person on a stage and do the show around them. You can see this virtual show using Samsung’s Gear or Google’s Daydream to understand what it is like to have a show like this where the acts are done a few feet from your virtual seat. While this represented virtual entertainment, my mind wandered over to the idea of virtual product reviews and how that might impact trade shows in the future.

As for the meetings and interaction with people at these booths, video conference systems such as Zoom and Skype video make it simple to provide the interactive video component of a virtual trade show. While viewing the exhibit through VR glasses, a representative from the company could be doing the demo as if they were standing next to you at the show.

Of course, the consequences of VR based trade shows could have a huge impact on convention centers and any venue such as hotel ballrooms where smaller trades shows are done. If we get the technology right and VR could be used to deliver virtual trade shows of any size, vendors could eventually opt for this means of getting the word out on their products and trade shows in general could eventually become less important.

Now, this won’t happen anytime soon. But after seeing the demo of HTC’s Vive Pro and the vivid VR content it can deliver, I am convinced that the time will come when we can create virtual product pitches and use them as if they were part of a trade show.
Also, VR headsets are not close to being prime time products for consumers. AR will be the next evolution where mixed reality will take off, but I now believe that a killer app for VR just might be for virtual product demos and in creating virtual trade show exhibits that can be viewed on demand.

Each year I leave CES I say that this will be my last. It takes a toll on my body and each day this year I walked close to 10 miles to get to meetings, different venues and to see the exhibits that I could. Perhaps my vision of a virtual CES is more personal in that I would prefer this way to see products than to have to deal with 180.000 people and endure the costs of travel, hotels, meals, etc.

But if you study VR and have a bit of imagination, you can see that the virtual trade show concept I laid out is inevitable. The technology that could deliver this VR to the mass market may still be as much as 8-10 years away, but I no longer think virtual trade shows are a pipe dream.
I believe VR technology will make virtual trade shows possible and expand many vendors reach exponentially and become one of the most important selling tools they will have in their sales arsenal.

CES has become a zoo. 180,000 people jostling their way around 2.5 million square feet of exhibit space has become unmanageable.
Even harder is to try and find gems or game-changing technology that will have an impact on people in the way they work, play or learn.

So instead of doing a scatter shot approach to trying to find game-changing products this year, I focused on one key area of interest around game-changing health technology that I suspected I would find at the show if I looked hard enough.

Also, I had one area of health that I have been looking at for a while around products that impacted peoples sight. I grew up with a blind maternal grandmother and understand first hand the challenges and problems that people who are blind or legally blind deal with every day of their lives. For years I have kept my eyes on technology that in some way could impact people with this condition.

So, in advance of the show, I saw two products that were in this category that I wanted to check out. The first one is called eSight and these are electronic glasses that let the legally blind see.

I went to their suite at the Palazzo to see how this worked. I was shown a set of electronic glasses that deliver a powerful level of magnification. The result of this magnification is so legally blind people can see things all around them and read material more clearly. In the demo I saw, the legally blind woman, using these glasses could see the street from the 30th floor of the hotel and could make out what people were wearing at street level.

eSight uses breakthrough technology that enhances functional vision for the legally blind. It does this by providing a high speed-high-resolution camera that captures what a user sees in real time. eSight algorithms enhance the video and project it onto two OLED screens in front of the user’s eyes. These users see full-color video images that can be seen with unprecedented visual clarity and practically no delay.

The woman who demoed it for me and who is legally blind told me this had changed her life. It has given her new freedom and even will allow her to work in the future.

They are costly though. They sell for $10,000, and as of now, insurances don’t cover them. There are some organizations who work with the blind and legally blind that provide some types of grants so that in the case of the woman who was showing this to me, a grant covered the cost of her eSight glasses. This is an extremely important use of technology, and for those who are legally blind, they are actual game changers.

The second product of interest comes from OrCam. www.orcam.com The person behind the Orcam is one of the co-founders of MobileEye, the company that Intel acquired for $15.3 billion to help Intel jumpstart their autonomous driving program.

The Orcam is a small camera that fits on the side of any glasses that can look at any text and read it back to you in real time.
The device that houses it is the size of a medium sized finger, and it reads printed or digital text. When I tested it, I pointed it at an article in a magazine and using my fist I pointed to the article I wanted it to read. Within in seconds of seeing the article, it started reading it back to me through a tiny speaker placed at the end of the camera housing and spoke every word of the article to me in a clear voice.

It can also recognize faces. Point the camera at a person in front of you, and you get real-time recognition of faces. You can use it to identify products, credit cards, money, etc. What is astonishing is the fact that all of the processing is done internally in this device and all you have to do is point and using a simple hand gesture it verbally gives you the info you asked for.

This is ideal for the blind and partially sighted people that uses AI and OCR technology in a unique way that helps impact the lives of people with these serious vision-related problems.

It costs $2500, and I also see this as being a game-changing technology that for the blind and legally blind and is important at helping them live normal lives.

I’ve been writing a tech predictions column for over 30 years now. I study our research and look for trends and information that give me hints of what I believe might be the hot topics, trends or issues that will impact the tech industry in the coming year.
Here are what I believe will be some of the biggest trends and issues in tech for 2018:

Cyber Security Threats Become Even Worse
For the last five year’s I have led most of my informed prediction columns by making this particular observation. But in the past, I mostly noted that the cybercriminals were small groups or even dastardly individuals. But in 2017 we found that “state” actors have entered the scene with what appears backing from countries like North Korea, Russia, and China who have created actual “armies” of hackers to try and steal everything from nuclear secrets to bank codes, hacking into power grids and stealing from people both money and personal identity. It is not a stretch to predict that this will get even worse in 2018 now that these hacking armies have learned how to even game our systems and will be even more aggressive in the new year and especially as we head to mid-term elections next fall.

What makes this worse for us in America specifically is that we just don’t have enough security expert talent available to counter many of these major threats. Without that talent and newer and more powerful cybersecurity tools, our various banking, power grids, etc. continue to be highly vulnerable. I fear that this will lead to many new hacking disasters in 2018 and am not very optimistic that we can thwart all of the security threats that will be leveled at us next year.

The First Folding Smartphone
I have seen some very interesting prototypes during the latter part of 2017 that suggest we could see the first products that have what will loosely be called folding designs both in smartphones and tablets.

I think that these types of new foldable devices will have a significant impact in 2019. ZTE has a foldable smartphone out now but has little distribution in the US, and I consider this a good prototypical design of this idea. But we could see at least one foldable smartphone and one foldable tablet late in the new year from some major players and set in motion a new trend in mobile designs going into 2019.

Augmented Reality Will Not Have a Major Impact in 2018
Although Apple popularized the term and concept of Augmented Reality in 2017, it is pretty clear that augmented reality is more a work in progress than it is a serious impact product that touches our lives in big ways anytime soon.

Many had expected that since Apple introduced their AR Kit and Google AR Core mid-year, that we would see perhaps the first killer apps by the Holidays. As of now, I have not seen what I or anyone can call a killer app that will make AR something we can’t live without. I do think Apple and Google will gain grown]th in AR by using their smartphone platforms to get more people interested in the idea and concept of AR but I am becoming more and more convinced that for AR to really impact our lives that it will have to be delivered through some smart glasses and I don’t see models of these that would be consumer priced and consumer-friendly before 2020.

On a related issue, we do see some real activity in VR recently, but outside of its use in gaming, which is consumer friendly, the real interest in VR is in vertical markets. You should expect to see much more of an uptake in VR within these markets in 2018 as all types of industries are experimenting with VR technology to see how it could impact that their workflow and potential profitability.

Alway’s connected PC’s will Morph Into All Day Computers
MY PC Mag colleague Sasha Sagan and I were in Hawaii recently to attend Qualcomm’s launch event for their Always Connected PC initiative. Qualcomm created a laptop design that uses their Snapdragon 835 mobile processor to power what they dubbed an “Always Connected PC.” The premise is that with the Snapdragon 835, which includes the LTE radio in its design, that people will be more likely to want a portable computer that can always be connected and have at least 20 hours of battery life.

They may be right, but to date, laptops with LTE built in have not been big hits. In fact, in our research on iPads, we found that 50% of all iPad’s sold include the LTE radio chip but that only 25% of those machines ever activate the LTE radios that are inside.

I think the bigger story from this event and the one that probably should be their lead story is the incredible battery life one will get with this type of laptop. Imagine heading off for the day and not even having to think about carrying a power cord for the laptop since you know you will get at least 20 hours of real use on this type of portable computer.

I think what Qualcomm has done has broken new ground in PC designs, and while I like the Always-Connected PC concept, I think their push also to create what I call “all-day” computing may be their bigger contribution to the world of portable computing.

Social Media Sites Become Regulated
I know this might be considered a bold prediction but my contacts in Washington say that legislators from both sides of the aisle are becoming greatly concerned about the negative impact social media has had on America, its election processes and the overall level of divisiveness that it has had on our worldview. Although people in Washington had hoped that Facebook, Twitter, and Google would police themselves, I continue to hear from Washington insiders that they don’t believe that they can do that without some government intervention. While full regulation is probably not likely, I would not be surprised if we do see some of the legislation put forward to reign in these social media sites and force some restrictions on them, especially when it comes to our mid-term elections and areas where hate groups are free to post anything they want without any serious checks and balances coming from these social media giants.

I was in Hawaii recently to attend Qualcomm’s launch event for their Always Connected PC initiative. Qualcomm created a laptop design that uses their Snapdragon 835 mobile processor to power what they dubbed an “Always Connected PC.” The premise is that with the Snapdragon 835, which includes the LTE radio in its design, that people will be more likely to want a portable computer that can always be connected and have at least 20 hours of battery life.

They may be right, but to date, laptops with LTE built in have not been significant hits. In fact, in our research on iPads, we found that 50% of all iPads sold include the LTE radio chip but that only 25% of those machines ever activate the LTE radios that are inside.

I think the bigger story from this event and the one that probably should be their lead story is the incredible battery life one will get with this type of laptop. Imagine heading off for the day and not even having to think about carrying a power cord for the notebook since you know you will get at least 20 hours of real use on this type of portable computer.

I think what Qualcomm has done has broken new ground in PC designs, and while I like the Always-Connected PC concept, I think their push also to create what I call “all-day” computing may be their more significant contribution to the world of portable computing.

I believe that the concept of an all-day computer could become the next big thing in laptops. While some of our ultra-thin notebooks can squeeze up to 12-14 hours of use, if you do any serious video processing or use the laptops graphics processor often, total battery life is more like 5-7 hours at best. I have at least seven ultrabooks or ultra-thin laptops, and with videos playing and a graphics-based game playing in separate windows simultaneously, I am lucky if I get 5-6 hours from any one of these thinner laptops.

While this new idea of 20 hours of battery life will become the new rallying cry for all laptop makers in the next two years, the term Always Connected and All Day computing does not roll off the tongue. I believe that Qualcomm, Intel and the industry in general needs to come up with a reliable, identifiable name as they initially did with the term Netbook or Ultrabook to define a specific type of new laptop design that can work all day even if you want to watch videos, play games or do productivity.

Since Qualcomm and Intel believe connectivity is key to all day computers, a name that either directly states or hints to connectivity should be in this type of portable computing moniker. However, I am still not convinced that people will activate the LTE connection given the fact that laptops and even iPads that have them in them now have low activation rates. On the other hand, I am convinced that an all-day 20+ hour laptop will resonate big time with mobile users and in that sense, this should be the real focus of any device and dedicated naming scheme related to this new type of mobile computing experience.

During most of my time covering personal computers, the OS Wars were basically between Apple’s Mac OS and Microsoft’s Windows OS.
The battle between these two operating systems has been fierce at times with loyal users on each side swearing by their preferred operating system.

Then came the mobile OS wars, and while at first there were at least 4 or 5 mobile operating systems vying for supremacy, today the real battle is between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. But we are about to move into a new area of what I call Mini operating systems wars, designed to work with a new class of CPU’s that run devices at what is called the Edge.

Edge computing has become a hot term in tech as it refers to actual devices that sit at the edge of a cloud-based solution. For example, an edge device could be a smart thermostat, smart light, smart refrigerator, or in a smart city example, smart parking meters, smart light posts, etc. For decades we have had many devices at the edge that used sensors in cars, appliances, etc. but their intelligence was controlled by some other type of internal CPU, and they had a tiny OS called a real-time OS (RTOS).

However, Qualcomm, Intel and other makers of core computing silicon are putting more power in the chips used at the edge to deliver a form of distributed computing where some of the actual computing is done on the edge device, and a minimal amount is done in the cloud.

These new CPUs will also find their way into what we call dedicated devices such as a new category of products that will hit the market next year that will be more like Digital Note-taking devices and not full tablets. It is estimated that close to 1 billion people use some pen and paper for note taking and various companies see an opportunity to create a new category of devices that simplify and digitize this task.

At the moment there are two main contenders for what I call a Mini-OS, and those are Microsoft and Google. In a recent post from Windows Central entitled “Microsoft’s ‘Windows Core’ aims to turn Windows 10 into a modular platform, the article outlines what is called Windows Core OS (WCOS). The article stated:

“In short, WCOS is a common denominator for Windows that works cross-platform, on any device type or architecture, which can be enhanced with modular extensions that give devices features and experiences where necessary.”

“In layman’s terms, its ultimate goal is to make Windows 10 much more flexible, allowing it to be installed on a wider variety of devices without being based on specific, pre-existing product variants. As a result of this, Windows itself can become smaller depending on the device, the OS itself can be built faster, and devices won’t be encumbered by components and features they don’t actually need; speeding up overall performance in the process on smaller or less capable devices.”

This would allow Microsoft or their partners to create application-specific devices and use this CORE OS to give intelligence to edge devices that has its low energy CPU and turns the edge device into a smart module of a distributed computing architecture.

Google also sees the need to provide an OS for edge devices and has what seems to be a mini OS in the works called Fuchsia. While details are still sketchy, Richard Windsor an analyst at Edison Investment Research states:

“Our take home from this analysis is that Fuchsia looks most suited to be used in embedded systems such as vehicles, white goods, machinery, wearables and so on.Consequently, this could be a single replacement for Android Auto and Android Wear.”

Mr. Windsor goes on to say:

“Fuchsia was first noticed on GitHub in August 2016 and differs from Android in that it is not based on Linux but on a kernel called Magenta which looks more like a kernel that is typically used for embedded systems such as vehicle infotainment units, white goods and so on. Fuchsia is also a real-time operating system (RTOS) which tend to be used for smaller systems which are typically embedded where response time is critical to the user experience.”

This news should not come as much of a surprise to serious industry watchers since the idea of edge devices becoming part of a distributed computing model has been in play for a long time. However, the move by Intel, Qualcomm, and others to give more intelligence to edge devices so that they can handle some of the computing locally do beg for some beefed-up RTOS, or in these cases, perhaps a serious modular extension of each of these companies current operating systems.

I disagree with Mr. Windsors suggestion that this might end up as a replacement for Android. I suspect this is a new type of mini-OS for edge devices that would allow Google to extend their reach well beyond their computing and mobile worlds today. And for Microsoft, if the Windows Central story is correct, it would give them a stronger foothold at the edge and bring perhaps billions of devices into the Windows World and allow them to grow their services model exponentially.

To date, I don’t see a similar Mini-OS coming from Apple although it is conceivable that they are working on a similar mini-OS that is a subset of IOS or a separate Mini-OS of their own from scratch. You can bet Apple wants to extend their reach to the edge too, so even if Apple does not have something we know about publicly, I can’t imagine they don’t see this same trend and are working on something similar.