ARM Exec Says 90% of PC Market Could Be Netbooks 307
Barence writes "ARM chief executive Warren East has claimed that netbooks could dominate the PC market, in an exclusive interview with PC Pro. 'Although netbooks are small today – maybe 10% of the PC market at most – we believe over the next several years that could completely change around and that could be 90% of the PC market,' he said. East also said ARM isn't pressuring Microsoft to include support for its processors in Windows, claiming progress in the Linux world is 'very, very impressive.' 'There's not really a huge amount of point in us knocking on Microsoft's door,' he said. 'It's really an operational decision for Microsoft to make. I don't think there's any major technical barriers.'"
you can say whatever you want (Score:3, Insightful)
whether it's true or not is another thing
Re:But Steve Jobs said... (Score:2, Insightful)
Steve Jobs said that because he'd rather we all bought netbook like devices that had no keyboard, and an OS so crippled that users don't even like it when it's on a *phone*.
Irrational exuberance, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does anyone seriously think that 90% of the PC market will ditch MS Windows, and all the applications it has, in 3 years? I don't have any reason to doubt the Arm-Linux netbook space will grow (although, even that isn't necessarily a given, but it seems reasonable, anyhow), but 90% sounds like a bunch of marketing BS from a guy who can't possibly deliver the goods.
Re:you can say whatever you want (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing that's absolutely true is that Microsoft reputation managers will be all over this article.
Cheap, ARM and Linux is the one combination they absolutely MUST discredit. Even if they can get Windows to run on it, the whole application stack that locks people onto the Wintel platform will be missing. Likewise, a $200 OS and $300 office suite simply aren't value propositions on sub $200 computers.
Expect an unprecedented level of FUD here.
Could be but I think it won't be (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Key message, "No operational barrier" (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft could jump in with Windows 7 Mobile (Score:4, Insightful)
Does anyone seriously think that 90% of the PC market will ditch MS Windows, and all the applications it has, in 3 years?
When Linux netbooks based on x86 were gaining market share, Microsoft embraced the netbook by first keeping Windows XP Home Edition available throughout the Vista era and then optimizing Windows 7 for such ultra-low-cost PCs. Likewise, Microsoft could decide at any time to embrace ARM by porting Windows 7 to the architecture and making a thunk layer for existing CE apps, just like NT for x86 has a "WOWExec" thunk layer for 16-bit Windows apps and NT for x86-64 (XP 64, Vista 64, 7 64) has a "WOW64" thunk layer for Win32 apps.
Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone? (Score:2, Insightful)
Does anyone seriously think that 90% of the PC market will ditch MS Windows, and all the applications it has, in 3 years? I don't have any reason to doubt the Arm-Linux netbook space will grow (although, even that isn't necessarily a given, but it seems reasonable, anyhow), but 90% sounds like a bunch of marketing BS from a guy who can't possibly deliver the goods.
Erm, he's talking about netbooks in general, not ARM netbooks specifically. But E for effort.
Absolutely not. (Score:5, Insightful)
ARM already has a huge part of the embedded market in cellular phones. He is trying to make the claim that no one needs computing power, so everyone is going to switch to the cheaper ARM microcontrollers, and they will get a lot of licensing money as a result. But remember, netbooks are optimized for the net and only the net. If you want to do anything else mildly processor intensive like watching a HD video, good luck. (Even Intel's Atom processor is essentially an overclocked 486.) If you want to watch a DVD, good luck--your netbook is probably a little too small for that DVD drive!
Low footprint netbooks (Score:4, Insightful)
Laptops are pretty crude these days. Spinning drives, spinning fans, bulky operating systems originally designed for desktops that were adapted for the laptop instead of purpose-built.
The Palm OS stuff years back really made me wonder, especially when I got an external keyboard for my palm -- could you upscale something like this into a computer? It has more horsepower than my first desktop, the fancier palms could get on the net with wifi. What if you made a bigger screen and stuck the palm guts in that? At the time I figured the problem was cost and performance. Screens are half the price of a laptop so why would anyone want to spend several hundred bucks for a gimped device when they could spend a few more and get a full-featured laptop? But the iPhone had the right idea. Stripped down, customized OS for the phone. Leave the whole desktop OS design behind.
The hardware really has come a long way and basic user needs haven't become that much crazier. Putting an mp3 player in a car used to involve putting a freakin' PC in the car, now you either have an mp3/cd player in the dashboard or a line in for your standalone player. You used to need a pretty beefy machine for the time just to get online and read your mail. Cell phones have enough power for that now. And storage capacity? It's crazy.
There will always be a need for as much crazy power as possible in a portable format but that will be a smaller niche of the market.
Re:Key message, "No operational barrier" (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's overwhelming strength, and considerable burden, is backwards compatibility. The market, especially the business market, is rotten with gross little bespoke applications(as well as big serious expensive applications, shrinkwrap and bespoke) that are win32 only and likely to remain so for years to decades. Microsoft's customers scream at them every time some change breaks something(and not just the little home users, whose whining is of limited consequence, the big thousands-of-seats guys). Even their move to 64 bit X86, once both AMD and intel had given it their stamp of approval and its future was basically assured, but with full 32bit compatibility, was slow and arduous. It isn't even past tense, really, the move is still happening.
If it were just a matter of porting the NT kernel and Windows components to ARM, I suspect that that would be in the realm of doable. It'd have to be worth their while; but doable. Dragging the third party ecosystem, which is a huge percentage of the value of Windows as a package, though would be an epic nightmare. Especially since, unlike 64 bit X86, this wouldn't be a one-way move. They'd have to be pushing for parallel offerings, ARM and X86 from all relevant vendors, for the indefinite future. Welcome to hell.
Re:Microsoft could jump in with Windows 7 Mobile (Score:5, Insightful)
Likewise, Microsoft could decide at any time to embrace ARM by porting Windows 7 to the architecture and making a thunk layer for existing CE apps, just like NT for x86 has a "WOWExec" thunk layer for 16-bit Windows apps and NT for x86-64 (XP 64, Vista 64, 7 64) has a "WOW64" thunk layer for Win32 apps.
But what would be the point when there are no applications for ARM Windows 7?
The only reason I use Windows on any of my computers is to run closed-source applications that only run on Windows; and they won't run on ARM Windows. Eventually companies might start selling ARM versions of their software, but that will take a long time unless Microsoft force them to.
Sure, Microsoft could release ARM versions of Word, etc, but if all you can run on your netbook is IE, Word and Powerpoint, why not run Linux instead?
Re:Key message, "No operational barrier" (Score:5, Insightful)
Sell out? Not sure what you mean by this. ARM sells (designs for) chips that can run Darwin, Linux, *BSD, RiscOS, Wince, Symbian, NewtonOS, and a host of others. If Microsoft chose to port Windows 7 to ARM, why would you regard this as ARM selling out?
Microsoft wont just agree to support ARM as is. It will have conditions attached to it. It won't be something so explicit as a requirement to stop supporting the other systems. It will be more insidious. One tack will be to nullify the advantage of other OSes. By requiring a cache large enough for Windows or memory requirement that will nullify cost advantage of Linux. Another tack would be to create a small variant of ARM that is incompatible with the others. Then due to the market dominance and/or shady undisclosed deals and pay backs, the window only version of ARM chips will be subsidized from the monopoly windfall in the MSOffice franchise.
Eventually everyone will be able to say, "we tried, but the market wants Microsoft. It is all free market you see!", while conveniently forgetting the backroom deals and tilting of the playing field done in smoke filled back rooms. The MsOffice franchise that is churning up some 25 billion dollars a year in profit, flowing through secret contracts wrapped inside non disclosure agreements, distorts the free-market continuum just like a black hole warps the space-time fabric.
Remember the original 150$ Linux netbook. How Microsoft suddenly extended the WinXP life by 10 years and strong armed Asus. How the one lap top per child project suddenly decided to add a 2GB memory chip, raised the price and foundered completely. Microsoft is not a 800 lb gorilla in the jungle clearing. It is a supermassive blackhole that influences everything in the galaxy.
No - 90% of the new and bigger market. (Score:5, Insightful)
i.e. including all those people who don't have PCs yet in this world of 6 billion people.
Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think industry-specific proprietary apps are missing, but you can do image editing, audio mixing, video editing, etc. all on Linux just fine.
Gimp approximates 90% of Photoshop's features, and most users only use that subset of features.
Apps like Skrooge and KMyMoney are making great progress on finance software for Linux these days.
I do keep Windows for gaming. But I probably could spend all of my free time playing Linux games and never play them all.
Re:Absolutely not. (Score:3, Insightful)
If it has a USB port, then it can "play" DVDs.
OTOH, if you've got anything but solid state storage then there's really no point in
bothering with DVDs. Just rip them and transcode them into what ever codec will play
nicely with your hardware. Or don't bother transcoding them at all if your player is
any good.
As others have noted... video decoding is moving into the video hardware. So the need
for beefy CPUs is wanning. You would be far better off worrying about core memory.
Re:Key message, "No operational barrier" (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow...
I don't think that expanding the Cache and ram on the ARM would hurt Linux or OS/X at all.
ARM doesn't make chips. So yes Microsoft could buy the right to make ARM CPUs and make their own flavor of ARM just like Apple, nVidia, TI, and Marvell have.
I think your fears are a bit miss placed at this point. Also since Microsoft has been floundering in the Mobile market for years I don't their is all that much to fear from them.
Re:Microsoft could jump in with Windows 7 Mobile (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, Microsoft could release ARM versions of Word, etc, but if all you can run on your netbook is IE, Word and Powerpoint, why not run Linux instead?
Well, IE and Word are the killer apps for many people. Lets face it: you're not going to get a netbook to run photoshop on, so what else would most people want to run?
Also note that there would be plenty of third party apps available in the situation described by the OP: he would have a WinCE thunk layer and therefore you would be able to execute WinCE (aka Windows Mobile) apps, and as a large proportion of the devices running this OS are already based on ARM chips, you'd have little trouble getting hold of the apps.
Re:you can say whatever you want (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you think MS isn't already on this? They have WinCE which is slowly but surely focusing on ARM as the primary platform.
(...)
Linux doesn't have the same ability to say something and have it taken as gospel truth.
Put any WinCE handheld side to side to n900. The WinCE looks like a kids-play fisher-price laptop, it is a joke.
You can't just compare it with Linux like you did. Linux on ARM is exactly the same thing as Linux on anything else (x86_64, PowerPC, ...), we are not talking about a crippled kernel here.
You can't also compare the software available for ARM-Linux with WinCE software. WinCE is a very reduced Win32 API (so we are not considering the huge collection of Win32 apps here) while GNU/Linux on ARM runs everything designed to be cross-platform. Given a powerful ARM machine with plenty of RAM, you can literally compile all your GNU/Linux desktop software for ARM.
The fundamental problem here is not what is already available or supported for ARM-Linux but the fact that ARM devices are mostly associated with new Human Interface paradigms which current software can't answer. But this is changing fast with the increasing interest of the community and companies like Nokia pushing Maemo.
Re:Irrational exuberance, anyone? (Score:2, Insightful)
Photoshop is irrelevant here. There are far cheaper and better "workalikes" for the vast majority of consumers.
This is exactly the attitude that will ultimatly keep Linux from serving the needs of most consumers.
Gimp *is not* an acceptable substitute for Photoshop. But seeting that app aside, people - consumers - *DON'T WANT* substitutes. They want the application they know to work on the platform they use. Thus, if the major commercial Windows apps do not port to Linux, neither will the average consumer.
Or *New* market (Score:4, Insightful)
Given that, as far as I can tell, the only difference between a laptop and a netbook is size, what he's really saying is that laptops are going to get smaller.
Or that, a lot of people who didn't buy laptops before, on such grounds such as price and size, would start buying the new /smaller/ devices.
The absolute number of classic PC and laptop won't change much. But a fucking big new propotion of the population would start buying the netbooks.
Don't think "Laptops are displacing desktops at the workplace".
Think the way PDA were a new market that didn't cannibalise laptop users, but made a whole new batch of people buy the devices.
Or think the way the Wii didn't lower the success of PS or Xbox, but got successful in reaching a whole new market of casual gamers who would never had bought hardcore-oriented machines.
(Or what Apple is hoping to achieve with the iPad : the device for the couch at home, missing in the line-up between Macs - at work - and iPhone/iPod - on the move)
There are a lot of young people, who don't really need a PC given their work or studies. But they would appreciate being able to go on-line for socializing.
Currently their smartphone's screen is a little bit smallish. Dead-cheap simple small netbooks would be the way to go
(and would enable them to do some small editing on the cloud / GoogleDocs while on the go).
Now, will ARM's hopes of finding a new market to exploit get realised ? Hard to tell but I suspect this might work.
Re:Absolutely not. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft could jump in with Windows 7 Mobile (Score:3, Insightful)
But what would be the point when there are no applications for ARM Windows 7?
Windows 7 ARM Edition would run existing third-party apps designed for early CE netbooks [wikipedia.org], Windows Mobile PDAs, and Windows Mobile smartphones, as I thought I explained in grandparent.
The only reason I use Windows on any of my computers is to run closed-source applications that only run on Windows
I'm in a different situation. Much of my workflow is based on free software, but I stuck with Windows so long because of closed-source drivers without a counterpart in the Linux world. Fortunately, those won't be as necessary on an ARM netbook, as OEM Windows distributions include drivers for all included hardware and anything that works with the standard class drivers [wikipedia.org]. I would guess that other kinds of hardware (such as a non-PostScript printer or a flatbed scanner without a memory card slot) are rarely used with a netbook.
if all you can run on your netbook is IE, Word and Powerpoint, why not run Linux instead?
Because one or more of Firefox/Chromium, OpenOffice.org Writer, and OpenOffice.org Impress aren't completely compatible with your employer's workflow.
Absolutely yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
What East is really saying is, "Behold. I shall inflate stock values by making false and pointless claims." ARM already has a huge part of the embedded market in cellular phones. He is trying to make the claim that no one needs computing power, so everyone is going to switch to the cheaper ARM microcontrollers, and they will get a lot of licensing money as a result. But remember, netbooks are optimized for the net and only the net. If you want to do anything else mildly processor intensive like watching a HD video, good luck. (Even Intel's Atom processor is essentially an overclocked 486.) If you want to watch a DVD, good luck--your netbook is probably a little too small for that DVD drive!
After spending a while in Japan (and observing their net/electronic pattern usages), combined with purely anecdotal observations on communication and usage patterns of people here in the US and in my beloved 3rd world country of origin, it is fair to say most people are fine with a device that lets them e-mail and twitter and upload pictures on facebook, google for stuff, read the news and job sites, maybe run MS Office or Google Apps, and for the savvyy video conference with skype (which is how my grandma who lives in a little town up in the mountains got to see my newborn baby for the first time after getting Internet over dial-up.) Shit, even some of the Xingu people up in the Amazon have internet access now!!!! Anyways, go back to the topic...
The average electronics consumer WILL NOT use that type of device to run DVDs (there are super-cheapo portable DVDs for that) or run gcc, Mathematica or a LAMP. They don't need a super-duper CPU and the latest and greatest graphics card.
We, what we call "powerusers") certainly want a mighty gadget that can run everything we want in one device. But we do not represent the average electronic consumer.
Typical people, the average electronics consumer of 2010, whether here or Japan or south of the border, on the other hand will be happy to have an iPhone/BlackBerry, the smallest possible laptop/netbook that can do the job without much jitters and a portable DVD player (comes handy for entertaining your kids while you are busy with your laptop/netbook while having breakfast at Panera or wherever they sell breakfast with free wifi).
Warren East is re-stating the obvious (and inflating stock values), but that's his job. What we are missing here, is our ability to objectively judge the merits of his claims, not from our point of view as l33t hax0rs, but from the shoes of the average consumer - they are the ones that constitute the market (and the opportunities therein), not us.
Re:Absolutely not. (Score:1, Insightful)
I see what you're saying, but it's worth pointing out that over 70% of portable gaming today happens on ARM CPUs that are far, far weaker than what's available today. The much-despised "casual gamers" aren't necessarily best served by a liquid-cooled tower with the phattest available CPU/GPU.
Not to mention how vanishingly small a market the hard-core PC gamers could end up as if once small Facebook-capable computers become a commodity. The market isn't anywhere near saturation, their popularity could approach some fraction of the mobile phones'.
If people don't notice that "the Atom is so crappy that it's pitiful", isn't it as good at is needs to be?
Re:Absolutely not. (Score:5, Insightful)
You greatly overestimate the prevalence of "gaming PCs"; the proportions you suggest are pretty much reversed, compared to reality.
Valve Steam is probably the most popular service of this kind. Now, current version of Steam Survey doesn't give absolute values anymore; but on the previous one (up to around year ago), it was clear from the numbers that there's not even 1.5 million participating subscribers. Out of those who do participate, hardly anyone has Intel GFX, which has biggest share of the general market. People usually simply don't play games on PCs; or at least not what you'd call "real" games, preferring Peggle, Solitaire or flashgames. Atom or fast ARM is fine for most of them.
Re:But Steve Jobs said... (Score:3, Insightful)
...an OS so crippled that users don't even like it when it's on a *phone*.
Back up your claim with fact.
Sorry, what's that? You can't? Thought so.
Important lesson all slashdot readers should learn - we are not the norm. We do not represent the majority of users. Not by a long shot. What we like/dislike often has absolutely zero bearing on what the vast majority of people like/dislike.
Re:Key message, "No operational barrier" (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is the past. Vendors who are out of business, or have EOLed given products, or who would(not unreasonably) want more money to deliver ARM versions of their existing X86 products. Horrible internal apps hacked together in VB6 by somebody who has since retired, or shoddily built by contract outfits. Even with Vista, a tiny compatibility break compared to an ISA change, caused much weeping and gnashing of teeth about this stuff. Heck, they had to build a fully, virtualized "XP Mode" into corporate editions of 7 just to get the legacy customers to shut up.
Linux went multi-platform comparatively easily because(while it is in many respects deeply conservative) the linux community doesn't really care about binary compatibility. If the source isn't there, available for update as long as interest persists, it is considered dead. If you want binary compatibility, you can go cry, or pay somebody to build it for you. Mac went sort-of multi platform comparatively easily because Steve doesn't much care about the past(one of the things that makes him interesting to watch is his willingness to murder products and technologies that he considers to be outdated, even if they are popular and successful. Look at the imac and the floppy drive, or his termination of the iPod mini, a hugely successful product, in favor of the nano) and because its platform moves have always been from less powerful to more powerful platforms. Rosetta and the classic environment were a (mostly) viable option for legacy PPC stuff because the new intel chips were a whole lot faster than the old PPC ones. An X86 emulator on an ARM netbook would be ugly.
In the long term, Microsoft could indeed make ARM an option(and, it seems, that their real long term plan is for everybody to be targeting the CLR in any case); but to actually sell a "Windows on ARM" product, they'd have to beat their legacy market, a tough task.
Hammer (Score:2, Insightful)
...hammer manufacturer claims everything is a nail....
He's probably right (Score:1, Insightful)
What he's saying is that 90% of computers are used casually only. An ARM or Atom based netbook or nettop has more than enough resources for email, web browsing, office document creation and so forth, with ARM holding a large advantage over Atom in energy efficiency.
Re:Absolutely not. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not quite true. Steam is big, yes, but Steam is hardly the whole market. What are the 11 million WoW players using, for instance. What are EQ and UO players using? What are players of original non-Steam iD games using? How about those EA games? Maxis games? The runaway ridiculously best-selling The Sims runs on gaming PCs, not cell phones.
Are there a whole lot of so-called "casual" gamers? Yes. Are there a lot more "real" gamers than is represented by Steam? Definitely.
Re:you can say whatever you want (Score:5, Insightful)
WinCE is a very reduced Win32 API (so we are not considering the huge collection of Win32 apps here) while GNU/Linux on ARM runs everything designed to be cross-platform.
The API isn't THAT much smaller, and a full API isn't needed on a compact device.
Even Windows Vista/7 had a massive API change from Windows XP that required adding proper "emulation" for XP mode. So are you trying to convince me that the "WinCE API isn't THAT smaller" than Windows Vista/7? Wait.. Are we still talking about the same WinCE where Windows Mobile is based on?
In case you haven't noticed, the devices that are owning the market right now are reduced versions of their desktop brothers. Doesn't seem that the majority of people prefer the full thing over the reduced version
Are you referring to the iPhone? That doesn't look like a netbook to me. Actually, on netbooks, people are using the "full thing" - Windows 7, Windows XP, OSX, GNU/Linux.. I never saw WinCE on a netbook.
Given a powerful ARM machine with plenty of RAM, you can literally compile all your GNU/Linux desktop software for ARM.
Because thats what makes a hardware/software package useful ... that you can compile a bunch of desktop software for a device that isn't a desktop. Just recompiling an app isn't all there is to it, regardless of what you think. A desktop app running on a small device, even a netbook, starts to get shitty since the screen real estate isn't the same.
Ok, I think you got confused by my words. My point is that GNU/Linux is VERY powerful for netbooks due to the reasons I mentioned before. On netbooks you don't have a ultra-tiny screen that need different UIs. Gnome, XFCE, KDE fit just fine on netbooks, hence my point about the importance of being able to "just" compile all of this to ARM.
Then I talked about the fact that the reason above doesn't hold true for handheld devices (netbooks excluded) because they have different Human Interaction paradigms which current and extensive GNU/Linux software isn't prepared to address.
The fundamental problem here is that the people using Linux in their smaller offerings are using it because they are cheaping out. Its not Linux's fault, but its a side effect of being free. They are trying to piggy back on everyone elses work to increase their profit margin, which in general is fine.
Why is this a problem? Even if they don't contribute back, IMHO, they are increasing Linux popularity which in turn will grab more attention of other manufacturers which in turn will give us more Linux device drivers and support.
Half ass hacks or recompiles of full desktop applications aren't that good on tiny displays like a netbook or phone, yet thats what they keep trying to do.
If XFCE (or Gnome) doesn't fit in the screen of your netbook, then I doubt any browser will, without permanent scrolling and resizing operations (using fingers or not). And that, IMHO, will beat down the reason of using a "netbook" in the first place.
Most Linux based devices on the market are 'we put in as absolutely little investment of money and time into the product as possible and expect it to rule the world, even beating out other devices where have much more energy and thought put into them.
GNU/Linux was already a good product, it just needed some sane marketing :)