

New version will bring the UI inline with Windows Phone


I. Windows Blue to Land in 2013?





Windows Blue
[Image Source: NeoWin]



II. Are Windows Users Ready for Another Big Shift?




Apple store NYC

Sources: ZDNet, The Verge, NeoWin

Comments     Threshold


RE: Why?
By geddarkstorm on 11/29/2012 2:13:16 PM , Rating: 1
It's a good question, but if we look at other industry rumors we may see a potential logic to their actions.

If Semiaccurate is correct, and they have been correct more often than not, Intel's successor to next years Hanswell processors, Broadwell, will be a BGA CPU only. That is, no Socket, but a SoC. In short, Intel is moving away from developing for the transitional desktop/laptop and more towards a mobile model. At the same time, Microsoft is moving its OS away from the desktop focused environment, to a mobile focus.

In the next few years, the entire industry may begin ditching the desktop as we've known it, and gearing towards intergrated PCs and mobile devices.

This still leaves AMD, though, but it's looking like the tech giants are preparing to relegate the desktop to a nitch market.

RE: Why?
By 91TTZ on 11/29/2012 3:57:07 PM , Rating: 5
The desktop and laptop market isn't going anywhere. You've been falling for the hype. In the past couple of years the news has been dominated by mobile offerings, but only because they're new. The PC market is becoming more mature and obsolescence is no longer the driving factor it used to be. People are keeping their PCs much longer than they used to. In 2007 you probably wouldn't have considered an 8 year old Pentium-2 running Windows ME as being usable. But it's almost 2013 and there are plenty of people running Windows XP on a Core 2 Duo. Windows XP came out in October, 2001 and millions of people still use it. How many people were still running Windows 3.1 in 2003? PCs are becoming like home appliances. They fulfill a purpose and you use them until they break.

But the mobile market is still relatively new. It hasn't reached maturity yet. Things are evolving quickly and people are throwing away perfectly usable phones because they seem so obsolete compared to newer offerings. I had to chuck my iPhone 3G last year because it was obsolete. It was only 3 years old. When the iPad came out everyone wanted a tablet and they sold like crazy, even at $500. Now many of those people feel that their iPad is obsolete so they threw down another $500 and bought an iPad 2, 3, or 4.

But profit margins are quickly falling for mobile devices. A few years ago the only tablets you could buy were several hundred dollars. Since they were relatively inexpensive to make there was a lot of profit made on those devices. Now you can get some quality devices for under $200. Low-cost tablets are coming to dominate the industry at a time when the heavyweights such as Microsoft are still trying to establish themselves in the industry with high-price devices. It isn't going to work. Already, Apple (#1 in the tablet market) is feeling the pressure and being forced to sell a smaller, stripped down version of the iPad in order to fend off companies with their lower-cost offerings.

It's just like watching sports news- every year you see analysts saying that this kid is going to be the next Joe Montana or Barry Sanders... only to have those predictions not pan out. What you end up getting is a lot of average players who nobody remembers.

