I'm not sure that's true. This is prior to Apple's and Android's App stores. This was when "completely open" were the hallmarks of the linux comments out there. A walled garden by Dell wouldn't have fared well at all.
I don't even see how App store's come into it, Apple has had a walled garden since their creation. They've just been building up the walls a lot more recently and making them prettier so they seem less bad.
Look, I think Linux is a fine OS. I have no problems with it at all. I also think that OSX and Windows are fine Operating Sytems. The reason Dell didn't "commit" the way you wanted was that it was a pretty big risk for something that was, and is a niche market.
Then don't do it. Half-assing it to placate a vocal minority of Linux users is just dumb and almost always backfires, as it did here. Of course the market for Linux desktops is small, most people don't know it exists or why they would want it. But there is a market for cheap computers and they could've leveraged Linux to enter that market. Instead they put it on like 3 machines that were hard to find on the website and priced almost the same as if you had gotten Windows on them. None of that makes any sense if they really wanted to try and sell them.
Studies are not supporting this claim. There are some that use tablets and phones as primary computing devices, I'm sure. But the vast majority of people use them as secondary devices. And while annecdotal, I personally, don't know a single person that uses their phone, Android tablet or iPad as a primary device.
Studies say whatever the company funding them wants them to say. But I'm not saying there are droves of iPad-only users out there, hell you need iTunes on a PC to activate, backup, etc the thing. But the future sure looks that way. The Cisco Cius was supposed to be a corporate tablet that could pretty much replace the desktop of a secretary, phone agent, etc. I don't know if they actually got all of that functionality in and working in the initial product, but that doesn't seem too ambitious these days and I could easily see that working for a number of people. I just don't know how much infrastructure it would require and Cisco loves to require a server for every "feature" of their stuff.
The Samsung Tabs already have docks, keyboards, etc being released so why is it so far fetched to think if someone at home using their Tab in a dock with a BT keyboard and mouse for email, Angry Birds, browsing, Google Docs, etc?
Android is one of the movers and the shakers in the phone market. There is no doubt. And I would take an Android phone over an iPhone any day. What the phone market will look like in 2 years is anyones guess. Especially when looking at international numbers. There are reasons why some industry analyst thing WP7 will top competitors in a few years. Now, I don't know if that's true, and given the popularity of Android and the iPhone and the way smart phones are used, I wouldn't bet money on backing anyone yet.
True, MS is good at pulling upsets and putting out products that have just enough of the features of the current market leaders to erode their lead while working on duplicating the rest of the features. Hyper-V is a good, recent example of that. But they don't seem to get consumers, while Apple, HTC, Motorola, etc do, and that will make their job of gaining mobile marketshare very hard.
Actually, I think Win7 is a better tablet effort than XP, Tablet edition. Being a tablet (convertable HP TN2, and Asus EP121) owner It's surprising how well Windows handles touch and pen input. Especially Pen input. It's also shocking how bad it is in certain areas as well. Personally, I use Rainmeter and a WP7 style interface that works remarkably well. It is definately a work around, and I hate that I really need to use it if I want a pure touch/pen experience. This is one of the reasons I am really interested in seeing what Win8 can do for me.
One thing that really frustrates me about Microsoft is the way they can release absolutly fantastic stuff, that could and should be game changing, yet totally fail to capitalize on it for one reason or another. Media Center is an excellent example. Windows Home Server is another. Their under the covers work with Pen and touch is phenominal, but their total lack of finding a good UI metaphor to capitalize on it sooner is shameful.
At least on the tablet front, I think it's early enough where MS can still manage to be an important player.
And that's MS' problem. They understand business, not people. And even though Win8 will run on ARM, I think most people have forgotten that tablets used to run Windows at some point. Apple successfully convinced everyone that a giant iPad Touch is a tablet, so now people see them as smaller, locked down devices that can't run Windows apps and that's fine because the App Store and Android Market have enough apps and games for them.
As I mentioned. Linux is a fine OS. For some, such as yourself, it fits the bill. For me, it doesn't. I can't live without my Office Apps (OneNote being the primary killer app for my tablet), Photoshop CS5, and my games (EverQuest 2, Company of Heroes, Civ 5, Battlefield 2 and soon 3!).
Obviously if you're committed to certain, Windows-only apps then your choices are extremely limited. For work I have a few of those, but an RDP session or small VM can cover those too these days. At home I hate to even see Windows, it's just so frustrating to use after using Linux for so long. Things just seem to work so much smoother in Linux.
That, certainly, is the primary hope and push of Google for the computing future. We'll see how it pans out over time. I much prefer local apps and using the cloud to backup data. This is going to be the preference of a lot of people and companies too.
I prefer local apps as well, but I don't mind having a copy of my mail kept in Gmail just in case. Or using Dropbox to get stuff to/from all of my devices at once. A ChromeOS laptop would never fly with me, but a Linux laptop with bits in it to sync with those services would work great.
Time will tell. I suspect Windows has a bit more going for it than that.
I dunno, even MS isn't sure how their partners are going to make money off their cloud. At the last partner conference they had a big thing on migrating customers to the cloud, how easy it is, etc. And if we migrate a customer to BPOS we get to charge for the migration time, etc but after that's done so are we. MS gives us a pittance each month since they're "our customer" but they do all of the maintenance of the Exchange infrastructure so there's nothing left for us to do but setup new accounts and such. It's more than a little scary for MS' partners.
Office 365 is the replacement for BPOS, from what I understand. And includes full, local versions of Office with access to the web version. It also a hosted service for Exchange and Sharepoint. Primarily for companies that don't want or don't have dedicated IT staff to manage these systems.
I have yet to see any evidence that Google Docs, or even MS's own free MS Office web client will put significant hurt on the traditional MS Office software. Time will tell, though, I feel we will end up with a combination of rich, local apps, using local and online resources. The best of both worlds if you will.
Of course, someone looking to do minimal e-mail, surfing, media consumption and light office work can get away with a simple browser. But I haven't seen anything that would take the place of Windows or any other Full OS, without a complete change of how and what I use my computer for.
And the BPOS name is appropriate, the trials we did were riddled with random problems that should've been easy to handle. Even a simple support ticket for Exchange transaction logs to track down an email went weeks without reply, eventually we just said f' it and told them to close the ticket. They'll need a major overhaul for O365 to work well. Exchange 2010 should take care of some of it, but their support needs ramped up too. Luckily there are other Exchange hosting providers out there that actually know what they're doing already.
I feel the same way about Windows, every time I'm using it and want to do something I wonder why some standard tool in Linux isn't there like 'whois' or 'wget' and then I have to figure out a way to work around it. Windows does a few things better, but they're minor. Hell, just recently I setup bonded NICs on 2 Linux servers and a half-dozen Windows ones. After a few minutes of reading in Linux I knew what I had to do and was done in another 10 min, had the interfaces renamed to match the docs, bonded on the switch side and servers, rebooted and tested. Largely because once I had one done I was able to just copy the config files over to the other host, change the MACs and IPs and that was it. For Windows I had to install the NIC manufacturer software because Windows doesn't do 802.3ad link aggregation, then I had to deal with the random NIC names (literally, on one server they'd be named blah #4, #85, #30 and #40 on a single 4 port NIC. I have no idea where those numbers come from and the only way to figure out which was which was to pull cables and see which goes down. And as an aside that means I can't bond 2 ports on NICs from different manufacturers, a limitation that doesn't exist in Linux because the bonding module is standard and the drivers are all open source. But I digress... =)
I'm sure local apps, data, etc aren't going away in our lifetime. But the requirements of a specific OS being eroded and Apple is doing their best to exploit that and hopefully Google does too.
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