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> And the answer is that in the future, "smart phone" will itself fade as a category and you'll have a smart phone that can be plugged in to a laptop body or de

by rodgerd 11y ago

> And the answer is that in the future, "smart phone" will itself fade as a category and you'll have a smart phone that can be plugged in to a laptop body or desktop hardware for when you need the extra power And, funnily enough, Windows tablets can do that today, and the phones get it with Windows 10.

jerf 11y ago
And you can find a few other things that go back three or four years; Acer had one, for instance. None of them seem to have quite stuck the landing yet. But I don't say this because I lack faith in the idea; I think it's inevitable. It's just that these things all seem to be ahead of the market. Now we just have to wait for the market to realize it wants this. (It's hard to read the market's mind. But every once in a while, you can guess where it's going to go in advance... and get yourself brutally murdered in your financials when you show up to the party years before the money shows up.) Back on the topic of the original article, it's possible this is Microsoft's core strategic play... if they agree with me that this is inevitable, they've still got the income and the OS resources to stick out the market's slowness, and build an incredible offering on this front out with all their resources. It's at least possible that they could indeed unseat an incumbent Android/Apple duopoly if they can be that much better than the competition once this use case becomes big... and it's not hard to imagine it going down that way. They've got a lot of cards on this front that even now Apple and Google do not, games, for instance.
- rodgerd 11y ago
  > They've got a lot of cards on this front that even now Apple and Google do not, games, for instance. Supporting older hardware, too. The fact every Windows 8 Nokia is getting a Win 8 upgrade contrasts pretty well with the way my Android 5 device won't be getting a patch for a critical security vulnerability.

by rodgerd 11y ago

jerf 11y ago

And you can find a few other things that go back three or four years; Acer had one, for instance. None of them seem to have quite stuck the landing yet. But I don't say this because I lack faith in the idea; I think it's inevitable. It's just that these things all seem to be ahead of the market. Now we just have to wait for the market to realize it wants this. (It's hard to read the market's mind. But every once in a while, you can guess where it's going to go in advance... and get yourself brutally murdered in your financials when you show up to the party years before the money shows up.) Back on the topic of the original article, it's possible this is Microsoft's core strategic play... if they agree with me that this is inevitable, they've still got the income and the OS resources to stick out the market's slowness, and build an incredible offering on this front out with all their resources. It's at least possible that they could indeed unseat an incumbent Android/Apple duopoly if they can be that much better than the competition once this use case becomes big... and it's not hard to imagine it going down that way. They've got a lot of cards on this front that even now Apple and Google do not, games, for instance.

rodgerd 11y ago
> They've got a lot of cards on this front that even now Apple and Google do not, games, for instance. Supporting older hardware, too. The fact every Windows 8 Nokia is getting a Win 8 upgrade contrasts pretty well with the way my Android 5 device won't be getting a patch for a critical security vulnerability.