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"I can’t imagine a computer without touch anymore," says new Windows product chief Julie...
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Friday, December 14, 2012, 5:02 PM ET"I can’t imagine a computer without touch anymore," says new Windows product chief Julie Larson-Green, reaffirming in an interview Microsoft's (MSFT) commitment to a joint PC/tablet OS remains following Steven Sinofsky's departure. By contrast, Tim Cook asserts iOS and Mac OS will remain separate, and has compared Windows 8/RT to fusing a refrigerator with a toaster. Barclays slashed its Microsoft estimates yesterday due to the lukewarm initial response to Windows 8 and poor Surface sales, though it sees Windows revenue falling at a slower pace than PC sales.
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This news story has 11 comments:
She doesn't have to imagine very hard, the majority of Windows 8 systems are sold on non touch screen computers. Right now Microsoft has two operating systems, one for touch and one for mouse/ keyboard, but all new consumer computers are sold with the touch OS.
A better statement would be can't imagining anyone buying a new monitor without touch.
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Yet... Microsoft still licenses millions of devices every year without touch. They are selling unimaginable systems every day... I don't have stats, but from what I've seen more W8 systems are sold with mouse than touch screen.
10/12/2012 comments posted to seeking alpha:
I see Windows 8 is truly a revolutionary OS.
I'm using my desk-top Dell Dimension 5150 bought in 2005. With such old time HW, win8 works much better than my original XP. It's really fast, particularly obvious when loading web pages with IE10, start-up and shut-down the Windows system.
This is the first time I encountered a new OS uses less resource.
I'm still using my mouse, keyboard for old Dell Dimension desktop and, with some minutes of learning the Metro & Desktop, I like the new OS very much.
For this reason, I give Micrsoft my 2 thumbs up!
Following are some my Dell Dimension 5150 HW spec.
Processor type: intel pentium D dual CPU 2.80GHz
Physical memory: DDR2 533MHz 512MB x4
HDD: Seagate 500G ATA
Video card: pci express x16, ATI Radeon HD5450 display 1 = DVI Prima 32" TV 1080p, display 2 = vga Dell 19" 1280 x 1080
Sound: sigmatel stac92xx c-major hd audio
Wireless: TP Link wi-fi adaptor TL-WN721N 150Mbps
Rest are standard types.
Performance: processor 4.5, Mem 5.0, Graphics 3.9, Gaming graphics 5.8 and Pri HDD5.9
But Microsoft always gets a mulligan, and IME, MS has set itself up for "Windows 9" (abstractly, I know the next non-big-bang upgrade is code-named Blue and will be more of an incremental update...MS recognizes that it needs to get back to the tee quickly.)
With progress toward a unified platform, I think Windows is set up for the day when the leveraging of hand motion that the mouse provides can be accomplished through Kinect-like recognition and hand gestures. You won't need to "touch" the screen, but the OS will need to react to multiple inputs.
IME, the platform that has "the right sized Legos" for what is common and what is not will have one advantage in that it will be more agile and take less work to respond to upcoming innovations.