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Assuring HTML5 et al stability for developers à la Microsoft: splitting the evolving specifications into “site-ready” and “experimental” for the years coming
What is Microsoft’s approach to assure HTML5 et al stability when web developers are absolutely negative about that based on their previous experience?
Microsoft’s answer came crystal clearly two days ago in a blog post quoted below. But before coming to that let’s include here the whole closing section of that post because it is summarizing the Microsoft approach about HTML5 et al stability very well (emphasis is mine):
Looking Ahead
In developing IE9, we considered how different specifications are still evolving at different rates. IE9 supports technologies that, while not always finished, are developed enough to avoid the problems that WebSockets illustrate today.
In the IE9 product, developers can expect site-ready HTML5 so they can take advantage of the best of HTML5 that is ready and can still experiment with emerging HTML5 with HTML5 Labs. By keeping these separate, developers get what they need without the negative consequences of co-mingling very different things in the same browser.
IE9 offers support for the most relevant, real-world web patterns that developers are using today as well as the HTML5 patterns we expect to become more mainstream. By relevant and real-world, we mean the technologies with the broadest impact for browser users (e.g. CSS ahead of MathML). By support, we mean providing developers a consistent programming model that enables the same mark-up. The goal is supporting great new capabilities, ideally in a way that interoperates or will interoperate soon across browsers.
This approach (along with its supporting points, like test suites and “same markup” as a goal) has garnered strong support from developers. It’s also resulted in some surprising headlines over the last year, like “Only Microsoft gets web standards” according to “Mozilla man [who] blasts Apple and Google for HTML5 abuse,” from The Register.
In this context of unfinished technology, measuring how much HTML5 different browsers support through “benchmarks” does not make much sense. In particular, many of these tests (like Acid 3) include different partial collections of unfinished standards, while they exclude deep or broad assessments of the quality of the implementations. The key questions for tests are how appropriate is their scope, how accurate and rigorous are the individual tests, and how comprehensive is their coverage. The standards bodies involved in the process of developing the standards (like W3C and Ecma) are a great forum for the development of trustworthy, high-quality tests.
Professional website developers are busy. They write a code for a living and genuinely don’t have the spare time to wade through comments on all these under construction specifications and keep track of every build of every browser. With this approach, we make it easier to take advantage of the capabilities that are stable and ready for prime time. We remove much of the guess work for developers of working with a moving target. The result is more time for site developers to innovate and create better web experiences.
Back in March when we released the first platform preview of IE9, we were clear that we love HTML5 so much we want it to actually work. One aspect of that involves using the whole PC to run HTML with the best performance. Another aspect is working with community and standards bodies on test suites. Making sure that developers avoid the frustration of wasted time re-writing sites over and over as technologies change – and that consumers avoid frustration of sites that break easily – is just as important.
In other words Microsoft’s approach is, as defined in the same day post Prototyping Early W3C HTML5 Specifications by Jean Paoli, GM, Interoperability Strategy:
… to implement standards as they become site-ready for broader adoption.
Writing Sites to IE Based on Stable HTML5
For developers, this means that they can write sites to Internet Explorer and be confident that it is based on stable HTML5 and will work in future browser upgrades. For users, it means that sites continue to work as they upgrade their browsers and they don’t get locked in to older browsers.
At the same time, Microsoft sees an important need in continuing to drive experimentation and testing of new specifications in the standards organizations. It is part of the process of ensuring that specifications are actually ready for real-world usage.
This new HTML5 Labs Web site is the place where our Interoperability Labs will publish prototype implementations of certain unstable and in-progress W3C, IETF, ECMA and other standards specifications still undergoing a lot of change. So, developers should expect that code and web pages based on these prototypes will have to be re-written as the specifications mature.
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So please experiment with these prototypes and tell us and other working group participants whether the APIs are usable. We are making them available to help improve the final specifications.
Other implementers can use these prototypes to determine whether we have interpreted the specifications in the same way, and a larger audience can get a better sense of what potential will be unlocked when these specifications have stabilized into interoperable implemented standards.
Also, please participate in the appropriate standards bodies to help finalize the specifications.
Details
HTML5, Site-Ready and Experimental [Dec 21] by Dean Hachamovitch, Corporate Vice President, Internet Explorer (emphasis is mine):
With many HTML5 technologies still under active development, our approach is to give developers better choices and avoid false dichotomies around standards support. The IE9 browser has site-ready HTML5 support that developers and consumers can depend on. We will also offer developers “HTML5 Labs” for more experimental technologies still under development. By clearly separating prototype implementations from mainstream browser product ones, we can avoid many negative consequences.
In the IE9 product, we’re delivering on the key parts of HTML5 that are site-ready. IE9 offers support for real-world web patterns that developers are using today as well as the HTML5 patterns we expect to become more mainstream. IE9 does this because we want to improve interoperability on the web by providing developers a consistent programming model through the same mark-up. The goal is supporting great new capabilities, ideally in a way that interoperates or will interoperate soon across browsers.
We will also offer prototype implementations for the more experimental or unfinished parts of HTML5 that some developers may want to try, but consumers can’t depend on yet. We will be explicit about the implementations that are more prototype than product. These prototypes are how we balance providing a product for millions of consumers while actively engaging in speculative technology discussions with developers and enthusiasts and avoid confusing either group. You can read more about that here [ Prototyping Early W3C HTML5 Specifications [Dec 21] ].
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Implementing a technology while the blueprints that describe it are still changing significantly causes many problems. In this section, we’ll use the experience of WebSockets to illustrate common challenges of under construction technologies. Below, through the transparency of Mozilla’s process, you can read for yourself how several different problems played out.
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One tech publication wrote that “the Web Sockets history illustrates some pitfalls of the style and pace of Web standards development,” and that “including support for a specification [that] wasn’t done” is just the latest wrinkle. The article’s headline describes “the risk of unfinished standards,” while another article describes “emerging Web standards like WebGL and WebSockets,” and a comment from a Mozilla leader here refers to “speculative features.”
WebSockets is just one of many, many unfinished, emerging, and speculative features. Rushing ahead with implementation while the blueprints are changing a lot creates dissatisfaction. This (warning: potentially NSFW) video dramatizes that developer dissatisfaction. That dissatisfaction is the result of supporting unfinished, emerging, and speculative features in the mainline product.
The question is how to balance the implementation of these under construction technologies (in order to resolve under construction issues) with the needs of developers (who don’t like re-writing their code over and over to get new capabilities) and the needs of consumers (who expect sites and browsers to just work). Today, iPhone and iPad 4.2 support WebSockets. Firefox and Opera have recently disabled their implementations because of (among other things) the security and compatibility concerns.
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One alternative approach to these experimental features is being much more explicit about implementations that are more prototype than product. This is the approach Microsoft is taking. You can read more about it here. Through these prototypes we balance the objective of providing a product for millions of consumers and engaging in early speculative discussions with developers and enthusiasts, without confusing either group.
There are many other technologies under development today that are still under construction. Because they are not site-ready today and will not be ready, relevant, and real-world before we release the IE9 product, these emerging standards are susceptible to the same problems and negative consequences that WebSockets has faced. Some technologies are in transition and being reconciled with others (or potentially abandoned in favor of others). SMIL animations and SVG fonts, though they are used in the Acid 3 test, are on the way out in favor of CSS animations and WOFF. The Web SQL specification, for example, was formally taken off the Recommendation track at the most recent TPAC with the emergence of IndexedDB as a better path. IndexedDB is itself an emerging and unfinished standard, along with WebSockets, the File API and WebGL (as the Ars Technica article above points out).
Site-ready also looks at the larger context of developer needs today and tomorrow and the viable alternatives as well as the state of the standards process. For example, CSS3 is an enormous set of technologies. IE9 already implements many CSS3 modules that are site-ready. Several other CSS modules (like CSS3 Gradients) are still emerging and unfinished. Other modules have perfectly fine interoperable alternatives, like using script in place of CSS3 Transitions and CSS3 Animations. For other technologies, like web workers, other considerations apply as well. Web workers introduce complex multi-threaded programming concepts to JavaScript, and require extensive prototyping (just like WebSockets) to fully explore the impact on developers and the broader web programming model.
There are many technologies that can easily play out the way WebSockets have. Developers and consumers are better off if these technologies are brought forward as explicit prototypes rather than in the product that so many people depend on. WebSockets and the IndexedDB web storage are the first prototypes in the new program. Some experimental CSS3 modules are potential candidates for prototypes, along with other technologies (e.g. the File API). This is a process we’re excited to work through with the community.
Additional information:
Introducing the WebSockets Prototype [Dec 21]
IndexedDB Prototype Available for Internet Explorer [Dec 21]
Prototyping Early W3C HTML5 Specifications [Dec 21] by Jean Paoli, GM, Interoperability Strategy:
Today we launched the HTML5 Labs Web site, a place where we prototype early and not yet fully stable drafts of specifications developed by the W3C and other standard organizations.
These prototypes will help us have informed discussions with developer communities, and give implementation experience with the draft specifications that will generate feedback to improve the eventual standards. It also lets us give the community some visibility on those specifications we consider interesting from a scenario point of view, but which are still not at the stage where we can consider them ready for official product support.
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The first two prototypes we are delivering today are Web Sockets and IndexedDB.
WebSockets is a technology designed to simplify much of the complexity around bi-directional, full-duplex communications channels, over a single Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) socket. It can be implemented in web browsers, web servers as well as used by any client or server application. The WebSocket API is currently being standardized by the W3C and the WebSocket protocol is being standardized by the IETF.
For its part, IndexedDB is a developing W3C Web standard for the storage of large amounts of structured data in the browser, as well as for high performance searches on this data using indexes. IndexedDB can be used for browser implemented functions like bookmarks, as well as for web applications like email. IndexedDB also enables offline scenarios where the browser might be disconnected from the Internet or server.
We chose these two specifications primarily because they are potentially very useful but currently unstable. These are the two specifications we currently believe the community stands to benefit the most from, but both are in flux.
The details of the HyBi protocol underlying WebSockets are being hotly debated in IETF right now, and the IndexedDB spec will soon be updated to reflect decisions made at a recent W3C working group meeting.
Announcing HTML5 Labs [Dec 21]
As you hopefully know by now, despite the hype, HTML 5 is not a completed specification. In fact, back in 2008, the author of the specification, Ian Hickson, estimated HTML 5 wouldn’t be a Proposed Recommendation until 2022! Indeed, the W3C site shows there are still significant aspects of the HTML 5, CSS 3, DOM and other specifications being fleshed out – just take a look at the ‘warning’ in every W3C Working Draft: Implementors should be aware that this specification is not stable.
Waiting until 2022 for all i’s to be dotted and t’s to be crossed is obviously not an option though. It’s infeasible to expect a drop of all these technologies at one fell swoop, and there are certainly aspects of the HTML 5 and related specifications that are relatively solid today: canvas and and semantic tags, to name a few. These are the types of stable ‘standards’ you’ll continue to see implemented in the IE 9 beta and the continuing cycle of Platform Previews.
But what about those bleeding-edge features? The ones like WebSockets (currently an Editor’s draft) that Firefox 4 and Opera recently disabled due to security issues? Or features that other browsers are “implementing” with vendor-specific extensions and the such?
There’s clearly need for a balancing act between providing a dependable, solid browsing experience to millions of users and incorporating new features that haven’t been completely vetted in the wild. With his post today, Dean Hachamovitch, announces another facet of Microsoft’s strategy to walk this tightrope between responsible development and active adoption of emerging web standards.
Microsoft Opens HTML5 Labs for Developers [Dec 21]
HTML5 Labs currently offers two prototypes: WebSockets extension for IE and IndexedDB for IE. WebSockets is designed to enable “bi-directional, full-duplex communications” between a client and server via “a single Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) socket,” according to a blog post by Jean Paoli, Microsoft’s general manager of interoperability strategy. IndexedDB aims at enabling the storage of “large amounts of structured data in the browser,” accessible both online and offline.
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Philippe Le Hegaret, interaction domain leader at the W3C, noted in October that some of the HTML 5 spec shouldn’t be used because of interoperability problems.
“The problem we’re facing right now is there is already a lot of excitement for HTML5, but it’s a little too early to deploy it because we’re running into interoperability issues,” Le Hegaret said at that time.
Microsoft, in rolling out its HTML5 Labs site, essentially agrees with Le Hegaret’s position, according to Paoli.
“We are in complete alignment between Philippe and Art; it’s more [about] the articulation,” Paoli said in a phone interview. “He [Philippe] actually wrote a blog after that explaining what he really meant. What we are saying is the same thing. We’re saying that every feature in HTML 5 — and there are many of them — every single one of them is not at the same level of stability.”
It could be as long as 12 more years before W3C Recommendation status is reached for the entire HTML 5 spec, but browser makers have already made parts of it practical to use through interoperability testing. Hachamovitch has described Microsoft’s position with HTML 5 as “write once, run anywhere.” If that goal is achieved, it will be a big change from the days when Web developers suffered with having to code for IE 6’s quirks, causing perpetual rewrites.
The HTML 5 spec is actually progressing, according to a comment by Giorgio Sardo, a Microsoft senior technical evangelist.
“HTML5 made lot of progress in recent months, [with] the HTML5 specification expected to go to Last Call (kind of feature complete) in the first 2-3 months of 2011,” Sardo wrote in a November blog post. “From there, the spec will move to Candidate Recommendation and there will be a call for implementers.”
Hanvon – E-Ink strategic e-reader alliance for price/volume leadership supplementing Hanvon’s premium strategy mostly based on an alliance with Microsoft and Intel
Following the strategic alliance between Marvell, Pixel Qi and OLPC on extremely low-cost consumer devices specially built for the cloud there are other cloud related alliances aimed at mass produced clients with sun readability. One of them is the Hanvon – E-Ink alliance which is the most visible and product-wise the most developed one. Such a strategy is also quite well supplementing Hanvon’s premium strategy which is mostly based on the Microsoft platform. Its cooperation on the new convertible classmate PC design with Intel is also going sharply against the Marvell, Pixel Qi and OLPC effort. Hanvon’s approach is also well aligned with component technology makers (such as Epson Seiko) tightly cooperating with E-Ink to sharply increase the quality and refresh rate of electrophoretic display (EPD) technology in 2011. See the latest update: E Ink and Epson achieve world-leading ePaper resolution [May 23, 2011]
Worth to read along with this: Gartner: media tablets are the new segment next to mobile PCs and desktops, as well as web- and app-capable mobile phones [April 16, 2011]
Regarding E Ink Holdings’ market position see the Undermining E-Ink and single-purpose E-readers [Aug 23, 2010 – Jan 10, 2011] report. What follows here is mostly summarizing Hanvon’s (Hanwang’s) position and future plans/opportunities.
Hanvon turns to e-book reader solutions combining hardware and software [Dec 28]:
As China-based e-book reader maker Hanvon Technology has recently achieved sales over one million units, the company plans to expand its business model from only selling hardware to providing solutions that combine hardware and software, according to an executive of Hanvon.
Hanvon is optimistic about the sales of e-book readers in 2011 and believes the company will have better shipment growth than the market average. However, the company declined to give a forecast.
Sources from upstream component makers also pointed out that despite consumer purchases of e-book readers in China are in fact increasing, 40% of the e-book reader sales in China are still contributed by government or enterprises, as they are giving the devices away as gifts. Since the contribution from these procurement orders are difficult to estimate, therefore Hanvon was unable to give a forecast for its performance.
As for tablet PCs, since Hanvon currently still cannot find an advantage in the market, the company will maintain its focus on e-book readers.
E Ink Holdings (EIH) – formerly Prime View International (PVI) – is the global leader of the electrophoretic display (EPD) market, while Hanvon is the leading vendor of e-book readers in China. … The E Ink chairman believes the e-book market will have high growth for the next 10 years, while his Hanvon counterpart thinks there should be more China e-book reader brands. …
Q: Can you talk about the current development and cooperation between EIH and Hanvon.
Scott Liu: EIH has improved the whiteness, contrast ratio and color performance of the new color EPD. Hanvon is handling the overall product design, and they will focus on special markets such as educational institutions, private companies and government offices for the color e-book reader.
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Liu Yingjian: EIH and Hanvon have been working together for many years. I would like to pay my respect to EIH, which decided to explore the potential of e-paper, including the acquisition of E Ink in order to have a tight control of the supply chain, when most people in the market were skeptical about such a sector.
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Our expectations for e-book readers are firstly demand from paperless offices and then the educational market. Paperless demand is huge, as vendors do not have to worry about content, and it fits the current popular trend of low-carbon life-style. In the educational market, bookbags are too heavy for students, and there will be huge demand.
Q: Will Hanvon and EIH have further cooperation in the educational market in the future?
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Liu Yingjian: We have had several meetings regarding the educational market, and we’ve concluded that there are several lines that we cannot trespass.
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Hence we have several proposals for promotions in the educational market, First, we will focus on the regions with better economic development as consumers in these regions have the means to purchase e-book readers. Second, we will focus on non-textbook reading materials as wealthy families may purchase the products for their children. Third, we will run trials at junior high schools, universities or some other grades. I believe the educational market will be substantial in 10 years.
Regional trials have been a success, with Shanghai being the most active region. Shanghai is the richest area in China with the highest GDP, and the municipal government has made a five-year plan to popularize the use of e-book readers for educational purposes, and a lot of preparation work needs to be done.
Q: Is there a concrete plan regarding cooperation between EIH and Hanvon for the educational market?
Liu Yingjian: The color e-book reader using EIH’s EPD will be tried out by a class of 500 students in Shanghai in the semester starting in September 2011. But trial use of e-book readers in classroom has already started in Yangzhou. We are now able to meet the two basic requirements for the educational market: color display and handwriting input.
Q: There are companies like Foxconn in Taiwan that have introduced e-book readers for students using TFT LCD panels or Mirasol displays from Qualcomm. What’s EIH’s opinion about the competitiveness of other technologies? What is Hanvon’s evaluation of other technologies?
Scott Liu: In fact, other technologies are not mature yet, while EIH has already introduced its color EPD, which is ready for mass production. But as far as I know, makers using other technologies usually will introduce products when the technologies are still at the lab-development phase, and it will be impossible for them to reach mass production in just a few months.
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Q: What does EIH think about Qualcomm’s investment in Taiwan in the future, and the fact that Qualcomm will soon start mass production?
Scott Liu: Based on my understanding of Qualcomm’s technology, there are some difficulties for mass production. Even if Qualcomm starts mass production, it will still not able to compete with EPD due to high cost, especially with the high investment amount for setting up a new 4.5G plant, and the depreciation cost could kill a newly developed business.
On the contrary, EIH is mass producing its EPDs on fully depreciated production lines. It has recently added a 5G line and possibly will add a 6G line in the future. EIH has absolute advantage in terms of production capacity. I think there may be a market for Qualcomm’s display products, but judging from its volume production cost, Qualcomm will probably focus on high-end applications.
Liu Yingjian: It is a challenge to produce reflective display products, but it have been proven successful in black and white displays. However, color displays based on reflective technology remain a big challenge for production. But a lot of people commented that the performance of our color EPD displays exhibited (at FPD International) was of high standard.
The products we have launched are better than colored newspapers, but are still worse than magazines and TVs. The color performance of color e-paper is not as rich as TFT-LCD, but what’s more important is that color e-paper does not have side effects on our eyes.
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Q: Any other expectations for color e-book readers?
Scott Liu: The basic application for color e-paper is still the e-book reader, and we don’t think that we should sacrifice the quality of black-and-white while doing color. The present color EPD is the first version, which means it is a product that meets the basic EIH standard, and the company will continue to improve the product.
The present color EPD uses color filters. We are making maximum use of the high-reflectivity characteristic of color filters, but this is only the short-term solution. For the long-term solution, we still hope to develop a particle-based electrophoresis technology to dislay colors without color filters. The development will take a longer time, and I expect some achievements in the next few years.
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Source: Digitimes Research, December 2010
Part I. The e-reader market
E-paper maker announces income spike [Aug 11]
Sales of global e-readers are expected to double to 20 million units next year as retail price has fallen to less than US$200 plus contract service
Global sales of 20-25 million e-book readers projected for 2011, says E Ink chairman [Oct 28]
Global e-book reader sales in 2010 are expected to reach 10 million units at least, and the forecast for 2011 is upward adjusted from 18 million units originally, to 20-25 million units, according to chairman Scott Liu for Taiwan-based E Ink Holdings.
e-Reader Market Will Reach 54M Units in 2015 by Displaybank’s e-Reader Industry Trend and Market Forecacast [Nov 16]
Tapping educational e-book reader market needs 2-3 years, says E Ink chairman [Aug 18]
Liu indicated that the Shanghai government aims to replace printed textbooks with e-books in five years, while the Korea government also plans to do the same by 2014.
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EIH currently is the supplier of e-book readers in a trial program for adopting e-books at school in Jiangsu, China, Liu added.
Although some countries are stepping up efforts promoting e-reading in schools, it may take years before e-books can really start replacing printed textbooks, as the process involves so many different sectors ranging from content, hardware, platform development to government policies, market observers said.
Global e-book reader shipments to be 2-3 times higher in 2H10, says E Ink chairman [Aug 11]
Price-cut competition for e-book readers among global vendors including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony and Hanvon is expected to stimulate demand in the second half of 2010, with total shipments expected to be 2-3 times those in the first half, according to Scott Liu, chairman of Taiwan-based EPD (electrophoretic display) maker E Ink Holding.
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Liu indicated that with the prices for e-book readers dropping significantly, players who only produce e-reading devices with no content support are coming under threats of being forced out of the market by the first-tier players such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble who will continue to dominate the market.
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E Ink added that clients are now able to run pricing campaigns because their EPD orders have already reached the agreed amounts, allowing them to have discounted prices, Liu said, adding that his company is happy to offer the discounts to help stimulate growth of the e-reading market.
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Amazon’s latest 6-inch Kindle without 3G connection only costs US$139, reaching the pricing sweet spot, and it is expected to generate significant growth for the vendor, he said.
Liu said that vendors will soon be able to provide sub-US$100 e-book readers judging from the market growth, and E Ink will help clients further lower the production costs.
Global e-book reader shipments fall short of forecast in 2Q10, says Digitimes Research [July 28]
A total of 1.35 million e-book readers were shipped to the global market in the second quarter of 2010, 33.2% fewer than the originally projected 2.02 million units, chiefly because shipments of new models were delayed to the third quarter, according to Digitimes Research.
Two other factors also prevented shipments from reaching the target. Telecom carrier China Mobile Communications’ subsidized sales of e-book readers were weaker-than-expected in the China market, and volume shipments of SiPix’s e-paper solutions were delayed.
Digitimes Insight: China e-book reader market smaller than expected in 2010 [July 14]
Digitimes Research has downward adjusted its 2010 projected total e-book reader shipments in the China market from 1.5 million units originally to 900,000-1 million units, as China Mobile Communications’ subsidized sales of its e-reading device have so far been much below expectations.
China Mobile Communications originally planned to procure one million e-book readers for subsidized sales in the China market in 2010, but the company actually only purchased 30,000-40,000 units in the first half of 2010, Digitimes Research noted.
Worldwide e-book reader shipments to reach 28 million by 2013, says Digitimes Research [March 24]
Global e-book reader shipments will increase from 700,000 units in 2008 to 28 million units in 2013, representing a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 386%, according to a recently published report from Digitimes Research.
The special report on e-book readers also indicated that the total market value for e-book reader shipments would surpass US$3 billion in 2013, up from only US$244 million in 2008.
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China, where the government is promoting e-reading as one of its major policies, is expected to become the second-largest single market for e-book readers in 2010.
Demise of the printed word? [Sept 6]
The desire to read books digitally on Apple iPads, Amazon Kindles or devices made in China such as Founder or Hanvon, is perhaps greater in China, where gadgets are adored, than any other market except the United States.
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Many of the world’s publishers believe what happens in China could alter the axis of the global publishing industry and condemn what we now know as the paper book to history.
The move to digital transforms the business model of publishing and who gets what slice of the cake.
Publishers fear they could become marginalized or cut out of the process altogether as the new operators in the market – those providing the platforms – want to become content providers themselves and sign their own deals with authors.
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One concern publishers have in China is piracy. Already on many street corners, forged copies of many titles of paper books are sold for a fraction of their normal retail price.
What scares publishers is that ripping off digital books is potentially easier and they don’t have to be sold on street stalls but could be sold in any part of the world in an instant.
A high-tech leap may put China front and center [Sept 6]
Lack of modern bookstores may make e-reading a public preference
John Makinson, chairman and chief executive of Penguin, a major international publisher, believes China could lead the world in the way people buy books.
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“One of the key features of the Chinese market is that the physical book retailing infrastructure is not quite as well developed as in other markets,” he said. “There is an opportunity for digital publishing because the book retailing market is not as efficient as in some other markets. There are few book shops and there are problems in getting early delivery of books,” he said.
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“To some extent, it could sort of leapfrog traditional publishing here, just as mobile telephony in some markets has leapfrogged fixed line phone networks,” he said. “You have a relatively conservative publishing and retail culture here while at the same time you have a very large community of book lovers engaged in online activity.”
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He said according to industry figures e-books now make up around 10 percent of the total market in the United States and that portion was growing at 300 percent a year. “We have no idea when it might start flattening out. I think it is heading for at least 20 to 30 per cent of the overall market,” he said.
More people are reading on screens, not on paper [May 7]
The value of the digital publishing industry surpassed that of the traditional publishing industry last year for the first time in China, according to a blue book on the cultural industry released on Thursday.
The scale of the digital publishing industry hit an unprecedented high of 75 billion yuan ($11 billion) last year, up by 40 percent year on year, the blue book said.
“Online books, cell phone books and digital books have become popular among Chinese readers,” Zhang Xiaoming, deputy director of the Cultural Research Center under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said at a press conference.
The country’s cultural industry totaled about 800 billion yuan in 2009, according to an annual report on the industry’s development released by Social Sciences Academic Press on Thursday.
The report says most of China’s publishing houses have started producing of digital books.
About 75 percent of newspapers have launched online papers and 55 percent of them are providing SMS (short message service) news, the report says.
About 2.8 percent of Chinese adults have stopped reading anything on paper and have become loyal readers of digitally published products, the report said.
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The number of cell phone users in China reached 780 million at the end of March, of which 155 million are mobile readers, according to figures from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
China Mobile, the world’s biggest cell phone carrier in terms of subscribers, runs e-book stores and provides wireless access to online publications, such as e-books, comics and magazines.
The subscription fee for its online e-book store is up to five yuan per month, 40 percent of which will be shared with copyright owners, according to China Mobile.
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“In recent years, the scale of the traditional publishing industry has remained at around 50 to 60 billion yuan a year, and it relies heavily on textbook publishing,” Gao Shusheng, an official with the publicity department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, said in an earlier interview.
“Many publishing houses are facing a crisis and digital publishing might help them break the ice,” he said.
Yan Xiaohong, deputy director of General Administration of Press and Publication, also said mobile reading has shown strong vitality and huge market potential in China.
“I spent 15 yuan on mobile reading last year, and I’m planning to buy an electric book this month,” said Yang Jie, a 27-year-old Beijinger. Reading an electric book on the bus is “fashionable,” and three to five yuan for reading an electric book online is affordable, she said.
China Mobile platform puts digital publications at fingertips [May 6]
China Mobile on Wednesday launched an online platform that enables its subscribers to read and download digital publications through cell phones and e-book readers, as part of its effort to profit from the country’s emerging mobile reading market.
The world’s biggest cellphone carrier in terms of subscribers kicked off an e-book store similar to Apple’s iBook store, which gives users wireless access to a series of online publications such as e-books, comics and magazines.
“Reading habits have fundamentally changed,” said Gao Nianshu, general manager of China Mobile’s data department. He said the company hopes the new platform will attract over 200 million users in the near future.
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Gao said China Mobile’s new e-book platform, which currently covers about 40 percent of the best selling books in the country, has attracted over 15 million users during four months of testing in eight areas.
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But … although about 45 percent of Chinese mobile Internet users read books at least once a day by mobile phone, few of them are willing to pay for online content.
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It was reported earlier this week that China Mobile plans to team up with Foxconn Electronics of Taiwan province to produce its own e-book readers.
Part II. New technologies for 2011
Color Comes to E Ink Screens [Nov 7]
However, the new color E Ink display, while an important technological breakthrough, is not as sharp and colorful as LCD. Unlike an LCD screen, the colors are muted, as if one were looking at a faded color photograph. In addition, E Ink cannot handle full-motion video. At best, it can show simple animations.
These are reasons Amazon, Sony and the other major e-reader makers are not yet embracing it. Amazon says it will offer color E Ink when it is ready; the company sees color as useful in cookbooks and children’s books, and it offers these books in color through its Kindle application for LCD devices. Sony is also taking a wait-and-see approach.
How E Ink’s Triton Color Displays Work, In E-Readers and Beyond [Nov 9]
E Ink developed the Triton screen in conjunction with a group of partners, including Epson, Texas Instruments, Marvell, and the semiconductor companies Maxim and Freescale, all of whom worked on the electronic components of the [previous black and white only] Pearl screen. In particular, Epson played a key role, providing the color filters’ controller chip.
Underneath, it’s still the same white, black and grayscale electrophoretic pigments; it’s only when filtered through the RGB overlay that the image appears in color. To reach for an historical analogy, it’s not totally dissimilar from film’s Technicolor process, which shot in black-and-white film strips through color filters, then reverse-processed.
Because the underlying technology is identical, Triton’s contrast, energy usage, viewing angle are all essentially the same as the Pearl. The image update or refresh rate for monochrome is the same (240 ms), but color animation can take up to about one full second.
Unlike a LCD display, though, pictures on the Triton don’t need to update the entire screen: a moving figure in the foreground might be refreshed while the background remains identical — just like traditional cel animation.
Epson and E Ink Announce State-of-the-Art Color EPD Controller [May 18]
Seiko Epson Corporation … and E Ink Corporation … announced a new jointly developed display controller IC. The S1D13524 is a high-performance EPD controller with a built-in color processor for E Ink’s VizplexTM-enabled electronic color paper displays.
…
Yingjian Liu, chairman of Hanvon Technology Co., Ltd, a leading eReader provider said, “Epson and E Ink’s color EPD controller is a revolutionary innovation in the eReader industry. Thanks to this breakthrough technology announcement, eReader lovers will now be able to enjoy reading colorful eNewspapers and eTextbooks. This new innovation will help expand the contents for eReaders, thereby helping to preserve the environment and changing the way in which people obtain information.” Hanvon is planning to launch its own colorful eReader at the end of the year.
The S1D13524 is the ideal choice for E Ink color EPD designs and design upgrades. Samples of the Epson S1D13524 will be available in June. Sample price is $24. Production quantities will be available in Dec 2010.
Epson to Provide Display Controller Platform that Sharply Improves e-Paper Product Performance [Oct 27]
– Platform to enable laser-quality images and high-speed refreshes –
Seiko Epson Corporation (“Epson”, TSE: 6724) today announced that it has developed a new display controller platform for electronic reading devices and other electronic paper products that provides laser-sharp image quality and rapid refreshes. The company will begin shipping the platform to e-paper-based product manufacturers in April 2011.
…
The display control platform will enable e-paper product manufacturers to speed up their time to market by allowing them to efficiently develop products with fast display refresh times and the ability to display images as sharp and clear as any produced by a laser printer. Notably, the platform will facilitate the development of products for business and education applications, which typically require higher image quality and faster displays.
Epson is the world’s no.1* supplier of controller ICs for e-paper displays, partnering with E Ink Holdings Inc. of Hsinchu, Taiwan, the world’s number 1 supplier of e-paper.
…
The display controller platform employs a newly developed e-paper display driving scheme that is unlike those used in current e-book readers. The new driving scheme capitalizes on high-speed image processing technology originally developed for Epson’s photo-quality printers to enable e-paper displays with resolutions of 300 dpi and higher to be refreshed at high speed, which is ideal for higher education, professional office and general business environments.
E-paper devices outfitted with the display controller platform and a high-resolution e-paper display will render intricate content, such as “kanji” characters, mathematical formulas and engineering drawings, as well as illustrations, photographs and other images that require smooth gradations, much more clearly than current e-paper displays. They will also be able to flip through the pages of an e-book much faster than existing e-readers. When combined with sensors, these devices will provide powerful handwriting recognition, a critical function for business applications. The sharp improvement in readability and usability are expected to fuel the popularity of e-paper products in Japan, China, and other regions where Chinese characters are used, as well as in business and education applications where huge amounts of data have to be processed.
E Ink Announces Next Generation Display Platform [July 1]
E Ink® Corporation, the leading developer and marketer of electronic paper display technology, today announced the Q2 release of its next generation display technology, Pearl. With Pearl, E Ink expands the capabilities of reflective displays, bringing electronic paper performance to the next level. With the whitest reflective displays in the industry, and a contrast ratio now approximately 50 percent greater than today’s products, text on Pearl “pops” from the page, enabling a reading experience most similar to reading text on printed paper.
…
The E Ink Pearl design builds on the current generation of Vizplex designs, which is used in millions of eReader devices today. Due to a unique and proven two pigment system that is extremely stable, the current E Ink products in the market today have demonstrated long life and high reliability, enabling a whole new class of consumer products.
Images and text become crisp on the screen as the contrast between the background and item of interest is increased. E Ink Pearl raises the bar for displays used in digital reading. This allows for eReaders to go from a contrast ratio typical of newspapers, to a higher contrast ratio typical of paperback books. The crisp text and detailed graphics also continue to remain pleasant to view when E Ink products are enjoyed outside. In addition, with 16 gray level depth, E Ink Pearl offers the sharpest rendering of images and allows product developers to display images with smooth tones and rich detail.
Part III. The Chinese market
E Ink to set up subsidiary in China to develop e-book hardware [Dec 16]
Small- to medium-size TFT-LCD panel and electrophoretic display (EPD) maker E Ink Holdings will invest US$6.61 million to set up a subsidiary in China to design and develop hardware for e-book readers for the local education market, according to the company.
… the company will not mass produce e-book readers. This investment in China is to provide an incentive to the textbook market to commence its transition to e-paper
China market: Hanvon to lower e-book reader prices by average of CNY500 a year, says report [Dec 7]
Hanvon Technology, the largest China-based vendor of e-book readers, has reached an initial economy-scale of over one million users in the China market and will keep reducing prices by an average of CNY500 (US$75) each year until it reaches production cost levels, according to a report by China-based Beijing News. … Hanvon will rely on sales of online content for profitability, the paper quoted Hanvon chairman Liu Ying-jian as saying. Hanvon will even offer free e-book readers, Liu indicated.
…
Hanvon has so far adopted EPD (electrophoretic display) panels supplied by Taiwan-based E Ink Holdings, and will cooperate with additional suppliers including Qualcomm MEMS Technologies and Fujitsu
Hanwang to maintain over 70% of China e-book reader market share in 2010 [Nov 24]
Hanwang Technology’s e-book reader shipments are expected to exceed one million units in 2010, an increase of 150% from about 400,000 units in 2009, and the vendor is expected to maintain an over 70% share of the e-book reader market in China for the year.
Hanwang is optimistic about the education market and expects significant growth in the future, noting that there are over 100 million elementary school students. Hanwang noted that flexible substrates will help to boost demand in the education market because they are more robust than glass substrates.
China market: Hanvon lowers e-book readers by 200-300 yuan on average [Nov 16]:
Hanvon Technology, currently the largest vendor of e-book readers in the China market, has lowered its retail prices by 200-300 yuan (US$30-45) on average, with the lowest price reaching 950 yuan, according to report by China-based Beijing Morning Post. The price war for e-book readers in the China market has kicked off and there are expected to be rounds of price-cut competition, the source cited China-based consulting company Analysys International as indicating.
…
In addition to Hanvon, fellow vendor MReader has cut the retail price for its S600 e-book reader to 999 yuan and another vendor Gorld has cut the price for its 500T to about 1,000 yuan.
Hanvon color e-book reader to hit the market in February 2011 [Nov 11]
Hanvon will start selling its new 9.7-inch color e-book reader featuring E Ink Holding’s latest color e-paper, Triton, in February 2011 with a selling price of 3,500 yuan (US$527.59) and is accepting pre-orders now.
…
Hanvon chairman Liu Ying-jian noted that thanks to E Ink’s cooperation, Hanvon was able to launch the world’s first color e-book reader with better-than-expected color performance. Hanvon will launch a Wi-Fi version with a selling price of 3,500 yuan, and latter a 3G version at a price of 200-300 yuan more.
In addition to competing with iPad, the 9.7-inch color e-book reader is also eyeing the commercial market as the product allows users to read and modify PowerPoint files, reducing the usage of actual paper and is easy to carry around, Liu added.
E Ink Announces Color ePaper [Nov 10]
“Color ePaper will enable richer content in eBooks, as well as enabling a broader array of other reading devices, for content such as magazines, newspapers, and educational materials,” according to Paul Semenza, Senior Vice President, DisplaySearch. “We foresee market demand for ePaper displays in these applications reaching $5 billion by 2016.”
…
For image-rich information applications showing charts, graphs, maps, photos, comics and advertising, color displays made with Triton Imaging Film enable ultra-low power and high mobility devices with a paper-like experience. In addition to 16 levels of grayscale, Triton is capable of displaying thousands of colors. And just like E Ink’s grayscale ePaper products, Triton’s crisp text and detailed color graphics are fully viewable in direct sunlight.
INTERVIEW: Aiming for No. 1 in e-reader sector [June 2]
Taipei Times: Hanvon Technology Co (漢王科技) enjoys a strong presence in the Chinese e-reader market and you aim to become the world’s top brand. How do you plan to do that and what is your timeline?
Liu Yingjian (劉迎建): We are currently the world’s No. 2 e-reader brand [after Amazon], and we will become No. 1 next year, or in 2012 at the latest. China has the biggest e-reader market. With our huge scale in shipments, we have advantages in lower costs and product functionality with our proprietary Mandarin-character recognition software.
Our goal was to ship 500,000 e-readers in China last year, but we sold only 266,000 units, as our upstream suppliers weren’t able to supply the volumes we requested. In the first quarter, we shipped 180,000 e-readers, and the total volume for the year will definitely surpass 1 million.
…
TT: The iPad is now taking the world by storm and Acer Inc (宏碁) last week announced that it would join hands with China’s Founder Group (北大方正集團) to move into China’s PC and e-reader market. How do you view the competition?
Liu: I regard [Apple co-founder] Steve Jobs as a hero and Apple itself is an outstanding company. Tablet PCs have been in the market for so long, but just didn’t take off. The launch of the iPad revived consumers’ interest. Apple’s business model, applications, stylish gadgets and the enjoyment these devices bring to consumers are amazing.
But this doesn’t mean that Apple products will also receive overwhelming response in China. The cultural essence is the part Western firms fail to offer. Hanvon has created computerized Mandarin-character handwriting recognition solutions, which allow the elderly and kids to enjoy technology by just scribbling on the panels.
[Liu developed the world’s first computerized Mandarin-character handwriting recognition technology in 1985, then founded Hanvon in 1998 and the company became the first Chinese IT firm to license technology to Microsoft Corp the same year.]
The market in China is huge and there won’t be only one player. We have over 40 e-reader brands and the competition helps us stay competitive. What Acer lacks in digital content is complemented by Founder’s resources.
TT: The market is now split into two segments: e-readers and tablet devices. Some say tablets will cannibalize the e-reader segment. What is your take on this, especially since Hanvon just debuted its first tablet — the TouchPad — late last month?
Liu: These two products share a similarity: They are both tablet devices, but use different panels. The major difference is that an e-reader is more for stationary use, such as flipping through newspapers and magazines, and uses less battery power. Tablets consume more power, but have color screens with more PC-like features. In the future, e-paper displays will be in color, while TFT panels used in tablets will consume less battery power. Both could merge into a single device over the next three years.
…
TT: How would you define your relationship with Taiwanese manufacturers?
Liu: We realized that when it comes product design, Taiwanese manufacturers are the cream of the crop. Hanvon isn’t strong in manufacturing and if we want to churn out products that have world-class quality, then we need to work with world-class companies. I started to pay aggressive visits to Taiwanese manufacturers in the second half of last year, looking for suitable partners. There are a slew of sleek products that we will introduce later this year and they are designed by Taiwanese firms. Also, we are currently talking to Book11.com for e-content and plan to bring in our e-reader and TouchPad to Taiwan in the second half.
China Hanvon Technology, the world’s second-largest e-reader manufacturers as well as the world’s leading technology supplier of handwriting recognition, optical character recognition and biometrics identification sets up an overseas marketing platform in Taiwan today to expand overseas markets. Hanvon also announces that all its four major product lines Ebook readers (including the latest six-inch touch-screen Ebook N620 with handwriting recognition and WiFi launched simultaneously in mainland China), Tablet PCs, Graphic Tablets and Face Recognitions Products will be available in Taiwan. Hanvon Technology will also cooperate with the digital publishers in Taiwan on the establishment a cross-strait publishing cooperation platform to support the distribution of Taiwan’s Traditional Chinese publication in mainland China and further expand the market of Chinese publication. Attaching importance to Taiwan market, Hanvon Technology today invites dozens of partners in Taiwan such as technology companies, distributors and digital publishers to attend the news conference. Hanvon Technology hopes the establishment of overseas marketing platform in Taiwan is an opportunity to Chinese digital publishers across the strait to collaborate on spreading Chinese culture and starting a new era of Chinese reading!
Hanvon to launch Taiwan subsidiary [Sept 8]
… it will have a workforce of 70 to 80 carrying out research and development, as well as sales, said Chen Shaoqiang (陳少強), president of Hanvon’s resources management division.
The commencement of local operations will also include the debut of its online bookstore, which will allow owners of Hanvon e-readers to download books onto their devices
…
To meet shipment goals, Hanvon has outsourced production to Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), Pegatron Corp (和碩), Inventec Corp (英業達) and Clevo Co (藍天電腦).
Part IV. Hanvon’s Microsoft and Intel cooperation
[FPD 2010] Hanvon’s Triton Powered Color e-Reader “WISEreader” hands-on [Nov 12]
Available in Pre-order in China, Hanvon’s latest e-Reader is according to the company the world first Color e-book reader. Name “WISEreader” this new e-Reader comes with a 9.68” Screen from E INK Triton technology, display 4096 colors, comes with Hanvon Digital Touch screen technology, runs on Windows CE 6.0 a Freescale CPU, has 2GB of RAM and support MicroSD Cards up to 32GB.
Other spec includes a 2350mAh Li-Ion Battery, Wi-Fi B/G as well as several WAN Options including TD, EVDO and WCDMA.
Finally the WISEreader support TXT Files as well as HTML, HTXT, PDF, CEB, DOC, XLS, PPT, EPUB, HEB, HEC, JPG, BMP, TIF, GIF, MP3, WAV and WMA.
We had some quality time with this little marvel and honestly the screen is quite good and the overall reader was responsive. With a nice 9.68 screen capable to rotate on landscape mode, the WISEreader is a pretty descent device. Capable to support some basic little games, it make us which to be in China just right now to grab one.
http://www.hanvon.com/en/products/ebook/index.html
6 inches
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5 inches
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8 inches
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| WinCE:· File Formats: – Text: TXT, HTXT, HTML, PDF, EPUB, DOC, XLS – Image: JPG, TIF, BMP, PNG, GIF – DRM: Adobe content management 4· Digital Audio Formats: WAV, WMA, MP3 |
WinCE 5.0:· Supported Digital Audio Standards: WAV, MP3· Reader: – TEXT: TXT, HTXT, HTML, PDF, EPUB, CHM, Mobi/FB2/(not available yet) – Image: JPG, TIF, BMP, PNG, GIF · Office: Microsoft® Word, EXCEL, PPT (not available yet) |
Linux:
· File Formats:
– Text: TXT, HTXT, HTML, PDF, EPUB
– Image: JPG, TIF, BMP, PNG, GIF,CHM
– DRM: Adobe content management 4
· Digital Audio Formats: WMA, MP3
Hanvon Ebook Readers [March]
… if you want handwriting recongnition incorporated into a reading device Hanvon has to be first choice. This is a key part of their work for over two decades, and something at which they do excel. …
Hanvon WiSEreader N618 at Microsoft booth on COMPUTEX Taipei 2010 [June 6]
Microsoft invites Hanvon to take participate in Microsoft booth in COMPUTEX Taipei (#L108). On 1st of June, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, OEM, Mr. Steven Guggenheimer introduces Hanvon to Microsoft media that Hanvon is a very important partner of Microsoft Window Embedded [because of Windows CE, see above], and that Hanvon comes from Beijing, which is a very magnificent media exposure for Hanvon brand.
Hanvon Invites Taiwan Peers to Jointly Enter Global E-book Reader Market [June 2]
Hanvon today unveiled an array of new products at the Computex Taipei 2010, including Touchpad B10 (tablet PC), WISEreader N618 (e-book reader), and Art Master Ⅲ(graphics tablet).
…
- TouchPad B10
Hanvon, Microsoft, and Intel jointly launched TouchPad B10 for business people. Also called the “iPad Killer” by the market, TouchPad has a trendy look and various practical features. With a weight around 990g and thickness of only 18mm, the stylish and light-weighted Touchpad is easy to carry. In addition, TouchPad supports VGA resolution of 1024×600 (16:9) and is equipped with a 2GB DDR2 memory and 250GB hard drive and therefore it makes video and audio files easy to read and write. With Windows7 pre-installed operating system, 2 USB ports, audio in/out, mini HDMI, TouchPad is a perfect trendy and handy product for consumers to use.
- WISEreader N618
WISEreader N618 is Hanvon’s first ebook reader equipped with built-in WiFi, which allows users to read ebooks via wireless web. It is a business type e-Book reader, equipped with a 6-inch E-Ink large screen and document editing/management software which supports multi-format files. Using Hanvon’s latest handwriting recognition technology and electromagnetic plate technology, WISEreader N618 is a more convenient tool compared to traditional notebooks for users as they can enjoy the dual touch screen features through gesture and handwriting recognition. WISEreader N618 is therefore a great companion for business and travel.
Hanvon B10 Win7 tablet goes on sale, gets video unboxing [Aug 25]
Hanvon Touchpad B10 tablet computer at CES China [July 12]
… new Touchpad B10 [linking to Hanvon’s product page] tablet computer. The 9.96 x 6.61 x 0.70 inch, 1.98 pound device is powered by a 1.3GHz ULV 743 Celeron processor and GMA X4500 display chip from Intel on a GS45 chipset with 2GB DDR2 memory and a 250GB hard disk drive.
Intel Shares Vision for the Future [April 13]
Also, Perlmutter disclosed that Intel is working with PC manufacturers Tongfang* and Hanvon* to introduce the new convertible classmate PC design that combines aesthetics with ruggedness, full PC functionality with enhanced e-reading capabilities and improved performance with energy efficiency. The flexible design of the new convertible classmate PC works and moves the way students do. The tablet touch screen form factor also adds additional functionality for students. Development of these new features was based on extensive ethnographic research with students and teachers.
Rugged Convertible Classmate PC Design Moves the Way Kids Do [April 26]
Intel Corporation today unveiled the most flexible and durable Intel-powered convertible classmate PC reference design yet.
PRESS KIT – The Intel-powered classmate PC: Photos
The new convertible classmate PC design converts instantly from a clamshell to a tablet mode with a touch screen, featuring a built-in camera that will swivel for 180 degrees while retaining its kids-friendly design. Features of the platform are designed for more mobility, flexibly and collaboration in students’ learning. The convertible design will coexist with the Intel-powered clamshell classmate PC for varying education needs in the world.
Pegatron lands orders for tablet PCs from China-based Hanvon [12 Nov]:
Hanvon has extended its own-brand business operation from e-book readers to tablet PCs and has launched a few business-use models including Touchpad B10 and B20 in the China market, the sources indicated.
Hanvon’s executives earlier came to Taiwan to seek ODM partners for its tablet PCs, with First International Computer, Clevo, Quanta Computer and Wistron regarded as candidates, the sources pointed out. Hanvon originally selected Clevo, but Clevo gave up the opportunity because Hanvon asked for too low prices, the sources indicated. Finally, Pegatron won by quoting the lowest, the sources noted.
China market: Hanvon to launch TouchPad B10 tablet PC in January [Dec 17]
China-based Hanvon Technology will begin to market its first Windows 7-based tablet PC, the TouchPad B10, in the China market in January 2011. Hanvon is currently outsourcing production of the TouchPad 10, which is powered by an Intel N455 processor, to Taiwan-based First International Computer (FIC).
FIC began shipping the TouchPad B10 in December and volume shipments will be maintained at 2,000-4,000 units a month initially. However, total monthly shipments are likely to reach 10,000-15,000 units when Hanvon launches Android-based products in the second quarter of 2011, according to industry sources.
More information:
Undermining E-Ink and single-purpose E-readers [Aug 23 – Nov 10]: a comprehensive report about the massive FUD generated by competitive forces a few months back. Has been successfully beaten back.
This Ink Is for Reading [July 1]: all you need to know about E-Ink Holdings (that times called Prime View International)
somewhat older information of the similar kind:
By the Book [Jan 8]
Taiwan firm spreads out e-paper magic [Jan 2]
Prime View and E-Book Readers: A New Page in Reading History [July 21, 2009]
Windows 7 slates with a personal cloud based layered interface for touch-first HTML5 applications on the CES 2011
Microsoft to Announce New Slates Aimed at the iPad [Dec 13]:
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, is expected to announce a number of these devices when he takes the stage at C.E.S., showcasing devices built by Samsung and Dell, among a number of other manufacturing partners.
…
The Samsung device is described as “similar in size and shape to the Apple iPad, although it is not as thin. It also includes a unique and slick keyboard that slides out from below for easy typing.”
The people familiar with this device said it would run the Windows 7 operating system [user interface] when in landscape mode, but will also have a layered interface that will appear when the keyboard is hidden and the device is held in a portrait mode.
…
… the company was encouraging partners to build applications for these devices that use HTML5, the Web programming language. … the applications would not be sold in an app store, as with the Apple iTunes model, but Microsoft will encourage software partners to host the applications on their own Web sites, which will then be highlighted in a search interface on the slate computers.
Update: While the above Samsung device was indeed introduced at CES 2011, under the name of Sliding PC 7 Series and even in a very prominent position in the Microsoft keynote, the layered interface wasn’t. See my post Microsoft moving to SoC & screen level slot management that is not understood by analysts/observers at all [Jan 7, 2011]. Regarding the rumored layered interface I wrote the following in the notes section of that article:
… the fact that HTML5 related announcements (as was anticipated in my previous post of Windows 7 slates with a personal cloud based layered interface for touch-first HTML5 applications on the CES 2011 [Dec 14, 2010] post) were postponed has even much bigger significance. Whatever will come regarding that upto the MIX 2011 of April 12-14 will be equally important to clarify the rest of the new strategic Microsoft picture. Particularly I am expecting that Silverlight technologies will nicely join the already known IE9/HTML5 push in a new platform technology setup.
The Dec 13 report from The New York Times indicated in the beginning has been widely quoted and analyzed over the web. Some of the most notable ones:
Microsoft to demo new slate PCs, Windows 8 tablet functionality at CES? [Dec 13]
Microsoft to show off true iPad competitors at CES? [Dec 13]
Microsoft iPad challengers surfacing in January [Dec 13]
Curious timing: Goldman Sachs issues another report saying the iPad and tablets are hammering Microsoft, then anonymous sources tell the New York Times that Windows 7 tablets are part of Steve Ballmer’s CES keynote.
…
An appearance at CES doesn’t mean the devices will go on sale in January. The show is really for retailers to see products that they’ll carry later in 2011.
Microsoft will show off new Windows 7 Slates at CES, no Windows 8 [Dec 14]
The New York Times suggests that Ballmer may show off a Windows 8 based Slate but WinRumors understands this is not the case. The software maker may show off a future Tablet/Slate concept device but will not refer to Windows 8 specifically. Microsoft is currently in the planning and preperation stage for Windows 8 and is compiling early milestone builds for product functionality.
Regarding Windows 8 there is a couple of days earlier report New Windows 8 user interface codenamed ‘Wind’? [Dec 8]:
Windows 8 will have two separate interfaces according to recent rumors.
Italian based windows8italia reports that Microsoft’s next-generation Windows operating system will be 32-bit and 64-bit with two separate interfaces. Windows8italia says that the main interface will be codenamed “Wind” and will initially only be supported by high-end notebook and desktop PCs with dedicated video cards. The site claims the interface will require around 170MB of video memory. “Wind” will only activate on 64-bit copies of Windows 8 and will be fully 3D.
The site goes on to explain that Wind will be “fully dynamic” and able to adapt to user habits. Icons and shortcuts will adapt to different usage scenarios to speed up daily tasks. Windows 8 is also rumored to include a new fast hibernation system. The system will hibernate in around three to six seconds and save all open documents and running tasks.
My earlier trendtracking has shown the following:
Windows slates in the coming months? Not much seen yet [July 13 – Oct 9] with the last relevant update stating:
Mr. Ballmer is now (Oct) talking consistently about “next year”: How Steve Ballmer told me what to do with my iPad! [Oct 6].
At the same time on my another website there is a very important in this regard Windows 7 UI overlays from Microsoft and elsewhere [Aug 28] article:
Microsoft Surfboard
This is a prototype application shown in the Brad Brooks demo part during Steve Ballmer’s session at the Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting 2010. This part is called “Chapter 11 – Windows 7 + Personal Cloud” and it is 18:27 long. The related section is close to the end, and the story told to us is the following (the emphasis is mine):
Now I want to show you something we think is going to be very compelling around consuming content across your personal cloud and with a device or form factor like … a slate. So, here I’ve got another slate form factor and again running Windows 7 and I’m going to pop open an application here that we’ve been, this is a prototype application we’ve been working with at Microsoft and using to help train our ecosystem about how to create touch-first application on Windows 7. And so this particular application is what we call internally Surfboard. I’m going to go ahead and open up the music session, and remember that song that I downloaded off Bing? Well now, if I go to Z, it actually shows up here, because it is on a connected PC across my personal cloud and this PC can now see this and use it across the personal cloud.
So, this Onkyo device that I had in my home, well, I can go ahead now and take this content off my personal cloud and I can move it right up to that Onkyo device and because that Onkyo device is connected through into my personal cloud with Windows 7, I can now take and take that music and play it across my PC through this Windows ‑‑ from Windows 7 PC into this device. But, I can take it much farther.
So, why don’t I go ahead and go into videos here. And go ahead and say that my wife ‑‑ we’re planning a Hawaiian vacation later on this year. I want to go ahead and get her excited about that. I’ll take this Hawaiian surf video and I’ll play it off to the Xbox over in the den. So, again, through one PC interface I can start controlling that experience in a different part of the house through wireless network and my personal cloud. Now, let’s say my wife wants to go ahead and set the kids up in the den and she wants to move to the main TV, I can take that right off the Xbox and move it right over to the main TV that’s connected up to my Western Digital box. And I want to take the kids and take children’s program that I recorded on that media center PC over there, and I want to take it off and I want to push it over to the Xbox in the den, so they can start watching it there.
Meanwhile, Ryan went and sent me a video of what he is doing over the weekend, which is being mascot for the Seattle Seahawks. I can pull that to the Media Center PC. So, now there you have it is I’ve now got this portable remote control device that is my slate PC that is now collected across my personal cloud. This is really going to change how people think about experiences and what they are doing with a Windows 7 PC, plus a personal cloud.
So what Microsoft is developing is not a UI overlay on top of a single slate device, like what we have with Apple iPad, but over an entirely different concept they are calling “personal cloud”, of which the Windows 7 slate is just one part. In the very beginning of his presentation Brad Books is describing the concept as follows (the emphasis is again mine):
Speaking of cloud and Windows, we have a unique point of view on the cloud for consumers, and we call it the PC. Only in this case we call it the personal cloud. And the personal cloud, well, it’s going to connect all the things that are important to you and make them available and ready for you to use wherever you’re at, whenever you need it. That’s going to be our promise to consumers. And it’s going to be centered around you, because we don’t believe around here that one size fits all. We believe in choice and we believe that you’ve got to bring that together in a lot of different ways for customers.
But the personal cloud … is going to do a lot more than just connect your Windows 7 PCs together. It’s going to connect you to your entertainment choices and bring new content into your personal cloud. It’s going to connect you to the people that matter to you most. And of course it is going to connect to different devices that you want it to connect to, like devices in the homes or ones you might carry in your pocket. And we are going to take this already super popular Windows 7 PC experience and make it even more compelling for consumers and deliver it on a scale that Microsoft can deliver it on. So starting this fall, the things I’m about to show you, this personal cloud delivered through a Windows Live update that will be coming, will be available to every existing Windows 7 PC user and every Windows Phone 7 user. And by Q3 a vast majority of all PCs that ship to consumers will have this pre-installed so people will have this personal cloud experience as part of their Windows 7 experience right out of the box, and of course that will come with every Windows Phone 7 as well.
Meantime the service part of that personal cloud was introduced, see my WHAT? … Windows Live Spaces SaaS moving to WordPress.com SaaS? … It is part of a NEW strategy with Windows Live Essentials 2011 released now! [Oct 2] post regarding that. We also have the Office add-on to that, see my Microsoft Office 365 SaaS (now in limited Beta) [Oct 20] post regarding that. Also these are essential parts of well thought-out overall strategy, so called “three screens and a cloud”, see my Microsoft (Ray Ozzie, Steve Ballmer) on the cloud clients [Oct 9] post.
So what Microsoft could indeed introduce as an overlay software on Windows 7 slates when they are operated without a keyboard is a personal cloud based new interface optimized for touch (over the traditional Windows 7 interface). This is only which still missing.
Regarding the HTML5 rumor there is also nothing essentially new since it could have been noted earlier as per my existing posts on this website:
Microsoft going multiplatform? [Sept 17]
Microsoft to lead standards compliance and implementation? … or how Microsoft is aiming to create a radically new Windows client platform via a set of “whole computer capable rich web” standards. [Sept 20]
Split strategy for HTML 5 and Windows only enhanced development from Microsoft [Dec 3]
And regarding the dependency of Windows slates on Intel SoC advancements there were clear posts here as well:
Intel SoC for Cloud Clients [June 27]
Windows 7 tablets/slates with Oak Trail Atom SoC in December [Nov 1]
Intel Oak Trail to beat ARM with MeeGo specific prices [Nov 25]
Intel’s industry position and prospects for years ahead [Dec 9]
So by CES 2011 time (January 6-9, 20011) everything will be ready to launch a truely competitive Windows 7 slate strategy. And one look at the program shows that Microsoft will quite probably be THE major keynoter with (emphasis is mine):
Steve Ballmer will kick off the 2011 International CES with a preshow keynote address at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, January 5, in the Las Vegas Hilton Center. In previous years, Microsoft has used the CES keynote stage to launch major products including Xbox, Windows Vista and its Sync technology partnership with Ford.
(Note: a year ago, as always, Ballmer was also a preshow keynoter. Let’s hope this time his keynote will indeed have a major industry impact since tooo many people are using Microsoft legacy client solutions which indeed urgently need a strategic update for the fast emerging cloud clients environment.)
Intel Oak Trail to beat ARM with MeeGo specific prices
As per Digitimes Intel starts mass producing Oak Trail platform [Nov 24]
… specifically for tablet PCs, with the combination of Atom Z670 processor and SM35 chipset the initial product, according to industry sources.
The Oak Trail platform will sell at about US$25 with MeeGo, and the price for Oak Trail and Microsoft’s Windows 7 will be higher.
There were a couple of news regarding the state of MeeGo a month ago as well:
– For developers’ eyes only: MeeGo version 1.1 [Oct 21]
Today marks a new project release of the MeeGo software, the open-source next-gen operating system for computing devices that Nokia and Intel kicked off earlier this year. The release brings it to version 1.1. This includes updates to the Core operating system, together with the Netbook, In-Vehicle and Mobile Handset packages. An updated Software Development Kit (SDK) for version 1.1 will follow shortly. So MeeGo’s well on its way and showing great progress.
So what is a “project release”? Let’s start with what it isn’t. This isn’t a finished product for you to load up on to your phone and use on a day-to-day basis. The user interface is neither finished nor is it representative of what the experience will look like on future Nokia devices (we’re creating our own unique experience using Qt). What it is, is a generic version intended to allow developers and device manufacturers to get familiar with the code and the capabilities of future devices.
… Version 1.2 is scheduled for April 2011, by which point the MeeGo handset user experience software should be pretty much complete. For all the technical details, jump to meego.com.
– MeeGo 1.1 Release [Oct 28]
This release includes:
- Core OS 1.1 – consolidated common base operating system for all UXs
- Netbook UX 1.1 – complete set of core applications for netbooks
- In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) UX 1.1 – includes a sample IVI home screen and taskbar built with Qt 4.7 and speech recognition
- Handset UX 1.1 – technology snapshot implements basic development UX for voice calling, SMS messaging, web browsing, music and video playback, photo viewing, and connection management
- SDK 1.1 Beta – SDK for MeeGo Core OS and supported UXs will be released during the coming days before the MeeGo Summit conference in Dublin.
…
Looking Ahead to MeeGo 1.2
MeeGo development continues forward on a six-month cadence. MeeGo 1.2 is scheduled for April of 2011 and it will include a Handset UX release with a complete set of applications, and support for other device usage models.
Relative to that nothing really new came out of the MeeGo camp. Chippy has a good Report: Timeline for MeeGo Netbooks, Tablets and Smartphones [Nov 20] for those who want to understand in all details what Meego will bring next year and when. Author’s final conclusion is:
We could see MeeGo netbooks with AppUp as early as January with ‘features’ such as quick-boot, lower cost, a simple-to-use operating system with a social-networking slant. We’re unlikely to see too much excitement around these early devices though because platforms and applications need to develop to create products with any major selling points. ARM do have an opportunity to get MeeGo on a netbook-style device in order to create an interesting long-battery-life product.
Tablets could appear in the early part of 2011 as 3rd-parties are already working on UI solutions based on MeeGo 1.1 but for interesting multi-touch products, with an application store, this won’t happen until around June 2011.
The first MeeGo smartphone requires MeeGo V1.2 and won’t happen, either on Intel or ARM until around June 2011. That phone is likely to be a Nokia product and its success will be critical to MeeGo.
Everything up until this Nokia/MeeGo phone can be called Phase-1 – led by Intel/Nokia investment. If these products show class-leading features and the developers start to create applications then we’ll start to see Phase 2 products created through independent investment that are true indicators of MeeGo momentum. That story starts in Q3 2011.
This means that Intel cannot effectively compete against ARM for another half year at least. Intel’s ally in the MeeGo strategy is also under reorganisation:
The mid-2000s represent something of a high-water mark for Nokia. In 2005, it was the undisputed king of the mobile market having sold its billionth handset.
Today, while Nokia remains the world’s largest seller of mobile phones, its prospects have changed dramatically. The company now faces slipping market share, competing mobile operating systems and a world where Apple and Android are regarded as the smartphone leaders.
… The fightback will be headed by Stephen Elop, the former head of Microsoft’s business division, who replaced outgoing CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo on 21 September.
- Nokia Hires A New Exec To Save Its Brand [Nov 24]:
Nokia’s new CEO just hired a new chief marketing officer to help the once-hot cellphone maker fix its dying brand.
Digitimes recently also had the opportunity to talk with ARM president, Tudor Brown and share his views regarding the market for tablet PCs in 2011, and the role of Taiwan’s hardware manufacturers in the booming business. Brown also discussed ARM’s business opportunities in a PC industry that is moving toward increased mobility. See:
– Tablet PCs are opportunities to redistribute profits among supply chain players, says ARM president [Nov 19
– Toward increased mobility: Q&A with ARM president Tudor Brown [Nov 24]
The leading vendor in Taiwan meanwhile unveiled its strategy as follows:
– Acer adopts AMD CPU for tablet PCs [Nov 25]
Among Acer’s announced initial batch of tablet PCs, a 10.1-inch Windows 7-based model is believed to use AMD’s Ontario APU codenamed C-50, according to sources from notebook players.
… The dual-core C-50 APU, which consumes only 9W of power, is currently priced at about US$55-60 and includes an integrated Radeon HD 6250 graphics chip [and also UVD dedicated hardware acceleration for HD video including 1080p resolutions, see later].
– Live and interact in total mobility – Tablets according to Acer [Nov 23]:
… support of its goal to simplify content consumption – a strategy which began with the development of Acer’s multimedia sharing system, Clear.fi. Acer’s strategy is based on the concept of sharing multimedia content and enjoying it across any device, and Tablets are ideal devices for this purpose.
A 10.1” Android tablet for a superb mobile and home entertainment experience … Designed for HD entertainment, this tablet comes with a high resolution, high color contrast display, allowing you to play or share HD video with your friends wherever you are. … Available April 2011
7” Android Tablet: the epitome of mobility … On the 7” (1280×800) 16:10 aspect ratio full touch screen, you can enjoy games, photos, videos while keeping up with your emails or your favourite social networks. Video chat or record a video with the front-facing HD camera. With HDMI support, hooking it up for a big screen video experience is easyier than ever! … Available April 2011
10.1” Windows Tablet: Versatility in a tablet form factor … an extremely innovative solution that combines touch screen user-friendliness with the comfortable experience of a physical keyboard. In fact, the tablet comes with a docking device that includes a full-size keyboard and more connectivity options to enhance the user experience. … Thin and light (only 15 mm and less than 1kg), and with a 10.1”, high resolution display, it’s easy to carry around and really unobtrusive. This tablet ensures outstanding entertainment and a superior touch experience. … Available February 2011
– Acer debuts 10.1-inch Windows 7 tablet: AMD-powered, inbuilt 3G, coming February 2011 [Nov 23]
– Acer aims at largest global market share for tablet PCs in 2-3 years, says CEO [Nov 26]. A detailed interview.
– Compal, Wistron to station in Chongqing, says Acer source [Nov 23]:
…accepted an invitation from Acer to set up production bases in Chongqing, western China, to support Acer’s operational headquarters there, according to a source inside Acer.
Acer’s headquarters in Chongqing will start operations in the second or third quarter of 2011 and are expected to handle half of Acer’s PC shipments in 2012, which is about 30 million units, the source said.
More information regarding AMD’s new APUs based on brand new Bobcat cores see in my post SoC advances for client, server and mobile basestation level [Aug 25, with updates going as of Nov 25]
More information regarding Intel’s Oaktrail see in my posts:
– Windows 7 tablets/slates with Oak Trail Atom SoC in December [Nov 1, with updates going as of Nov 24]
– Intel SoC for Cloud Clients [June 27, with updates going as of Aug 23]
More information on the current leading edge in ARM offerings see in my posts:
– Marvell ARMADA with sun readable and unbreakable Pixel Qi screen, and target [mass] manufacturing cost of $75 [Nov 4]
– Marvell ARMADA beats Qualcomm Snapdragon, NVIDIA Tegra and Samsung/Apple Hummingbird in the SoC market [again] [Sept 23, with updates going as of Nov 2]
More information regarding Windows slates/tablets see in my posts:
– Windows 7 tablets/slates with Oak Trail Atom SoC in December [Nov 1, with updates going as of Nov 24]
– Windows slates in the coming months? Not much seen yet [July 13, with updates going as of Oct 9]
Marvell ARMADA with sun readable and unbreakable Pixel Qi screen, and target [mass] manufacturing cost of $75
Update: OLPC plans solar charging, satellite Internet for XO-3 [July 20, 2011]
The XO-3 will become available early next year or perhaps sooner, and price is still being determined, but it will still be under $100, Negroponte said.
The tablet will also include a camera on top of the screen, placed inside the bezel surrounding the display. A microphone will be placed in the bezel under the screen, and USB 2.0 ports and a headphone jack will be on the sides.
Decisions are still being made about the display, which is holding up development of the device, Negroponte said. OLPC wants a transflective screen, much like the current XO, but with improved richness in e-ink and transmissive modes. OLPC plans to use spin-off Pixel Qi’s hybrid screen …
The original post:
Pixel Qi’s problems with mass manufacturing are well described in the latest June 3. update of Pixel Qi’s first big name device manufacturing partner is the extremely ambitious ZTE [Feb 15, 2011].
This all comes together in a prototype form to be shown sometime in the middle of February 2011 as per OLPC XO-3 Tablet Delayed [Nov 3]. Product delivery would be ready by the end of 2011 in a form suitable for developed countries, then a year later in another form for developing nations of the world. While an advanced cloud client capability based on then latest version of Google’s Android operating system will be perfect for the 1st world countries, the 3d world will get a next generation version of the current XO-1 and XO-1.5 computer from OLPC .
Follow-up: High expectations on Marvell’s opportunities with China Mobile [May 28, 2011]
Update: that plan is going well with the progress as best reported by XO-1.75: cutting through the nonsense [Jan 11, 2011] referring to the corrections by the VP of Hardware Engineering at OLPC to errors in a CES 2011 report, and also comments throughout the blogosphere regarding the absolutely coincidental announcement by Microsoft of their ARM support:
There were several errors in that [CES 2011] news article [with title: OLPC cuts price of XO 1.75 laptop to $165, power by half [Jan 7, 2011]] which I would like to clear up:
- the XO-1.75 will not have an 8.9” screen, but will continue with the sunlight readable 7.5” screen designed by Mary Lou Jepsen (now at Pixel Qi) used in the XO-1 and 1.5.
- the $165 price is fiction (BOM price hasn’t been finalized), but probably not very far from the truth for the non-touchscreen equipped version. Please don’t forget that since we don’t add any profit margin, the laptop price directly depends on the volume ordered.
- the switch to ARM was completely independent of any future support for ARM in Windows. That support was announced this week, while I’ve been pursuing this ARM design for three years, with active development over the last eight months. Furthermore, we are using the Marvell Armada 610, which won’t be supported by Windows (if you believe M$).
- Linux has shipped, and will continue to ship, on EVERY XO produced. You can believe random commenters, or you can believe the person who signs off on every SKU produced.
I’ll also add that a lot of work has gone into software development, including porting Fedora 14 to ARM and adding multi-touch support to the Sugar UI. This has been a long time in the making, and the announcement of Microsoft’s ARM port is a coincidence. Sorry, no riveting conspiracies here.
Some media reports have been implying that mass production will start by mid-year. This is incorrect. It may possibly be that the design is finalised by then, but planning and tooling for mass production and deliveries is quite an endeavour beyond that.
If you want the real information on the XO-1.75, look at the OLPC Wiki page. Right now, they’re up to Alpha test model 2. If you want to view or take part in the development discussion, head over to the devel mailing list (strictly speaking, this list is for software development, but the community are discussing the hardware there too).
Notes [Jan 11, 2011]: On the OLPC Wiki page for the XO-1.75 there is a link to the Announce: OLPC software strategy [July 7, 2010] in which you can find the following crucial statements:
XO-1.75 and beyond
XO-1.75 software development is underway. Today we’re announcing that we’re planning on using Fedora as the base distribution for the XO-1.75. This wasn’t an obvious decision — ARM is not a release architecture in Fedora, and so we’re committing to help out with that port. Our reasons for choosing Fedora even though ARM work is needed were that we don’t want to force our deployments to learn a new distribution and re-write any customizations they’ve written, we want to reuse the packaging work that’s already been done in Fedora for OLPC and Sugar packages, and we want to continue our collaboration with the Fedora community who we’re getting to know and work with well.
[Fedora was chosen more than two years ago and delivered in the very convenient Fedora 10 on SD card [Nov 28, 2008] format. This is why it has such a widespread use in the OLPC community, especially among adults who do not want to use the child focused graphical interface called Sugar but rather a desktop environment on their XOs.]
BACK TO THE ORIGINAL [Nov 4, 2010] POST:
Whatever will be delivered by Windows 7 tablets/slates with Oak Trail Atom SoC in December [Nov 1] or anything else the next XO-3 tablet effort outlined below will be an enormous threat to the current ICT establishment, everybody included (mighty Apple as well).
Two undisputed technology leaders are behind the whole engineering effort: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. for the leading System-on-a-Chip (SoC) capability and Pixel Qi Corporation for the incredible screen.
Follow up: Marvell to capitalize on BRIC market with the Moby tablet [Feb 3, 2011]
Follow-up: Kinoma is now the marvellous software owned by Marvell [Feb 15, 2011]
Update [Jan 6, 2011]: Marvell 100 series tablet [Jan 6, 2011] is giving quite a credibility to the follow-up project described in the rest of our post
[CES 2011] Marvell’s foray into the tablet market sees this rather cute and well designed model, the 100 series. Unlike other tablets that are in the market, this one comes with Android 2.2 (instead of 2.1), while sporting a rather young, all-white design with all the lines in the right places. A microSD memory card slot is there for expansion purposes, and you won’t get multi-touch support on the 10” display which is a bummer, so forget about zooming in or out in Angry Birds. There is 1GB of internal memory inside, while Wi-Fi connectivity is supported although 3G will not be present when it hits the market sometime this year for $199 a pop [with $99 manufacturing cost — see in the below video]. Of course, as with Marvell’s OLPC project, the 100 series will target the educational environment more. It is pretty heavy, but it won’t weigh a ton like most textbooks. Looks hardy enough to stand up to the rigors of restless kids, too! Interestingly enough, being an Android-powered device, it has more than the usual 4 buttons of Home, Menu, Back and Search, but will include the “Up” and “Down” buttons, too.
Update [Jan 10, 2011]: Mobylize Tablet on ABC News: Good to Know [Jan 10, 2011]
Note while watching the video that the LCD screen used in the tablet has wide viewing angle.
Update [Nov 2]: Sehat Sutardja: An Engineering Marvell by IEEE Spectrum [Nov 2, in print Oct 27 but with the title of Marvell Inside] is describing the extremely deep electronic engineering mentality lead by the CEO of Marvell Technology Group Ltd. as the secret recipe for success from the very beginning:
Sehat already had plans for the first product: a better read channel for disk drives. It sounds incredibly specialized and it is, but it’s also one of the drive’s key components. The read channel takes the analog signal coming from the magnetic head as it scans the disk, converts the noisy signal to digital, and puts that information out onto the bus that will take it to the computer. Existing read channels used a bipolar transistor on a complementary-metal-oxide semiconductor substrate (BiCMOS), but Sehat planned to use only CMOS. That way the channels could be manufactured by a chip foundry like the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., so Marvell wouldn’t have to build its own fab. Using CMOS also meant that the device would consume less power. This would, however, present an engineering challenge: Existing CMOS read-channel designs were much slower than BiCMOS.
… they convinced Seagate Technology to take a chance. Ken Burns, an executive at Seagate, told them that the company’s next-generation drive would need a read channel at 240 Mb/s—could Marvell deliver? … They told Burns yes. In less than three months the Marvell team hit the 240-Mb/s mark, and Seagate became Marvell’s first customer. … Today, in terms of units sold, Marvell has about 60 percent of the market for hard drive systems-on-a-chip.
“This little start-up, with one product line, put Texas Instruments out of the read-channel business,” Ohr [an analyst with Gartner] says.
Added later: Winner: Pixel Qi’s Everywhere Display by IEEE Spectrum [Jan 20, 2010] is well describing the innovative screen technology in a way that the leading mind behind, Ms. Mary Lou Jepsen is also well represented. Here is a key excerpt from that:
The Pixel Qi display consumes far less power than traditional LCDs, drawing a peak of about 2.5 watts, of which the backlight accounts for about 2 W, says Jepsen. Turn off that light and slow the refresh rate, and you can maintain a static image—such as the page you’re reading now—with just half a watt. That’s still more power than is needed by electrophoretic displays, the generic term for the kind made by E Ink [and used in most e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle devices]. Electrophoretic screens are bistable, which means that the pixels can maintain a static image powerlessly. But e-paper also requires a higher operating voltage than the Pixel Qi screen, which means that if future e-paper displays offer faster refresh rates, their power advantage will likely wane.
… Pixel Qi has also beat E Ink to color. In the Spectrum conference room, Jepsen cranks the backlight all the way up to show off the color and video playback. The video is perfectly watchable, although it probably wouldn’t be your first choice if movies were the primary application [like with the TV sets]. The colors don’t look as saturated as they would on a glossy cinema display, but at least the blacks in dark scenes are very black. In other words, the Pixel Qi screen offers an excellent compromise for a class of gadgets defined by their low-cost versatility.
READ ALL the details below in order to understand the reality of the – seemingly, believe me just seemingly – bombastic claim in the introduction (… this will be an enormous threat to the current ICT establishment …)!
Here is the video interview accompanying the article referred in the introduction, to start with:
This engineering effort goes back to May with announcement that One Laptop per Child and Marvell Join Forces to Redefine Tablet Computing for Students Around the World [May 27]. The most important details are (emphasis is mine):
The new family of XO tablets will incorporate elements and new capabilities based on feedback from the nearly 2 million children and families around the world who use the current XO laptop. The XO tablet, for example, will require approximately one watt of power to operate (compared to about 5 watts necessary for the current XO laptop). The XO tablet will also feature a multi-lingual soft keyboard with touch feedback, enabling it to serve millions more children who speak virtually any language anywhere in the world.
The device is also decidedly “constructionist” in nature. By design, it combines hardware and software to deliver a platform that will enable educators, students and families around the world to create their own content, and learn to read, write, and create their own education programs and share all of these experiences via a mesh network model. The device will also feature an application to directly access more than 2 million free books available across the Internet.
“While devices like eReaders and current tablets are terrific literary, media and entertainment platforms, they don’t meet the needs of an educational model based on making things, versus just consuming them. Today’s learning environments require robust platforms for computation, content creation and experimentation – and all that at a very low cost,” said Dr. Nicholas Negroponte, Founder and Chairman of One Laptop per Child.
… “Marvell has made a long-term commitment to improving education and inspiring a revolution in the application of technology in the classroom. The Moby tablet platform – and our partnership with OLPC – represents our joint passion and commitment to give students the power to learn, create, connect and collaborate in entirely new ways,” said Weili Dai, Marvell’s Co-founder and Vice President and General Manager of the Consumer and Computing Business Unit. “Marvell’s cutting edge technology – including live content, high quality video (1080p full-HD encode and decode), high performance 3D graphics, Flash 10 Internet and two-way teleconferencing – will fundamentally improve the way students learn by giving them more efficient, relevant – even fun tools to use. …”
Marvell indeed has all the necessary SoC prerequisites and credentials for such a fantastic goal (both technically and market-wise) as described in my post Marvell ARMADA beats Qualcomm Snapdragon, NVIDIA Tegra and Samsung/Apple Hummingbird in the SoC market [again] [Sept 23] (BTW the most popular post on my blog by far).
The details of the original plan were described in OLPC’s Negroponte says XO-3 prototype tablet coming in 2010 [May 27] with an accompanying video interview shown below:
OLPC and Marvell collaboration has since significantly been strengthened as evidenced by (emphasis is mine):
One Laptop Gets $5.6M Grant From Marvell to Develop Next Generation Tablet Computer [Oct 4]
Negroponte says the deal, signed in the past week or so but not previously announced, runs through 2011. “Their money is a grant to the OLPC Foundation to develop a tablet or tablets based on their chip,” he says. “They’re going to put the whole system on a chip.”
… it will form the basis of what might be called an interim step, a tablet developed by Marvell (and also apparently modeled partly on its own Moby tablet for the education market) that is intended for children in the developed world. As such, it won’t be the machine OLPC wants to distribute in developing nations. … The Marvell tablet will also utilize the Android operating system, while the XO 3 will be based on Linux, among other differences, Negroponte says.
“The first one would definitely not have our brand. It’s a First World machine,” Negroponte says. The plans are for Marvell to develop this initial machine, in partnership with OEMs and a partner in education, and release it for sale sometime in 2011, he says.
Negroponte says a follow-on version, based more completely on OLPC’s designs, will hopefully be ready in 2012. “The second one…would have our brand on it, because it will be identified with and for the developing world,” he says.
OLPC’s Negroponte: Tablets must be a ‘constructionist’ medium [Sept 30]
Tablets are all about consumption, said Negroponte. “You could say that Apple makes peripherals for iTunes,” he said. In a developing world and educational environments, you need haptics and ways to make tablets constructive. “You can’t turn these kids into couch potatoes,” he said. “You learn by making.”
Cloud computing won’t fly where OLPC plays. “Clouds are fine for us, but there are no clouds over Ethiopia, Rwanda and Gaza,” he said.
Marvell co-founder talks technology in education, R&D [Oct 7]
On her relationship with Negroponte, Dai said she met him five years ago and they talked about moral causes and technology. Marvell had the mesh networking technology used in the original XO. “The priority was affordable technology for poor countries,” she said. “Nicholas set a bar. In many ways, he invented the e-book, netbook microcosm and form factor. The other piece was to make those devices affordable.”
What’s the OLPC’s role today? Dai said that in many respects the OLPC is a design shop—something Negroponte has noted after laying out plans for the next-generation XO. “OLPC sets a bar and the industry takes it and commercializes it,” she said. “It’s like the old days where Bell Labs would create and others would commercialize it.”
Marvell Delivers Vision of 21st Century Classroom Technology at NBC News’ ‘Education Nation’ Summit [Sept 27]
Marvell to Fund Next Generation Education Apps [Sept 27]
Marvell, one of the world’s largest chipmakers, announced today that it’s launching a competition to recognize and fund the most clever new education apps for classroom tablets. The challenge invites ambitious, intelligent software developers around the world to create apps that transform the way students learn. Three winners will share prize money totaling $100,000, along with access to Marvell’s considerable engineering resources for support and testing.
The $100K Challenge, unveiled at the NBC News’ Education Nation summit, is a part of Marvell’s Mobylize campaign, the company’s long-range commitment to mobilizing technology innovation, speeding education innovation and bringing to students everywhere the inexpensive yet powerful tools they need to learn, connect and collaborate in new ways.
The campaign and the $100K Challenge were inspired by Marvell’s new Moby tablet reference design. The classroom-friendly Moby tablet reference design is a high-performance, low-power device based on Marvell’s ARMADA™ application processor and Google’s Android™ operating system. It’s the platform for which developers enter the $100K Challenge will design their applications – and it’s perfect for the part. It’s equipped with 1080p HD, advanced 3D capabilities and full Flash internet. For developers, the Moby tablet reference design provides far-reaching possibilities. For students, it opens vast horizons, at a price school districts can afford.
Ms. Dai is the only woman co-founder of a major, public semiconductor company in the world, and has helped lead Marvell’s 15 years of growth from start-up to a current market capitalization of $12 Billion.
… Today, Marvell is the third-largest fabless semiconductor company in the world, and ships more than a billion chips per year. Marvell provides two out of every three chips used in storage media critical to the infrastructure of the Information Age; its broad portfolio of leading network and communications solutions and high performance, low-power chips have rapidly become the technology of choice behind a broad range of connected electronics — such as tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices. From a half dozen employees in 1995, Marvell has today more than 5,700 employees on four continents.
“It is my passion to work to bridge my two homelands – China and the U.S. – and try to promote cooperation and economic growth in both powerful nations, particularly in the areas of semiconductor, communications, education and green technologies,” said Weili Dai, Marvell’s Shanghai-born co-founder. “For that reason, I am very proud that the Governor chose to launch his Asia Trade Mission from Marvell’s Silicon Valley campus and then a few days later, visited our Shanghai design center. I am also proud that Shanghai government officials were able to join Governor Schwarzenegger in highlighting the exciting new developments at our Shanghai design center. It is an honor that reflects well on Marvell’s global leadership and growing industry influence.”
…
During his visit, the Governor toured demonstrations of Marvell’s latest communications, computing and consumer technology and presided over the dedication of the expansion plans at the company’s Shanghai Zhangjiang facilities, including the plans for a three-way research consortium between Marvell, China’s prestigious Tsinghua University and the University of California Berkeley. Additionally, Marvell announced its support of the Governor’s Executive Order to promote integration of advanced technologies in early education with a donation of eReaders and tablets to PS7 Middle School, a St. Hope Public School in Sacramento, California, and Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Experimental Primary School in Shanghai, China.
In China, Marvell has operations in Shanghai, Beijing, Hefei and Shenzhen. Marvell’s Japan design center is in Tokyo; its South Korea operations are in Seoul. Marvell has strategic business relationships with the world’s largest telecom, mobile, and consumer electronics manufacturers in the region.
The screen technology in question comes from Pixel Qi as per ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD AND PIXEL QI SIGN CROSS-LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR SCREEN TECHNOLOGY [March 30]. The details here are:
OLPC receives full license to all Pixel Qi “3qi” screen technology, including 70+ patents in process and all current and future IP developed by Pixel Qi for multi-mode screens. Pixel Qi is leading the design of new screens for OLPC’s next-generation XO laptops. The agreement also calls for Pixel Qi to receive full license to the dual-mode (indoor and outdoor) display technology used in the XO.
“A huge barrier to getting computers to mass use in the developing world is limited access to electricity. Pixel Qi is designing new screens for OLPC that will keep laptops going even longer between recharges and excel in long-form reading while providing color and video,” said Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of One Laptop per Child.
… Mary Lou Jepsen, founder and CEO of Pixel Qi, added, “OLPC’s focus on the need for low-cost, low-power devices led me to invent power-efficient LCD screens that are optimized for reading. Commercial tablets, notebook computers and smart phones have precisely the same needs. This is one of the few examples in which cutting-edge computer technology first deployed for developing nations benefits the developed world as well.”
Pixel Qi is actually an almost three years old start-up by Mary Lou Jepsen, former CTO of OLPC. She made a very early commitment to support OLPC further on as described in her post about the Next Generation OLPC Laptop [May 21, 2008]. It contains a HUGELY important remark:
In essence, the future of computing is all about the screens.
She was a very early pioneer of that approach for the XO-1 computer designed by OLPC. Mark Foster, who was the engineering chief there, described her particular contribution (besides her overall influence as CTO) in Mark J. Foster at Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium (Part 1) [October, 2006] as (emphasis is mine):
Another thing that’s really unusual about our machine is the LCD display. Our CTO, in fact, has created something that is really special. What this panel does is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen reflective color, I’ve seen transflective color, I’ve seen transmissive panels, I’ve never seen anything like this. This panel is truly a reflective monochrome panel. No backlight, you see a 1200X900 dot per inch seven and a half inch LCD. And it’s dense. At 200 DPI, we’re talking very close to laser print quality. Certainly from the original laser printers. It’s really nice.
And then, magically, you turn on the backlight, and you see color. Really unusual, pixel structure, it’s all 100% Mary Lou’s invention, and this is a really neat part of the machine. Completely new text, I’m really delighted to have this component in our box, because it gives all kinds of cool benefits that we can exploit. In particular, it’s inexpensive, straight, but also very low power consumption. And this ability to instantly go between a monochrome, a very high-res monochrome mode with a great reproduction of text or whatever it may be, and immediately flip to color mode when you want to is totally cool. I wish I had brought one with me today, and show you, my apologies that I did not.
But, it’s running, it works, and in fact, just this last week, we did some [xx] on the panel, that doubles it’s reflectivity. We actually measured, and the goal of double that reflectivity worked. So it’s a really neat trick, and again, there’s no other system out there like this. And it’s something that is invention purely of OLPC. Not that someone came and told us. Mary Lou created this, pushed it into the LCD manufacturers and made it real. Really neat stuff.
And Mark Foster is the person to judge that properly since himself has been introduced in the above Stanford EE talk as a true pioneer:
He’s led different projects in portable computing at Apple, at DEC [Digital], and at Zenith. He created the first notebook with Ethernet, which was the Z-Note [introduced on the same date as Windows 3.1, see the Z-Note press release [Apr 6, 1992]]. The first true sub notebook [with 8.5-inch (viewable) black-on-white VGA], which was the Z-lite [see the press release [Nov 16, 1992]]. And the thinnest notebook in the world at the time, which was the Hi-Note Ultra [From Digital].
Indeed, there were a couple of quite innovative ideas put into the XO-1 laptop as has been described by their inventor in A Conversation with Mary Lou Jepsen [Jan 17, 2008]
It defies conventional wisdom to put a display expert in charge of a laptop architecture, but since the cost of the screen in a laptop is more than $100, it was the main barrier of entry to building a low-cost laptop.
What I’ve found coming to this project is that people who design computers don’t know a lot about displays, and in fact by starting with the display and designing the computer kind of backwards, rather than just slapping a display onto a motherboard, we can design a whole new architecture.
The architecture we’ve created is very powerful, not just for low-cost laptops, but for high-end laptops as well.
… If you look at what’s been happening in computers for the past 40 years, it’s been about more power, more megahertz, more MIPS. As a result, we’ve had huge applications and operating systems. Instead, at OLPC we focused on an entirely different kind of solution space. We focused on low power consumption, no hard drive, no moving parts, built-in networking, and sunlight-readable screens.
… we had to design a laptop that was also the infrastructure. It has mesh networking, which is the last mile, 10 miles, 100-mile Internet solution. The solar repeaters and active antennas that we’ve added into the mix cost about $10 a piece and help to relay the Internet. If one laptop in a village is connected to the Internet, they all are.
Yes, it might be just a trickle, a low-bandwidth connection from the Internet to the laptop, but between the laptops is a high-bandwidth connection through the mesh network. We use 802.11s, which is the standard for mesh.
… We use an AMD chipset, the LX-700, which allows you to turn the CPU on and off in a hundredth of a second. It’s not noticeable to the users whether the motherboard is on or off because the moment they hit the keyboard or get a Skype phone call or what have you, the CPU and motherboard are back up and running.
That also allows us to run the mesh at extremely low power: 400 milliwatts, compared with my ThinkPad laptop, which uses approximately 10 watts just to run Wi-Fi.
… We had to get rid of the hard disk, because not only is it the second most expensive component in a laptop after the screen, but it’s also a huge power hog, and the number one cause of hardware failures is hard disk failure. That’s three strikes against it. Instead, we used flash memory, which people are starting to use.
… I should also talk about the low-power display. We did something I’ve been doing for a long time in different kinds of display technology: putting memory directly into the display itself. You can’t do that with amorphous silicon, which is the standard transistor process used in LCD. To keep costs to a minimum, I used a standard process for the screen. But you can add memory in the timing controller. That means the screen can stay on while the rest of the motherboard or the chipset is off.
Why would you want to do that? It turns out that most of the time you’re using a laptop or a desktop, the CPU isn’t really doing much, even while it’s running at multiple hundreds of megahertz. Right now I’m staring at my laptop. Not a single pixel on my screen is moving. What’s the CPU doing on? What’s the motherboard doing on? The way to get to low power—the big secret—is to turn stuff off that you’re not using. But nobody has ever made a laptop with a screen that self-refreshes. You really do have to keep flipping the liquid crystal molecule; they like AC fields. The liquid crystal molecules fall apart in DC. You need to keep only two images in memory for that, and you can keep the screen on all day long.
We also put a tiny ARM core in our Wi-Fi chip. We used the Marvell chip because it’s the only Wi-Fi chip with a tiny ARM core in it, which means Wi-Fi can also stay up and running while the CPU is off.
… I came up with this idea for a sunlight-readable screen by starting with a transflective process, which was used briefly on cellphones but wasn’t very readable inside or outside (it was very dim) and so was dropped from most products. What I did differently was to put color filters over the transmissive part of the pixel only, instead of the mirror part of the pixel, and I used—get this—a colorless color filter over the rest of the pixel as a spacer.
In a transflective display, part of the pixel is reflective and part of it is transmissive. People think of it as kind of the worst of both worlds, so it hasn’t been that popular. Again, these displays are considered dim, high power, and not that readable.
Each big LCD fab had developed a transflective process, so, I thought, why not use this process and then change the pixel layout by putting a little sliver of a color filter (red, green, or blue) over part of each pixel and then changing the bulk layout of the pixel as well? For best compatibility with minimal image-generation systems, I used diagonal stripes of color so that we would get square-root-of-3 resolution in X and Y in color mode, when compared with the black-and-white (grayscale) resolution. You see, each pixel is black-and-white (grayscale) in reflection and shows a single color in transmission (red, green, or blue when the backlight is on). Strictly speaking, therefore, you get one-third the resolution in color. The human visual system isn’t digital, however. It’s analog and biological, and through this pixel layout we get higher perceived resolution—about 800 by 600 in color. You get all this with a low-cost and low-power TTL (transistor-transistor logic) interface that can be used because the true pixel count is so low. I’m just making the pixels do double or triple duty.
Soon after this interview appeared on ACM Queue Mary Lou Jepsen made the announcement that Higher resolution than we thought – the XO laptop screen [May 28, 2008]
The XO screen has been shown to be higher resolution than we thought. Michiel Klompenhouwer from Philips Research says the color resolution is effectively 984×738, even though strictly speaking straight division indicates color resolution of 692×520 (this is 1/3 of 1200×900 our black&white resolution). We have been saying for some time that the resolution is about 800×600, but his new study shows a more exact way of measuring perceived resolution. Michiel presented an analysis of our screen and other display pixel layouts at the Society for Information Display Annual Meeting this week in Los Angeles in a talk entitled “Comparing the Effective Resolution of Various RGB Subpixel Layouts” SID08.
Because of that XO design she became a true ICT industry celebrity which is well expressed by the New Statesman in The NS Profile: Mary Lou Jepsen [April 30, 2009]
The XO is the cheapest, least power-hungry notebook computer ever produced, a device that may eventually prove one of the most important educational tools of its time – and for which last year Time magazine named Jepsen one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
Along the way, her design sparked a mainstream computing revolution. Jepsen’s primary intention was to “innovate at the bottom of the pyramid”, creating a simple computer for educational use in impoverished areas. But it turned out that computer users in industrialised countries also wanted inexpensive, environmentally friendly laptops. The netbook was born. Just two years after the XO was first released, nearly every major PC brand is selling an inexpensive, low-performance mini-laptop, and analysts predict sales will have reached 50 million by the end of the year. “Every time I meet with the CEO of a big laptop company, they tell me they ‘studied’ my design,” Jepsen has said.
While some could argue that her effort had nothing to do with the birth of netbooks (attributed to Asustek alone) the fact is that Taiwanese companies were intrigued by the idea of a low-cost PC from her 2005 and 2006 attempts with different Taiwanese manufacturers to collaborate. As was described by Ministry of Information (Taiwan) article Small Laptop, Big Splash [April 1, 2008]:
In December 2005, Barry Lam, chairman of Quanta Computer, agreed to manufacture the XO-1. Then, in April 2006, a second Taiwan technology group, Chi Mei Optoelectronics, joined at the urging of the conglomerate’s octogenarian founder and philanthropist, Shi Wen-lung.
… the head of the project at Quanta is Dandy Hsu, general manager and vice president of the company’s Educational Product Business Unit and one of two OLPC board members in Taiwan.
Hsu says bringing the XO-1 to mass production took Quanta nearly two years–an eternity by original design manufacturing /original equipment manufacturing (ODM/OEM) standards.
… Obviously, the XO-1 wasn’t a typical laptop project. “Normally, when we design a commercial notebook, we have Microsoft’s Windows or other software that will run on the device,” Hsu explains. Usually hardware engineers design commercial laptops around the requirements of the marketplace’s dominant operating systems (OS) and application program interfaces (API), then use these for testing as the design work proceeds.
Software was not available for the XO-1 because it was being developed simultaneously by OLPC, which oversaw a team of volunteer engineers designing a Linux-based OS for the XO-1 and writing code for its open source application programs.
… Engineers faced other surprises. In March 2006, when the XO-1 motherboards were ready for testing, OLPC held a “country conference,” which was attended by “delegates” from the governments that intended to purchase the machine. The result was a decision to upgrade the XO-1 with a more powerful CPU. This was no minor modification.
“Change the CPU and you’re talking about a completely new machine,” Hsu says.
Then, later in March, came devastating news. Quanta had recently completed the sale of its subsidiary, Quanta Display, and new owner AU Optronics decided not to manufacture the XO-1 screen, the most critical component of the project.
The XO-1 appeared dead. OLPC’s chief technology officer, Mary Lou Jepsen, disappointed and exhausted from more than a year of intense work for OLPC, left Taiwan for home. Hours later, she was near death as well, having gone into adrenal [mellékvese] failure on the flight to Boston.
In April 2006, two weeks after her illness, Jepsen returned to Taiwan and approached the Chi Mei Group, a Tainan-based conglomerate, to ask if it would manufacture the XO-1’s display.
“Mary Lou is one of the heroes of this project–a selfless, beautiful thing,” says Scott Soong of Chi Mei subsidiary Chi Lin Technology. Soong is the other OLPC board member in Taiwan, along with Quanta’s Dandy Hsu.
… By August 2006, Chi Lin Technology had a working prototype of the XO-1’s dual-mode screen. Jepsen says that without Scott Soong, “the display would not exist. He found ways around the seemingly impassable roadblocks during the design and production process.”
“In the concept, the engineering … we did that fairly quickly; then it was tweaking and tweaking and tweaking,” Soong says.
Later, Chi Mei assembled the Taiwan-made display components at its LCD factories in China.
Another Chi Mei contribution is the plastic housing, the fabulously cheerful green and white material that makes the XO-1 so recognizable.
Summing up, Soong says, “I’ll be honest with you. What Chi Mei has done is build a world-class display nearly at cost. This is not just another project for us. Nobody wanted to let this project down. Everybody went above and beyond to ensure success.”
“That is true for Quanta, and that is true for us,” he says. “And true for all of the other partners.”
From this chronology it is quite visible that OLPC XO-1 had ample publicity for notebook manufacturers of Taiwan to pick the idea, but in not so innovative way (they could not do that either because of intellectual property rights protection). Read the local Taiwanese news article of that time High Time for Low-priced Laptops [Nov 17, 2007] to understand the launch time situation for XO, Asus EeePC, and Intel Classmate (the latter also getting the lead from the OLPC idea).
Follow-up: Pixel Qi and CPT alliance for sunlight readability [Dec 22, 2010]
Follow-up: Pixel Qi’s first big name device manufacturing partner is the extremely ambitious ZTE [Feb 15, 2011]
For the even more industry paradigm changing output from Mary Lou Jepsen’s own company, Pixel Qi, read the following posts in her blog (the posts are in backward chronology):
- DIY Pixel Qi screens – available now! [July 1, 2010]
- Computex Update – Pixel Qi [June 2, 2010]
- Pixel Qi receives SID Display of the Year Award! [May 25, 2010]
- Pixel Qi wins top IEEE award! [April 28, 2010]
- Pilots & Production plus a Nomination [Feb 1, 2010]
- CES [Jan 4, 2010]
- Pixel Qi Starting Production [Dec 7, 2009]
- Screens in Office Lighting, Part 2 [Nov 22, 2009]
- Most screens hard to read on bright office light [Nov 21, 2009]
- Pixel Qi Late? [Oct 28, 2009]
- Pixel Qi Screens debuting in Tablets [Oct 17, 2009]
- Comparing the Pixel Qi screen to others [Aug 26, 2009]
- Pixel Qi is Hiring! [July 29, 2009]
- More videos of our new screen [June 4, 2009]
- Josh Quittner’s Blog post [June 4, 2009]
- Charbax posts some videos of our screens [June 2, 2009]
- Short (very short) video of the screen [June 2, 2009]
- answering the blog [June 1, 2009]
- First pictures of Pixel Qi 3qi screen [May 28, 2009]
- Our first screens out of the fab! [May 24, 2009]
- Samples Due Soon [Apr 23, 2009]
- Netbook and Ebook blur lines [March 16, 2009]
- Product Freeze [Feb 2, 2009]
- Thanksgiving Update from Pixel Qi [Nov 29, 2008]
- Pixel Qi is Hiring [June 6, 2008]
- Upcoming Public Appearances [Apr 16, 2008]
- Traveling… [Apr 16, 2008]
- Pixel Qi is One Month Old [on Feb 2, 2008] [Apr 16, 2008]
Windows 7 tablets/slates with Oak Trail Atom SoC in December
Intel “is aiming to mass produce its Oak Trail platform for its Sleek Netbook segment targeting the tablet PC market in December 2010. The Oak Trail platform is a combination of Intel’s Lincroft (Atom Z6xx series) processor with Whitney Point chipset.”
See: Intel reveals Chief River platform for notebooks [Digitimes, Nov 1].
- Update: Intel starts mass producing Oak Trail platform [Nov 24]
… specifically for tablet PCs, with the combination of Atom Z670 processor and SM35 chipset the initial product, according to industry sources.
The Oak Trail platform will sell at about US$25 with MeeGo, and the price for Oak Trail and Microsoft’s Windows 7 will be higher.
This notification given to Intel manufacturing partners in Taiwan might remove the long-standing barrier for Microsoft to introduce its long awaited Windows 7 slates to the market as early as in the second half of November, with retail availability in December. This would be even more than that since on November 20th the company will celebrate the 25th anniversary of Windows. Steve Ballmer might also have an additional, big case for celebration as whatever he has been telling in the last months there had been no sufficient evidence to back his claims, see: Windows slates in the coming months? Not much seen yet [July 13 – Oct 6, 2010]. And for people interested in technical details it has been well known all along that the Moorestown Atom chip (Atom Z6xx series) has not been developed to run the prime Windows software so Microsoft should wait for arrival of a Windows 7 capable version, code-named Oak Trail and originally promised for early 2011 availability only. See: Intel SoC for Cloud Clients [June 27 – Aug 23].
What kind of Windows 7 tablet/slate might soon arrive with Oak Trail availability? Will such a “sleek netbook” device (as per Intel’s new terminology) be able to compete with Apple’s highly successful iPad or even surpass that in capabilities. Before those devices are announced no definite answers could be given. Nevertheless there is sufficient evidence already that there could be very big surprises in that regard.
Here is Dell Inspiron Duo flipping tablet/netbook device first shown on the Intel Developer Forum in September:
Update: Dell is definitely the #1 Microsoft ally now as evidenced by Michael Dell: Developing Windows smartphones ‘easier’ than Android [Nov 2]
More information:
– Hybrid Dell Inspiron Duo Tablet : A Netbook and A Tablet Device [Sept 19]
– Dell’s Atom-powered Inspiron Duo: 10-inch netbook / tablet hybrid with a crazy swivel (update: more video and detailed press photo!) [Sept 14]
– Dell to Reinvigorate Its Brand Name with New Campaign [Oct 21]
The marketing campaign will include television spots, due to start November 6, and print ads about a week later. According to the company, the campaign would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Even Intel Free Press, a 3 weeks only Intel tech news initiative is drawing attention to it by a title telling a lot – Free Shot: Looking for Tablets this Holiday Season? [Oct 8]:
This is the first year when tablet computers have a chance of hitting a relative’s top 10 wish list for the holidays. In addition to the widely popular iPad, several new touch screen tablets are rumored to be coming before the end of the year, including the hybrid Dell Inspiron Duo tablet-netbook. Moving away from a physical keyboard and familiar computing experience might scare away many people, but Dell seems to have found a nice middle ground. This video shows how the 10-inch touch screen flips transforming the tablet slate into a traditional netbook with keyboard.
Look at the video and you will be more than convinced.
There is also an explicit confirmation from Microsoft in Ballmer: Windows 7 tablets to be seen by Christmas [Oct 5]:
A spokesperson said Microsoft can confirm three Windows 7 slates: one from Hanvon in China, Toshiba’s Libretto W100 (which doesn’t really count because it’s a limited-quantity prototype) and the Dell Inspiron Duo Tablet, which Dell has said will be available later this year.
We can already see from this that there will be other vendors with Windows 7 slates/tablets. There is more evidence to support that:
– Intel: Our Tablet Design Momentum Is Very Strong [Oct 13]
– Acer tablet PC line launching on November 23rd, priced from $299 to $699 [Oct 27]
– Acer set to unveil multiple tablets on Nov. 23 [Oct 29]
– Acer first tablet PC aimed at fulfilling telecom carrier demand [Oct 29]
– Asustek details tablet PC plans [Oct 29]
– Latest Update On ASUS Tablets – 7-Inch to 12-Inch Range [Oct 29]
Furthermore Intel has already started to mount a strong market attack:
– via their own CEO at the current earnings conference call with: Intel CEO praises iPad, throws down gauntlet [Oct 12]
– via the well-known market research company iSuppli explicitly stating: Intel Aims to Enter Tablet Market With Oak Trail Processor [Oct 19]
– via their own Intel Free Press with an extensive article about Reports of Netbook’s Death Greatly Exaggerated, Experts Say [Oct 26]
And this is all before the 25th anniversary of Windows! Watch the news!
HTC: the most promising ICT brand in Taiwan
Major updates: HTC expects business performance to bottom out in 1Q12 [Feb 7, 2012]
Taiwan-based smartphone vendor HTC expects its business operation in the first quarter of 2012 to bottom out due to a decreased average selling price along with the process of transitioning from old smartphone models to new ones, with consolidated revenues projected to decrease by 31.0-35.9% on quarter to NT$65.0-70.0 billion (US$2.19-2.36 billion) while gross margins and net operating margins are expected to slip to 25% and 7.5% respectively, according to company CFO Winston Yung at an online investor conference on February 6.
HTC expects sales to increase beginning in the second quarter of 2012 along with the launch of several new flagship smartphone models, with gross margins and net operating margins to rise to levels seen in the first three quarters of 2011, Yung indicated.
HTC has been faced with hot competition from Apple and Samsung Electronics in the US market and less competition in the Europe market, but has performed well in the Asia market, especially in China, Yung pointed out.
As smartphones are increasingly popular, HTC will cater to each market segment by launching price competitive models yet with functional differentiation to increase added value to maintain gross margins, Yung pointed out.
While sales performance of LTE (Long Term Evolution) smartphones fell short of expectation in 2011, HTC expects increased adoption of LTE models by mobile telecom carriers in the US, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea in 2012, Yung indicated.
|
HTC: Financial report (NT$b) |
||||
|
Item |
4Q11 |
Q/Q |
2011 |
Y/Y |
|
Consolidated revenues |
101.42 |
(25.33%) |
465.79 |
67.09% |
|
Gross margin |
27.12 |
down 0.89 percentage point |
28.30% |
down 1.79 percentage points |
|
Net operating margin |
12.71 |
down 2.15 percentage points |
14.77% |
down 1.06 percentage points |
|
Net profit |
10.94 |
(41.40%) |
61.98 |
56.77% |
|
Net earnings per share (NT$) |
13.06 |
73.32 |
||
Source: Company, compiled by Digitimes, February 2012
– Mid-market Android Meltdown – HTC Warns Big Again [Forbes, Feb 6, 2012]
HTC has issued another massive revenue warning.The company is now guiding 1Q12 revenues to T$65-70 Billion, way below the T$89 Billion consensus expectation. January revenue crashed by 52% YoY. You read that right – in the overall smartphone market where at least volume growth probably was close to 50% in January, HTC sales halved year on year. Operating margins are now heading below 8% in 1Q12. What seemed like a triumphant success story just last autumn is rapidly turning into a bitter rout that has some intriguing parallels with Motorola in 2007.
This follows two major warnings from 4Q11 – warnings that should have lowered analyst expectations to realistic levels for 1Q12. Instead, many leading firms like Sanford Bernstein have continued insisting that HTC will do just fine. The size of the latest sales guidance cut clearly indicates that HTC is suffering from a post-Christmas inventory hangover that is far more serious than Wall Street expected.
…
We see once more how dangerous the impulse to protect strong operating margins can be. It demolished Ericsson‘s once so proud handset division in mid-Nineties, it killed Nokia’s innovation in mid-Noughties, it hamstrung Motorola around 2006.
In 2011, HTC refused to dive deep into low-end smartphone market in order to protect its mid-teen operating margins. It opted to compete head-to-head against iPhone at the high-end.
As a result, HTC now risks losing the handset success it spent half a decade building. Welcome to the club.
The market capitalization showing the real value of HTC, however, is just right on the spot:
- US$14.8 billion as of Feb 7, 2012 vs. the US$8.01 on March 1, 2010 when according to the Forbes 2000 list below HTC forged ahead of Acer and Asustek, and thus becoming the source of this original post as “the most promising ICT brand in Taiwan”.
- That promise had already been well fullfilled with Acer just at US$3.88 billion (vs. US$7.6 billion in Marc 1, 2010) market capitalization, and Asustek at US$6.2 billion (vs. US$7.57 billion in Marc 1, 2010).
- The changes in market capitalization are well reflected by the historical values of the HTC stock over the last 5 years:
End of major updates
The news 4 days ago were HTC Becomes Most Profitable Listed Company in Taiwan [Oct 14, 2010]:
Thanks to increasing popularity of smartphones worldwide, the Taiwan-based High Tech Computer Corp. (HTC), a globally leading vendor of smartphones its under own brand, reported an EPS (earnings per share) of NT$30.29 for the first nine months of this year, unseating MediaTek Inc., a world-caliber handset IC designer, as the most profitable listed company on the island in the period. Launching a couple of hot-selling smartphones, such as Desire, Wildfire, Legend and Incredible, to boost its market shares worldwide, HTC has enjoyed explosive sales growth and remained one of the most successful brands in Taiwan.
…. The firm raked in NT$27.058 billion [US$0.88B] in combined revenue for September, sharply up 129.65% from a year earlier to hit an all-time high. This pushed up its combined revenue and net profits for the third quarter of the year to NT$75.849 billion [US$2.47B] and NT$11.098 billion [US$0.36B], or NT$13.61 per share, respectively. Meanwhile, HTC`s aggregate combined revenue and net profits for the first nine months of the year reached NT$174.756 billion [US$5.7B] and NT$24.735 billion [US$0.81B] …
- Update: HTC faces challenge for 2011 shipment goal [July 5, 2011] (emphasis is mine)
HTC has set an internal goal of shipping 54 million smartphones in 2011 but the goal is expected to be difficult to attain because the company will be faced with strong competition from Apple’s new generation of iPhone and Nokia’s Windows Phone 7-based new smartphones in the fourth quarter, according to industry sources in Taiwan.
Based on the ASP of US$359 recorded in the first quarter of 2011, HTC’s second-quarter shipments of smartphones will top 11.5 million units, an increase of 18.6% from 9.7 million units shipped in the first quarter, and better than the company’s projection of 11 million units, the sources indicated.
With demand for HTC’s Android-based smartphones still growing steadily and HTC set to begin selling its naked-eye 3D model, the HTC EVO 3D, in Europe in July, the company is expected to garner revenues of NT$135-140 billion (US$4.7-4.88 billion) in the third quarter with its smartphone shipments reaching 12.5-13 million units, estimated the sources.
HTC is also expected to roll out new models for the year-end holiday season and to fulfill its annual shipment target, said the sources, noting that HTC will be able, at least, to ship 50 million smartphones in 2011, double from the amount shipped in 2010.
- Update: Cher Wang and Wenchi Chen (her spouse) are now Taiwan’s wealthiest people worth US$ 6.8B [Forbes, March, 2011]
- Update: HTC announces December revenues of NT$33 billion [Jan 6, 2011]
Smartphone vendor HTC has announced that unaudited consolidated revenues for December 2010 totaled NT$33.087 billion (US$1.131 billion). Total consolidated revenues of fiscal 2010 came to NT$278.761 billion [US$9.529 billion], up 92.92 % on year. Consolidated operating income was NT$44.185 billion, consolidated net income was NT$44.696 billion before tax and NT$39.330 billion or NT$48.24 a share after tax based on 815,239,000 weighted average number of shares.
- Update: HTC aims to roll out 60 million handsets in 2011 [Dec 10], we may add that this is an almost 100% increase in their market share, from 7.1% in 2010 to 13.6% in 2011, as per the earlier Digitimes Research published forecasts of the device manufacturers
HTC has reportedly informed its suppliers that it will eventually need parts and components for the production of up to 60 million handsets in 2011 compared to shipments of 20 million units projected for 2010, according to industry sources.
- Update:HTC Aims to Double Smartphone Sales in 2011 [Dec 8]
… to 50 million units in 2011 from an estimate of 25 million units for 2010, according to institutional investors.
… Worth mentioning is that HTC is likely to announce its foray into the tablet PC segment soon, and will launch its first model in 2011 as its ace in the hole to drive business operations. So far, the firm has kept completely silent on the product launch plan though.
- Update: HTC November revenues hit record for second time straight [Dec 6]
HTC has reported consolidated revenues of NT$38.484 billion (US$1.258 billion) for November 2010, hitting a monthly record for the second consecutive time. HTC’s November consolidated revenues were 4-10% higher than the originally expected NT$35-37 billion, according to investors. HTC is expected to generate consolidated revenues of NT$33-35 billion in December, resulting in fourth-quarter figures of NT$105 billion [US$ 3.49B] which is higher than HTC’s forecast NT$100 billion, the sources pointed out.
HTC’s shipments of Android and Windows Phone 7 smartphones have been short of demand and its booming shipments will continue and reach 8.5 million units in the first quarter of 2011, the sources indicated.
- Update: HTC acquires office space in Taipei from VIA Technologies [Nov 23]
… The office space is to accommodate HTC’s expanded R&D staff during the construction of its headquarters building 230 meters away from the purchased property, HTC pointed out. The building, with 17 stories and five basement levels, will have a total floor area of 85,620 square meters to accommodate 2,200 employees, with completion scheduled for the end of 2011, HTC indicated. 11 floors of the new building will be used to house R&D capacity, HTC noted.
In related news, HTC is expanding its production capacity at a factory in northern Taiwan, and another in Shanghai, eastern China, with combined monthly capacity to be increased to four million smartphones at the end of 2010, HTC noted. [This will be ~48% of total Taiwan handset output capacity. See the report below.]
- Taiwan handsets – 3Q 2010 [Nov 19]:
Taiwan’s handset shipments hit a record in the third quarter of 2010. First-tier handset vendors Nokia, LG Electronics (LGE), Sony Ericsson and Motorola all expanded JDM or ODM orders to Taiwan, and Taiwan’s own-brand smartphone vendor High Tech Computer (HTC) also saw shipments increase, spurring Taiwan’s total handset shipments to top 21 million units.
In April this year HTC was positioned among the Global 2000 ICT companies from Taiwan as follows (source: Forbes Global 2000 Country List [Apr 21]):
The market value has dramatically changed since then for most of those companies (sources: Forbes Global 2000 Country List [Apr 21] and Reuters Stocks [from which market values were taken on Oct 15]:
The red line above corresponds to the ~10% average increase for those ICT stocks, so here we can also see the above the average new increased (or below the average new decreased) value of the companies by looking at the columns themselves (while the data label numbers show the percentage value as of Oct 15 vs. March 1).
It is also worth to look at the exact numbers (by clicking on the link here you will get a PDF which provides all the source data links as seen on the image by the usual hyperlink presentations, so you could have full background, including company overviews):
One could see here that HTC became the #3 most valuable ICT company from Taiwan jumping from the #5 place to the current #3 in just 7.5 months. Meanwhile such well established Taiwanese brands as Acer and Asustek are much behind of HTC. Also all of the PC/notebook ODMs (Original Design Manufacturers), Quanta, Compal, Wistron and Inventec are much behind HTC now. Only Hon Hai Precision Industries, well known outside Taiwan as Foxconn Technologies, is significantly bigger in market value, but Foxconn Technologies is a huge contract manufacturer owning 50+% of the worldwide Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS) market. And certainly Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is even more valuable, not surprisingly, because TSMC is the #1 chip foundry in the world.
|
Ranking (2008 ranking) |
Brand |
Brand value (US$100 M.) |
|
1 (3) |
Acer |
12.41 |
|
2 (1) |
Trend Micro |
12.35 |
|
3 (2) |
ASUS |
12.26 |
|
4 (4) |
HTC |
12.03 |
|
Source: Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) |
||
Here is an Oct 23, 2009 ranking from Global Recession Reshuffles List of Top-20 Taiwanese Brands 2009 rankings show China`s rising [Oct 23, 2009]:
The reason? Here are two press releases from iSuppli which might somewhat explain (I will devote a whole post later to this question):
Android Drives Success in Q2 Smart Phone Market by [Oct 14] – Makers of Android-based handsets outperform the market (emphasis is mine):
Droid phone specialist HTC Corp. achieved industry-leading growth, with its smart phone shipments rising by a stunning 63.1 percent in the second quarter compared to the first.
… HTC’s Android success can be traced to wireless operators that want to showcase the capabilities of their upgraded networks by offering handsets with sophisticated features to subscribers. For example, U.S. wireless carrier Sprint Nextel Corp. is offering HTC’s EVO 4G, a feature-packed Android handset that can capitalize on the high speed of its WiMAX-based 4G network. To keep its momentum going, HTC is expected to offer an Android phone that supports Long Term Evolution (LTE)—the other major standard for 4G.
HTC’s share of global smart phone shipments in the second quarter rose to 8 percent, up from 5.3 percent in the first quarter, allowing the company to solidify its No. 4 position in the market.
HTC Intensifies Android Push, Starts Cloud Service [Sept 14]:
HTC shipped 5.4m smartphones in Q2 2010, an 80 per cent increase year-on-year. HTC owes this strong performance in no small part to its Android-based devices which were greeted with both critical and commercial success.
Initially a white label manufacturer catering to operators, HTC changed course two years ago and invested heavily in building its own brand identity, mostly on the high-to-mid end of the market. This led to the launch of Sense, which is aimed at maintaining a differentiator in a market increasingly crowded by Android devices. Screen Digest believes this strategy should prove successful in helping HTC reach 20m handsets shipped in 2010.
The move towards online services might seem surprising at first given the existing syncing options offered by Google as part of Android, but can be interpreted as a way for HTC to build further loyalty through additional complementary services.
Global Recession Reshuffles List of Top-20 Taiwanese Brands
2009 rankings show China`s rising
Microsoft (Ray Ozzie, Steve Ballmer) on the cloud clients
There have been great expectations about what Microsoft will be offering against the incredibly successful Apple iPads. Microsoft ‘s CEO Steve Ballmer was also raising the expectations this summer and only this week has this been calmed down by him telling that:
… what you’ll see over the course of the next year is us doing more and more work with our hardware partners creating hardware-software optimisations with Windows 7 and with Windows 7 Media Center …
… Media Center is big and, when people say ‘hey, we could optimise [that] more for clients’ I think what they generally mean is ‘Big Buttons’. Big Buttons that’s, I think, a codeword for Big Buttons and Media Center is Big Buttons not Little Buttons. I’m not trying to trivialise that – it’s a real issue.
We’re not going to do a revamp of Windows 7 over the course of the next year for that purpose. Whether we should, or we shouldn’t, we’ve put all our energy around doing a great job on that and other issues in the next version of Windows …
See that and more on my earlier blog post which was regularly updated in recent months:
– Windows slates in the coming months? Not much seen yet [July 13 – Oct 6, 2010]
One should keep also in mind that Intel will be ready with sufficiently low-power x86 processors just in Q1 2010 as shown in my another post Intel SoC for Cloud Clients [June 27, 2010].
The major thing, however, is that Microsoft is pursuing a much different and broader strategy than Apple. This is the so called “three screens and a cloud” approach which has been extensively articulated by Microsoft a year ago. Nevertheless, in extensive web discussions about Windows slates vs. Apple iPad issue this clear and quite rational strategy has not beeen mentioned at all. Even such highly appreciated analyst firm as Gartner has not taken the implications of that strategy into account (at least not to a sufficient degree) as evidenced by Gartner: Global Tablet PC Sales to Top 100 M. Units in 2014 [Oct 5, 2010]. See also other recent reports such as:
– iPad leads the tablet PC charge as mini-note shipments plummet, says DisplaySearch [Oct 4, 2010]
– iPad-Killers Take Aim at the Tablet PC Market [Oct 4, 2010]
Therefore, in the post below I will first give a retrospective on the “three screens and a cloud” strategy (Part I.), and then give an overview of the company’s current standing on that strategy from the point of view of the cloud clients (Part II.)
I will also recommend to read additional posts of mine because they are quite closely related:
– Microsoft strengths for the PC -> cloud transition [June 27, 2010]
– Microsoft going multiplatform? [Sept 17, 2010]
– Microsoft to lead standards compliance and implementation? … or how Microsoft is aiming to create a radically new Windows client platform via a set of “whole computer capable rich web” standards. [Sept 20, 2010]
– WHAT? … Windows Live Spaces SaaS moving to WordPress.com SaaS? … It is part of a NEW strategy with Windows Live Essentials 2011 released now! [Oct 2, 2010]
Part I. Retrospective on Microsoft’s “three screens and a cloud” strategy
Ray Ozzie [& Bob Muglia] Day 1 Keynote: Professional Developers Conference 2009, Los Angeles, Calif. [Nov 17, 2009], see also the video recording in the time interval indicated by me with square bracketed numbers in the below text:
… [4:33] whether you’re developing for servers or services or PCs, phones or browsers, all of this diversity means that it’s a very complex software environment out there. Many platforms mean many choices. And whether users or enterprise IT, we all want everything just to work together very, very simply, interoperating as one.
And so across PCs, phones, TV, Web, and cloud, across our many products and platforms, across products serving both consumers and business, we at Microsoft have but one simple strategy, and that is to focus on leverage and seamlessness in everything that we do.
We aspire to deliver compelling, seamless, multi-screen experiences for users, and to enable skills leverage and investment leverage for developers and IT.
Of course, this is the very same vision that I laid out at last year’s PDC right here on this stage, and it’s a strategy embodied in a very simple picture we’d like you to keep in the back of your minds, and that is of [5:45] three screens and a cloud, three primary classes of screens, surrounding the Web as the hub of most everything we do.
Note: Those watching the video will notice that Ozzie was actually using a different picture, and before that a corresponding to that “N Screens and a Cloud”. I’ve put a different one here which I think is more expressive, and also putting the TV and XBox experience to the same screen which will be the case with Kinect delivered, as you could see from Steve Ballmer’s latest speech transcripts excerpted below.
With this picture you can visualize our fundamental belief in a world of Web-centric experiences that are also extended richly through apps on your desktop, through apps on the phone in your pocket, and delivered on the inherently shared big screen on your wall; experiences delivered from clouds in private datacenters or from the worldwide public cloud. [6:19]
More information on the “three screens and a cloud” strategy:
– Microsoft Cloud Services Vision Becomes Reality With Launch of Windows Azure Platform, Microsoft Press Release [Nov 17, 2009]
In his keynote address, Ozzie described the company’s “three screens and a cloud” vision, where software experiences are seamlessly delivered across PCs, phones and TVs, all connected by cloud-based services. Underscoring the IT industry’s shift toward a hybrid approach of online services combined with on-premises software, Ozzie described the programming model for a powerful new generation of applications for both businesses and consumers, enabled by new Microsoft development tools and technologies. He also demonstrated customer and partner commitment to Microsoft’s development platform with Seesmic, WordPress and Cheezburger Network.
– Read this Interview of Ray Ozzie, on Cloud Computing [Dec 22, 2009]
– Exclusive Interview With Steve Ballmer: Products, Competition, The Road Ahead [Sept 24, 2009]
– Steve Ballmer: Vision Forum Keynote [Nov 4, 2009]
Part II. Microsoft’s current standing on the cloud clients strategy
Steve Ballmer European Tour 2010 [Oct 4-8, 2010]: Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, was visiting Sweden, UK, Germany, France and Spain as part of his European tour to drive cloud computing adoption and discuss Microsoft’s innovation in the technology. He was also discussing Microsoft’s consumer strategy, highlighting the upcoming launch of Kinect for Xbox 360 and other products.
Microsoft has provided transcripts and Q&As for the major events on that tour. From this the following excerpts are providing a quite excellent overview of the company strategy regarding the cloud clients (emphasis used there is mine, if one goes through only that then one could have already enough information to grasp the essence of their current standing with the strategy):
Sweden Cloud Keynote, Cloud Day Summit, Stockholm, Sweden [Oct 4, 2010]
… when we talk about new client hardware and software, we’re not talking about clients turning away from the Internet and from standards, we’re talking about new ways in which clients — phones, PCs, and TVs — can embrace the cloud, but bring the benefit of intelligence on the device and the advantages of intelligence in the cloud together, and that’s really what we’ve done with Internet Explorer 9.
… it’s about integrating the smart client with standards from the cloud. … how to use the full advantage of PC hardware to make things go fast, and it treats applications on the device and websites both as first class citizens that can be mixed and matched and run concurrently, and we think that is an important part of the way we embrace this boundary between the cloud wants smarter devices, the cloud wants devices like Windows to know about it, to love it, and to treat cloud applications and client applications similarly and both as first class citizens. And I think by building an Internet Explorer 9 experience that loves the cloud and loves the Windows PC you start to see the direction in which we’re taking that.
Seizing the Opportunity of the Cloud: the Next Wave of Business Growth, LSE in London, UK [Oct 5, 2010]
The Cloud wants smarter devices. This is – it was semi-controversial; I think it is now 100% obvious. When we first started talking about the Cloud there was a view that said ‘yes, OK the devices that we use will all get dumb and all of the intelligence will move back out into the Cloud’. And what we have found is quite the contrary. People want smarter devices but smarter devices that can connect with the Cloud in intelligent ways. We just launched a new version of Internet Explorer 9 that really integrates with Windows. Why is it important? Because it’s about both supporting Cloud standards, HTML5 etc, but by doing a better job against those, by taking advantage of the hardware and hardware acceleration capabilities that are built into the PC.
As we buy smartphones people are writing little front-end applications that can talk intelligently to Cloud services. We are on the verge of launching a new such phone. But perhaps the device that I’m most keen on that will launch this Christmas season, which shows a different kind of relationship between the device and the Internet, is the next generation of our Xbox product, which allows you, with your body and your voice, to control everything that is going on on your TV screen. We say you are your control. And yet all of the important content, and information and interaction with friends is all happening out through the Cloud. So you want a smart device processing ‘me’, talking to a smart Cloud on the back end.
[Kinect video plays]
You will again see more when we actually ship next month, but it gives you a sense of why the Cloud might want smarter devices. You want the ability to do things locally; you want the ability to use natural user interface and process language and voice and action locally. And yet you do want to be able to participate in games and track meets and dance competitions with friends, potentially, around the globe. So we need to think about using the intelligent TV, the intelligent PC and the intelligent phone to participate in this new kind of application that people are really going to want to write.
… [in response to a question about what makes Microsoft’s Cloud computing offering distinctive] On the consumer side of the Cloud, I think we have some strengths and we definitely have some opportunities to improve our market share. Certainly with Windows, with IE, with Hotmail and Messenger, we have some strong positions. And I’ll say on the phone and all of the cloud infrastructure that backs it up, I’ll be pleased to announce our next generation of phone here in another week or two. And obviously the Kinect stuff. I’d say the whole sort of Cloud TV connectivity thing is really early. But if you take a look at what you can do with an Xbox this holiday, I think it’s quite a bit ahead of anything that at least our traditional competitors have.
… [in response to a question about making money out of the cloud while Microsoft has lost a pile of money in the past few years on that]
We had a round in the early 2000s where people were telling us we were wrong to do Xbox. I don’t feel wrong to be doing Xbox with the kind of profit that it’s making and the innovation that we’ve got. I don’t feel wrong about it at all. Does that mean that there aren’t things that I wish we’d done differently along the road and we’d be even more successful and even more profitable? Of course I do. That would be the case almost no matter what.… [in response to a question about his take on the future of our tablet computing in relation to the Cloud, the growth of Google’s Android operating system and Apple iOS devices hindering the growth of Windows in that region] … the thing for at least most of us in the developed world is: we are going to want to have and be able to afford to have technology in our pocket, on our big screen, and our mediumsize screen. Big screens are great for social activities with multiple people. You saw that a little bit in the Kinect demo. There’s nothing quite like having a bit of intelligence in your pocket. And, you know, on the pocket side, we got out to kind of an early jump. We’ve had competition come back in ways I’m not excited about. Now we’ve got to come back against competition. And I think, with our new Windows phones, we really have a beautiful product.
… The bigger screen form factor slate/tablet, very different discussion. We, as a company, will need to cover all form factors, and certainly we have done work around the tablet as both a productivity device and a consumption device. …
And so exactly where the form factors are and how they evolve – and you’ll see, you know, slates with Windows on them. You’ll see them this Christmas. You’ll see them continue to change and evolve. But if you really want most of the benefits of what a PC has to offer – the ability to create and consume, take documents of all types – a form factor that actually has been tuned for a lot of things over a number of years, we certainly have a superior device, and you’ll see us continue to expand the footprint that Windows does a good job of targeting over time.
But the job one thing, right now, is: we’ve got to get back seriously into the game of phones.
The Future of Cloud Services, BITKOM Conference ( of the German association of IT, Telecommunications and Consumer Electronics Enterprises), Cologne, Germany [Oct 6, 2010]
… the cloud wants smarter devices. When the word “cloud” first popped up two or three years ago, I think the view was with the cloud everything goes and becomes recentralized, and we use very dumb devices at the end of the day, and all the intelligence is in the cloud.
All the data since then is, no, we actually want smart devices, but we want smarter devices that think more intelligently about how to use the cloud.
Our new version of Internet Explorer we support HTML5 and the standards, but we’ve also taken advantage of the power of the PC to speed those things up and run them faster than you could in any other way.
… We’re going to launch a new version of the Xbox here in the next month called Kinect where literally you can control the TV set with your voice and your body motions. Well, that takes some intelligence, but you still want it designed so you can play games and connect with people intelligently across the cloud.
So, it will be a world of a next generation of smart device, a next generation of datacenter, a next generation of software that supports those, and a next generation of applications built on the corpus of information of the Web and the corpus of information of the social graph.
Kinect Press Event, Paris, France [Oct 7, 2010]
… back 10 years ago when we started down the Xbox path, we started and said, look, we’ve got to be very good at videogames, and videogames is a very important, big market. Over that time, we’ve sold over 42 million Xboxes around the world. … with the launch of Kinect and with the broadening out of experiences on the Xbox, based upon the kind of partnership that we’re talking about today with Canal Plus, I think you’ll see a real broadening out of the demographic, and we’ll really think about the Xbox as a family entertainment, TV entertainment center as we go forward.
Kinect will launch in November. You’ll be able to buy it in stores here in France in early November, November 10th. We have had a chance to show it in a few places. … so far the visceral response from people is really quite amazing to have such a powerful sensor technology, recognizing your voice and taking action, recognizing your body, and as we say, letting you be, if you will, the controller.
… As we think about the future of user interface to all devices, the notion of having the machines understand you, your actions, your behavior, your gestures, your writing, your voice, those natural interface techniques, they’re going to be very important across the gamut, from the family entertainment and TV, all the way through to important industrial applications.
… we have 25 million subscribers on Xbox LIVE out of a total of 43 million users. If we can dial up the number of users and the percentage of subscribers and the number of people who buy a sensor, I’m pretty — I’m enthusiastic
… One of the nice things is because we have a live service, we can tune the ability of the system to respond to voice and gestures. We’re getting smarter all the time. Kind of one of the magic of let’s call it the cloud approach, we don’t have to build one technology that recognizes voice the same way for the next — for the next few years; we get smarter the more voices we hear, again with appropriate privacy and all of that ensured.
… [in response to a question about whether they intend to use the Kinect with Windows] Do we plan on using — certainly these technologies will be used in all — at some point in different ways with all three screens. Initially we’ll launch the Kinect with the Xbox. But we do have certainly people in our labs who are experimenting with what I would call appropriate applications for various environments?
This sensor, as you will know when you get your hands on one, it actually works very well if you’re about three feet away to about 10 or 15 feet away — one meter to about four or five meters. And if you get too close it encourages you to get a little further back, and if you get too far away — and, of course, the technology will continue to improve, but if you think about at least many PC environments where you’re sitting less than two feet away, this particular technology would need to continue to evolve.
Now, there are plenty of places where the PC might be doing work on your behalf but you’re not sitting next to the PC, and we have a lot of work we’re doing to pioneer some of those applications.
… [in response to a question about what Steve Ballmer sees as job No. 1 among all things Microsoft is doing]
For Microsoft — the family entertainment scenario.
Microsoft is a company that — you know, in a sense I would say we have six different things we’re trying to get done as a company. It’s not the 52 that some people think, and it’s not the three that some of our — or one or two that some of our competitors are after. We’re trying to do great software and experiences for phone, for PC, and for TV, which is really what the Xbox is. It’s broader than just gaming. We’re certainly engaged in search with our Bing search engine; that’s very important to us. We provide tools at work and at home for people to be productive, Office and the like. And then we build platforms that are really enterprise specific and software developer specific for people to build applications and deploy them whether it’s in the cloud or the enterprise datacenter. So, that’s six, it isn’t 10, but it’s not two or three.
Microsoft Days – France [Oct 7, 2010]
The cloud wants smarter devices. A few years back, I think the theory would have been that as things move to the cloud, people are actually going to have less and less intelligence in their devices, and everything is going to operate in the cloud. We’ve seen exactly the opposite happen. We have smarter phones, but phones that are being built with the notion that says they’re going to plug into the cloud from the get go.
We see smarter and smarter PCs being redesigned around this notion of the cloud. What we’ve done in Internet Explorer 9 to speed up the cloud and integrate it with the smart Windows PC is such an example. We showed you the Xbox and the Kinect technology. You couldn’t do that with a dumb client. You can only do it with a smart client, but it’s got to participate in the cloud. So, our clients are being redesigned to be user friendly, easy to take care of and from the get go very cloud-aware.
Next week we get a chance to launch our Windows Phone 7 and the new Windows Phones I think are very good examples of this kind of next generation cloud-oriented, smart phones. We have an application model. I get a chance later today to go judge a little contest of some of the app developers here in France who have been doing applications for Windows Phone 7. We’ve got a new kind of a user interface that assumes that what you really want to do is focus not just on applications, but actually on the people and data that’s most important to you. And so we’ve re-pivoted the user interface consistent with some of the things that we think are possible in the cloud. It’s very different kind of user interface.
Nueva Economica Forum, Madrid, Spain [Oct 8, 2010]
… in the world of the cloud we can think of all of the world’s people and in all of their different personalities as individuals, as employees, as citizens, we want to be able to write new innovations to provide new solutions.
… New devices, there’s new devices coming. We’re always in big competition with other guys out there, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s really a tough world out there.
But we all know there’s a need for new devices. This meeting proves it. There’s a lady here with pencil and paper. I’ll prove I have one, too. I’m not giving her a hard time. (Laughter.) If I lose this paper, my whole week of action items is gone. That would be bad. There must be a digital form that’s better. But no matter what device you pull out today, if you sit there and start typing, it’s not very sociable, it’s not very pleasant, in some cases it’s not even very efficient compared to jotting a quick note.
We have lots of room to continue to invent what does the future of the television look like, what is the future of the PC, the phone, the note-taking device, the reading device.
