Weekend tech news: The U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to next year, market research firm IDC said; by cozying up to IBM’s PowerPC platform for Xbox, Microsoft could "neuter the Linux threat," Red Herring says.
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Linux isn't probably going to ever really dominate the desktop - but that's not the threat.
wonder if M$ will be selling Xbox 2 boxen at a loss the same way they're doing with xbox version 1, just to get market share. Buy an xbox and put Linux on it, stick it to M$ both ways!
wouldn't it be hilarious if OS X worked on Xbox 2, especially if M$ was selling them at a loss. M$ subsidizing Apple compatible hardware, I would laugh myself silly. Then all we'd need is for IBM to license OS X for their big blue servers. Don't see either market cannibalizing Apple's sales...it's fun to dream.
All your PPC chips are belong to us.
Microsoft would have to find partners who are willing to put xp on their devices. Good Luck. Big Blue will not do it. They did it once, and lost the platform as a consequence. A costly error they will not repeat.
The big story here is outsourcing. We already oursource much of our manufacturing. Take a look where your iPod or Powerbook was made.
Where will we be in 20 years? We won't know how to build anything. With tech job leaving, we won't know how to design or support anything. How long will if be before some of these other countries realize if they have the engineers to design and the manufacturing process to build, what do they need America for as a middle man?
I think companies are very short-sited in trying to save a little which at least in my experience (on the tech side) doesn't truly save. What I've observed is a slower turnaround and poorer quality work coming out. This isn't to say there aren't good programmers in places like India (most I've delt with are very good). Most times, you simply need development close.
But it often takes time for these effects to be seen by management while outsourcing a job shows an immediate bump on the bottom line. Great for some VP shooting for her/his bonus.
But that's the beauty of Capitalism At Work. You're not afraid that the US will get shafted by the same system that they've been using to shaft other countries. What are you? Some sort of commie?
Actually, we are finding that much of the stuff that we are outsourcing to India etc. are still US companies (simply subsidiaries). So we outsource to save money and end up making more money (product + cheap labor) AND we still retain all of the development information.
Nice... I know... So we are going to have an even richer upper class.
Xbox is a PC-class machine, minus the configuration headaches. A beefed-up second-generation Xbox will teach no one about the realities of using drastically limited resources (CPU, power, memory, storage, etc.) to develop applications that can't crash lest someone die. Further, embedded applications have widely varying hardware configurations, while a game console has one (plus optional accessories).
Note that the graph used in the article to support the assertion that Linux is more of a threat to Unix than Windows is not only just a projection, but that it projects much faster growth for Linux than Windows. And it doesn't take a genius to notice that Linux is a threat to SCO and Sun.
Where he gets the idea that PowerPC based blade servers are a major market that Microsoft needs to worry about in order to fend off Linux, I have no idea. Dubious AltiVec-centric benchmarks notwithstanding, the price/performance advnatage belongs to Linux and x86 rather than Windows and PowrePC, respectively.
Which CIO is sitting around wishing that they could buy a PowerPC blade server from IBM running Windows, if only Microsoft would use the embedded knowledge they gained from building 3D games on a souped up PC in a black case to help them make their servers run better?
At least for now, Customers remain in the US. Design remains in the US. It's very difficult to understand the "pain points" of a customer who is an 18+ hour plane ride away, but understanding someone's pain is what's required to formulate a solution. I've worked on several outsourced projects, and spoken to many developers who have worked in outsourced arrangements, and not one of them had a positive experience. Everyone in the trenches is convinced that the outsourcing overhead costs more than the savings from lower salaries. And yet, the tide continues. Perhaps this is becoming a competitive advantage: refuse to outsource, and outmaneuver your confused competitors whose products are hung up by the misunderstood specifications, blown deadlines, and spectacularly poor QA that are typical of outsourced projects. (You get the wrong thing late, and it doesn't even work.)
What we should be more concerned about is the dismantling of hard science research, particularly the space program. That knowledge is going away but it's not being outsourced; it's just disappearing as engineers grow old and die. Our national obsession with privatizing R&D has resulted in a situation where the process of experimentation and discovery has to fit into a Microsoft Project Gantt chart, or it doesn't happen.
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Joined: Jul 2001
Linux runs on PowerPCs
Umm, the article seems to forget Linux runs on PowerPC chips, and can already be used on embedded devices. So, porting Windows embedded edition dosen't really change too much.
An interesting thought, will we be able to run OS X via MacOnLinux on the XBox 2?