Damn Elop! He should had gone this route instead:

Hey MIke

That takes me back, thanks for that.

Up until recently I still had a copy of 1.15c, slightly before you could overlap windows.

its only taken them till Metro to get that retro .... pun intended!

Cheers

rgds

Didn't mean to confuse - it's a long thought that I've yet to fully share with most people; only a couple of people here actually and one of them (ARJWright) has even deeper thoughts about that than I.

"More cellphones will be sold than desktops and laptops sooner than later..." was something I said in 2001. Later, that came true. But to be honest, what if a cellphone could be used like a desktop? Closest so far was the Atrix that had a desktop mode and a laptop mode. The N900 was a good go at that concept too - but it was limited quite a bit due to the lack of 3G bands that worked with AT&T in the states whereas T-Mobile was the better suited carrier and they had bad coverage in some places (like Pittsburgh, PA for instance).

And the Ubuntu Edge seems to be going back down that path - which is a good thing. Thus my statement stands. Cellphones are not desktops. But they could be.

In the rush for a smartphone, most inner-city youths don't have access to a desktop or laptop but they do have access to a cellphone. So let's be honest, how many of you can use a stock smartphone as your main and only computer? Not many can say "I can" without it being modified, something added to the stock configuration that makes it more comfortable to use as your only computer.

A bluetooth keyboard or a hardware keyboard is a good start. Access and ability to alter Microsoft Office documents is another start - editing via Google Drive, SkyDrive, Box or Dropbox is already there. With the screens getting higher and higher resolution, doing a lot of the aforesaid is also getting easier too.

But it's not fully there yet as a replacement. And not very many manufacturers are closing in on that missed demographic. Not yet.

And that concludes the final part of my contradictory statement from before... people are indeed missing the point. The next billion of anything will have to be a device that can do more than the current iteration(s) of smartphones. And funnily enough, Nokia could have beaten folks there if they had stayed the path and worked out how to not piss off prior Maemo device owners and push their wares into places that could have benefitted from a forward thinking process.

That didn't happen. People are still missing the point (see above).

That's my take.

Yep... the people that made the decisions are at fault. They're too busy chasing the most megapixels and not figuring out how the users today are different from the users tomorrow. I've been through the gigahertz race, the RAM race, the bits race... and now, megapixels and high-definition screens.

Yeah. I'm real excited (yawn).

Oh, I really believe this played a part in their decline. That and the politics surrounding Symbian.

Not on a stock N900, but Easy Debian is easy enough to install. But I understand what you're saying. And that's what people are missing... those lil' pocket computers need to become something more useful than a Facebook/Angry Birds vessel.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/08/01/s...share-q2-2013/

We need more OSes. iOS, Android and windows is simply boring.

I think you may be confused. Linux never won the desktop wars, no. Smartphones and tablets aren't a desktop, even with the way you're TRYING to explain it.. it does not qualify under any circumstance. That's not even arguably true--you're completely incorrect to try to twist that language around to try to fit a smartphone/tablet as a desktop.

I think what you MEAN to say is that although Linux never won the desktop war, it ultimately won the the PC war through Android. The smartphone and tablets have successfully replaced desktops and laptops as the personal computers. This is also the reason why Intel and AMD are sorely losing out lately to ARM manufacturers and licenses.

Language is important. They aren't the new desktop--they made desktops irrelevant to the common person.

Check this section of the Symbian Freak forum, it's for discussing apps (even apps with maps). Note the dates carefully, then look up when the iFeaturePhone was released.

The walled garden and crippling device functionality that might offer your customers freedom of choice might have been Apple's concepts but an 'ecosystem' certainly was not.

Nobody argues that this wasnt on other people's radar. Ideas are like assssholes, everyone has one. Its who delivers first that wins. And although iphone came out in 2007, you can bet that they were working on it since 2003.

I meant to imply servers running open-source Linux variants.
They are a small niche, from what I know.
Sure, most run on Linux... but they are the proprietary versions.

Gerbrick, I agree with you [open-source is superior to proprietary solutions]
-- in theory. In theory, communism works. In theory.

^See if you know where that reference is from, elephant.

@Kangal

http://royal.pingdom.com/wp-content/...7/netcraft.png

Assuming that Apache is mostly running on Linux which I admit is an assumption, it certainly seems that proprietary Windows is indeed small and niche.

Also from the w3tech stats I linked to earlier which you may have missed, Unix Server variants hold roughly 64% market share (32.5% of which are Linux) versus Windows server at 35%.

So proprietary Windows is roughly equally as niche and small as opensource Linux so no theory here then. It appears to be in use by many.

@Danramos

I meant what I wrote. For many peoples use cases the desktop of yesterday (keyboard, monitor, mouse, desk, chasis) is no longer required, smartphones and tablets have become their desktop of today.

rgds

By having to use the qualifier "variants", you're assisting the non-savvy perception of fragmentation. That needs to stop if it'll actually gain more traction - and folks need to stop defining what is Linux in different ways too. Start with the kernel, stop with the file system. Or something...

I'm going to ignore the "small niche variants" verbiage because in the end, it's still Linux. NetCraft would disagree with you - but finding actual numbers based on the OS/Kernel as opposed to the webserver daemon is hard at time. So I'll just go with something magical - experience.

And Linux has the edge on web servers.

Drop the extra "r" at the end... gerbick. Dr. Octagon would be ashamed of that extra "r"... see if you get that reference.

And nice Homer reference. Didn't even need to use Google for that one.