So here's the thing. Big tech is all about the verticals nowadays. Here's my future.
Apple showed us how it's done - having the CPU, the iDevice, the OS, developing carrier relations, an app store, a lot of apps and a developer community, and now a cross-device cloud service. Apple makes most of its money from the devices by the way.
Google's not letting down. After Eric Shmidt and Larry Page had their disagreement on whether Google should be fleshing out its own stack or consolidating around its "core business" (see Yahoo for why I believe that's a BAD strategy), Eric left and Larry went to work. They thought about their stack - same stack as Apple only top-down and with only part of the components - the cloud services, the OS, the app store and developer community, and its minor foray into the device business.
So they bought all the stack components they were missing in one lean and mean acquisition of virtually all 'things' Motorola - the solid carrier relations worldwide, a device making capability, the "defensive" patent portfolio - and they even one-upped Apple - they got another rung down - they now make the baseband too.
And here's where the big surprise rolled in.
Microsoft Windows 8.
Windows? In the mobile space? Weren't they late to the party? Aren't they dragging their feet with some distant relative of PocketPC? Wasn't their buddy Nokia about to be decimated and dismembered with cheaper ~350$ iPhone models and cheap Androids in some 100 countries with no carrier subsidies? You know, those places where Nokia still sells more phones than everyone else in the world combined? Those places where nobody buys 500$ phones?
Apple and Google are still going to take them to pieces, right? You know, Apple driving a cloud software package and "Cord-free" in those same countries where many people don't have enough money for both a PC and a phone?
Well... just hang on for a second and let's think about it like rational geeks who pertain to understand why Android and iPhone changed the market.
So don't sell your microsoft stock just yet. Looks like they've been thinking it through. REAL hard.
Remember how in 2007 a "phone" was a device? As was the music player, the GPS and to some extent the camera? Today, just like the others, the phone is an app. Sure, we call the device a "phone", but that's just legacy that stuck. Almost like calling a computer a typewriter. It's a rabidly multi-dimensional device. It's a web node, a tricorder, a content delivery platform and a bank terminal. And so much more. We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
All this to say, a phone is an app.
So it's 2007 all over again, only now it's Microsoft actually doing something /different/ for the first time in 24 years. It's their defining iPhone moment.
It's all in the PC, stupid - it got commoditized, all but forgotten, but it still does al the heavy hauling of our actual work.
And on the new breed of mobile devices - "phones", tablets and whatever follows, it is, if Microsoft have their way, going to become, plain and simple, an app.
And not just any app mind you. It'll be the killer app that will allow a lot of people to drop their desktop or laptop.
You'll hook your phone or tablet up to a screen and a keyboard (with or without cables), or not, launch said app, and do your word, excel, visio and other work stuff. When you close this app, under it all will be a mobile OS UI on-par (one would hope) with iOS and Android.
Cute, but where's microsoft going to conjure the entire stack needed to pull this off? It ain't a single-layer market anymore where you can get by as a big player making just the OS or just the device....
Microsoft isn't as bad as you'd think in their stack. They have handsets, basebands and carrier relations covered by their now best buddy Nokia, both them and Nokia have access to CPUs, they have a mobile OS that unlike Blackberry, webOS etc is actually competent, with a new kernel and the metro UI everyone's raving about, and they have the momentum and can wear the hard slog of gearing up an apps community and app store. And they're already pushing the cloud package with Office 365. Oh yeah, and they make their money from selling Office, so don't expect them to wither away and die anytime soon.
Apple can do this in a blink by the way. They have a powerful desktop OS they can just integrate straight into their mobile stack. They're already laying out the groundwork in fact - notice how you can show your iPad screen on an external display wirelessly? Notice how the "PC" was demoted below the cloud? Or how iDevices no longer require a PC tether?
Think how useful it'll be when your iPhone is running real desktop stuff in an app. And driving an external 30'' display and keyboard wirelessly.
And here's the irony - Google, seems to be missing a layer of the stack everyone, particularly themselves - has pretty much written off as "there's no business to be made there" - the desktop OS. And Chrome OS is not a desktop OS. It's a browser. Android can do what it does.
But the desktop hardware is going to go the way of the dodo, and the desktop OS will become the killer app of the mobile. And google will either need to somehow emulate for ARM-OSX (ya-ha, because Apple will so agree to that) or ARM-Win8, or see their hard-earned chunk of the smartphone market erode to Apple, Microsoft and Nokia.
And before you holler "There's not enough CPU or MEMORY BANDWIDTH in mobile devices!"... This is never going to happen at scale!"
Well, there's seemingly three CPUs out there, but there's really only two.
There's ARM CPUs with cortex cores - everything from the snapdragon, the reference A9 or Apple's A5 or countless others. That's the pick for mobile phones and tablets. Why? Because they have most of what we traditionally call a "motherboard" on the chip itself - a System on Chip. And the whole thing chews up 2 Watts. They're not particularly powerful compared to your desktop core i7, having nowhere near as much cache or predictive execution logic, but they'll take on an Atom.
An Atom also takes 2 Watts. Only unlike the ARM CPU, it doesn't have the entire system on the chip, and needs another 15 Watts of infrastructure around it on the motherboard. This makes a whole Atom system a relative power hog and takes up motherboard space not exactly abundant in small mobile devices. It's only competitive advantage is that it's a good old x86 architecture.
Which is why it's neither here nor there. And the moment ARM versions of Windows will appear, the Atom is dead weight. It can't do anything you can't do far better with an ARM. On the performance end, the CORE (and AMD) will chew it out. I'm writing these words on a "computer" that is as thick as an iPad, marginally longer, has a motherboard that can fit in a phone and drives a Core i7 CPU on a meager 17 Watts (TDP, less most of the time) for 5 hours. When a "desktop PC" killer app is out there, expect it appearing in a tablet (and its even lower voltage siblings in a phone) near you. And it will drive a working PC app juuuuust fine.
I'm not suggesting you can stick an i7 in a phone just yet. An i7 is not a system on chip either, and the system will at its core require no less than 30 Watts (and nobody will buy a phone that lasts 45 minutes, or want to hold something that emits as much heat as a 30 Watt light bulb). But with a killer app to drive demand, several years of development, using the equivalent of an i3 rather than an i7 and perhaps CPU designs that haul the memory controller onto the chip, alongside higher capacity batteries... it's not science fiction either.
My point in all this discourse is that while the OS's will take a few years to get there, and as the killer app generates the mass demand, ARM, core and other architectures will clamp down on the gap in the middle, expect something powerful enough to drive desktop, and power-cheap enough to get shoehorned into phone form factor to come on offer. Some will remind you we were driving desktops with XP and office >2000 on machines with 450MHz CPU's as little as a decade ago.
And why Google just wagered on the Atom in its new Intel pact is beyond me. Seems like the wrongest route to take given it is already ill positioned to cope with mobile devices that will drive desktop OS's.
I think it's still their move - everyone else has made their long-term play that seems to be making sense, and they need to show how they intend to swim in what is now a virtually certain future, at least insofar as the other two major players have placed their bets and are plowing their way relentlessly in that direction.
It may still be a good 2-4 years off, but it's now officially been put into play.
Interesting Tmes.