Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Comments from irate users centered mainly around the
artificially imposed lack of DVD playback, no media streaming, no
personalisation and no media centre. Fewer have noted the lack of XP
mode.
With the announcement of its
intentions for Windows 7 Starter edition, Microsoft has telegraphed in
no uncertain terms that it intends to end the profit sapping
abomination of the continued success of its own Windows XP.
The fact that Windows XP runs so well on netbooks and requires fewer
resources to do a similar job to both Vista and Windows 7 has been an
expensive embarrassment to Microsoft.
So strong has been user loyalty to XP that Microsoft has been forced to
offer "XP Mode" as a feature of Windows 7 in the hope of enticing
existing XP users to make the switch to the more expensive new
operating system.
For price conscious netbook users, however, Microsoft is playing a
different game. New netbook users won't even get basic features already
available on Windows XP, such as DVD playback, unless they upgrade to a
more expensive version of Windows 7.
Windows 7 requires considerably more resources than XP to run and
hardware vendors such as Dell and Asus have fallen into line by
considerably beefing up their versions of netbooks to 10 inch displays,
1 GB RAM minimum, 160 GB hard drives and at least Atom N270 processors.
Small notebooks is a more apt description of the new generation of
so-called netbooks.
The ground breaking Asus Eee PC 701 running Linux (and later XP) seems
to be disappearing into distant memory. Once again, Microsoft looks
like it is succeeding in manipulating the hardware market by flexing
its Windows muscle.
The issue for Microsoft, however, is that the Eee PC 701 revealed an underlying demand for real netbooks.
The question is whether Linux implementations such as Ubuntu Netbook
Remix, Intel's Moblin 2.0 and Android, running on a new range of small
netbook hardware based the Atom and VIA hardware platforms, could once
again sneak under Microsoft's guard.
Microsoft managed to beat off the Linux netbook challenge by
resurrecting Windows XP at give-away prices. It can't do that again
using an artificially crippled version of Windows 7 that doesn't even
have DVD playback.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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