stevesi
The 68030 was an elegant chip, but the OS for it did not arrive until 1991.
The spirit of the post is about integrated hardware and software. Sorry if I was not perfectly clear in this line. But by all means do not take anything I said seriously :-)
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There's no prior restraint--no one is reviewing this and there are no constraints on what I am writing
(all of this as per the Author note and introduction)
If you've followed CES over the years (maybe you have) then you know the incredible pains consumers have gone through with physical button remotes--trying to make IR work, trying to figure out what grids of tiny buttons do (with shift keys no less), trying to customize physical button remotes to control multiple devices and more.
If you've tried to put in a security camera or other monitor you might have noticed how unsightly the wires can be when you put them where you want to see. Or how impossible it is to put one at an outside door where there are no outlets. Of course having mains is compelling but this is another trend that we experience in mobile that turns out to be pretty convenient for many uses.
You might think an ethernet cable is one cable to rule them all, but the jack is very large and almost no homes have those jacks on more than one wall of any room (if that). And many systems (in particular lighting) were controlled using ethernet cable from each outlet. But those were all based on proprietary home runs and routed to the electrical panel not data location and so you ended up with a "one cable to rule them all" legacy wiring that was quite costly.
Just a few thoughts.
The reality is that IT has always pushed to be more than the control point or network. Different organizations have different ways to execute on the use of ITs skills in business units. The complexities of large organizations (budgets, accountability) make this dynamic very localized to a company and why the role of the account manager is so critical.
My own experience at Microsoft was going from a consumer company to a business unit focused sales effort to a top down IT/C-suite sale. Office was a classic bottom up sale at the time which morphed into a strategic sale over the course of a decade. Many people forget that in the early 1990's Microsoft was always a big question mark in the world of the enterprise.
Regarding pricing, here's a post I did a while back on SaaS pricing. http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/16/the-price-is-right-for-earl...
--Steven
This type of issue would be identical across NVIDIA based ARM PCs and large numbers of the reference platforms were available at the same time they have been available to external developers.
Developers on the Office team (and Word team) that needed to contribute to the ARM focused work had access to the tools and hardware needed, including Surface specific hardware. There was no shortage of knowledge, hardware, or communication.