Bill Gates: Cellphone will Beat iPod 1017
93,000 writes "CNN is running an article featuring Gates' prediction that the iPod is on the way out. From the article: 'As good as Apple may be, I don't believe the success of the iPod is sustainable in the long run.' His prediction for a successor? Mobile phones-- powered by none other than Windows Mobile 5.0, of course."
He might be right... (Score:5, Informative)
MS are desperately looking for a niche (Score:5, Informative)
He's Right (Score:2, Informative)
Re:40 Gigs of Ring Tones (Score:5, Informative)
Cell phones beating the iPod? No problem! (Score:5, Informative)
Don't Laugh Now (Score:2, Informative)
Re:40 Gigs of Ring Tones (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Quacks (Score:3, Informative)
When a "guy" says that, perhaps he's uneducated about the subject or biased. When Bill Gates says that about IE it's not only biased, it's good business sense.
Like he would ever admit his software and marketshare domination is inferior/lower to another product out there.
If you are going to rag on him you might as well do it for the right reasons.
Re:Cell Phones over iPod? (Score:3, Informative)
The people who read his predictions, that's who.
The point of this thread is not whether or not Bill Gates is successful. The point is whether or not he is right in his prediction that cell phones will overtake standalone DAPs for music playing. Lots of people assume that because he is successful, that his predictions carry some weight. And his predictions do carry some weight, but that does not imply that he is always, or even usually right.
Gates has predicted a lot of things that have not come true. Some things (like the tablet PC) he insists still will come true, even if it's not happening the way he planned. Other things (like MSN and WebTV) he's basically given up on. But people often forget about these things when they read a new prediction, simply based on the fact that he has made a lot of money with Windows and Office. (And make no mistake - that's still where the vast majority of MS's revenue comes from.)
Re:Cell Phones over iPod? (Score:3, Informative)
This wasn't exactly a visionary statement anymore by 1977, what with the Apple (I AND II), the Commodore PET, and the Tandy TRS-80 Model 1 all on the market by then...
Re:40 Gigs of Ring Tones (Score:4, Informative)
You know I used to be of the same opinion, but my mind is changing on such things.
I recently sold my Samsung E700 phone and upgraded to a Microsoft / Orange SPV C500. Its the size of a quite compact, regular phone, does all the regular phone stuff, but is powered by PocketPC - so I have access to Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer, and all kinds of other wonderful things.
I'll get the Microsoft bash out of the way first.. it crashes. As hilarious as it sounds, its the only phone i've ever had that crashes. I've had mobile phones for about 6 or 7 years now, and none of them have been as unreliable as this.. not even the very first Motorola 'brick' I had! It must crash on average once a month, which I feel is pretty poor..
But onto the positive side. I genuinely feel that this is the swiss army knife of phones. Firstly it takes minisd cards.. so I can stick a nice 512MB minisd card in the phone, compress a DivX movie down to fit on the card, and then take a train and have a portable movie player with me. The screen is large compared to the rest of the size of the phone and is very clear. The phone comes with a handsfree kit which is also a pair of stereo headphones, so no annoying of my fellow passengers as I watch a film. I could also put MP3's on there and use it as an alternative to the iPod shuffle I recently bought...
Secondly.. I never thought I would find having mobile internet access so helpful, but it is. Internet Explorer on this phone works surprisingly well, and renders most sites without too much trouble. Again, I never thought I would need such a frivolous feature but as I sat in Schipol airport with a girlfriend, late one Sunday night a few weeks back I wondered if I would be able to get a train back from Birmingham airport back in the UK or if the trains had all finished. No worry.. just whip out my phone, and check the train timetable online.. saved me a lot of hassle and time just having access to that. In the end we had to get a taxi
The camera is good too, and has come in handy so many times.. like getting a picture of the map of the maze at a country house before going into it so we can find our way back out if we get stuck or taking a quick snap of a note that you don't want to forget!
Wonderful phone.. I don't think i'd change it for anything right now.. well.. maybe one with a bit more reliable firmware on it
Don't be so quick to gloss over the seemingly frivolous features. They are more useful than you realise sometimes!
Apple is already addressing this 'oversight' (Score:2, Informative)
The major wireless providers have basically shut the phone out of the market by opting not to subsidize them because they want music downloads through their networks as a revenue stream.
It's not as if anyone is caught flat footed by convergence devices. The question is not if they will come about, but how long it takes a good one to make it past all the market barriers.
Eeyore
Re:Anyone else... (Score:5, Informative)
Um, no. Gates thought that the internet was a joke, not for the business user. M$ was very late coming out with a browser, because they had no interest until it was almost too late. They scrambled like mad to warp and mutate Mosaic into the non-standards complient bastard IE when it was obvious that the internet was not going away.
jfs
Re:I'm not a huge fan of format-restricted Ipods, (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.ipodlinux.org/Main_Page [ipodlinux.org]
Check back on the iPodlinux project every few weeks, they are working on ogg playback. Once the 4th gen version is out of alpha, ogg can be implemented more easily, due to the more powerful processor.
Re:Sure... (Score:2, Informative)
2 : published after the death of the author
3 : following or occurring after death
Re:640k, Anyone? (Score:2, Informative)
QUESTION: I read in a newspaper that in 1981 you said, ``640K of memory should be enough for anybody.'' What did you mean when you said this? ANSWER: I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time. The need for memory increases as computers get more potent and software gets more powerful. In fact, every couple of years the amount of memory address space needed to run whatever software is mainstream at the time just about doubles. This is well-known. When IBM introduced its PC in 1981, many people attacked Microsoft for its role. These critics said that 8-bit computers, which had 64K of address space, would last forever. They said we were wastefully throwing out great 8-bit programming by moving the world toward 16-bit computers. We at Microsoft disagreed. We knew that even 16-bit computers, which had 640K of available address space, would be adequate for only four or five years. (The IBM PC had 1 megabyte of logical address space. But 384K of this was assigned to special purposes, leaving 640K of memory available. That's where the now-infamous ``640K barrier'' came from.) A few years later, Microsoft was a big fan of Intel's 386 microprocessor chip, which gave computers a 32-bit address space. Modern operating systems can now take advantage of that seemingly vast potential memory. But even 32 bits of address space won't prove adequate as time goes on. Meanwhile, I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again.
Re:40 Gigs of Ring Tones (Score:3, Informative)
I may be in the minority, but I would definately like to have an all-in-one device. I dont think we're there yet in terms of useability, but eventually why not? When we have the technology to make a phone thats too small to use, an mp3 player that you could lose amongst pocket change and a 10 mp digital camera smaller than a fingernail, I say figure out how to get them all into a single device with elegant functional design and I want one.
Re:40 Gigs of Ring Tones (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Too big and bulky? (Score:2, Informative)
The 300 was pretty big, though.
Nokias aren't much better (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I recently returned from Japan (Score:3, Informative)
My latest phone isn't as fancy (Its a Sony Ericsson) but only cost 1Yen - Its got dual LCDs, a web browser, some 3D games, and a decent camera.
Both phones had 3d animated menus that were perfect for what they were - menus for navigating some simple functions on a cel phone.
Oh, and my latest phone has about 100 little animated smilies, cars, animals, and different graphics that I can use in my texts.