Anand Shimpi

12 million unique visitors per month is a lot.

Far from Silicon Valley, tech industry finds an oracle

His website, AnandTech.com ..... At age 30, Shimpi is courted by technology executives and followed by Wall Street analysts keen to hear his well-informed product views. He briefs Intel executives, dines with Asian PC executives and commands a loyal following of tech enthusiasts, with AnandTech.com drawing 12 million unique visitors per month. ...... His workbench at his home in Raleigh is cluttered with high-end storage drives, laptops and recently released tablets, one of them playing a Harry Potter movie in an endless loop. A storage room is filled with hundreds of other products shipped to him over the years, and he says UPS drops more gear off almost every day. ..... benchmark reviews, focusing strictly on performance data ..... Shimpi's data, painstakingly collected using proprietary tests he has developed over the years. .... "We have known Anand for a long time," Jonney Shih, chairman of the big Taiwanese computer-maker Asus .... the chips, touch screens and batteries in the latest tablets and smarpthones ...... a large, specialized audience of cutting edge techies ...... The Harry Potter movie playing over and over on a Google Nexus 7 tablet was part of a test to document its battery life. ..... carries out measurements several times for each device, with the results feeding spreadsheets with thousands of data points ..... Chip executives .. ship them samples of their new products, often ahead of their release ...... frequent travels .... standard tests established over a decade ago .... Soon after his start in high school building PCs for students and faculty at Saint Augustine's College in Raleigh, where his father taught computer science, Shimpi created a website and started writing about components. He quickly gained a following with a rapidly growing niche of PC enthusiasts. .... deliberately maintains a distance between his personal life and the tech world, even if that means frequent, long flights to Silicon Valley to visit chip execs. .... He takes phone calls from investors who pay him for his advice and spends more and more time hunkered down with design engineers. But Shimpi says his main focus will remain AnandTech's readers - the sort of tech fans who spend hours reading up on new products before deciding which to buy.

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Surfacing

Image via CrunchBase

Microsoft Admits Risk in Tablet Plans

its Surface family of tablet computers could weaken support for Windows

The tablet took off without Microsoft. Steve Jobs likened it to a car when the PC was a truck. The tablet is a phenomenon. It is happening. It is eating up the world. A lot of the PC action is shifting to the tablet space.

Isn't this what the innovator's dilemma is? To build the next big thing you have to cannibalize your existing cash cow. And why would you do that? Right?

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Instagram On The Web

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - MARCH 28: (EDITOR'S NOTE: Image was shot with an iPhone using Instagram) Justin Han of Australia poses during the adidas 2012 Australian Olympic Games competitor uniform launch at Sydney Olympic Park Sports Centre on March 28, 2012 in Sydney, Australia. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Instagram For The Web Coming Soon? Online ‘View Profile’ Link Spotted In The Wild

You can’t take a desktop experience and shove it into a 3-by-4-in screen. It’s a very different behavior pattern. It’s a very different browse pattern. People interact with their phones very differently than they do with their PCs and I think that when you design from the ground up with mobile in mind, you create a very different product than going the other way.

Instagram took too much time to get on the Android platform, and it is a mistake it is not on the web already. But better late than never. Mobile is where the action is, but you ignore the web at your peril.

Instagram's attempt to get on the web will be a good way to mesh the service into its now ownner: Facebook. As is well known Facebook struggles in the mobile space.

If Instagram will have a hard time adopting the web, the two services will have a higher chance of melding.

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Post PC Or PC Plus

Image via CrunchBase

Winrumors: Microsoft slams post-PC idea, claims “PC isn’t even middle aged yet”: even their most ardent admirers will not assert that they are as good as PCs at the first two verbs, create and collaborate. And that’s why one should take any reports of the death of the PC with a rather large grain of salt. Because creating and collaborating are two of the most basic human drives, and are central to the idea of the PC. They move our culture, economy and world forward. You see their fingerprints in every laboratory, startup, classroom, and community.

I am in agreement with Microsoft on this one. But let me clarify. A laptop is PC. The Macbook Air is PC. The Chromebook is PC.

In my case instead of me migrating my computing to the smartphone I have migrated most of my phone calls to the free Google/Gmail/Google Voice phone on my laptop. If you have been getting many text messages from me and have been impressed with how fast I can type on the small screen, be warned. I am not typing on a small screen. I am typing on a proper keyboard on my big laptop. I am sending text messages to people from my laptop. Thank you Google Voice.

Being on the move is important. But if you already know you are going to be online for so many hours per day, there the laptop rules. The laptop is mobile.

Steve Jobs' home office features a huge screen desktop. That dude be driving a 18 wheeler.

The smartphone is a great addition to the family and is on its way to becoming the center of the known universe, and for good reason.

Exuberance, Not Froth

Image via WikipediaI said it was not a bubble, but there was some froth. I am revising that. I am now saying it is not froth, it is exuberance. It is mostly a positive scenario.

Fred Wilson: Megatrend Crosscurrents: The history of tech investing is a series of waves or megatrends that come one after another. Mainframes to minicomputers to PCs to client server to Internet, for example. But right now we are in the midst of a number of these megatrends all happening at the same time. There are at least four big ones going on at the same time:
- Mobile - yesterday I wrote that at least 16% of the visits to this blog are coming from mobile devices and that number is up from essentially zero six quarters ago
- Social - Facebook will have 1bn users in the next year or so
- Cloud - A third of Netflix' new subscribers are opting for the streaming only plan
- Global - companies like Skype, Facebook, Twitter, Google see upwards of 80% of their users from outside the US and these numbers are growing faster than ever ...... Each one of these megatrends would be an investable wave on its own. But we are in an environment when all four are crashing on the shore ata the same time. Twitter, for example, is mobile and social and global.

Wait, Did They Say Froth?
Bubble, Boom Or Froth?
Is It A Bubble?
Glass Half Full Phase

At first Fred Wilson said maybe a bubble. John Doerr said it's a boom. That word does not quite capture it. I said froth. Fred said froth. Then Fred said glass half full. Now he is saying exuberance. And I agree. It is not bubble, boom, or froth, it is exuberance. Done right this can give America China like growth rates. This is about lifting billions out of poverty, and making the already rich feel like it is not happening at their expense or at the expense of the planet.

Armdroid

Image via Wikipedia

Harvard Business Review: The Fall of Wintel and the Rise of Armdroid: incumbents find it immensely hard to disrupt themselves..... They tried jamming a PC into a smaller form factor, which entirely missed the point. Their tablet should have been about disrupting the PC market with something light, cheap and simple. Instead, Microsoft tried to make it do everything. ...... the only line of business that is barely growing is the Atom, Intel's mobile processor. ..... Microsoft's point of view: now that Windows 7 has been developed, to sell another copy, they don't have to do a single thing. Because of this, it becomes very hard for any executive to advocate the complete development of a low cost OS that will run on tablets: not only would it cost Microsoft a lot to develop, but it would result in cannibalization of its core product sales ...... ARM processors are perfect for powering these handheld devices. Manufacturers can customize to their heart's content. And Android is on track to dominate the operating system space .... ARM and Android — Armdroid — are providing everything that tablet manufacturers need, and doing it more effectively and at a lower cost than Microsoft and Intel are able to.

I am still betting on the Chrome OS Notebook to kill Windows. Tablets and smartphones are all good, but for the power user there is still a need for a bigger screen and a full fledged keyboard.

Eric Schmidt's Cloud Computing And My IC Vision

The Official Google Blog: Cloud computing: the latest chapter in an epic journey: It’s extraordinary how very complex platforms can produce beautifully simple solutions like Chrome and Chrome OS ...... but then there are very few genuinely new ideas in computer science. The last really new one was public key encryption back in 1975. ..... But the web is not really cloud computing—it’s an enormously important source of information, probably the most important ever invented. One major web innovation cycle happened in 1995—remember the Netscape IPO, Java and all of that—ultimately leading, in 1997, to an announcement by Oracle
Image by wicho via Flickr (and bunch of other people including myself) called “the network computer.” It was exactly what the Chrome team at Google was talking about on Tuesday. ....... Moore's law is a factor of 1,000 in 15 years—so 15 years ago versus today, we have 1,000 times faster networks, CPUs and screens. ...... Asynchronous JavaScript XML, or AJAX, came along in in 2003/04, and it enabled the first really interesting web apps like Gmail to be built. ...... LAMP, which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP—and Perl, Python and various other Ps—evolved as a platform for the back-end........ Instead of building these large monolithic programs, people would take snippets of code and aggregate them together in languages like Java and JavaScript. ..... As usual, Larry and Sergey were way ahead of me on this. From my very first day at Google, they made clear that we should be in the browser business and the OS business. ...... we've gone from a world where we had reliable disks and unreliable networks, to a world where we have reliable networks and basically no disks. Architecturally that’s a huge change—and with HTML5 it is now finally possible to build the kind of powerful apps that you take for granted on a PC or a Macintosh on top of a browser platform. ....... a small team, effectively working as a start-up within Google

I am working on a blog post called Google stole my idea. I am only half kidding, of course. I first thought of the IC concept in 2000. That was before I ever ready about Larry Ellison's network computer vision, something he had talked about apparently a few years before that.

The IC vision is what I hung on to as my straw when the dot com collapse happened.

Chrome OS Moved On Further

Image via WikipediaI guess Google has been riding the Android storm and wishes to stick to the momentum for as long as possible, and so the latest hint is the Chrome OS will not see the light of day for a few more months. That's too bad.

That Thing Between The PC And The Smartphone

Image via WikipediaSteve Jobs, when he unveiled the iPad, claimed that the iPad was that thing between the PC and the smartphone. He famously called the PC the truck and the iPad the car. I disagreed. I did not think, I don't think the iPad is that thing between the PC and the smartphone. It is one of the things in that space, but the definitive device between the PC and the smartphone has not arrived yet. Whatever it is, it will try to render both the PC and the smartphone unnecessary.

Apple Insider: Apple component allocations point to new form factor sub-notebook: Activity within Apple's supply chain throughout the better part of 2010 has shown signs that the Mac maker is gearing up to introduce a new notebook that doesn't fit into any of its existing hardware designs ...... d a new MacBook Air .... "true" multi-touch Macs.

Something that is not as small as the smartphone, but approaches it in weight would be nice. The screen has to be decent size. You should be able to make and receive calls. There has to be the webcam option. Could you fit a camera into it?

But then major advances in the software behind the keyboard have made the tablet more appealing. If you can type away on the tablet like on a netbook, I mean.

And in the mean time Apple's shares keep getting pricier. Steve Jobs is on a roll.

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Sculley: Scum

Image by tsevis via Flickr

Cult Of Mac: John Sculley: The Secrets of Steve Jobs’ Success [Exclusive Interview]: In 1983, Steve Jobs wooed Pepsi executive John Sculley to Apple with one of the most famous lines in business: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?” ...... Sculley is best known today for forcing Jobs’ resignation after a boardroom battle for control of the company. ...... “It’s impressive how he still sticks to his same first principles years later.” ..... “I don’t see any change in Steve’s first principles — except he’s gotten better and better at it.” ..... “I don’t have any contact with Steve these days,” Sculley said in one of our initial emails setting up the meeting. “He’s still mad he got pushed out of Apple 22 years ago… ...... beautiful design .... At that time, nobody was doing this in Silicon Valley. ...... Apple wasn’t just about computers. It was about designing products and designing marketing and it was about positioning.” ....... ‘How can I possibly ask somebody what a graphics-based computer ought to be when they have no idea what a graphic based computer is? No one has ever seen one before.’ ...... showing someone a calculator, for example, would not give them any indication as to where the computer was going to go ....... a perfectionist to the end. ..... He felt that the computer was going to change the world and it was going to become what he called “the bicycle for the mind.” ...... He was a person of huge vision.” ...... He’s a minimalist. .... He simplifies complexity.” ..... ability to reach out to find the absolute best, smartest people ..... extremely charismatic and extremely compelling in getting people to join up with him and he got people to believe in his visions even before the products existed .... he personally did all the recruiting for his team. He never delegated that to anybody else. ” ..... At the other level he is working down at the details ..... “bozos.” That was his term for organizations that he didn’t respect. ..... “I can’t remember more than a hundred first names so I only want to be around people that I know personally. ....... Steve would shift between being highly charismatic and motivating and getting them excited to feel like they are part of something insanely great. And on the other hand he would be almost merciless in terms of rejecting their work until he felt it had reached the level of perfection ....... Bill was brilliant too — but Bill was never interested in great taste. He was always interested in being able to dominate a market. ..... . He was not a designer but a great systems thinker. .....

Steve Jobs Should Never Have Been Fired

Proves my point. This guy was too dumb to even have contemplated firing Steve Jobs. You have to at least be in Steve Jobs' league to have the option to make a decision like that. Sculley and other scums cost Apple a full decade and more.

Cult Of Mac: Apple Cracks 10% PC Market Share For First Time in Decades: Apple had 10.4% of U.S. PC shipments in Q3, making it the fourth largest computer maker in the U.S. ..... Lenovo showed the strongest growth among the top five vendors worldwide. ....

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PC Consolidation: End Of PC Era

Image via CrunchBase

BusinessWeek: HP, Oracle Lead Acquisition Spree Tearing Down Tech Barriers: The race to add businesses hearkens back to the early days of corporate computing, when IBM’s dominant mainframes included home-grown chips, software, storage and networking technology. With the advent of the PC, these technology areas split up into their own industries.

I am glad the writer drew this parallel between the mainframe and the PC, because just like that consolidation symbolized the end of the mainframe era, this current consolidation symbolizes the end of the PC era. The PC is running its final lap right very now.

The smartphone is here. The 2010s belong to the smartphone. The mobile web will engulf all of humanity. Big screen broadband will have to eventually get there, but it will not get there first.

The smartphone is an addition to the ecosystem. The smartphone does not replace the PC, it was not meant to. But there is going to be a device that will reside somewhere between the PC and the smartphone. I don't think the netbook is it, I don't think the tablet is it. But they look like siblings, sure.

The PC might stick around, but not at the center of the universe.

"(C)hips, software, storage and networking" will splinter all over again.

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$35 PC

This is simply put awesome. This excites me like the Chrome OS got me excited when I first heard about it. Looks to me like my IC vision is coming to fruition with me simply keeping up with the news. Between the Chrome OS, the $35 PC and the spectrum bids in India, there is only one missing piece to the puzzle: how do you bring the costs of internet access down drastically by serving ads? How about bringing it down to zero? Maybe that will be a Chrome browser innovation.

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This $35 price goes down to $10 when you mass produce it, and it goes down to zero if you splash ads on the back of the computer. I think plenty of companies will pay $10 to be permanently placed on the back of your computer.

The iPad Is No Laptop Killer
The iPad
iPad

Finally a tablet I am excited about.

India's $35 PC is the Future of Computing PC World will replace the bloated desktop and laptop hardware architectures in use today. .... runs on a variation of Linux. It has no internal storage ..... a Web browser... can also run on solar power.....far exceeding the $100 laptop developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ..... makes the $500 iPad seem significantly over-priced. ..... economy of scale will allow it to push the price down to $10 ......the iPad has also been embraced by corporations and is widely used as a portable computing platform for business professionals. .... What businesses need is a simple, cheap device that uses a secure cloud connection to keep data where it belongs and keep workers up and working without the down time of expensive, failure-prone hardware.
$35 computer taps India's huge low-income market Christian Science Monitor targets a vast, untapped market of 1.2 billion people. ..... ncludes an Internet browser, a multimedia player, a PDF reader, and video conferencing ability. .... its biggest attraction is the price: $35. ..... a thrilling prospect for the future of global education ...... how technology and ultra-cheap innovations are bringing new options to India’s 1.2 billion people, whose per capita income is $1,030. ..... by 2020 rural markets in India will grow to $500 to $600 billion from the current $487 million. ..... the nearly 742 million people across rural India are pushing retail demand faster than urban areas and accounting for more than 60 percent of the national demand ..... In 2008, Tata launched the world’s cheapest car – the bubble-shaped Nano – priced at $2,500. Its low-cost engineering fulfilled the aspiration of millions of moped-riding Indians for whom a four-wheel drive was far out of reach. The same company last year launched the Swach water purifier – its two models priced at 749 rupees ($16) and 999 rupees ($21) – with the promise of providing clean drinking water to millions of India’s poor. ..... The price of the new computer is expected to fall to $10 in the coming years
India unveils world's cheapest tablet computer at $35; may drop to $10 New York Daily News From the country that brought you the $2,000 open-heart surgery and $2,127 car comes the latest bargain – a supercheap, touch-screen computer..... The Linux-based tablet appears to do most things an $499 iPad can do - but at a fraction of the cost: Internet browsing, word processing, video conferencing and more..... Research teams at India's leading technical institutes - the Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science -developed the tablet to compete with a $100 computer developed at MIT ..... part of India's initiative to modernize its schools
India's $35 tablet - vaporware or the real deal? ZDNet (blog) potential ODM interest in Taiwan to manufacture these devices at scale.
India unveils prototype of $35 tablet computer The Associated Press looks like an iPad, only it's 1/14th the cost .... India, which is home to the 100,000 rupee ($2,127) compact Nano car, the 749 rupees ($16) water purifier and the $2,000 open-heart surgery. ... $100 laptop .... India rejected that as too expensive and embarked on a multiyear effort to develop a cheaper option of its own. ...... Sibal turned to students and professors at India's elite technical universities to develop the $35 tablet after receiving a "lukewarm" response from private sector players. He hopes to get the cost down to $10 eventually. ..... The tablet doesn't have a hard disk, but instead uses a memory card, much like a mobile phone. The tablet design cuts hardware costs, and the use of open-source software also adds to savings .... several global manufacturers, including at least one from Taiwan, have shown interest in making the low-cost device ..... India plans to subsidize the cost of the tablet for its students, bringing the purchase price down to around $20. .... government subsidies or dual marketing — where higher-priced sales in the developed world are used to subside low-cost sales in markets like India — ..... the device could send a shiver of cost-consciousness through the industry. .... an ambitious education technology initiative by the Indian government, which also aims to bring broadband connectivity to India's 25,000 colleges and 504 universities and make study materials available online.
India's Rs.1500 laptop a godsend for students Sify a built-in key board, a 2 GB RAM memory, Wi-Fi connectivity, USB ports and is powered by a 2-watt system for use in power deficit areas. ..... will support functions like video web conferencing facility, and multimedia content viewing. .... hopes to bring down the price to $10 after the device is mass produced. .... the ministry is reported to be in discussions with entrepreneurs, private firms and industries. .... One motherboard was reportedly designed by a student of Vellore Institute of Technology under his B.Tech project
India unveils Rs 1500 computing device Hindustan Times writing and storing text, browsing the internet and viewing videos

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iPad

The name is so obvious, I am surprised I and others did not think it up soon enough. There were many other names floating. iTablet, iSlate, iBook. I was kind of thinking the name might be iSlate. But iPod, iPhone, iPad, the name just makes sense. P, P, P.

It is a new category. This is not a netbook. There is the PC - invented by Apple - there is the digital music player and the smartphone - both reinvented by Apple - there is the netbook - ignored by Apple - and now the tablet - reinvented by Apple. Microsoft toyed with the tablet idea a long time, but I guess they are not a hardware company.

Apple today is primarily a mobile company. The PC is more of a backdrop to them. Steve Jobs cracked Graphical Use Interface (GUI) before Bill Gates did. Now it is all about touch. I don't know if touch is the next big thing, but it is definitely a big, important addition to the computing experience ecosystem.

Image by tsevis via Flickr

I keep thinking of the physically challenged. Some of these advances are good for them. But we need to do more. What would be an audio-only computing experience? You consume only audio, and you only give out voice commands. And you don't miss out on any website, not on any of the key applications like email. That would be great not just for the visually impaired, but also for those whole and on the move, like when you are driving. We already got touch for those who can't hear well.

What I have noticed most is the enormous amount of buzz around the official CEO of the Decade. Google is the company of the decade, and Jobs is the CEO of the Decade. There is a lot of sizzle.

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