REUTERS/Rick Wilking
More bad news for
The president of Samsung's memory chip division, Jun Dong-soo, had a lot of negative comments about Microsoft in a meeting with reporters. The Korea Times transcribed his quotes.
First, he said the obvious: "The global PC industry is steadily shrinking despite the launch of Windows 8."
Then he added this: "I think the Windows 8 system is no better than the previous Windows Vista platform."
Vista is considered to be one of the biggest disasters for Microsoft. It's not good for a partner to compare the new Windows to Vista.
He then added even more: "MS’s rollout of its Windows Surface tablet is seeing lackluster demand ... Meanwhile, previous vigorous pitches by Intel and MS for thinner ultra-books simply failed and I believe that’s mostly because of the less-competitive Windows platform."
This wouldn't be so bad if it were just one guy talking. But, he's just the latest to pile on. Executives at Asus, Acer, and Fujitsu have all had bad things to say about the state of Windows.
A big part of the problem is that the PC market is contracting as users buy smartphones and tablets instead of new PCs. Smartphones and tablets don't replace PCs, but they act as good-enough substitutes, negating the need for an immediate PC purchase. If you have an iPad for couch computing, it's okay to have a five-year-old PC for limited heavy computing.
However, Windows is supposed to solve this problem by working on tablets. If it's not solving the problem, it's bad for Microsoft.
Coming from Samsung, these comments are particularly damaging. Samsung has made a lot of money on Android for the smartphone. If it's seeing great success with Google software and little success with Microsoft software, in the future it's going to put its tablet, and notebook development efforts, towards Google not Microsoft.
Via: All Things D