I'd rather them take their sweet damn time than bungle the launch because they rushed it all. They're already a little late to the party. Might as well hold back and polish it to a shiny gleam.
On a guess, I'd say we'll see MS geared ARM and x86 tablets show up the exact moment Windows 8 is released to the public. So...Octoberish?
Looks like it from what I 've been reading too... should of made it end of summer though, really, I hope they don't take their sweet time AND manage to bungle the launch too.
What with that moron of a ceo they have they might have started compiling for arm a year ago, hence the wait... (btw isn't it high time ms's board told balmer to get lost?) arm devices as the iphone being out since 2007 they had oh about 5 years to maybe think about porting their os to arm too...
Anyway at this stage I wish them all the best, the market need as much competition as it can, apple and google ripping each other off as the only option for the coming years won't do anyone of us any good. And if they want to make a good entrance they should sponsor some devs too for their store. They can't expect to catch up by not throwing money at it.
If I were running ms and the marketing dept came up to me and said we need 50 million for launching 8, I 'd tell them take $20 mil (it's not like ms's marketing has ever done them much good recently have them, tons of money on ad agencies for rebranding that ended up embarassing them by using macs for the ads, or paying J.Seinfeld tons of cash for shoe store ads...remember these?), and I d throw 30 mil like crazy on sponsoring devs for my store. If the devices catch up -and the only way they can is via a decent app market- they make it up anyway via selling to more oems, and selling more apps...marketing money is pretty much gonna go down the drain anyway... Will they do it? I doubt it...
They need to have a leader, a bold one for this, and with a vision, to say I am going to take a risk, apple's taking a 30% cut, I am going to go no cut for 3 years, and $50 fee for the dev program, and I am throwing a few mils to be spread around to apps I find worth the effort. Apple is the big guy now, apple is the company that's making billions upon billions and issuing 10,000 itunes checks upon selling a gazionth of apps as I said in another thread and not giving anything back to developers in curating the store just leaving them to race to the bottom. Ms can hit them there, and say look, we value you more than these guys, we want your creativity, we used to be monopoly, but now we are not, the other guys are and they are passing it off as they are doing you a favour for having your apps in the store while making billions out of you while they slap together a few parts from other people and they maintain an os, we want to pay you for exclusive apps too, we want to give more to the community than both google and apple are offering. We won't be 5% market share also runs here, we're going for 40%.
