Winston Churchill once said of Russia, "It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." Now, I don't deal with international politics. I just write about technology. But when I've looked at HP lately I've been left thinking of its strategy as, well, "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma."
DEK: Flop or not? Users will soon decide whether Office for the iPad is the greatest thing since Flappy Birds or the next Microsoft Kin. What's a Kin, you ask? Exactly.
OSs will still matter to developers and engineers, but ordinary users are going to be more and more in the cloud, where their OS doesn't matter at all.
More and more for Windows users, there's no OS like an old OS.
Microsoft appears to be backing off on its biggest user interface fiasco since Microsoft Bob: In the Windows 8.1 update, the desktop rather than Metro reportedly will be the default interface.
Yes, Windows 8's been a failure. It's been worse than Vista. But is the solution really to push out a new operating system in double-quick time?
What went wrong? The answer could keep your IT team from a similar design fiasco.
At last. At long last, there's a real challenger to the Windows desktop, and its name is Google Chrome OS.