There is no doubt that this economic crisis redraw the landscape of technology, a proof of this is that netbooks have captured the scene and are the protagonists of the ICT sector. This has occurred primarily for two reasons, first is the terrible economic situation has limited the spending power of most households and the other is the arrival of Intel Atom chip, which has allowed the great majority of assemblers of computers offer their own versions of netbooks.
An unexpected result for everyone, including Microsoft, is that for the first time in its history, the market is not looking for a faster processor, a proof of this is the cool reception by the market of the new desktop processor for Intel Core i7 . What the market is now looking machines are lightweight, economical and to enable us to easily enter the Internet, ie the market demand netbooks. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the vast majority of these computers come equipped with the Atom processor N270, which although nominally has two cores and operates at 1.6GHz, it has proved in practice that is too slow to run the new operating system from Microsoft, Windows Vista.
Microsoft has pressured its ally Intel for many years to accelerate the introduction of high-end Atom processor as the Z530, but the higher cost of these nebtooks does not seem to inspire many to the point that even Dell has introduced its new Mini 10v, which is equipped with an N270, as an alternative to more expensive Mini 10, which uses the processor N530.
It is clear that low-end hardware still runs Windows XP Home Edition with some limitations, in fact to run with relative ease, the XP netbooks have taken steroids and this is reflected in their prices. From the perspective of manufacturers of netbooks made little sense to expect that Windows 7 that XP is more agile in this category. After all the main supocisión of engineers designing the next generation of Windows is that this will be a more powerful processor, a sort of tacit acuerto with Intel, which tavés to a new version of Windows to help sell the new generation of high-end processors, which is where Intel brings greater profit. This crisis has broken this pattern and this cracked the much lasting alliance between Intel and Microsoft.
Things have escalated to the point that Intel has developed its own operating system for netbooks called Moblin, a project originally intended to be used as the operating system of smartphones, but due to the turn which took Android (Google OS for smartphones), which now also runs on netbooks, Intel did to refine their plans for Moblin. In this fight to fill the space the OS low-cost netbooks has also entered Canonical with its Ubuntu Remix.
That is why it is not surprising that having been released yesterday (May 19) Moblin v 2.0 beta, free to download and clearly intended to create a community to develop applications for this platform. Hours later a video appeared on YouTube in which leaves Doug Anson, one of the strategists of Dell technology, showing a Dell Mini Cupcake 10v running Android, in addition to two others of the same model netbooks running Ubuntu and Ubuntu Remix.
The intention is clear from my point of view, long computer assemblers have lived in the shadow of two giants, Intel and Microsoft. One gave them the hardware and software. Now that Microsoft’s position has been weakened and even Intel is seeking to develop an OS optimized to further promote the use of its Atom chip. Dell does not mean that you accept its OS to blindfold gift, after all do know that Dell will continue to rely on Intel as its sole source of processors, in addition to back Android in netbooks Atom processor enables even a future when the users feel comfortable with the surroundings change to another platform such as ARM, which no longer depend on either Intel.