AOL/Gateway/Transmeta/Linux
slashdot.org
AOL/Gateway will announce their Transmeta/Linux based Web appliances today. The article is particularly interesting since it details the motive behind AOLs going counter Wintel, And Transmeta's Ditzel says it best: "The truth is that the phrase Internet appliance has become a code word in the industry meaning 'no Windows.'"
The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO May 29 -- Breaking ranks with the powerful "Wintel duopoly," based on Intel hardware and Microsoft software, Gateway and America Online plan to announce on Tuesday that they will use a processor from an upstart Silicon Valley chip maker and a version of the Linux operating system in a new Internet home appliance scheduled to go on sale later this year.
The decision is a big victory for the Transmeta Corporation, a chip design company in Santa Clara, Calif., that has developed a microprocessor intended to be a low-power and inexpensive alternative to Intel's microprocessors.
Transmeta, which was founded five years ago by David Ditzel, the former Sun Microsystems hardware designer, with backing from George Soros, the financier; Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder; Deutsche Bank; and others, said last month that it had raised an additional $88 million in financing from Compaq Computer, Gateway, Samsung, Sony and a number of Taiwanese manufacturers.
The deal is a portent of the arrival of what is being popularly referred to as the post-PC computing era, a world in which the personal computer is displaced by an expanding array of digital cellular phones, personal digital assistants, Webpads, which are tablet-style computers, and other appliance-like devices.
Both Intel and Microsoft have largely resisted this vision, maintaining instead that the PC will remain at the center of the computing world for many years to come and that the new devices will function more or less as peripherals to a central PC.
Gateway executives on Friday said that they decided to break with Intel and Microsoft because the new devices were not personal computers.
"We're not building a personal computer, we're building an appliance," said Peter Ashkin, Gateway's senior vice president and chief technology officer. "Hence, there was no strong requirement for Windows."
nytimes.com |
