That was then. Less than a decade later, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu sponsor company Canonical, has closed the bug. It’s not that Ubuntu has replaced Windows as the default for preinstalled PC operating systems, of course – the reason, he noted on Thursday, was the wholesale redefinition of what personal computing is:

“Personal computing today is a broader proposition than it was in 2004: phones, tablets, wearables and other devices are all part of the mix for our digital lives. From a competitive perspective, that broader market has healthy competition, with iOS and Android representing a meaningful share.”

And Android, of course, is now in the market-dominating position that Windows once held. Not ideal, said Shuttleworth, but a vast improvement:

“Android may not be my or your first choice of Linux, but it is without doubt an open source platform that offers both practical and economic benefits to users and industry. So we have both competition, and good representation for open source, in personal computing.”

These days, Canonical is pushing hard to make Ubuntu a major player on everything from smartphones to servers. In cloud, Canonical was an early OpenStack supporter and is now releasing Ubuntu Server versions in close coordination with that open-source project.

Of course, Microsoft knows it’s facing a very different world today from that of 2004, and Shuttleworth was full of praise for the resulting shift in attitude:

“The Microsoft IaaS team are both technically excellent and very focused on having ALL OSs including Linux guests like Ubuntu run extremely well on Azure, making them a pleasure to work with. Perhaps the market shift has played a role in that. Circumstances have changed, institutions have adapted, so should we.”

It’s really worth reminding ourselves of how, in many ways, open source won. True, it’s still hard to walk into a store and buy a PC that doesn’t have Windows preinstalled – one of the key complaints in that original bug report – but, in a way, that doesn’t matter anymore. Microsoft may still dominate the PC market, but what we traditionally think of as a PC is no longer the default personal computer. Heck, these days we even have a market-leading and (largely) open-source browser, in the shape of Chrome, that has become a significant operating system of sorts in its own right.

Back in 2004, very few people saw that one coming.

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HTC’s prior tablets and the market for Windows RT

HTC did create a 7-inch Intel Atom-powered tablet in 2007 called the HTC Shift. It had a hardware keyboard and ran Windows, but like many other UMPC models from that time, it was never a hit. The company doesn’t have expertise with Intel chips and the full version of Windows, however. A few Android tablets from HTC — the Flyer and the Jetstream — came and went without fanfare as well. Given HTC’s experience with ARM-powered chips in smartphones, it would likely build new tablets with similar silicon. That would mean both would run Windows RT and not the full Windows 8 software.

Unfortunately, I’m not yet convinced there’s a market for Windows RT devices. I fully understand that some readers may have purchased one and are quite happy with it. However, there’s no data to support that Windows RT is a success by any measure: Microsoft hasn’t yet broken out Windows RT license sales from Windows 8 sales.

And after spending time with Surface RT and other Windows RT slates, I haven’t been able to recommend them to anyone. It’s not because they’re bad products; I actually like the user interface and the hardware of the various models. But at a similar price point, it may make more sense to buy an Intel Atom slate that provides similar battery life and performance to RT tablets but also adds support for legacy Windows software.

HTC’s current issues stem from several problems

I can understand why HTC might want to expand its product line to include Windows tablets: The company’s smartphone sales have been falling and so too are HTC’s revenues and profits. Instead of leading the pack with Android phones like it used to, HTC is losing out to Samsung. So too are other companies that used be smartphone stars; HTC isn’t unique. As a result, HTC reported just $2.88 million profit on $1.45 billion in revenues last quarter and unless it can quickly reverse its fortunes with the new HTC One, it could see profits dip into losses.

We’ve previously discussed why HTC is in its current predicament. Stronger competition is one part of it. The relative lack of brand awareness and marketing is another big reason. And a lack of focus — too many different permutations and combinations of similar products — haven’t helped either. And therein lies the rub: all three of these issues would only be magnified in the market for Windows tablets.

Losing focus isn’t a winning strategy

A better idea for HTC might be to get its smartphone house in order. It’s definitely on the right path with the HTC One; it’s a top-notch Android smartphone. If the phone is successful, I supposed the company could re-invest profits into designing a Windows tablet or two, but it might be better to continue improving the smartphone line first.

Tablet sales are growing, even as PC sales are slowing, but the market for smartphones is still bigger than both. I’d hate to see HTC lose focus by entering an already crowded market for products that haven’t yet proven successful. It just seems like a big risk that HTC isn’t in a position to take right now.

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The features of Wunderlist Pro will come as no surprise, as 6Wunderkinder accidentally revealed them last month, but here’s the gist anyway: tasks can be assigned among friends or colleagues, and subtasks can now be created. This should make Wunderlist Pro an effective replacement for the axed Wunderkit, which was a project management counterpart to Wunderlist’s task manager.

The Pro version costs $4.99 a month or $49.99 annually, and is available now for iOS devices, OS X and the web. 6Wunderkinder tells me the Android and Windows versions will follow in a week’s time.

“Wunderlist Pro allows you to easily delegate to-dos and effectively track the progress of each task, yet this is just the beginning. There is still a whole lot more to come,” 6Wunderkinder CEO Christian Reber said in a statement.

The first installment of that “whole lot more” will be the ability to attach files to tasks, which can then be shared for collaborative work. Meanwhile, the sharing functionality of the original Wunderlist has also received a boost through the addition of an “action bar” that allows one-click access to email and share lists.

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All things considered, however, Microsoft had a pretty good quarter — with profit of $6.06 billion, up a healthy 18.5 percent from a year ago. Not bad for a company that’s been slammed for missing the smartphone and tablet revolution. It shipped Windows 8 in November as part of its bid for credibility in these new form factors, but the OS met with mixed reviews. On the call, Microsoft CFO Pete Klein (who will leave the company at the end of the fiscal year) noted the challenge:

“There is no doubt that the device market is evolving. Consumers and businesses are increasingly shifting their focus to touch and mobility, and as a result, they want touch-enabled computing devices that are ultrathin, lightweight, and have long battery life. While Windows revenue has been impacted by the transition from the traditional PC to a new era of computing devices, the overall addressable markets are growing, and we are excited by the opportunities ahead of us.”

He reiterated that it is moving to an “accelerated pace for updates and innovations” starting with Windows 8 to meet the challenge.” Klein also said Microsoft’s big investment in cloud is starting to pay off with broader adoption of Office 365, which delivers including Word and Excel functionality as a service. “One in four of our enterprise customers now has Office 365, and the business is on a $1 billion annual revenue run rate,” Klein said.

Some on Twitter noted that in a dismal economy Microsoft managed to post pretty impressive profit growth. Maybe that means folks will stop calling for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s head. But then again, maybe not.

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Jolla, which is led by ex-Nokians, has taken the abandoned MeeGo OS and wrangled it into a new, slicker version called Sailfish. The Linux-based OS will in theory be available for a number of device types, but the first commercially-available version will be on a smartphone sold through the Chinese distributor D.Phone and the Finnish carrier DNA.

According to a separate tweet a few days ago, the timescale for that release is looking a bit fuzzy:

@jpetrise @nmshenoy @ashnazir Product shipping in 2nd half of year, announcement will happen closer to shipping.

— Jolla (@JollaHQ) April 1, 2013

One significant partnership announced at Helsinki’s Slush Festival last November will already be in trouble, namely that with ST-Ericsson – a chipmaker that is in the process of being broken up by parent companies STMicro and Ericsson.

Sailfish will certainly find itself in choppy waters this year. There are a range of factors that threaten the iOS-Android duopoly, from Windows Phone and BlackBerry to newer players such as Firefox OS — and let’s not forget Nokia’s low-end Asha platform, which will likely compete in the same market as Sailfish and Firefox OS, and Facebook Home, whose effect on the smartphone scene is yet to be felt.

Jolla will have a tough time establishing itself, but at least developers can really sink their teeth into its native app potential (they can also submit Android, HTML5 and Qt apps) now that they have the SDK.

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Some of these suggestions are bold, but it’s hard to see how Dell can continue to compete against IBM, HP and Cisco on one end and cloud services on the other without taking some risks. I actually think Dell is well positioned to be a big part of the future of IT if it just embraces a future that’s all about software and next-generation applications. Hardware, well, it’s largely just a necessary evil on which increasingly intelligent and virtualized software needs to run.

1. One word (occasionally hyphenated): Webscale.

Here’s an interesting fact: According to IDC, while the rest of the big four server vendors lost both market share and revenue in the third quarter of 2012, Dell gained in both. Why? Because it’s selling webscale servers like crazy — thousands at a time to web companies such as eBay, cloud providers such as Microsoft and even high-performance computing shops. In fact, Dell has shipped more than 1 million of these no-frills, scale-out boxes since it began selling them in 2007.

It seems only logical that Dell should keep riding this horse on the hardware side (including by continuing its close relationship with the Open Compute Project), but there’s a real opportunity in software, too. Although companies like Facebook and Google have the engineers to build their own tools for managing large server environments — both in terms of operations and power consumption — many smaller and more-mainstream companies don’t. If it’s already selling the servers, Dell might as well be selling the software that ensures they’re easy to manage and troubleshoot, too.

2. Make a big bet on big data.

If Dell wants to get a piece of a big data market that’s going to be worth tens of billions in the next few years, it will have to do more than just sell servers. Dell needs a database or platform like Hadoop that it can deliver as a service on top of its commodity hardware — much like what Oracle, EMC, IBM and others are trying, only with a lower price tag and a focus on scaling out versus scaling up.

I actually suggested Dell make a big data investment (and cloud and systems-management investments) two years ago, and although a lot of potentially good fits have been bought in the meantime, there’s still a variety of options available. The Hadoop distribution vendors are probably out of its price range (so closer partnerships with Cloudera, Hortonworks and/or MapR should be in order), but there are whole markets full of analytic, NoSQL and NewSQL databases just waiting to be snatched up.

3. Buy up some real cloud knowledge.

Sorry to burst any bubbles, but it’s hard to see how Dell’s proposed Microsoft, VMware and OpenStack-based public cloud offerings will amount to much unless they’re part of a division with an ingrained cloud mentality. The company is competing in this space against not only Amazon Web Services, but also the companies (and Rackspace) who have developed and are selling the very platforms Dell is looking to resell. And the debacle that is HP’s cloud business should highlight the perils of trying to build something from scratch when operating cloud platforms isn’t in your corporate DNA.

Still, I think OpenStack is probably Dell’s best bet (if only because it has already made its bed with the open source platform). Like Rackspace with Anso Labs (and unlike the DIY approach by HP), Dell could acquire some OpenStack talent to help it build quality cloud infrastructure offerings — both public and private — and services. And even outside of OpenStack, there are still a few startups that have real institutional knowledge of building and running cloud infrastructure, but that might not come with a huge price tag.

4. Push the envelope with ARM.

One of Dell’s ARM server designs

Dell’s focus on alternative server architectures shouldn’t stop with its webscale business, but should color its entire hardware strategy. And if it wants to be the server maker for next-generation applications, doubling down on its ARM investment is probably a good thing to do. Dell has already designed a couple of ARM servers, but they’ve generally been reserved for webscale and research customers, as well as for the Apache Software Foundation.

However, as even Dell has acknowledged, many big data and other applications that rely on distributed infrastructure and parallel processing don’t require brawny x86 chips. They just needs lots of cores, which is something ARM’s server designs can deliver at a fraction of the energy footprint. Assuming software vendors are on board — and a growing number appear to be — Dell could actually distinguish itself by being the only big server vendor delivering tomorrow’s applications on gear actually designed for their unique needs.

5. Tell Microsoft to suck it.

Or, rather, gently ask its new creditor and likely board member to take a back seat and hope the rest of the board agrees. Because if there’s one thing Dell can’t afford to do, it’s get locked up in the same last-millenium relationship that has both companies reeling today. Yes, there might — and maybe should — be some deals between the two companies to deliver Microsoft software on Dell hardware, but in an era of open source, cloud computing, VMware and Apple, there’s no real future for Dell in pushing Windows anything down its customers’ throats.

Besides, I don’t think Microsoft actually needs to push its agenda in order for the Dell investment to pay off (and it’s not just because a successful Dell is the only way to make Microsoft’s investment pay off). Microsoft, too, is struggling to find its direction in a world increasingly dominated by alternative operating systems (mobile, desktop and server) and it should realize there’s precious little Dell hardware can do to get people to buy Windows.

If anything, Microsoft should view Dell as a great server vendor to power its Windows Azure and Office 365 cloud offerings and provide the physical medium for some next-generation enterprise software.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Dusit.

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Here’s the simple answer from Steve Paine, provided you’re using an Asus Taichi 21 in your local coffee shop:

I’ll be honest, I never really saw a use for the second touchscreen display on this Asus laptop. Now, I have. Of course, with the Asus Taichi 21 costing $1,300 or more, this is far more expensive than the old method of using an Apple sticker, no?

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Tablet sales are quickly growing, PC sales have been slowing

I compared the same device shipment numbers for the third quarter back in November, suggesting that nearly 1 in 4 computers sold then were tablets during that time. Of course, I was lumping tablets and PCs together for that comparison; an arguable aggregation since tablets can’t do everything a typical PC can do.

But for many, particularly consumers, today’s tablets do just enough to be the next computing purchase while those few legacy computing activities simply keep the old desktop or laptop on life support for another few years.

And in my mind, this is the challenge that PC makers are facing: How to compete with lower-priced devices that are more portable, typically run longer on a single battery charge and handle the most common computing tasks.

That’s why I’m less interested in the question of “who has the most tablet market share?” It’s still Apple at 43.6 percent, if you’re interested, with Samsung and Asus — thanks to the Google Nexus 7 — growing faster than all others:

Here’s the big story

Why don’t I care about the market share numbers between vendors? Because that’s not the bigger story. The more important point is which companies are in this chart and which companies aren’t. Three computer makers are in the top 5 while two retailers and content providers round out the list.

Missing are the names of the long-time computer makers that either didn’t see the trend, lost their focus, are late to the game, or simply decided to pass on tablets; think Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer and Sony. They missed out on the rise of smartphones, which now outsell PCs by several factors, and they’re missing out on the tablet market too, even though they’re now making some attempts at relevancy here.

Withering Windows?

This market snapshot also says something about the operating system that has held the top spot for decades: Windows. Yes, there are still hundreds of millions of Windows users on the planet. There will be for years to come. But if you lump together the shipments of PCs and tablets — admittedly a stretch, but bear with me — you get a telling number: About a third of these devices don’t run Windows; they’re using iOS or Android.

That’s far different from the years of  Windows market domination at 90-plus-percent. And I see no reason why the growth of non-Windows tablets will stop. I wouldn’t be surprised by this time next year if non-Windows tablets actually outsell Windows computers.

All of a sudden, Microsoft’s presence in this overall computing market is in the minority; something the word hasn’t experienced in more than 20 years or so. Again, that’s why the vendor share in tablets isn’t the big story; there’s a bigger theme of legacy operating systems compared to newer, more nimble platforms.

Another big inflection point in the market

We can debate if a tablet should be compared to a PC all day long: Yes, you could say it’s just a different form factor and shouldn’t be considered equal to a PC. But you can’t debate two simple facts: The PC market is stagnating, if not receding, and sales of new computing form factors are growing.

It’s that simple. The definition and use case of a “personal computer” has changed, just like it did when laptops overtook desktops. And those who stuck with their old definition of computing are stuck missing out on this next wave of how people will interact with and use computers, which in this case are tablets.

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