[Discuss] Google's Nexus 7

[Richard Pieri]

On 7/11/2012 1:52 PM, Bill Bogstad wrote:
> Now if we are just talking about JB, I might agree.   But longer term
> (1-2 years), Android can add a lot of functionality while I don't see
> Apple ever being the price leader.

Android already does far more than iOS can.  Galaxy Tab 10 is 
technically superior, both hardware and OS, to iPad in every way.  Yet 
Apple is selling 10-15 times as many iPads as Samsung is selling Tab 
10s.  Technical superiority clearly is an insignificant factor in the 
consumer decision making process.  Making Android even better isn't 
going to change this simple fact.


> So what.   Manufacturer market share for PCs have gone up and down for
> decades now.  Top tier vendors have literally disappeared, but Windows
> continues forward.

Windows continues on because it isn't tied to any single hardware 
source.  If you want to make valid comparisons then Google is like 
Microsoft; Samsung is like Dell, HTC is like HP, Eee is like Gateway. 
Google is on top because many OEMs are using Android, but none of those 
OEMs can hold a candle to Apple.  The three biggest OEMs together can't 
match Apple.


> that modern CPUs weren't actually helping them much.    The problem
> was that they needed to randomly access large memory datasets to do
> speech recognition.   Their datasets wouldn't fit into CPU caches and
> random access speeds to main memory weren't keeping up with CPU
> speeds.

I used to work with a guy who did voice rec programming for one of the 
big telcos.  It's not just the massive datasets that the neural networks 
need to scan.  It's adapting that data for individual speakers and 
irregular speech patterns just to name one complication.

By the way, the hardest word in the English language for a computer to 
recognize?  banana.

-- 
Rich P.