Gut-Check Time For Windows 8, Microsoft

theodp writes "GeekWire reports that, for better or worse, the upcoming week is shaping up as one of the most pivotal in Microsoft's history, as the software giant makes its pitch for Windows 8 at two important conferences. First, Microsoft will be huddling with hardware and software developers beginning Tuesday at its sold-out BUILD conference ('BUILD will show you that Windows 8 changes everything'), where it's rumored that Samsung will unveil a Windows 8 tablet. And on Wednesday, CEO Steve Ballmer and other execs will be holding the company's annual Financial Analyst Meeting, which was delayed from its traditional summer date to allow the company to put its Windows 8 strategy in context for Wall Street. So, are we about to finally see the realization of Microsoft's vision for Information at Your Fingertips (Part 2), which Bill Gates introduced with a hokey video at Comdex 1994?"

Keep Selling Windows 7

[DanielRavenNest]

Windows 7 is a nice operating system, and is selling well. If they don't do something stupid like stop selling it when Windows 8 is released, they will do fine.

Re:Planned obsolescence treadmill accelerating

[saleenS281]

Rushed? Vista was extremely late because they tried to do too much (WinFS anyone?). They were on a 3 year cadence for just about every release prior to that. They're now back on their normal cadence. I get the impression your first experience with Windows was XP if you think this is "rushed" for Microsoft.

Re:Planned obsolescence treadmill accelerating

[GameboyRMH]

Every time a Linux distro comes out it doesn't cost three digits to upgrade, the distro maintainers don't go out of their way to push me onto the new distro, and doing an in-place upgrade will work fine with just the occasional minor problem, whereas with Windows an in-place upgrade for anything greater than a service pack tends to leave the install totally fucked up.

So let's recap.

Linux upgrade: A few clicks in the Update Manager (or "sudo apt-get dist-upgrade") and wait.

Windows upgrade: Spend at least a hundred bucks, back up all data, clean-install & activate OS, reinstall apps, put data back.

OSX is cheaper than Windows but with the higher upgrade frequency I don't know which one's cheaper overall.

Tablets and smartphones for developers

[Dennis Sheil]

With the explosion of smartphones and tablets, HP announcing they're leaving the PC business and all the news being how Windows 8's perhaps main feature being tablet (and smartphone) ability, the mobile aspect of Windows 8 is what many people will be looking at.

I hear some Windows fans talk about how Windows 8 is going to come in and eventually dominate smartphones and tablets. However, Apple already has been in the smartphone space since mid-2007, and the tablet space since April 2010. Android has been around since October 2008 in the smartphone space, and Honeycomb came out in February of this year (and a few months earlier things like the early Samsung tabs were coming out). Developers have spent a lot of time learning these platforms and writing code for them. The App Stores and Android Markets are filling up with apps, which are being improved continually by updates based on user feedback. Over 550,000 Android smartphones are being turned on a day. Customers are familiar with the apps on their phone, and how to do various things on their phone or tablet.

What do we he hear from Microsoft? It's all just vaporware so far. Even if developers want to develop for an SDK with no device, there's no SDK out yet. Maybe it will be put out after this conference. Also - Microsoft has been saying a lot of it is HTML 5 and Javascript. I'm happy about that, but it doesn't really exploit all the code and experience for Visual Basic, Silverlight, .NET and so forth. I understand they backpedaled on this a little bit, although HTML 5 and Javascript will still be on it. They're kind of forced to do this - they can't force mobile developers to develop just for Microsoft, they have to hope that the popular iPhone/iPad/Android applications are easy to port to Windows 8 so they can get some applications that way. Microsoft's Windows 7 smartphone/tablet market share is very, very low, so due to the lack of any kind of monopoly strongarm, they're forced to open up a little bit.

The two things Microsoft has going for it is the existing Windows code base, and the ability for people to connect to their PCs, or PC formats (Word, Excel) or Microsoft servers at work (Exchange etc.). As people dump Microsoft PCs for iPads and Android tablets, this lock-in becomes less important. Also insofar as the Windows existing code base, both Apple and Android have had a lot of C++ OpenGL code which used to be primarily dedicated to Windows ported to Apple and Android mobile devices. Miguel de Icaza and company have even brought Mono to Android, so a lot of C# and .NET code can get on Android. As existing Windows code can often be used on Android, this lessens the advantage of Windows 8.

And then there's other things. Microsoft makes money selling Windows 8 to manufacturers like HTC and so forth. Google gives Android away for free, and makes money on the hook-ins it has for Google Maps and so forth. I guess with the Motorola purchase, Google will make some money actually selling the hardware as well. Microsoft has to sell an unwanted product to manufacturers, when a free, popular OS already exists, with a user base of millions, with an Android app market with hundreds of thousands of apps, and many developers working on creating new apps and improving existing ones.

I also wonder how hard it is to develop for Windows 8. For Android, I can download Eclipse on a Linux machine, and the Android SDK, make an Android emulator, develop code in Java (with a few calls to special Android SDK Java classes like Activity), pay Google a one-time lifetime $25 fee to put as many apps on Android Market as I want, and I'm all set. I can even release the app to a non-Market competitor site and save the $25. So the whole shebang costs $25 for life. What will Windows be like? Will I have to pay to get on their app store? Will I have to buy Visual Studio or something? If they don't make things real easy and cheap for developers, they're going to have problems. They might even have problems if they do make things real easy and cheap.

Re:Keep Selling Windows 7

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 7 is a nice operating system compared to Vista and most else it has released before. I'm glad they took the time over the 20 plus years since Windows 1.0 to upgrade the games from Minesweeper to something maybe worth $9.99 on the bargin bin at Walmart, that they took the time to not make the copy/move dialog completely braindead, and that they took away the "Repair" option in the network "notification icon" away to replace it with a just as brainheaded "Troubleshoot..." function that takes five times as long to fix any issue as the old Repair option ever did, and that they decided that removing the names of the tasks on the task bar makes things less confusing. Nice to see the time was put to good use.

Really though, aside from the Aero theme, text of some dialogs finally rewritten, and some nice little apps, it's really not much different than XP.

I know there's lots of changes under the hood. Above the hood it's the same shit, different reflectivity index. Fuck Windows.