Gut-Check Time For Windows 8, Microsoft 516
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?"
Planned obsolescence treadmill accelerating (Score:5, Insightful)
When they rushed out Windows 7 after Vista flopped that was understandable, but now Win8 is coming out just as quickly behind Win7. It's like they're doing the famous trash-good-trash-good pattern on purpose. Rush out the next trash OS to get the next good one out sooner.
Re:Planned obsolescence treadmill accelerating (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Planned obsolescence treadmill accelerating (Score:5, Insightful)
XP and 7 are the good ones. Vista and 8 are the trash OSes (an app store, the ribbon disease spread over the whole OS and a tablet UI? Trash.)
Re:Planned obsolescence treadmill accelerating (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, Vista was a good OS, but it changed the Windows fundamentals so much that many apps broke. But to advance, improve security and to use better driver model Microsoft had to do it at some point. There was nothing wrong with Vista but the old badly designed programs that stopped working with it when MS had to take the step forward.
cell phone carriers may mobile use hard (Score:2, Insightful)
By
* 2 year lock in
* CDMA VS GSM
* locking out wifi on some phones
* saying no to tethering or makeing you pay more it's like the old cable days where they did not want you use routers and or make you pay for more ip's to use more then 1 system.
* low data caps with slow down or high fees for going over.
* app store lock in
* custom carrier ui's and apps.
* locked OS rom's
* app store mystery censorship
* lack of a local corporate app store on some systems
* insane roaming fees.
Yes, but don't abandon Windows 8... (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows trying to release Windows 8 with its tablet shell interface on a mainstream PC makes about as much sense as Apple release iPads with a command line shell. Here's what I mean; watch this video [youtube.com] (starting at minutes 15) where the presenter tries to show how Windows 8 is just as easy to use on a laptop as it is on a tablet. It makes no sense for any user to have to move the mouse around that much just to get to the object they want to select. Microsoft needs to stop taking this silly "one-size-fits-all" approach with its OS. Make one OS for the enterprise, another for laptops (primary PC machine purchased nowadays by home consumers), and another for tablets. Tailor the shell to fit the machine, not force the machine to fit into the shell.
Now, while I still have my administrative gripes about Windows 7 (bloated size of WinSxS directory, unable to easily unlock a workstation locked by a user, behavior of & driver support for legacy devices, etc.), but I would still recommend that Windows keep selling Windows 7 for the enterprise rather than try to force us to swallow Windows 8. We want something newer, and a lot of these gripes could be fixed w/ SP2. Stop with the one-size-fits-all crap. Market Windows 7 for the enterprise and tailor it for the enterprise. Let Windows 8 start and develop on tablets. If Windows 8 turns out to be a good OS on tablets, I would predict in a very short amount of time, laptops will start to ship w/ touch-screen interfaces to take advantage of the Windows 8 shell.
Re:Pathetic (Score:3, Insightful)
No, the problem is that everything Windows does natively is done wrong.
Re:Planned obsolescence treadmill accelerating (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yes, but don't abandon Windows 8... (Score:5, Insightful)
If Windows 8 turns out to be a good OS on tablets, I would predict in a very short amount of time, laptops will start to ship w/ touch-screen interfaces to take advantage of the Windows 8 shell.
It may spawn touch-screen laptops, but they won't be well received or used for very long save for some specific niches. Why? Gorilla arm syndrome. Holding your arm in front of you to touch a screen for long periods of time just wears it out. It'll suck quite a bit. Using it for maybe one or two things might be OK, but using it over and over will be a chore that will rapidly be painful.
TL;DR unless Microsoft ships a new human arm, I don't expect touchscreen laptops to take over the general laptop market.
As for the rest, some of the stuff isn't just a service pack away. For example, they're supposedly integrating a new and improved version of Hyper-V in at least some desktop versions of Windows 8. There's also rumors of per application virtualization. I don't think either of those would be simply bolted on in a service pack.
Windows 8 mostly is Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I suspect we should just consider the "Metro UI" as a very hyped gadget layer (like those HTML+JavaScript gadgets that both Windows and Mac have had for years now), but allowing them to be more complex, better performance, giving them a new "swipey" way of accessing them, and allowing you to run your Windows Phone 7 apps as Windows 8 gadgets. Dashboard/Sidebar redux.
I think MS is hoping this will be a tipping point where these HTML+JavaScript apps now become actually useful and usable, and that the portability of gadgets between Phone 7 and Windows 8 will be a market advantage. But I don't see any way in which this should detract from existing Windows 7 usefulness. Just if you're on a tablet, you'll be interacting with the dashboard much more, and if you're on a desktop you'll be interacting with the desktop much more.
Too 'corporate' strategy (Score:2, Insightful)
MS is stuck and I think their audience of business, developers, investors and consumers are confused. It can't be everything to everyone for ever.
The thing with an OS is you can't be evolutionary and change the entire platform without ticking off your largest customers - OEMs and Fortune 500 types. So, instead as Windows users, we're stuck with persistent sucky features, and the new OS releases have stupid features that should have been replaced a long time ago. And when you get as big as MS, the software that comes with Windows has to be kind of crippled otherwise they'll have the DOJ burning them for monopoly stuff all over again.
So what are we stuck with?
- Wordpad and Notepad that are about as useful as they were in Windows 3.1
- A non-customizeable interface
- A crappy and confusing command line (I haven't learned Powershell) but copy and move commands are seriously crap but better (somewhat) than the GUI version
And so what new features are we getting in Windows 8 other than GUI. I haven't followed this very closely, I admit, but lately they announced:
-- A faster boot time why didn't this get included with 7?
-- A multi-threaded copy/move operation in Windows which correctly reports time to complete
-- some new GUI you can turn on or off
As for Samsung tablet, I don't know what to say. I think the HP tablet firesale, is evidence enough, any tablet comparatively overpriced" compared to the iPad is not going to do any major volume. I think there's a $200 spot the market is willing to bear and that's it.
MS is also very conservative. Launching a trendy, hip product in front of a conservative crowd is probably not a good idea. Samsung should probably launch it on its own. Preferably with a guy in Jeans, a black turtle neck. Also put a hyponotizing background and spike the kool-aid at the conference. Tablet should do really well after.
Re:Keep Selling Windows 7 (Score:2, Insightful)
I do give Microsoft credit for finally producing a usable OS since XP. But that's like giving the guy in the wheelchair credit for finishing last in a leg-running marathon.
Re:Keep Selling Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
Too desktop oriented.
Sort of.
This rejigging of desktop Windows is pretty good evidence that MS didn't see the trap they were setting themselves with WP7, which won't scale to tablets.
Not to mention that, while "Windows 7 is a niceer operating system" than previous versions of Windows, it's still not a very interesting or innovative platform, and is only selling well because it's the default OEM install. It's certainly not growing the market, which groundbreaking products tend to do.
If you look around the current OS scene, there's a lot more innovation and excitement than there has been for decades - you have the phones, with fast new text input methods like Swype, tablets with tilt and touch interfaces, UIs like Android, Meego and iOS that are instantly responsive on their dual core ARM devices, even new laptop/netbook form factors based on online data storage (ChromeOS). It's all an indication that the computing world is finally routing around the damage that is Microsoft's desktop computing monopoly.
In that context, Win7 looks pretty lifeless. It may be faster than Vista, but even on good modern hardware it still feels like the UI is mired in honey. And under the hood, sure, there were improvements, but nothing that changed the way users worked. Microsoft is rushing W8 to the market because they have to get SOMETHING out there to still seem relevant.
Re:Keep Selling Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft has to keep their customers on the upgrade treadmill, even if they're still getting paid for selling the old version, because they have to keep their platform a moving target.
They've advanced from that, they are now getting $15 a pop from almost every android phone sold. So they don't even have to make anything anymore and they can still make profits just from leeching on others work.
Re:Keep Selling Windows 7 (Score:2, Insightful)
Interesting that you left out WP7 from your list of innovative new OSs ... it's certainly more innovative than Android, which is basically an iOS "me-too!" UI, only tooled for nerds and customizers (where as iOS is "one size fits all monotony" and is actually starting to seem a little stale already).
Re:Keep Selling Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
They've advanced from that, they are now getting $15 a pop from almost every android phone sold. So they don't even have to make anything anymore and they can still make profits just from leeching on others work.
For now, but that's only a consequence of the unconscionable nature of software patents, in that someone who claims you're infringing a patent can hold you up and threaten to have your products removed from the market unless you pay up. It doesn't provide you any time to work around this patent you've never seen before, but by the same token it isn't a permanent situation because they have to tip their hand and list the patents they're holding so that in the next version you can design around them.
On top of that, all it would take to put a stop to it is for Google to buy some patents that Windows is infringing. Or, for that matter, if we would all just come to our senses and recognize that software is not patentable. (And we'll see how quickly the major companies get that pushed through soon enough when some patent troll holding a blocking patent inevitably demands an injunction against e.g. Windows unless Microsoft pays them 50% of their revenues.)
Re:Keep Selling Windows 7 (Score:4, Insightful)
Support networks how? I recently purchased a USB-ethernet device. I simply attached the device to my laptop and ethernet cable, and it worked.
After doing hours of research regarding to what USB ethernet devices actually work under Linux? ;)
Re:Keep Selling Windows 7 (Score:4, Insightful)
Android, which is basically an iOS "me-too!" UI, only tooled for nerds and customizers
It's not what you think. You should try it someday.
Re:Keep Selling Windows 7 (Score:4, Insightful)
It is also worth pointing out that comparing a desktop operating system and something like Android or iOS is apples to oranges (sorry for the bad play on words :) ). Android and iOS are designed to be light weight, low power, mobile operating systems. They are not really full featured and have a lot of serious limitations. They are great for what they are intended for, but I would never want to run Android on desktop hardware. (At least, not for day to day use, doing it just to do it might be entertaining for a bit).
Multitasking, networking and platform adaptability are probably two of the biggest areas. Android does it a whole lot better than iOS, but even still, compared to a modern desktop, the capabilities are a joke (but quite impressive for the hardware they run on.) Networking services that are built in to modern desktop OSes require third party software and are fairly hit and miss from my experience on mobile platforms. The driver support is perhaps the largest issue. The amount of tweaking that goes in to getting Android to run on different hardware platforms is fairly extensive compared to the desktop world. I can throw just about any components together and get Windows running on it in less than an hour most of the time. The same can't be said for Android and iOS only deals with about a dozen hardware platforms specifically designed for it.