Can Microsoft Afford To Lose With Windows 8? 630
snydeq writes with the opinion that Microsoft can afford Windows 8 failing on the desktop. From the article: "Windows 8 is an experiment that may well fail, but Microsoft will cull invaluable feedback for Windows 9 in the process, long before Windows 7 runs out of gas, writes InfoWorld's Serdar Yegulalp. 'Can Microsoft really afford to alienate one of its biggest market segments for a whole product cycle? In a word: Yes. In fact, doing something this risky might well be vital to Microsoft's survival,' Yegulalp writes. 'Microsoft needs to gamble, and right now might well be the best time for the company to do it. The company needs to learn from its mistakes as quickly and nimbly as they can — and then turn around and make Windows 9 exceed all of our expectations.'"
Microsoft has managed to weather several OS flops (Windows Me anyone?) thanks to their domination of the market, but with Android gadgets and iPhones becoming pervasive can they pull it off again?
Re:Cycles (Score:4, Informative)
I agree, Windows 7 is a really good OS. I have somewhat warmed up for OSX, but in general, Win7 does it all too.
For Microsoft it's best they take changes. Now is good time for them, as Win7 is out and maturing. Couple those tablet and computer interfaces and let the system get more use. Vista sucked because driver makers weren't ready with new drivers. Win8 is going to suck in the beginning because the usual apps aren't ready. But it will get there, sooner or later, and Microsoft will own all PC + Console + Smart phones + Tablets industries.
They alienated a major sector before (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Its how microsoft works (Score:5, Informative)
Windows 95 - Stable
98 - Bluescreening POS
Wow really, what planet were you on? '95 (3.95) was hardly better than 3.11 on Dos 5+. It was not until '95OSR2 (4.0?) running on a mass market OEM system (DELL, HP, COMPAQ, etc) with mature drivers that it got solid. Windows 98 (4.10.98) was also pretty solid on decent hardware. You could run into problems with old (stuff with older VXD type drivers targeted at Windows '95) junk; which is what anyone upgrading a Win 95 machine had because manufactures never supported their own hardware beyond the initial release in the PC world at that time.
Re:Cycles (Score:5, Informative)
Don't forget Windows 2000, which many preferred over XP because of its stability and lack of bells and whistles bogging it down.
It may not have been a big consumer hit, because there never were any cheaper "home" versions. But it was a big hit for businesses and power users.
Nor NT4, which was a workhorse for a long time.
I'd include Windows 3.11 too, which, crappy as it was, didn't have the stability problems of 95, and was thus used well beyond its EOL.
Re:Are bad Microsoft versions deliberate? (Score:5, Informative)
The DOS 4 flop was pretty bad (most users stayed with DOS 3.3 for the longest time), but it also made DOS 5 and 6 look like gold when they came out, and made it harder to make the case for OS/2, which seemed like too much bloat and closer to DOS 4.
Just tried Windows 8 Server a few hours ago (Score:5, Informative)
I figured that I'd just do what I did with Vista, and run the server edition of Windows 8 instead of the consumer edition, so that I can have all the new capabilities without the tablet UI.
No such luck.
I ran up the beta and got a few things up and running on it, and it's just mind-blowing to experience how horrendously unusable it is first hand. This is the server edition, mind you, and it had animations, things sliding around, the start menu is gone, and some notification popped up that said something like "tap here to view details". Tap? On a server? Are you kidding me? Everything is a tablet now?
The strangest thing is that the PowerShell 3 command line is so fantastically good* that I almost don't care that they've fucked up the GUI, but for most people any improvements are going to be swamped by the atrocious user interface.
They've stuffed up everything. Things like the new Server Manager look pretty, but it does odd things like adding new menu items after a delay. After clicking some item like a server role, at first maybe only three or four menu items would be shown, so you think, ah well, nothing I can do here... and then after two seconds more menu items appear out of nowhere. If you're like me and click fast, you can miss critical things because some idiot decided to lather on the WinRT asynchronous APIs without any thought to the impact on usability. It's one thing if a placeholder changes after a delay, but to keep structure hidden until an arbitrary delay is a huge design flaw. And why the fuck is it asynchronous in the first place, anyway? Why aren't menu items known ahead of time, like you know... in all other software ever made by man?
Everything has cute tiles now, none of which are big enough to show their text content, so you find yourself having to choose between "Active Direct...", "Active Direct...", or "Active Direct...". It doesn't help that the icons are all cool and Metro and lack distinguishing characteristics.
I love the nested scrollbars, where the horizontal and vertical scrollbars are attached to two different controls with different sizes, where one of them can be used to scroll the other scrollbar into an invisible location.
Of course, everybody has covered the idiocy of Microsoft deciding to eliminate the Start menu, but on Windows Server it's particularly bad because there's a vaguely similar looking icon in its place! If you don't click exactly in the corner of the screen, you launch Server Manager instead, which is not a lightweight app, and can take a while to launch even on an SSD. Expect to learn quickly from your mistakes, because you'll be punished for making them. A lot.
I still haven't figured out how to quickly get a list of all start menu items, without first searching for something and then erasing the search term so that everything matches. I'm sure there's a better way, but it's not obvious to me.
Some of these things might be a bit nitpicky, but from what I've seen the flaws are pervasive, and it's a bad sign that even the most commonly used GUI screens have glaring usability problems despite having what appears to be final layout and artwork.
It's one thing to grumble and have to get used to something new and different if it's better, but it's a whole different story when I'm forced to get used to something that is not only objectively worse, but also totally inappropriate for the type of product: "tap here" on Windows Server Datacenter Edition tells you everything you need to know about Microsoft's myopic vision.
*) While they've added some impressive features [microsoft.com] to PowerShell 3, they've fixed none of the bugs. For example, (Get-ADUser "invalidusername" -EA SilentlyContinue) still throws an exception even though it was told to fail silently. This bug affects a lot of different things and was reported to Microsoft back when PowerShell 2 was still beta! I'm going to whip my crystal ball out and predict that this bug will not get fixed until, lets say, PowerShell 5 Service Pack 2, at which point nobody will care because we'll all be using Apple computers and Google cloud services instead.
Re:Cycles (Score:4, Informative)
WinFS is the next big thing for the next windows version since windows 95... in each new release they postpone it... its just vaporware, its too slow to be usable
Re:They've pushed the Trendy boat out too far now (Score:5, Informative)
Mission Control lets you control virtual desktops on the Mac. Just click the + button in the top right corner of Mission Control (mouse over that region if you don't see it, which is kinda silly UI) to add new desktops. After that, you can use Mission Control, gestures, or hotkeys to switch between desktops.
Now, if you had wanted to gripe about Mission Control because it gimped Expose's functionality, that would have been fine, but almost all of Spaces' old functionality (with the notable exception of having a two-dimensional virtual desktop layout) is still in Mission Control.
The feature I don't like is LaunchPad. I love my iPhone and iPad, but keep the iOS launcher away from the Mac. It feels incredibly cumbersome and out of place.
Re:Cycles (Score:4, Informative)
Actually your claim is not true. M$ had a license with HP (kind of forced by their buddy Intel) so that NT could run on the Itanium chip. They also had a license to run on DEC before Compaq killed the chip off. Since it never really ran on either, the projects fizzled out.
The funny part with Itanium is that you had to run the chip in 32bit mode since NT4 was only 32bit. The Itanium needed a full restart and BIOS flag to run in 32bit mode. The concept was great mind you. A 64bit PA RISC chip that had an Intel Pentium co-processor. But the Intel chip could never run as a co-processor.
Microsoft was never licensed to run on most RISC chips, and the couple they tried to run on were.. well.. they sat at the BSOD. I'm pretty sure that they did publish some articles telling people how great they were and that they had partnered with HP and Intel, maybe even said they were "OPEN" because of their license with DEC. Reality is rarely the same as what they pay media to type about them.