Is Windows 8 Microsoft's Riskiest Bet? 362
Microsoft has rolled out many new products and many revisions of old products over the past couple of decades. The releases haven't always gone well, as in the case of Windows Vista, but Redmond has managed to ride out the rough patches. However, Windows 8 is an even more dramatic revamp of one of Microsoft's top products than Vista was. At the same time, they're piling their tablet hopes onto Windows 8 as well. Does this make it Microsoft's riskiest bet ever?
"Thus the problem facing Microsoft: How to convince Windows users to rush out and buy an upgrade of a perfectly good (and relatively new, at least by Windows standards) operating system? Compounding the issue is the new Windows 8 design, with a Start screen that discards the traditional desktop interface in favor of a bunch of colorful tiles linked to applications. That revamp is supposed to make Windows 8 more touch-screen friendly, and thus optimized for tablet use; but it could turn off consumers who don’t like change, not to mention businesses that shudder at the idea of retraining their workers in new ways of doing things. ... if Surface and the other Windows 8 tablets fail to make an impact on the market, then Microsoft will have lost a major chance at seizing the new paradigm, which is centered on mobility and the cloud. Meanwhile, that same paradigm shift is drifting the center of peoples’ computing lives from desktops and laptops to smartphones and tablets—which puts Windows’ traditional center of strength at long-term risk.
Other examples (Score:5, Interesting)
Was Gnome 3 risky?
Was the American version of Iron Chef risky?
Was a sequel to The Matrix risky? (Actually, it shouldn't have been, but...)
We'll see how well this plays out.
Re:It's Not A Bet... (Score:5, Interesting)
Pescatore asked Ballmer what he considered to be Microsoft's "riskiest product bet."
... Ballmer's answer? "The next version of Windows."
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/ballmer-riskiest-product-bet-by-microsoft-is-the-next-release-of-windows/7786 [zdnet.com]
how could MS not do something risky now? (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft's hold on personal computing is slipping, partly due to their own lack of foresight, and they are in danger of being resigned to the role of "legacy personal computing". To get back on top, they have no choice but to do a hail mary pass at this stage.
I think the main overriding problem is that Microsoft as an organization doesn't know how to do that. They make money by maneuvering, with innovation coming a poor second. Mind you, there are very bright engineers working there, but management has for too many years been the consumer computer equivalent of a water economy (the government that controls the water can rot until it's just a shell, but will not be toppled from within) that they don't know how to act any differently. And so, they try a variation on a past strategy (come out with a product that's more strategic than useful, incidentally screwing their partners in the process) and assume it'll be business as usual. They might be right, but I don't think so.
Not even remotely close (Score:5, Interesting)
The riskiest bet Microsoft ever made was selling IBM an operating system before they actually had one to sell. Imagine what would have happened to the fledgling Microsoft had they failed to come up with the product in time.
Re:It's Not A Bet... (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it's not suicide.
If this was 10 years ago, then yes, probably suicide. The Windows ecosystem is so big, and so entrenched with 'new' computers being sold with 2 year old parts in them (not used, just parts fabbed 2 years) as great buys that a single iteration of windows being a clusterfuck isn't the end of the world, because people will still buy the old version, with hardware suited to the old version.
That gives them a chance to change direction after people have had windows 8 for a few months and the torrent of negative feedback ends up as a pie in ballmers face. And then they can change direction to: consistent design. It's not that any of the interfaces in Windows 8 are bad, it's that there are more than one, and things inconsistently shift between them. That's a fundamental design problem on microsofts part, and they'll have to pick something and go with it.
It probably is, correctly guessed, the biggest bet MS has taken so far. They know that the feedback has been by and large negative, and that it's horrible to use, microsoft employees must have parents and putting windows 8 on one of their computers risks getting you disowned it's that bad. But they're releasing it anyway, and it's hugely expensive to make an operating system like Windows 8, so that's certainly risky, and it's risky because they're banking on their ability to not fuck up windows 9, whatever that will be, even if (and likely when) windows 8 is a disaster.
It certainly won't be the biggest bet MS ever takes, but to this point I could be reasonably persuaded it is the riskiest bet they made. All of the other major revisions they've made have been into different market conditions or as a much smaller company.
What Risk, where are desktop users going to go? (Score:4, Interesting)
They have no real tablet share, so they aren't risking losing that.
They have no real smartphone share, so they aren't risking losing that.
They own desktop users body and soul, and there are scant real alternatives where users can go even if they hate it. So I don't see much risk here either.
Worse case, it's another Vista, which they tweak, and continue business as usual.
Already there is Classic Shell to restore the start menu and solve the main Win8 complaint:
http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
Obvious if Win8 was received even worse than Vista, MS could simply issue a patch that does the same and have a soft fallback.
Bottom line, the fixes are easy, and the desktop users are going anywhere else anyway, so minimal risk.
Re:Here's where I see it (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that Windows 8 DOES offer a lot of enterprise features (SMB 3, Powershell 3, Windows to go, fast boot, secure boot, among others) but most shops will forgo those due to the horror of trying to spring "Modern UI" on their users.
Re:It's Not A Bet... (Score:5, Interesting)
They are attempting suicide but they still know that for OEMs to dump Windows, the OEM would have to create either new partnerships with something new to the desktop in the scale of Windows shipments or create their own software org to tune something like a GNU/Linux version to be desktop ready. Much like how Corel once did that with Corel Linux.
I do think they will be pushing many many many of their customers to the Mac. Their OEMs will shrink as sales of new systems fall and Microsoft will spend billions subsidizing their own hardware products in attempts to gain a market share in the double digits. It'll be suicide by one thousand cuts and a slow death unless they give the desktop back a familiar UI and quick like. IMO.
LoB
I can't see a reason to buy it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Posting Anon because, well, I'm posting this on an rtm Win 8 machine so you guess why.
The persistent question is "Why did we do this?" It's not faster, not more intuitive, not easier, not really anything more than pretty IF you're using Win 8 on a computer. It is really nice on a small touchscreen device, but that's not the big debate.
What does Win 8 give me on the desktop versus Win 7?
Not really anything except for a terribly ugly fullscreen MEGABIG START MENU with icons that update themselves.
More navigation and less actual work. A lot of extra clicks to find simple crap like control panel settings.
IE 10, which despite what the terribly annoying ads say is still embarrassingly slow compared to Firefox.
And wtf if I just want to work some documents? I have to dig thru even more "Libraries" and "Favorites" and "Desktop > User > Libraries" and "Recent Places" that all point to the same folders and confuse the living hell out of novice users. Putting "tiles" on top of this does not help, it makes it worse.
The straight poop is that "people" (the larger part of the 80/20 pop) do not care about the details of this. They just want to use a browser and email that point to data in the magic cloud, and they want to use word and excel that point to documents they can see/move/copy/delete locally in one or two clicks. Win 7 is a 2- or 3-click UI, so people tend to like it, and get used to the annoyances in trade for being pretty stable. Win 8 is a 4-5-click + dual-personality UI so more likely than not we're f#cked.
I ask folks over on the Win8 team whether they learned anything from the large userbase hit Ubuntu took when they implemented Unity, an UI similar to the Metro^h^h^h^h^hWin8 UI. Most of them don't even know about it, don't look at OSX, never heard of X11 or Gnome, KDE, etc etc. They have no interest; a lot of this crap was thought up in a vacuum, given cursory userlab testing, and whatever looked shiniest and had the most political oomph internally got shoved into this half-baked mess. Don'tCallItMetroBecauseMetroAGSuedUs? Apparently we have as much due diligence to the name as we gave to much of the UI design.
Maybe I'm underestimating the number of Win8/Surface tablets we're going to sell, but I'm putting in a sell order...
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Re:The Only Logical Reason for this (Score:4, Interesting)
no.. he wants to be the one who got most windows users to get their sw from microsofts sw marketplace. MS has been trying to do that for some 15 years now under different guises(road ahead).
that's what metro is all about - it's not about the UI, it's about how the sw is distributed and what infrastructure it uses, it's about getting sw developers to use ms's push systems, ms's update systems, ms's testing services.. you can already do metrostyle apps in win7 - of course with the exception that if you do that you can actually scale the window as you wish - new os isn't really needed for that. but a new os push to users is needed to get them to sign in to their personal computers with a microsoft account(sure, it's not mandatory but they sure do push users to do it, and sure you can get your apps elsewhere in x86win8, but that's not their aim).
Re:It's Not A Bet... (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, the advances they've made to the core of the OS are very nice. Once you get to the desktop, as long as you create shortcuts for the stuff you use a lot, it is fine. But that new UI is definitely not for large screens.
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Re:It's Not A Bet... (Score:4, Interesting)
I have been in a server room lately. A lot of them actually since I'm a senior systems architect for servers, storage and networking and a repairman for these things, and a consultant on the sales side too. I get a better window into what's going on here than most people because of this perspective, since what's actually going on in server rooms is a dire secret. Just a few days ago I was sitting in a conference room so close to Mordor that it made me uneasy. I could see the Microsoft Redmond campus out the view window, and the issues under discussion were all about Linux servers. They didn't bring up Windows, and we didn't either.
Windows Server is losing share lately in my anecdotal experience, in my area. People are more interested in other options now than they once were. I can confirm that this is the trend for the Northwest US, which is the home of Microsoft. Outside of this realm I would expect the trend to be even more distinct. Excepting Idaho, which seems to buck every trend ever.
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