Windows 8 Killing PC Sales 1010
yl-roller writes "IDC says Windows 8 is partly to blame for PC sales suffering the largest percentage drop ever. 'As if that news wasn't' troubling enough, it appears that a pivotal makeover of Microsoft's ubiquitous Windows operating system seems to have done more harm than good since the software was released last October.' According to a ZDNet article, IDC originally expected a drop, but only half the size."
Are tablet PCs counted as PCs or tablets? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Apple sales as well (Score:3, Informative)
Re: Apple sales as well (Score:4, Informative)
You might want to look a bit closer. The IDC report said that apple sales went up 7.5%
Re:So... no Win 7? (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft isn't selling Windows 7 licenses anymore. PC manufacturers can't get new Windows 7 licenses to install on to their new computers. Their only option is to buy a windows 8 professional license and use the downgrade rights that come with the professional edition license to install Windows 7. This adds $100 to the cost of the windows license and therefor adds $100 to the price of the computer. They had this same issue with Windows XP when Vista came out... you had to pay more for the computer just to get XP because you had to buy the professional edition of the OS.
Re:My theory (Score:5, Informative)
The only reason corporate IT is slow to upgrade now is that XP (and now Windows 7) is good enough,
Corporate IT is happy with ThinPC, aka Windows Embedded Standard. It's a de-goobered 7. It's not de-goobered enough in my estimation, but that's a matter of taste, I guess. ThinPC SP1 gives you a desktop that users don't have to re-learn, is more amenable to policies from hell (you can even choose not to install IE, for example) and all applications behave as if you have 7. It will probably also have a longer support lifetime than 7.
What I consider de-goobered enough: Windows FLP. I would *love* to see a ThinPC version of Windows trimmed back as far as FLP is. Stick FLP in a VM and Thin PC in a VM, and compare speeds. You'll see what I mean.
--
BMO
Re:My theory (Score:5, Informative)
corporate IT is so tied to Microsoft
I work for a multinational company, very structured, AMAZING levels of bureaucracy and I thought we were joined at the hip, neck and everywhere else to Microsoft products - yet I was amazed to hear they are moving this company (200k+ employees) over to Gmail for emails and contacts as well as a bunch of other things. Until I heard that, I would have bet body parts to say that they would never move off their current technology.
Having said that, we are still on XP rather than having skipped Vista to Win 7.
I wish that were true in the corporate space (Score:3, Informative)
We need a MINIMUM of a quad core 8GB machines just to run some basic business type apps what with the scanners, agents, asset checkers, license checkers, security tools, encryption, VPN, Url filters, DLP and virtual engines. And since everything is written against some weird ass one off back level and DIFFERENT Java, we have to run a bunch of different Javas too. And half our web apps don't run in FF only IE, so.....both.
Yaaay fucking corporate standards!!!!!!
Re:My theory (Score:5, Informative)
No, not in a laptop. Video editing is mostly why I like having the speed.
15KRPM U320 SCSI disks perform extremely well with high-bandwidth non-random workloads.
SSDs have much faster seek times; however, there is the possibility of greater write latencies, and eventually lower throughput -- due to read - erase - program cycle.
This is especially the case with non-write-optimized MLC type flash.
Re:I wish that were true in the corporate space (Score:2, Informative)
Java
That one word explains the quad core 8gb of RAM requirement.
End user computing experience moved away from java, and onto HTML5/Javascript
Re:Win8 Experience (Score:5, Informative)
... Speaking of the interface, Microsoft should seriously fire the people who are responsible for this garbage ...
They did.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57548751-75/controversial-windows-boss-steven-sinofsky-leaves-microsoft/ [cnet.com]
Re: My theory (Score:5, Informative)
Re:My theory (Score:4, Informative)
MS doesn't want to fix their UI, the Blue leak proves that. The UI is what people hate about win8, therefore win8 will conintue to drag down PC sales. The OEMs must be screaming at Redmond.
The tablet space is an attractive market for now, but that fad will pass in 2 years when the general public realizes that touch UIs suck.
Corporate IT is about the only friend MS has left, if not now then soon. And it won't be long before corporate IT begins looking elsewhere for future solutions because win8 throws a huge retraining cost in their face: Metro.
All three points are the result of a two intertwined phenomena: Microsoft's hubris and paranoia. I still think OEMs will finally bring about the Year of the Linux Desktop in 2015, all because of win8.
Re:Windows 8 doesn't allow windows... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:My theory (Score:5, Informative)
This pretty much means you aren't in any industry that has government contracts
Not true. I work for a government research lab and we switched to GMail last year. Check it out: https://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/government/ [google.com]
Re: My theory (Score:5, Informative)
XP64 was poorly supported by driver developers. For Vista and 7 MS mandated that both 32-bit and 64-bit drivers must be available at the same time, or MS will not sign any of them. This helped. Another factor is that in XP days 2 GB or RAM was all that most people had, and 64-bit bought you nothing. Today there is probably no new PC out there that has less than 4 GB of RAM, and 64-bit OS is a necessity. RAM-hungry applications also come now as 64-bit builds; a build for XP64 was unheard of.
Re:My theory (Score:4, Informative)
Errrrr... I wouldn't go that far. Circa 2002, a high-end best-of-breed corporate laptop was a 500-800MHz P-III with 512mb. Just *try* watching a 1080p30 HD Youtube video on that. My 2GHz Thinkpad T61p can barely play 720p30 h.264 without falling flat on its face and gasping for breath. Anything can play 480p60 MPEG-2, but high-profile 720p60 and 1080p30/i60 h.264 can bring even mighty computers to their knees and leave them stuttering & dropping frames.
And don't even get me STARTED about Ajax and sites that try using Javascript to build the entire DOM from scratch in realtime. A site like Amazon (or Slashdot, in desktop mode, attempting to post) will bring even a Galaxy S3 to its knees & make the soft keyboard choke on every other touch.
Re: Apple sales as well (Score:5, Informative)
No, that's just incorrect - here are the actual reports.
The IDC report says Mac sales were down 7.5%:
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24065413#.UWZPFVfJLz9 [idc.com]
There is a different report, by Gartner, that says U.S. Mac sales were up 7.4%, but a) that's not the IDC report and b) it's not worldwide data, it's for the U.S. market only:
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2420816 [gartner.com]
Re:Microsoft removed the biggest anti-Linux argume (Score:2, Informative)
it doesn't require a re-install every couple of months.
I can't even think of any time where I've had to do a re-install of Windows. I had a hard drive die on me once, but any OS would need to be reinstalled after that. What are you doing wrong?
Re:My theory (Score:5, Informative)
Nope, Speed Holes [youtube.com]
Re:My theory (Score:5, Informative)
I used to tell folks that adding RAM would be their best speed upgrade, but now I tell them that an SSD is the best speed upgrade.
The problem with giving this advice to unsophisticated users is that they will use the SSD in ways that tend to shorten its service life. It can be quite a shock to these users when they go to boot their machine one day and find it dead. Their experience with traditional hard drives, which rarely fail so badly and suddenly that there isn't at least a chance to move data off, may earn them a nasty surprise when their data is lost. If you recommend an SSD upgrade you should probably also recommend a traditional external hard drive as a backup device, with regular automated backups, and at least warn them that SSDs have a limited number of writes and can become unreadable with little or no warning.
Re:And a turbo button! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:My theory (Score:5, Informative)
http://zareason.com/shop/Laptops [zareason.com]
Linux laptops, no Microsoft Tax.
Re:And a turbo button! (Score:5, Informative)
Acually, the turbo button was for slowing down the computer. You left it in turbo mode all the time, unless you needed to run some poorly-written software that required the lower clock speed.
Re:My theory (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, that's just not true - or at least not usefully true. A modern SSD should perform just fine far beyond the expected life of a laptop. Of course, anything may fail, but outside of a lab experiment even early adopters of laptop SSDs aren't finding themselves suddenly bereft of data. Exaggerating the risks just reduces credibility.