Microsoft Killing Off Zune, Windows Live Brands? 262
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from The Verge:
"Microsoft appears to be killing off two of its key user-facing brands with the upcoming Consumer Preview release of Windows 8. Windows Live applications have been rolled into preinstalled apps that work as the core 'Windows Communications' applications for Windows 8, and this lack of Windows Live branding is only the tip of the iceberg. 'Microsoft Account' will replace Windows Live ID in Windows 8, and the software giant has also removed traces of Zune from its Windows Store, Music, and Video applications, although Zune Pass functionality remains."
Great (Score:2)
So now we have that annoying Bing Bar in desktop mode and the annoying family safety program that slows your computer down even if you do not use it
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes. It's called installing Chrome or Firefox.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Great (Score:4, Informative)
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On Linux.
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Re:Great (Score:4, Funny)
I don't see the problem. If you like Windows, you should be happy to pay $200-500 for a fully-featured copy that allows you to control the installation and not have it loaded with crapware from Norton et al.
If you don't like that, I suggest you look into alternatives. Personally, I think MS's prices are much too low, and that they should jack up their prices.
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sorry but you don't have to pay 200-500 for a full copy of windows to do that. All you need is a valid copy of any Win7+ disc in order to do a clean install. Activation will require the use of the product license key that's placed on the machine for OEM installs and MS will validate such an install over the net - I've done this with a single Win7 Upgrade set for all the systems in the house and had no problems with MS about validation. When I or one of the customers I support purchase a new system, that's t
Re:Great (Score:4, Informative)
You didn't pay for a "Windows" license, you paid for a license for a version of Windows that is configured in one particular way and loaded down with a bunch of shitware. What you're doing is like buying a Chevy Aveo (with a big discount in exchange for having ads pasted to the side of the car) and then complaining that you didn't get a Corvette.
Macs are more expensive partially because they're not loaded with shitware. The shitware makes a big difference in price; that's how the mfgrs are able to sell you a laptop with Windows for less than the same laptop with Linux (which itself is free): your cost is being subsidized by all the pre-loaded shitware. By being forced to spend $300 or whatever for a fully-featured Windows license, you're only being forced to realize the true cost of the software. Of course, the preloaded Windows versions also frequently have various limitations that the higher-cost versions don't, hence the "Starter" edition which only lets you run 3 programs at a time, etc.
Comparing a shitware-loaded OEM Windows version to a Mac is apples and oranges. If the version of Windows you want ends up making your system cost as much as a Mac, then that shows that Windows isn't, in reality, any cheaper, it only appears that way when you use crippled versions and/or various vendor marketing deals that subsidize the cost.
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Going to have to call bullshit. Macs are more expensive because Apple has found that people are willing to pay extra for the apple logo. Their marketing people have done a fantastic job inflating perceived brand value.
If you buy a computer through the MS Store it comes without any shitware. If your theory were correct it would be more expensive than the same unit sold with shitware. It isn't.
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Close: it's like buying that Corvette (with Aveo engine and leaky crap from the 99-cent store) for $10K, and then complaining that it's not as good as the normal price Corvette (which costs $50K IIRC).
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I don't give a rip how much of a discount they give vendors, they're not giving away Windows for free. There's still some cost in there, antitrust or not. But, every time someone sells laptops with Linux pre-installed, it costs more than the same hardware with Windows pre-installed. The reason is simple: it's not some big conspiracy, it's because the vendors are getting money from the shitware companies (Norton etc.) to pre-load that shitware. It really has nothing to do with MS at all (although obvious
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
If you mean windows starter edition you can run as many programs at once as you want. check your facts before posting.
I did:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/04/21/1356245/windows-7-starter-edition-3-apps-only [slashdot.org]
No, you didn't. You're just spreading FUD. See here [arstechnica.com].
just need a ISO and the key on the case to do (Score:2)
just need a ISO and the key on the case to do a clean install
Back to the classics (Score:2, Interesting)
I miss the minimalistic approach of Windows 7 where it came with barely anything, Windows 8 is starting to turn back into Vista but with a horrible UI.
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Considering MSFT's stock being up 20% this year - a lot of people think you are wrong.
BEEEP Lack of context penalty!
Why is MSFT stock up 20%? Is it irrational exuberance? Did they shave unproductive brands/divisions? Cut workforce? Move more workforce to countries where workers are paid a fraction of high western wages? Give some background to defend your assertion.
Re:Back to the classics (Score:4, Informative)
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Cut workforce, moved a lot of stuff to other countries, and most important - it's because they're hugely profitable and pay a regular dividend.
Investors like profits, but they LOVE dividends, especially in this economy.
So when it comes to OS vendors, we have Apple being the most profitable, Microsoft at #2, Google at #3, and RedHat at #4.
Any distro except RedHat running at a profit? Canonical? Nope, never did, never will. Mandriva? Struggling to stay out of bankruptcy court. Suse? Dependent on anot [geekwire.com]
50% because of low bond prices (Score:2)
A good chunk Between 5% to 10% of the increase of the 20% increase can be ascribed to the low treasury rates. Stock prices raise when bond yields fall. A 2% dividend yield looks very attractive against a 0% treasury. (And stocks tend to hold their value better than bonds in inflationary periods – which a lot of people think will be happening.)
Re:Back to the classics (Score:5, Informative)
All stocks are up this year, Microsoft's it just up a little more than the average. Stocks and commodities are going up because central banks the world over are printing staggering quantities of money [zerohedge.com]. Central bank balance sheets are where money is created out of thin air and turned over to banks who then leverage it anywhere from 11X to 50X creating a tidal wave of inceasingly worthless dollars, euros, yuan, and pounds.
Stocks and commodities are going up to counteract the decline of the paper currencies they are denominated in. The actual valuation of the companies hasn't changed that much but their value in dollars and euros soars as the real value of these fiat currencies plunge as more and more are printed (they are not actually printed they are electronically conjured from thin air with a stroke of a key on a computer).
The DOW rally from 6,660 to 12,000 was driven almost entirely by the Federal Reserve flooding the worlds banks with dollars which they mostly plowed back in to stocks and commodities.
The huge rally in the stock market so far this year started on the day the ECB gifted European banks with 500 billion in newly created Euros in exchange for their increasingly worthless PIIGS bonds, in a program called LTRO. The ECB is scheduled to do another round of this at the end of this month that could equal that or go as high as 1 Trillion Euros. The ECB had a German President opposed to printing money in 2011, but he was replaced with an Italian who immediately opened the spigots to save Italy's bonds from collapse. It did miracles for Italy's bonds and stock markets the world over. Its also fueling a new round of inflation in oil and assorted other commodities.
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Considering MSFT's stock being up 20% this year - a lot of people think you are wrong.
Looks like MS is up to where it was two years ago, wow! And Apple.... Well at least MS is no longer lower than two years ago. Markets reflect moods. One cannot fairly judge a companies planned changes based on stock history. Some have felt Microsoft needs to ditch the old or make some radical changes. It looks like they're trying. The risk with a big change is higher than doing little, but it offers chances for new life instead of giving in and watching slow decay (well maybe not as slow as it seeme
I guess this means (Score:5, Funny)
we shouldn't expect mobile products from MS with names like "Zune Messiah" or "Children of Zune" either.
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There was a Zune mess alright, but no Zune Messiah.
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zune as a shipping sw brand is well alive as is large parts of the design and code.
if you get your hands on a windows phone(7) and want to load some apps or music you'll notice it very fast, at the point when you'll be downloading zune sw just to get some photos off the damn thing.
it's funny because ms makes pr effort of when they were designing windows mobile 7 they decided to start from scratch(they didn't! they just took the zune and ran with it, that pretty much explains why wp7 feels like a rather simp
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No, but I hear they're working on a new eReader, codenamed "Chapterhouse Zune"
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Which is kind of funny, since "Messiah" is Hebrew (transliteration) and Zune in Hebrew sounds a lot like "FUCK" (crude term meaning fornicate)
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Wonderful. Now you've given me a horrible mental image of Steve Ballmer as the Baron Harkonnen.
How can anyone invest themselves in MS? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I use and support MS server products as a consultant, and I actually make this point a lot to colleagues that want to use what I'll call "fringe" features of their products.
While they may seem like a magic bullet for some problems, I always worry because many of these features are poorly documented, leading to confusion about how they work or whatever resource limits or capabilities they really have, and more importantly, what happens when the feature goes away and you need to migrate to some newer release
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Windows+ R Delta Echo Victor Mike Golf Mike Tango dot Mike Sierra Charlie has worked for as long as I can remember while Ctrl+Alt+F2 no longer brings me a TTY in Ubuntu. KDE could not die quicker.
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I know you were trying to make a point, but you failed.
What consumer has to learn how to use .Net, Silverlight? These are development platforms used to create apps, no consumer needed to know anything about these technologies other then installing or updating them (running Windows update). And if you were a developer you realize these platforms have evolved over the last 5 years building off the previous generation. Even WinRT which "replaces" .Net is mostly indistinguishable from .Net code that its an e
None of them do the same thing (Score:2, Insightful)
Come on, none of the examples you give work. Google might kill something occasionally but what is still there doesn't fundamentally change identity every few years. Apple keeps development stuff around forever, just building atop it.
Someone who used Oracle five years ago probably wouldn't have any trouble starting in on Oracle again today. Linux, I can still use a WM I used 20 years ago if I feel like it...
Re:None of them do the same thing (Score:5, Informative)
Apple changes things at pretty much the same rate...
iTools - Originally launched as a free collection of internet services for users of Mac OS
Then "relaunched" in 2002 as a paid subscription as ".Mac"
Then "relaunched" again in 2008 as "MobileMe"
which it discontinued offering, and will kill in 2012 entirely
as it herds everyone over to its newly launched "iCloud"
I'd say Apple is pretty much exactly the same thing.
Re:None of them do the same thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple changes things at pretty much the same rate...
Exactly! Remember when they completely shut down iTunes 5 years ago?
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like SIlverlight and WinFS and Windows Live and so on.
WinFS meet OpenDoc ...
Zune meet Xserve
Apple's list might not be as long... but any tech companies past is littered with projects that got dropped after failing to gain enough momentum or after hitting technical or other obstacles...
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Yep, the GUI thing is a big problem with Linux these days. Your best bet is to pick a good KDE distro, such as Linux Mint KDE, Mageia, OpenSUSE, Chakra, etc. KDE's finally worked out most of their performance and stability problems, and the GUI is traditional and easy to learn for anyone coming from Windows, unlike those other new abominations. Unfortunately, it's the crappy GUIs that get most of the press in Linux-land and also the two most-popular distros push them, though one of them seems to have los
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Seriously? I *Hate* the new KDE4 UI. And I was a huge fan of KDE3. What's with the scrolling "start" menu? I just want a list of apps to run. Then there's all the clutter in dolphin. The newer builds of 4 are faster and less crash-y, but the UI is bloating up pretty badly.
Re:How can anyone invest themselves in MS? (Score:4, Interesting)
KDE4 can be set up almost exactly like KDE3.
You don't like the scrolling start menu? You like the old classic KDE3 menu? Simple: right-click on the K menu icon, select option #2: "Switch to Classic Style Menu". Presto! You now have a KDE3 menu.
You don't like Dolphin? You prefer the old Konqueror for file browsing? Simple: run Konqueror. It's still there; no one's forcing you to use Dolphin. You can even set it to be the default file manager (I'm not exactly sure how offhand).
KDE is the same as it's always been: loaded to the gills with configuration options. If you don't like the defaults, you're free to change them. Spend a half-hour going through all the menu options in System Settings when you first install it, and leave it like that for years.
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I think it reflects on Ballmer himself. He probably personally approves all their ad campaigns, and rejects any that are actually decent, which is why we don't see them.
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Try opening an old MS Works file in anything other than MS Works [wikipedia.org].
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It came bundled for "free" on tons of low end machines in the late 90's. I'd say half of the college students I helped at the university help desk used it for writing papers. I'd imagine there are still a lot of Works files floating around.
Ding Ding the witch is dead! (Score:2)
Re:Ding Ding the witch is dead! (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder if Windows 8 will have an emulation layer for x86 on the ARM.
Nope. [msdn.com]
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to the point where you even wonder if products were made by the same company
They weren't. For one thing, many or most of their products are actually acquisitions from other companies: Powerpoint, Excel, etc. were all from acquisitions. Secondly, internally, MS operates as a bunch of smaller competing companies, with various department heads constantly backstabbing each other rather than working together. It's amazing they get anything done in that environment.
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I've worked for companies far smaller than Microsoft that have the exact same corporate culture.
Many years ago, one of the companies I worked for had grown through acquisitions. With each new one, the VP of R&D for the newest became VP of R&D for the entire company ... and t
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Wow, that's weird and rather hard to comprehend honestly. I've worked at two large tech companies, Intel and Freescale, and neither of them operated like this at all.
Intel had its problems (I was there during the whole P4/RAMBUS debacle, when AMD was beating us in performance and cost, and don't forget the whole Itanic thing), but I don't remember any kind of outright in-fighting like that. The decisions about what strategy would be pursued, which products would be developed and which would be shelved, al
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In my experience, software companies especially suffer from this problem. They all grow by buying smaller companies with niche products, and then try to add the features from one into another. However, since the purchase is done at a management level, they often don't understand the technology barriers (product A is UNIX, product B is Windows -- you can't just smush them together in a week and get "New and Im
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Killed? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a difference between killing and rebranding. Aside from the Zune hardware I don't see a single thing I would consider "killed" by Microsoft. And I'd even accept that idea that the Zune isn't being killed but instead reintroduced in a slightly more integrated format.
What about Games for Windows Live? (Score:2)
So, is Games for Windows Live being renamed as well?
What is it now? Games for Windows? Games for Xbox Live? Hell, they already call their phone app My Xbox Live...
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Amen, brother!
When I found out I'd have to log into both Steam and GFWL in order to play DiRT3 it made me glad I hadn't paid money for it; I'd have been demanding a refund otherwise. If Steam were to buy GFWL and get rid of that stupidity I'd be in heaven.
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Thanks, I'll look into that. Honestly it annoyed me enough that I didn't bother trying to figure out the nuances.
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I bought skyrim "Platform: Games for Windows®".
you know what the installer did first? install steam...
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And Windows with a link to Ubuntu.
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Zoon? (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft Killing Off Zune
The what?
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The cheap brown iPod touch with no apps.
Let us take a moment of silence... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Let us take a moment of silence... (Score:5, Informative)
Parse Error (Score:5, Interesting)
and think of how boned the Zune lifetime pass owners are.
They didn't say YOUR lifetime.
An Ode to Zune (Score:5, Interesting)
I own 2 Zunes. I've been using them to listen to music at work nearly every day for the past 3 years. I've found them to be very high-quality pieces of hardware. I'm not a huge fan of the Zune software, but I don't think it's any worse than iTunes. Yet most of the time when I tell co-workers that I listen to music on a Zune, I have to endure ridicule for not using an Apple product. I have even heard from ex-MS colleagues that by-and-large, MS employees don't think very highly of the Zune.
What gives? Did I totally miss the boat on this and the Zune actually sucks? Am I just destined to be forever uncool by being associated with a failed MS product? I just never understood the hate, and somehow it seems to be worse now than ever. And now MS is apparently trying to distance itself from Zune as much as possible.
Keep your chin up, Zune. You still have a few fans out there.
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What can brown do for anybody?
Plenty; for one thing it can get you into the Advertising Walk of Fame:
United Parcel Service Inc.'s slogan "What Can Brown Do For You" has delivered a major award.
Source [bizjournals.com]
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Re:An Ode to Zune (Score:4, Interesting)
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A name like Zune would kill any product.
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Only if you were stupid enough to get it tattoed [wired.com] on your arm. ;-)
Other than that, you should be able to buy the music player of your choice and pretend it never happened. Nobody need ever know.
FWIW, I'm not sure I ever remember anybody saying good things about Zune ... except, of course, for the guy with the tattoo before he decided the product wa
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Good Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Good Idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone who is still buying a device separate from their phone to listen to music needs to have their head examined.
No. Some of us don't see the need for a smart phone. I get a new shiny basic phone free from Verizon every two years.
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You know, some of us don't find that to be a problem.
The single gadget, in my experience, often ends up with "almost good enough at 4 different things, but not actually that good at any of them".
It really comes down to how you use them, and what you expect to get out of them. My cameras, for instance, will always be only ever that, because I can't stand the pictures that I've seen from smart phones (and because my main camera is a fairly high end
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Queue Nelson Muntz (Score:2)
Ha-HA!
Microsoft Account (Score:2)
what about the user-facing CEO? (Score:2)
If anything needed to be deprecated or "killed off"......
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Better safe than sorry! If only consumers could be bred...
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it is dead as a physical product pretty much.
however the software lives in windows phone 7 and pc sw as the management sw for wp7 phones.
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Doing this in light of the fact that iTunes was already free, used by millions, and was more mature and "better" than Zune is rather psychopathic. But it is Microsoft, and I expect nothing less than Evil from them.
I find iTunes UX to be quite annoying whereas I enjoy using the Zune interface. I'm not a Microsoft fan-boy, I just like having a Music UX that doesn't make me want to pull my hair out.
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
When these CEOs have to meet with shareholders and the board of directors, they have to face questions about what the company is doing in response to the success other companies are having with a certain product. There is intense pressure on them to have an answer.
This is why Microsoft has things like their storefronts. So Ballmer can tell the shareholders they're doing a 'me-too' in response to the Apple store success. It's also why HP bought Palm and released the TouchPad. It's why motorola released the Xoom. It's why RIM released the PlayBook.
Seth
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How do you kill that which has no life?
Take away his access to the Internet.