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Microsoft To Switch Focus To Windows 8 In July 2010
An anonymous reader noted a bit from Ars saying Microsoft will be switching internal focus from Windows 7 to Windows 8 in fiscal year 2010. Microsoft's fiscal year starts in July, which is only eight months away. According to Microsoft's roadmaps, the release of Windows 8 is scheduled for 2012."
Hey, I heard that Ubuntu going to be switching focus to 10.x next year as well! STOP TEH PRESSES!!!1!
Do we actually have anything to talk about regarding Windows 8, or is this just another thread where we trot out all the usual "ZOMG evil Micro$oft abandonware bloated faked figures blah blah blah"? Because that's getting kind of old.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Most large corporations have 3-year PC replacement cycle, and get pissed when the new thing is the same as the old thing except for the hardware.
A company is planning ahead for their next version. News at 11.
I'd think that constantly creating new versions of windows to create an income stream is getting
ridiculous now. What can Windows 8 do that can't be done with Windows 7? I guess the trend may be
that the consumer/customer will update on every 2nd or 3rd windows version that comes out instead
of every year. The same goes for the browsers and office too. I think that it should be v7.1 and v7.2
etc to add additional functionalities for free vs. buying functionalities in increments. Also just
changing the GUI interface to look new improved shouldn't count either.
The only new version that should come out that would drastically be new that one can purchase
is the artificial intelligence version. That is, one that can improve itself!
Is Read this Article and take some important notes.
NOTES!
bells and whistles do not sell in the real world were work needs to be done.
People want a system/car/airplane/appliance that works, always. Not part of the time.
If you want to dick around get a Mac Book Wheel
$30 is about what the os, in its MAX config, is worth. any os.
linux, freebsd, opensolaris: all free and all way more stable.
paying $100+ for an o/s is so 1990's.
if MS priced their os's at the $30 range, only those who have 'issues' with buying software would continue to pirate copies. everyone else would say 'ok, fair enough, here's your $30 now leave me alone and take that WGA crap with you!'
I almost always build my own pc's (so they 'come with unix from the factory, lol') but recently I finally decided to buy a laptop (netbook). yes, it came with xp installed but the netbook was $175! the cost of the os was essentially zero, to me, since all that $175 seemed to be about the hardware, itself. the o/s install was essentially free at that price. so I didn't mind!
MS is extremely greedy and THAT is one reason that people who can even afford to buy their sw, simply just copy it instead.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Ah. So if you give the product away, frequent releases make sense; but if you profit off the product, that allows us to believe that frequent releases are just a ploy to make money (even though nobody actually buys the upgrades that frequently), so you should be criticized if you release frequently (even though you probably also have the same reasons to release frequently as anyone else).
Yup, that makes perfect sense.
Wow, the 2010 Fiscal Year is ONLY 8 months away when 2010 is only 4 weeks away? Yeah, better start planning for this massive and abrupt shift... (yeah, I know the difference between a fiscal and a calendar year).
Seriously, though. Good for them. I think XP was out way too long and while I never really had a problem with it that wouldn't be inherent in any type of Windows (I'm just old enough to have missed out on needing to learn much about DOS, and PowerShell pisses me off by not being tcsh), and I think people got complacent with it. The long run of XP probably had as much to do with Vista fears as early bugs did. I purchased a copy of Vista Ultimate a few months ago, and I had no problems with it at all, other than shitty command line, but I was never really an XP user at home anyway.
The story yesterday with regards to Win 7 stealing more XP market share than Vista market share, I think backs this up. The XP users who were still hanging on were doing so because of perceived issues with Vista, which may or may not have been valid, so Win 7 is more for them than for anyone currently using Vista by choice. Kicking up the Win 8 cycle should keep interest higher, and hopefully they'll be able to deliver on time (yeah, yeah...), because 2 years plus 8 months is still sort of slow compared to Apple's releases, and like a glacier compared to some of the major Linux distributions or BSDs which are on might tighter release schedules.
They should have been working on Windows 8 nine months ago, or whever they basically put Windows 7 into freeze. It was over a year ago that they decided certain major features weren't making it into 7.
The team that develops the OS should be focused on the new version right away.
Surely Microsoft is a well-run corporation with long term planning. Surely they have a future roadmap of where they want Windows to go over the next 5 years. Surely Vista and 7 were intentional stepping stones along their master plan.
I can't fathom the possibility that Microsoft has become this un-agile behemoth that no longer innovates, but rather has knee-jerk reactions to the OS market.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Its far easier to criticize when those "frequent releases" also include a price increase every go around, along with the need to buy new equipment just to support it, changes in functionality nobody asked for, and restrictions that border on invasion of privacy.
Many Linux distros run on just about any hardware you can load it on. Can the same be said about the last 2 versions of Windows?
When you discover Austrian economics, you'll learn that there is no such concept as intrinsic value. So this statement is meaningless about any good or service. It might be meaningful for YOU for RIGHT NOW, but the notion of value is time and observer dependant.
And all miss certain desktop scenarios that windows nails, which is why everyone on the planet hasn't simultaneously said "OMG -- why do i keep paying money for windows when *nix does EVERYTHING I NEED EXACTLY THE WAY I WANT"
Given the amount of inflation between now and then, even paying $250 for an OS today is "so 1990s".
The idea that the operating system on your computer -- the thing that actually lets it do useful things -- isn't worth dinner for 2 at a national-chain resturant (your $30 figure) is completely hillarious. You honestly would rather forego the last 30 years of personal computer history and instead have 1 dinner for two?
I think "an" OS is easily worth $100 or more per year to me. I'd skip dining out 4 times a year to have one. It's nice that there are free choices available, and in some cases I use those free choices since the marginal utility benefits of pay-ware doesn't justify the marginal cost increase for my scenarios.
I think it must be a common fallacy amongst f/oss zealouts that they feel like the only people that must be clued-in, and that if only the rest of the planet would "discover" that there are free operating systems out there, Windows and other commercial operating systems would vanish.
I suspect that the major vendors and Fortune 500 companies are very well aware of free software and what its advantages and disadvantages are, and have conciously chosen to continue using Windows for the majority of what they do based on a value analysis. I also suspect that they continually re-visit this analysis [and this accounts for things like the Wal-Mart and Dell linux machines..]
I think it's fair to guess that most people paying for windows figure it is worth 75% or more [to them] of what they're paying for it.
So I don't find your post insightful at all. You don't understand economics, and your assessment of value seems very contrived to me... based on ideology rather than reality.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Actually, some site called "Windows 8 News" just made up a fake Linkedin profile I couldn't seem to find in real life, citing a name that I am told by sources did not exist in internal company directories, with quotations mis-using the company jargon. But don't let that stop you from speculating about it.
Yeah, I'm sure he cries real hard each time he hears about someone who buys his product but does not use it.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
While I agree there is a problem. The shorter the release cycle, the more incremental the releases needs to be.
1. Users won't like having to shell out for a new windows every 6 months to a year.
2. Vendors won't like needing to re-write drivers for whatever the spread of hardware it is that they still update drivers for every year.
This means that at shortest a two-year release cycle at least makes sense, it is also about how often I'd expect a user who is serious about his IT to upgrade his notebook/pc.
The march of Technology on the other hand dictates a shorter release cycle though, small increments and often releases.
The optimum would probably a totally new version every three years, with proper service pack type updates every six months which actually are incrimental new releases.
In that way Win7 would have been a service pack, and the next new version could have been a proper full overhaul. I think economically it makes a lot more sense as well, you get a buy cycle that is predictable, hardware vendors get a lot of time to prepare their hardware and there is a general consensus with users and developers both knowing what to expect.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
I started with a home computer in the 80s. Quite fun but cassettes were slow, so I got a PC with MS DOS 3.3
I upgraded to DOS 5 because of its memory management. I then installed Windows 3.1 upon DOS 5 because of the truetype fonts and word processing. It made me more productive.
(I also started using Linux because it allowed me to have a Unix at home without suffering that asshole sysadmin at the university, but this posting is not about Linux)
I upgraded DOS5+Win3 to Win95OSR because it was more stable and easier to use than 3.1, it had font smoothing, native TCP/IP and it was generally an OS vs DOS and a windowed shell. It made me more productive.
I skipped Win98 and WinMe because they offered nothing new.
I started using Win2000 because it was a real OS, much more stable and secure than Win95. It made me more productive.
I started using XP when nLite matured because I could remove the useless crap and XP is optimized for speed and supports network bridges and, most importantly, cleartype. It made me more productive
I've tried Vista and 7 but they have not made me more productive. I wonder if Microsoft can change that with 8.
I must've missed your posts in other stories, but could you please enumerate the number of major releases of other operating systems that you haven't used? Be sure to cover OS X, the various BSDs and Linuxes, OS/2, BeOS, real-time operating systems, and so on.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
There isn't an actual value.
There is a _price_ at which the two parties in question: buyer and seller, are willing to conduct an exchange at a given point in time.
You know how stores have sales? "15% off -- only today!" Is the product 15% less valuable today, and then tomorrow it reverts to being more "valuable"? If so, what is that value changed based on?
For all actors in the market and for all non-coercive transactions [i.e. where force or fraud are not involved], "value" is determined independantly by each party in the transaction, and what is true for both parties right now may not be true tomorrow. The product doesn't change, but the preferences and broader situation of the marketplace participants does.
Today, windows is "worth", say, $100 to me. Tomorrow, if I've lost my job, it won't be worth _anything_ to me. It's not like windows is suddenly a worse product because I've lost my job. But my framework for evaluating the "value" of things to me changes dramatically.
This isn't a new problem: it's [at first glance] wierd that Windows costs one amount in the US and a different amount in other places. Other places have a different standard of living than we do, so in such places the US based cost of a Windows license would be unthinkable.
In the US, most people have enough money that they figure the value they get from windows is worth about what they have to pay for it. Even though they pay a lot more than many other people do in other places. I think think most Americans would trade their position in the world so that they could have cheaper windows pricing, but those that would are free to do so. And in any situation, one is always free to decide windows doesn't represent a good value to them at the price Microsoft is willing to sell it for, and so no transaction has to happen.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
That's kind of a foolish statement. Windows doesn't do things the way people want either, which is why the average user can emit an impressive stream of complaints about their computer if you let on that you're in any IT-related field. The reason people don't switch is a combination of some or all of these factors:
The idea that the operating system on your computer -- the thing that actually lets it do useful things -- isn't worth dinner for 2 at a national-chain resturant (your $30 figure) is completely hillarious. You honestly would rather forego the last 30 years of personal computer history and instead have 1 dinner for two?
What are you talking about? Linux and others have been around forever. In the past five years or so Linux, particularly desktop-focussed distros like Ubuntu, have gotten to the point where you could give one to Your Mom and she'd be able to install it. These are free operating systems. They're also completely gratis. There's no law that says an OS has to cost money, and there's not that much support in the history books for such a notion either.
You say that for you, an OS is worth about a hundred dollars. That's fine, but understand that's your perception of value, something about which you just finished lecturing that other guy. Neither history nor economics support the idea that an OS must have a pricetag.
Finally,
I think it's fair to guess that most people paying for windows figure it is worth 75% or more [to them] of what they're paying for it.
That's patently absurd. Most people don't realise they're paying for Windows at all. Remember, to them, "it came with the computer". To an extent they are paying very little for it since OEMs subsidise the cost with the idiotic crapware they also pre-install. But the point is that most people do not go out and buy a Windows disc. They use whatever the hell is on the computer and give zero thought to the price or value of the OS.
A more realistic scenario would be to talk to a real user. You know, that nice lady next door who has been pulling her hair out for the past two weeks because Windows has getting less and less stable. At first it was just throwing Dr Watson stuff in her face she didn't understand. Then Explorer would crash practically every time she booted the thing and she's had to learn to reboot seven or eight times before it would come up and stay. Then McAffee started throwing a hissy fit, often crashing and taking down Windows with it. IE is taking forever to open and half the time, when sh
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Ten years ago, I would have completely agreed with this post. Today, if anything, the Microsoft shills have taken over slashdot.