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Gut-Check Time For Windows 8, Microsoft
theodp writes "GeekWire reports that, for better or worse, the upcoming week is shaping up as one of the most pivotal in Microsoft's history, as the software giant makes its pitch for Windows 8 at two important conferences. First, Microsoft will be huddling with hardware and software developers beginning Tuesday at its sold-out BUILD conference ('BUILD will show you that Windows 8 changes everything'), where it's rumored that Samsung will unveil a Windows 8 tablet. And on Wednesday, CEO Steve Ballmer and other execs will be holding the company's annual Financial Analyst Meeting, which was delayed from its traditional summer date to allow the company to put its Windows 8 strategy in context for Wall Street. So, are we about to finally see the realization of Microsoft's vision for Information at Your Fingertips (Part 2), which Bill Gates introduced with a hokey video at Comdex 1994?"
When they rushed out Windows 7 after Vista flopped that was understandable, but now Win8 is coming out just as quickly behind Win7. It's like they're doing the famous trash-good-trash-good pattern on purpose. Rush out the next trash OS to get the next good one out sooner.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Windows trying to release Windows 8 with its tablet shell interface on a mainstream PC makes about as much sense as Apple release iPads with a command line shell. Here's what I mean; watch this video (starting at minutes 15) where the presenter tries to show how Windows 8 is just as easy to use on a laptop as it is on a tablet. It makes no sense for any user to have to move the mouse around that much just to get to the object they want to select. Microsoft needs to stop taking this silly "one-size-fits-all" approach with its OS. Make one OS for the enterprise, another for laptops (primary PC machine purchased nowadays by home consumers), and another for tablets. Tailor the shell to fit the machine, not force the machine to fit into the shell.
Now, while I still have my administrative gripes about Windows 7 (bloated size of WinSxS directory, unable to easily unlock a workstation locked by a user, behavior of & driver support for legacy devices, etc.), but I would still recommend that Windows keep selling Windows 7 for the enterprise rather than try to force us to swallow Windows 8. We want something newer, and a lot of these gripes could be fixed w/ SP2. Stop with the one-size-fits-all crap. Market Windows 7 for the enterprise and tailor it for the enterprise. Let Windows 8 start and develop on tablets. If Windows 8 turns out to be a good OS on tablets, I would predict in a very short amount of time, laptops will start to ship w/ touch-screen interfaces to take advantage of the Windows 8 shell.
Windows 7 is a nice operating system, and is selling well. If they don't do something stupid like stop selling it when Windows 8 is released, they will do fine.
I suspect we should just consider the "Metro UI" as a very hyped gadget layer (like those HTML+JavaScript gadgets that both Windows and Mac have had for years now), but allowing them to be more complex, better performance, giving them a new "swipey" way of accessing them, and allowing you to run your Windows Phone 7 apps as Windows 8 gadgets. Dashboard/Sidebar redux.
I think MS is hoping this will be a tipping point where these HTML+JavaScript apps now become actually useful and usable, and that the portability of gadgets between Phone 7 and Windows 8 will be a market advantage. But I don't see any way in which this should detract from existing Windows 7 usefulness. Just if you're on a tablet, you'll be interacting with the dashboard much more, and if you're on a desktop you'll be interacting with the desktop much more.
Too desktop oriented.
Sort of.
This rejigging of desktop Windows is pretty good evidence that MS didn't see the trap they were setting themselves with WP7, which won't scale to tablets.
Not to mention that, while "Windows 7 is a niceer operating system" than previous versions of Windows, it's still not a very interesting or innovative platform, and is only selling well because it's the default OEM install. It's certainly not growing the market, which groundbreaking products tend to do.
If you look around the current OS scene, there's a lot more innovation and excitement than there has been for decades - you have the phones, with fast new text input methods like Swype, tablets with tilt and touch interfaces, UIs like Android, Meego and iOS that are instantly responsive on their dual core ARM devices, even new laptop/netbook form factors based on online data storage (ChromeOS). It's all an indication that the computing world is finally routing around the damage that is Microsoft's desktop computing monopoly.
In that context, Win7 looks pretty lifeless. It may be faster than Vista, but even on good modern hardware it still feels like the UI is mired in honey. And under the hood, sure, there were improvements, but nothing that changed the way users worked. Microsoft is rushing W8 to the market because they have to get SOMETHING out there to still seem relevant.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Microsoft has to keep their customers on the upgrade treadmill, even if they're still getting paid for selling the old version, because they have to keep their platform a moving target.
They've advanced from that, they are now getting $15 a pop from almost every android phone sold. So they don't even have to make anything anymore and they can still make profits just from leeching on others work.
They've advanced from that, they are now getting $15 a pop from almost every android phone sold. So they don't even have to make anything anymore and they can still make profits just from leeching on others work.
For now, but that's only a consequence of the unconscionable nature of software patents, in that someone who claims you're infringing a patent can hold you up and threaten to have your products removed from the market unless you pay up. It doesn't provide you any time to work around this patent you've never seen before, but by the same token it isn't a permanent situation because they have to tip their hand and list the patents they're holding so that in the next version you can design around them.
On top of that, all it would take to put a stop to it is for Google to buy some patents that Windows is infringing. Or, for that matter, if we would all just come to our senses and recognize that software is not patentable. (And we'll see how quickly the major companies get that pushed through soon enough when some patent troll holding a blocking patent inevitably demands an injunction against e.g. Windows unless Microsoft pays them 50% of their revenues.)