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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?"
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 think Microsoft is gonna take it on the chin over the next few months.
Too little too late in phones and tablets
Please convince me why I need up upgrade?
If you give me a system with win8 on it (and probably only a laptop) I'll probably leave a partition for it so I can update the OS once
or twice a year...
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
I don't think Microsoft is that late for tablets. Quite frankly, I think the current Android tablets still aren't worth using. That leaves you with iPad, so there's definitely some market open for tablets and what Microsoft has shown about Windows 8 for tablets it looks quite nice. On top of that you get the support for Windows apps, which is a huge deal.
But even on normal computer side, Windows 8 seems to improve many things over 7, which already is really good OS.
Last I checked, they've got all sorts of contracts with every PC vendor out there (name brand). When Microsoft releases a new OS all their 'vendors' immediately update.
Granted, this is /. where the average user probably builds their own. But, the 'roll your own crowd' is not the majority.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
Um, I'm seeing a lot of things in that future prediction that were dead on. Making purchases with cell phones? Right around the corner. SMS like texting on a small PDA device? Bingo. Roku-like video on demand, controlled by a standard remote and a simple menu system? Exact match. Stylish, flat-panel LCD monitors? Yep. The kid was pretty much doing his assignment straight from Wikipedia (with a more simplistic and stylized interface). At one point the kid and his mom went into an art store to shop. That was wrong in the sense that they wouldn't have gone into an actual brick and mortar store and talked to a saleperson who showed them things on a screen - they simply would've done it from home (eBay, Amazon, etc). Tablet computers - check, but they got the interface all wrong - it had external controls, like a trackball with buttons. Obnoxious PowerPoint presentation? Yep, that's pretty realistic. They went overboard with the amount of Facetime-like video. Takes too much time, too engaging, doesn't allow multitasking, etc. SMS came to rule the communication mode that Sci-fi movies and predictions figured would all be video chatting. The other thing is a lot of the style and design shown in this flick were never brought to the market by MS or the companies embedding their OSes, but from Apple. Now THAT is ironic. Whoever did the prop work on this video should've been hired by MS.
Better known as 318230.
The desktop PC Is a dying platform.
No, it's not. The form a personal computer takes may change slightly, but it's not going anywhere. I think you'll just find an atrix/bionic or EEE Transformer style computing experience coming, where your phone/tablet becomes your computer, and when you bring it home you just plug it into a docking bay with a good ole fashioned keyboard and large LCD screen. and maybe even a mouse, cause there's no way that you're going to want to play quake 6 with touchscreen. That's mid-to-long term though. in the short term, nothing portable is powerful enough to replace a real desktop for real computing work. sending an email or reading a pdf is not the kind of work I'm talking about either.
The average person is increasingly moving to smartphones an iPads to get away from the viruses, driver problems, malware, and other crap that infests Windows desktops.
smartphones already have viruses and malware. try again. most phones even ship with bloatware already.
It's too late for MS. To paraphrase B5, the avalanch has started, and it's too late for the pebbles to vote. The world had a few decades of Wintel, and it doesn't want to have more.
You writing this on your iphone? or are you man (or woman) enough to admit you've got an x86 cpu on/under the desk?
lot's of corporate uses is just rolling out 7 with lot's of stuff still stuck on xp due to software / old ie and maybe even some old hardware.
Now windows 8 new UI may be a big show stopper and likely have alot of software not work with it.
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.
Statistics argue otherwise. More than 78% of desktops are running Windows. Even accounting for the fact that a lot of /. folks are huge nerds and eat, sleep, and breath linux, there's still a better than 50% chance that something running an x86 chip, posting here, is running Windows. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems
Microsoft's consistent marketing strategy for Windows over the past quarter century can be summed up in a few lines:
No, the problem is that everything Windows does natively is done wrong.
(Score:3, Unintelligible)
With the explosion of smartphones and tablets, HP announcing they're leaving the PC business and all the news being how Windows 8's perhaps main feature being tablet (and smartphone) ability, the mobile aspect of Windows 8 is what many people will be looking at.
I hear some Windows fans talk about how Windows 8 is going to come in and eventually dominate smartphones and tablets. However, Apple already has been in the smartphone space since mid-2007, and the tablet space since April 2010. Android has been around since October 2008 in the smartphone space, and Honeycomb came out in February of this year (and a few months earlier things like the early Samsung tabs were coming out). Developers have spent a lot of time learning these platforms and writing code for them. The App Stores and Android Markets are filling up with apps, which are being improved continually by updates based on user feedback. Over 550,000 Android smartphones are being turned on a day. Customers are familiar with the apps on their phone, and how to do various things on their phone or tablet.
What do we he hear from Microsoft? It's all just vaporware so far. Even if developers want to develop for an SDK with no device, there's no SDK out yet. Maybe it will be put out after this conference. Also - Microsoft has been saying a lot of it is HTML 5 and Javascript. I'm happy about that, but it doesn't really exploit all the code and experience for Visual Basic, Silverlight, .NET and so forth. I understand they backpedaled on this a little bit, although HTML 5 and Javascript will still be on it. They're kind of forced to do this - they can't force mobile developers to develop just for Microsoft, they have to hope that the popular iPhone/iPad/Android applications are easy to port to Windows 8 so they can get some applications that way. Microsoft's Windows 7 smartphone/tablet market share is very, very low, so due to the lack of any kind of monopoly strongarm, they're forced to open up a little bit.
The two things Microsoft has going for it is the existing Windows code base, and the ability for people to connect to their PCs, or PC formats (Word, Excel) or Microsoft servers at work (Exchange etc.). As people dump Microsoft PCs for iPads and Android tablets, this lock-in becomes less important. Also insofar as the Windows existing code base, both Apple and Android have had a lot of C++ OpenGL code which used to be primarily dedicated to Windows ported to Apple and Android mobile devices. Miguel de Icaza and company have even brought Mono to Android, so a lot of C# and .NET code can get on Android. As existing Windows code can often be used on Android, this lessens the advantage of Windows 8.
And then there's other things. Microsoft makes money selling Windows 8 to manufacturers like HTC and so forth. Google gives Android away for free, and makes money on the hook-ins it has for Google Maps and so forth. I guess with the Motorola purchase, Google will make some money actually selling the hardware as well. Microsoft has to sell an unwanted product to manufacturers, when a free, popular OS already exists, with a user base of millions, with an Android app market with hundreds of thousands of apps, and many developers working on creating new apps and improving existing ones.
I also wonder how hard it is to develop for Windows 8. For Android, I can download Eclipse on a Linux machine, and the Android SDK, make an Android emulator, develop code in Java (with a few calls to special Android SDK Java classes like Activity), pay Google a one-time lifetime $25 fee to put as many apps on Android Market as I want, and I'm all set. I can even release the app to a non-Market competitor site and save the $25. So the whole shebang costs $25 for life. What will Windows be like? Will I have to pay to get on their app store? Will I have to buy Visual Studio or something? If they don't make things real easy and cheap for developers, they're going to have problems. They might even have problems if they do make things real easy and cheap.
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.
And it takes a lot more than a recompile to go from a keyboard and mouse to a touchscreen interface, to say nothing of the things that contain x86 assembly or assume x86 processors in one way or another, or apps that are extremely poorly optimized for battery life, etc.
Productivity apps suck on a touchscreen either way - anyone who tried using Pages or Numbers on iPad knows what I mean.
What can be done, however, is a tablet that can be docked to become a netbook, like Asus Transformer or Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet. Imagine this kind of thing, but with Win8, and the ability to switch between tile-based touch UI, and classic Windows desktop - and running e.g. Office in the latter, with keyboard docked and mouse attached.
I wonder if they will make the corners sharp so Apple doesn't sue them. Apple owns rounded corners combined to touch screens with icons. Well, I guess Windows 8 isn't going to have icons so I wonder if Microsoft was smart enough to copyright rounded corners with square buttons interface.
The desktop PC Is a dying platform.
Compare a pick up truck to a subcompact car. Yeah. Pick up trucks are so ugly, they guzzle gas, and when they have a back seat it's uncomfortable as hell. I predict the end of pick up trucks!
Desktops are here to stay. What's more, cases are getting bigger and bigger, for better air flow. I'm writing this on a water-cooled i7 at almost 4GHz with 12GB of RAM, while running 5 simultaneous EVE Online clients on 4 monitors with 3 graphics cards. My CPU load is at 25%. Yeah, do that on your little tablet.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The desktop IS dying, and has been for years.
Emphasis mine. But this should be your first clue. What's taking them so long to roll over and die? Desktops are moving into a very real niche market. The guy who needs a server but not a rack. The guy who crunches a lot of numbers. The guy who needs lots of hard drives in a RAID array. The scientist who needs to plug in custom hardware. The gamer who needs to keep up with the video card upgrade cycle (which is much faster than the CPU cycle). Becoming niche is not the same as dying.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
That's missing Windows 2000, which wasn't exactly a "skip" release.
Windows 2000 was a server release, in the same vein as Windows NT.
If you wanted to include 2000 you would need to include the NT releases in between as well.
Windows 1.0
Windows 2.0
Windows 2.1
Windows 2.11
Windows 3.0
Windows 3.1
Windows for Workgroups 3.1
Windows NT 3.1
Windows 3.11
Windows for Workgroups 3.11
Windows NT 3.5
Windows NT 3.51
Windows 95
Windows NT 4.0
Windows 98
Windows 98 SE
NT 5.0/Windows 2000
Windows ME
Windows 2000 Advanced Server
NT 5.1/Windows XP
Windows XP Media Center
NT 5.2/(Windows XP 64-bit)
NT 5.2/Windows Server 2003
NT 5.2/Windows Server 2003 R2
NT 5.2/Windows Home Server
NT 6.0/Vista Business
NT 6.0/Windows Vista Home
NT 6.0/Windows Server 2008
NT 6.1/Windows 7
Windows Server 2008 R2
Windows Home Server 2011
a reputable source has informed me that Win8 will have a feature Microsoft employees insisted on having: a chair widget you can throw.
hopefully this will reduce the number of flying chair injuries from Ballmer.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Remember when we all thought that the mainframe was history? (They are entrenched in corporate America, and have experienced a strong resurgence as they do what they do extremely well.)
Remember when we all thought that Unix was going to disappear? (Where do we begin? Android/IOS, MacOSX, Wireless routers, cheap Linux servers everywhere not to mention Linux workstations, Unix/Linux variants easily outsell Windows variants today)
Windows won't disappear any time soon, any more than *nix and mainframes will. Both are rubust and well suited to their "home turf" and Microsoft would have to perform a long series of stupid things before they could kill their long-entrenched legacy. Instead, we'll see new marketplaces built upon the framework of existing infrastructure, and right now, javascript has rapidly become an emergent phenomenon - there's a new paradigm forming before our eyes as it goes from a little toy to a serious application development environment.
Will we talk about Prototype or JQuery in a few years like we now talk about Windows?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
And where do you get this from? That shitty article a few months ago?
Having access to the builds, I can tell you now that .Net is very much alive and available in Windows 8.
The problem is that the whole "value proposition" of sticking with windows is keeping your existing investment in desktop apps. That's been true since the days Lotus 1-2-3 was the killer app.
The main problem with Windows 7 tablets (I have one, in addition to an iPad and a hacked Nook Color), aside from the bulky form factor, is that there aren't enough tablet oriented apps to make them worth using. While you can operate desktop apps on the the thing the experience is excruciatingly bad. That's because it violates user expectations. What users expect when they use a tablet is a direct manipulation experience; you interact with the widgets onscreen with your finger. When that app is a desktop app you get something different; you're using your finger to push the cursor around like a really tiny and awkward tool.
While there may be advantages to MS to having a greater commonality within all its various offerings, that doesn't translate to the user. A desktop app and a tablet app are very different animals, so he's buying and learning a whole different set of software. That mean that the fact he can run the same OS on his tablet and on his laptop doesn't mean anything to him. There might be some advantage in gaining penetration in corporate environments because of the management infrastructure for windows, but I predict user experiences will be so bad Windows tablets won't succeed in the corporate marketplace. This won't be because of Windows per se, but because people will be naively running desktop apps or using badly reskinned desktop apps from developers with no mobile experience.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
We all have a self confirming bias in favour of one system or another. The problem is that the greater the effort to please a wide audience, the less optimized it becomes for the speicalized user. Windows and all the mainstream linux distros are both going down the road of running tons of unneded stuff, that just slows everything down. We both know that - so we cut away the worst of the bloat on our primary system, which then runs pretty decently - but the 200 mashines in the server farm, and your wifes PC that gets infected with malware at least once a year - they'll all have to make du with a stock install, whicever OS they're running.
And I think it's strange how the latest Windows always seems to be the greatest thing on earth - while all previous versions suddenly stinks from the day when MicroSoft wan't to sell you the upgrade. They should rather adopt some sort of subscription model so everyone was running on the same newest version without the all the planned obsoletion.
Just in case anyone was wondering about my bias: I have an MSDN (free MS software galore) subscription AND run gentoo linux on my main mashine.
Run with the lemmings, and you'll get your feet wet.
Please let me apply my Windows purchasing checklist to the new product:
1) Can I buy a permanent, non-revocable license to use the software at a reasonable price per seat (not per user) without requiring activation servers on my network and the possibility of the damn thing just switching off one day because it's unhappy? (I class "reasonable" as lower than the most expensive piece of application software I plan to run on the machine) Also, can I work out what version and license option I need, and find somewhere that will actually sell it to me, without spending a week researching the options (hint: I work in education in the UK and apparently it's just not possible to offer me a perpetual license at a sensible price because I don't have enough MS software on the premises)
2) Can I turn the desktop back to what I want it to be - basic, empty, simple, not requiring a full-3D graphics card just to load up?
3) Can I control EVERY aspect of the computer from a network server without waiting years for an appropriate Group Policy and/or other hack to appear? (I had to wait until Vista to control things like Power Policies effectively without using third-party software, I imagine there's a whole swathe of similar problems with newer OS too). This means being able to turn off pop-up warnings, taskbar icons, and EVERYTHING that might provide an avenue for a user to get to a dialog that I've deliberately locked them out of.
4) Can I just image a working machine byte-for-byte if something breaks (takes minutes) for diagnosis/repair/recovery/replacement without having to reinstall the entire damn thing or worrying about the licensing going apeshit?
5) Can my users use the damn thing on their own initiative, alone, without retraining, or do I have to rejig every single machine so that it's more familiar to them and yet still never quite get it to look/work the same as previous OS?
6) Can I install it on the same machines that I have now without things running slower? (Why is this such a big problem, especially if I want to run in "classic" modes?)
7) Can it run everything that previous versions did without requiring months of tweaking, testing, and crossing fingers?
My guess is that basically zero of those are true of Windows 8 (certainly, Windows 7 fails too, which is why we haven't deployed that yet). I don't think these are onerous demands, either, and if the newer versions of Windows offered even some of them, it would be infinitely more attractive. As it is, though, Microsoft are slowly pushing people out of their own market.
Seriously, you spend decades creating a product, and don't think that some of your big corporate users might want to exist without having to "activate" their own licensing from a server they have to pay for?
That default start screen featured in the article - that's not what they expect me to use on my Desktop is it??
On a small device that looks fine. (I see the little "Desktop" tile... I hope there are multiple desktops....) But on a big screen, on a PC, it looks like an "e-business website template" circa 1995. Something you'd expect to find in a Photoshop 6.0 book, under a section about layer slicing for the web. It would be a horrible UI on the desktop or laptop computer.