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Is Windows 8 Microsoft's Riskiest Bet?
Microsoft has rolled out many new products and many revisions of old products over the past couple of decades. The releases haven't always gone well, as in the case of Windows Vista, but Redmond has managed to ride out the rough patches. However, Windows 8 is an even more dramatic revamp of one of Microsoft's top products than Vista was. At the same time, they're piling their tablet hopes onto Windows 8 as well. Does this make it Microsoft's riskiest bet ever?
"Thus the problem facing Microsoft: How to convince Windows users to rush out and buy an upgrade of a perfectly good (and relatively new, at least by Windows standards) operating system? Compounding the issue is the new Windows 8 design, with a Start screen that discards the traditional desktop interface in favor of a bunch of colorful tiles linked to applications. That revamp is supposed to make Windows 8 more touch-screen friendly, and thus optimized for tablet use; but it could turn off consumers who don’t like change, not to mention businesses that shudder at the idea of retraining their workers in new ways of doing things. ... if Surface and the other Windows 8 tablets fail to make an impact on the market, then Microsoft will have lost a major chance at seizing the new paradigm, which is centered on mobility and the cloud. Meanwhile, that same paradigm shift is drifting the center of peoples’ computing lives from desktops and laptops to smartphones and tablets—which puts Windows’ traditional center of strength at long-term risk.
Was New Coke risky?
Was Gnome 3 risky?
Was the American version of Iron Chef risky?
Was a sequel to The Matrix risky? (Actually, it shouldn't have been, but...)
We'll see how well this plays out.
sig: sauer
Pescatore asked Ballmer what he considered to be Microsoft's "riskiest product bet."
... Ballmer's answer? "The next version of Windows."
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/ballmer-riskiest-product-bet-by-microsoft-is-the-next-release-of-windows/7786
Microsoft's hold on personal computing is slipping, partly due to their own lack of foresight, and they are in danger of being resigned to the role of "legacy personal computing". To get back on top, they have no choice but to do a hail mary pass at this stage.
I think the main overriding problem is that Microsoft as an organization doesn't know how to do that. They make money by maneuvering, with innovation coming a poor second. Mind you, there are very bright engineers working there, but management has for too many years been the consumer computer equivalent of a water economy (the government that controls the water can rot until it's just a shell, but will not be toppled from within) that they don't know how to act any differently. And so, they try a variation on a past strategy (come out with a product that's more strategic than useful, incidentally screwing their partners in the process) and assume it'll be business as usual. They might be right, but I don't think so.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The riskiest bet Microsoft ever made was selling IBM an operating system before they actually had one to sell. Imagine what would have happened to the fledgling Microsoft had they failed to come up with the product in time.
I am officially gone from
it is so far looking like an attempted suicide and all because someone thinks all their products must run the same UI. And it's a phone UI tuned to work on tablets forced down to all users of their desktop devices. As we've seen the iPod->Touch->iPhone-iPad migration while Apple has left the MacOS as a different product at the UI level. We've seen Android on phones to TVs, infotainment systems and tablets without any push to desktop systems. But along comes Microsoft with a migration from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone and it's Metro UI( yes it's easier to define it as Metro because they have for 2 years on the phone ) based on Windows CE and a port of Windows 7 to ARM with the Metro UI on it for phones and tablets while at the same time forcing desktop users to endure the Metro UI also. that is just nuts. But I can see that with the failiure of Windows Phone 7 to gain any market share and even the loss of their market share held with Windows Mobile, Windows 8 not only would have not apps but be the same as Windows Phone 7 but different only under the hood. Developers developers developers as Monkey Boy once danced is once again their bet. Because they are forcing desktop developers to make Metro apps for teh desktop and by default they can be listed as developers for tablets and phones. Not to unlike how they killed off PenOS by Go Inc by marketing how many developers they have on the platform(Pen for Windows) when it was mostly smoke and mirrors.
They are attempting suicide but they still know that for OEMs to dump Windows, the OEM would have to create either new partnerships with something new to the desktop in the scale of Windows shipments or create their own software org to tune something like a GNU/Linux version to be desktop ready. Much like how Corel once did that with Corel Linux.
I do think they will be pushing many many many of their customers to the Mac. Their OEMs will shrink as sales of new systems fall and Microsoft will spend billions subsidizing their own hardware products in attempts to gain a market share in the double digits. It'll be suicide by one thousand cuts and a slow death unless they give the desktop back a familiar UI and quick like. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Posting Anon because, well, I'm posting this on an rtm Win 8 machine so you guess why.
The persistent question is "Why did we do this?" It's not faster, not more intuitive, not easier, not really anything more than pretty IF you're using Win 8 on a computer. It is really nice on a small touchscreen device, but that's not the big debate.
What does Win 8 give me on the desktop versus Win 7?
Not really anything except for a terribly ugly fullscreen MEGABIG START MENU with icons that update themselves.
More navigation and less actual work. A lot of extra clicks to find simple crap like control panel settings.
IE 10, which despite what the terribly annoying ads say is still embarrassingly slow compared to Firefox.
And wtf if I just want to work some documents? I have to dig thru even more "Libraries" and "Favorites" and "Desktop > User > Libraries" and "Recent Places" that all point to the same folders and confuse the living hell out of novice users. Putting "tiles" on top of this does not help, it makes it worse.
The straight poop is that "people" (the larger part of the 80/20 pop) do not care about the details of this. They just want to use a browser and email that point to data in the magic cloud, and they want to use word and excel that point to documents they can see/move/copy/delete locally in one or two clicks. Win 7 is a 2- or 3-click UI, so people tend to like it, and get used to the annoyances in trade for being pretty stable. Win 8 is a 4-5-click + dual-personality UI so more likely than not we're f#cked.
I ask folks over on the Win8 team whether they learned anything from the large userbase hit Ubuntu took when they implemented Unity, an UI similar to the Metro^h^h^h^h^hWin8 UI. Most of them don't even know about it, don't look at OSX, never heard of X11 or Gnome, KDE, etc etc. They have no interest; a lot of this crap was thought up in a vacuum, given cursory userlab testing, and whatever looked shiniest and had the most political oomph internally got shoved into this half-baked mess. Don'tCallItMetroBecauseMetroAGSuedUs? Apparently we have as much due diligence to the name as we gave to much of the UI design.
Maybe I'm underestimating the number of Win8/Surface tablets we're going to sell, but I'm putting in a sell order...
No shit. Zune, Kin, Sidekick, rushing the x360 out with a 2 billion dollar flaw...the man is a disaster.
For those that want an unbiased review of what to expect with Win 8 I've run DP, CP, and RP on nearly a half a dozen different machines here at the shop so I'd say that makes me at least qualified to give the review, along with watching my customers look lost and get frustrated on the win 8 CP I've had running on the shop floor, so here goes...
Do you have a little netbook or laptop, preferably 10-12 inches but no bigger than 15? Then you probably only run one app at a time and your screen is low res enough win 8 will look fine. Are you gonna buy this on a tablet or smartphone? then i'm sure it'll work fine there as well. Do you never ever install more than a half dozen programs? Then the new tile UI won't make you want to pull your hair out.
For everyone that doesn't fit that description? RUN, run as fast as you can and grab you a copy of Win 7 NOW, don't wait, get it and hang onto it like a drowning man hanging onto a lifejacket. Because the Tile UI quickly becomes a huge mess when you add programs so soon you end up with this multiple page PITA UI, most of the Tile "apps" and many of the Windows programs themselves are obviously written for low res screens and look like ass on anything 1600x900 or better, the only "advantage" which is faster boot is a lie and a hack (Google "Win 8 hybrid boot" to see what I mean) and in every appreciable way it feels like a boat anchor tied to your productivity. And ZOMFG do NOT open to any depth in control panel, it becomes this giant shotgun tile nightmare o' doom!
The sad part is while the guts are fine in reality...its WinPhone folks, that's ALL it is. Its WinPhone ported to the desktop so MSFT can try to force people to like the Tile UI and get a piece of that appstore iMoney that Apple has been rolling around in, but like everything else Ballmer touches its half assed, obviously designed by committee, its a trainwreck is what it is.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I do agree with most of your points. For example I have a dual screen setup at work - one 27" 2560 x 1440 screen and one 23 inch 1680 x 1050 rotated to portrait (mostly for PDFs, Word docs, etc.). Why would I want one app at a time on that huge screen? It just makes no sense. After running all the releases like you did (DP, CP, RP) I am now on the RTM build. On Win 7 I can click on Freecell and boom! I have a card game going. On Win 8? Download a 196 MB app from the MS Store. It wants me to login to xbox Live like I was playing Halo or something. For freaking Freecell! It loads extremely slowly and takes a bunch of clicks to get a game going - and only runs in that full screen interface that used to be called Metro mode. Garbage.
On the other hand, the advances they've made to the core of the OS are very nice. Once you get to the desktop, as long as you create shortcuts for the stuff you use a lot, it is fine. But that new UI is definitely not for large screens.