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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.
It's suicide.
Windows 8...another thing to add to the long list of Obama's failures...
The releases haven't always gone well, as in the case of Windows Vista, but Redmond has managed to ride out the rough patches.
It's worth noting that Windows Vista still to this day has an install base of 12% of computers, more than every version of Mac OS combined. It was still gaining market share until October 2009, a little after Windows 7 was released. Although it wasn't gaining traction as fast as MS would have liked, they sold hundreds of millions of copies thanks to the fact that it's the defacto install on all new machines, and the same will be true for Windows 8.
Even a botched release for Microsoft by all accounts is considered a good day.
I think it is an educated risk, Windows 7 is well done and robust, and still has a future, much like XP lived all those years. So they are throwing Win 8 to see what happens.
Sig? Heil
It's risky as hell. Not for their PC business, really. Home users will get it because it's what comes on a PC. Corporate users will ignore it just like they ignored Vista.
The real danger is that by changing so much in the desktop version, users will get confused and annoyed. That kind of reaction taints an entire brand, exactly like how "Vista" became a four-letter word in the PC industry. Nobody wanted to touch it. If Windows 8 has a negative reaction among users due to how much they screwed up the UI formerly known as Metro, that won't stay contained.
It'll spread to the tablets and phones too. People will see a Windows tablet and immediately think of their last, negative experience with their home PC. Then they'll go buy an iPad.
That's the real danger. This might be a great tablet OS. But it's a shitty desktop OS, and you won't get people buying Windows tablets if they hate the Windows desktop.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
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
Like Vista, enterprises will wait. Heck some of them are now deploying Win 7. Win 8 does not offer a lot of enterprise features. For consumers, OEMs will offer Win 7 downgrade rights for desktops and non-touchscreen laptops. I'm sure they are pissed enough about MS competing against them with Surface. MS will count all downgrades as Win 8 installs to inflate their numbers.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Where do 98, 98SE, NT4 and W2K fit into that "pattern"? You can make a pattern out of anything if you pick and choose.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It won't be a total flop. They'll market the hell out of it. Heck, the IE9 ads are so flashy, you'd think they reinvented the internet and if you don't use IE9, you're SOL.
If they can do that for IE, imaging what they can do with Win8.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
They just best the company that the future of computing is the tablet and not the desktop. They then did everything they could to force the enterprise to stop treating desktops like desktops (no you may /not/ shortcut your way into the desktop) and to start treating them like tablets wither they wanted to or not.
What do you mean you think you know you to manage tens of thousands of your users better than we do? The enterprise has made very clear they don't want metro forced on them and Microsoft has made very clear they are going to ram it down their throat anyways. It's the biggest corporate bet in the history of business. Who blinks first?
/I really wish people would quit copy Apple all the bloody time just because they are Apple.
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
Windows CE
Windows ME
Windows NT
Windows CEMENT!
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
The problem is that the paradigm isn't shifting to mobile. There's certainly a lot of mobile use being added, but in the corporate world especially the vast majority of computer use is conventional desktops. Tablets and phones don't work well for data entry, or for typing up long documents, or for doing complex spreadsheets with lots of math and data entry. And mobile doesn't seem very compelling when the employee's going to be at his desk anyway.
Home users on the other hand seem to be adding mobile instead of replacing their desktops. They already have a desktop, and they aren't inclined to throw it out while it's still working. I don't see my artist friends throwing out their big Cintiq graphics tablets for a 10" screen, I don't see college students throwing out keyboards and trying to type long papers on a smartphone, and I don't see my gamer friends abandoning their high-performance gaming machines for a 1GHz system with a 7" screen and no custom keyboard commands because there's no keyboard.
Mobile and tablets are just as likely to replace the desktop as the desktop PC is to replace the corporate mainframe.
They have no real tablet share, so they aren't risking losing that.
They have no real smartphone share, so they aren't risking losing that.
They own desktop users body and soul, and there are scant real alternatives where users can go even if they hate it. So I don't see much risk here either.
Worse case, it's another Vista, which they tweak, and continue business as usual.
Already there is Classic Shell to restore the start menu and solve the main Win8 complaint:
http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/
Obvious if Win8 was received even worse than Vista, MS could simply issue a patch that does the same and have a soft fallback.
Bottom line, the fixes are easy, and the desktop users are going anywhere else anyway, so minimal risk.
They've done this before, except the other direction. For years, MS insisted that phones and tablets should run Windows that worked almost exactly like a desktop version (with a pen), because: 1) Windows Everywhere!, and 2) people lived and died on MS apps, and they want the apps to work the same everywhere.
Compare to WIndows 8, where they're strongly suggesting (I say "strongly suggesting" because there is some backwards compatibility) the converse: desktops should run Windows 8 that works just like phones and tablets.
I like the idea of Windows 8, and the guts to take a risk. But I think Apple has the better strategy of having a common code base (OS X/iOS) and different but intelligently-converging UI's for laptops and handhelds. So Apple's established a tick-tock kind of rhythm of moving each UI forward, but also pushing developments between them. Things like moving more multi-touch gestures to their (larger) trackpads on their laptops, etc.
I guess Ballmer delegated the design of the Windows 8 UI to the right people, but also demanded MS's historic Windows Everywhere attitude.
I'd have to say "Yes." Our entire testing system revolves around virtual machines and VMWare. No install. Not testing. No verification. No support.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Vista was different. There was no heir apparent. Now there are two. That may be difference enough.
I presume you are referring to OS X and linux? Not going to happen. Even if Windows 8 was a colossal flop, Windows 7 still exists and people would simply use it instead just like they did with Vista. Microsoft has enough cash to survive Windows 8 failing horribly. The only real alternative that will be considered is Windows 7.
Apple's PC products are too expensive for businesses and Apple makes little effort to pursue business customers. Furthermore Apple doesn't make $250 PCs - they don't even try to compete at the low end of the market. Their products are nice but they don't try to be everything to everyone and they would go out of business if they tried. OS X is not a threat to Windows dominance.
As for linux, as much as I like it, linux has no reasonable prospects of becoming a desktop of choice for PCs anytime soon. It certainly isn't going to supplant Windows. It doesn't have access to certain key pieces of software as native applications. (No LibreOffice is not going to seriously challenge Microsoft Office in the near future unfortunately) It has very little support among OEMs and even a horrible failure of Windows 8 would not change that. Windows installed base is too strong to overcome on the PC platform as we know it. Where linux can and does beat Windows is on platforms where Microsoft has no installed base and software ecosystem to overcome. Mobile phones, tablets, servers, etc. Linux does just fine on these. Perhaps in time these other areas will provide enough to be a threat to Microsoft on PCs but I can't see it happening for at least another 10 years.
And when does Win 7 expire? MS hasn't announced it yet to after these two expire.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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...
:)
but snopes.com says that five years before New Coke they were already allowed to replace half the sugar with HFCS, and six months prior to New Coke they could use 100% HFCS instead of sugar.
The boot lockout has been discussed on Slashdot to a great depth:
red-hat-will-pay-microsoft-to-get-past-uefi-restrictions
ubuntu-lays-plans-for-getting-past-uefi-secureboot
uefi-secure-boot-and-linux-where-things-stand
red-hat-clarifies-doubts-over-uefi-secure-boot-solution
"Only for ARM products"... for now, and while MS does not require to lock x86, manufacturers can still "voluntarily" do it (*wink* *wink*)
So once it's done -- all your hardware belongs to Microsoft, and they will start to raise the barriers you need to hop to dual boot. Already you will need to go to BIOS every time and change setup. Eventually they will migrate new "security and piracy protection" to x86 as well, and make "circumvention" a federal offence, as the last nail in the coffin.
no.. he wants to be the one who got most windows users to get their sw from microsofts sw marketplace. MS has been trying to do that for some 15 years now under different guises(road ahead).
that's what metro is all about - it's not about the UI, it's about how the sw is distributed and what infrastructure it uses, it's about getting sw developers to use ms's push systems, ms's update systems, ms's testing services.. you can already do metrostyle apps in win7 - of course with the exception that if you do that you can actually scale the window as you wish - new os isn't really needed for that. but a new os push to users is needed to get them to sign in to their personal computers with a microsoft account(sure, it's not mandatory but they sure do push users to do it, and sure you can get your apps elsewhere in x86win8, but that's not their aim).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
My UI evolution: CLI ONLY (and not very user friendly CLI at that) -> Text based menu systems (including the early ASCII dropdown menus and such -> WIMP GUI -> Early mobile devices (non-touchscreen) - > Continued evolution of the WIMP GUI -> Mobile devices w/early touchscreens -> Mobile devices and other devices with modern touchscreens
Mix in there the fact that that is only a rough approximation of the timeline, countless other types of UIs via games and game platforms, and I'm sure some stuff I'm forgetting and I'm damn sure at this point I know what works for me.
Win8's UI is not what I want. No amount of marketing, shilling, or any other crap is going to change my mind. They do not know better than me at this point. Further I can see past the crap and know what they are trying to do; force a UI on people that increases their own pockets to put it bluntly/simply.
Yes, I want a modern good UI on my mobile devices. But no, I do not want and will not accept that type of UI on my desktop/laptop where the WIMP/CLI interface works very well. There may come a day that the WIMP/CLI interface is surpassed by something new. But a smartphone/tablet UI is not it.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
It's none of Google's business. The OEMs make what they make, and Google has to stay away from subsidies to avoid the sphere of control that has made Windows so sucktacular. They have to try hard to not tell all OEMs what to invent, or what not to invent, though they can give clues like their Nexus line does, because OEMs are really clever but once they start down that road they will look always to Google for guidance and not look on their own for the Next Big Thing.
OEMs can differentiate with Android. They can put any peripherals they want, use any processor they want (Intel included) because the underlying OS is Linux and all the peripheral manufacurers and processor manufacturers target Linux and Android. They can customize the Linux and Android for whatever their target is: smooth performance at least price, best display, most branding on the home screen, whatever they like - because they have the source code. They can pollute it with crudware, exchanging customer experience for software vendor subsidy to drive the price down - or not. They are free to customize it - and many do - or they can choose to leave it as close as possible to the way Google gave it, which is also a profitable choice. They have the source code.
This differentiation is the difference between brands that makes an Asus tablet preferable to an Acer tablet with almost identical specs at the same price, or equally attractive at a higher price. Asus has higher brand value in tablets. By consistently delivering an outstanding customer experience Apple gets the most differentiation and the highest brand value of all, and that equates to higher gross margins or higher sales (and hence lower per-unit costs and so higher gross margins at the same price) as customers will pay more for a product from a brand that's reliably good and significantly different. The greater the distance of the brand in reliability of a good experience and more significant the difference from the rest of the pack, the more margin can be demanded.
Delivering software upgrades on time adds to the brand value through differentiation too, as some vendors don't service the customer as well after the sale. Asus does take care of this. My original Transformer TF101 got ICS promptly, and the update was nicely done. This makes me more willing to put my money in their products in the future.
I haven't been a big Apple fan since the '80's, but I have to have to hand it to them. The iPad was sufficiently different that it avoided the "uncanny valley" of too much, but not quite enough difference and became its own thing without compare. They had so reliably delivered a good experience with iPhone that people were willing to try it out. On a fluke I got two on launch day as VDI clients for a big demo, and carrying them around made me more attractive than a man with both a toddler and a puppy. It hit instant meme status, and they had to call the factory and ask them to run four shifts for a year. That's winning through differentiation.
This is not rocket surgery.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
What Microsoft is doing is a little bit like the crying wolf story we all heard when we were told
A little kid cried wolf the first time, people rushed to help him, only to find there was no wolf
He cried wolf the second time, people rushed to help him, and again, no wolf
The third time, wolves came, and he yelled " WOLF ! WOLF !! ", but nobody came
Same thing with Microsoft
They could have produce good software - and they could, given the resources they have, the amount of very talented individuals they hired, and all that - and then sell them at fair prices
But no
They produce bloatwares, bugwares, and uselesswares
Times and times again users are forced to upgrade, upgrade, and then upgrade again, and each time, users have to part with their hard earn money just because if they do not upgrade, the software that they have bought is no longer supported, and can not read files in newer formats
The more Microsoft have put users through this mindless threadmill, the more users get disgusted, and the more they seek out alternatives that are available outside the Microsoft channels
For example:
The success of Open-Office (now Libre-Office) mainly was propelled by users who are disgusted with Microsoft, rather than those who genuinely awed by the power of Open/Libre-Office
And when it comes to Windows 8, users reaction to it is almost similar with what had happened to Gnome 3 - Users are utterly disgusted with the design, the usefulness, and the need to do the [groan] upgrade, again !!
Disclaimer:
Formerly I worked in Microsoft, many many eons ago
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !