Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates Talks Windows Future, Touch Interfaces
Nerval's Lobster writes "In a YouTube interview released by Microsoft, co-founder Bill Gates offered a few hints of where Microsoft plans on taking Windows in coming years. 'It's evolving literally to be a single platform,' he said, referring to how Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 share a kernel, file system, graphics support, and other elements. At least in theory, that will allow developers to port apps from the desktop/tablet OS to the smartphone OS with relatively little work. The two operating systems already share the same design aesthetic, with Start screens composed of colorful tiles linked to applications. Gates also praised natural user interfaces — which include touch and voice — while taking a subtle dig at Apple's iPad and other tablets on the market. 'People want to consume their mail, reading, video anywhere, and they want it to be awfully simple,' he said. 'But you want to incorporate touch without giving up the kind of mouse, keyboard capability that's just so natural in most settings.'"
If you try to "incorporate touch without giving up the kind of mouse, keyboard capability that's just so natural in most settings.", you end up with Windows 8, Unity, and others I don't even want to know about. Keep touch interfaces out of my desktop, please.
I thought he wasn't so involved anymore? PFFFFFTTTTTTT
MS has been doing mobile devices since the late 1990's trying to make a unified OS.
apple got lucky with the price of mobile components dropping to reasonable levels and the fact that samsung and others started to make touch screens
and steve jobs correctly predicted that computers will go the way cars did back in the early 1900's. from what were essentially open parts to a fully vertical system where one company either makes most of the components or designs and manufactures the whole product.
MS's problem was that the OEM's never tried to put out a decent product
Yes yes, I've always wanted a motorbike that takes 4 passengers and can also carry shipping containers.
*sigh* I s'pose 'cos it's software the mangement view is that all that redundant functionality won't actually get in the way of the 10% you actually want in THIS device
apple got lucky with the price of mobile components dropping to reasonable levels...
yeah, they just "stumbled" into being the most profitable company in the world. it's their manufacturing capabilities and their supply chain logistics that make this happen. there's absolutely no luck involved in this.
It's ironic that the guy who was telling us a decade ago that tablets (with styluses) were the future of personal computing, is now such a big fan of the mouse and keyboard.
Each input method (touch, stylus, mouse, keyboard) has its uses. Different devices need different methods.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Maybe for Microsoft's survival.
The surface ARM is no more than another netbook (remember those? TABLETS replaced them), and the surface x86 version is just another ultra portable with touch screen support.
As far as Window 8 is concerned, Microsoft is used to shoving its products by leveraging its monopoly in the OEM market. The case with mobile devices however is very different. Microsoft HAS to prove Windows 8 is worth all the fuss (comparing to existing Android and iOS), with the only advantage (which is yet to be tested) of having apps for your Windows based x86 share information with their ARM counterparts (please spare the build-once for both platforms BS). This synchronization may have been a killer app in the early mobile device days, but today information is synchronized across all platforms quite easily.
Microsoft is definitely all-in on this one, if people adopt Windows 8 as a mobile OS, we may very well see Windows taking over the mobile devices market. If it won't, it's only a matter of time until desktop OS's (or at least Windows OS for most desktops) is obsolete, and so will be Microsoft.
Only time will tell, but my money is on a colossal failure for Microsoft
After that anti-trust investigation and suit in the 1990s, Microsoft has been waiting for other companies to take innovative steps so that it can adopt them later. The Apple "app store" was a boon to Microsoft, as they couldn't have done it on their own without ending up back in court.
What's come of this is an intelligent strategy. They are essentially reviving an older strategy for making a standardized interface, which will allow developers and users more ability to mix-and-match interface components.
It's also intelligent to sneak away from the venerable win32 and make a gift to developers, which is one platform for mobile, desktop and any other form of computing (knowing Gates: smart house and smart agents) that will arise.
While I have my doubts about the Fisher-Price interface as well, I also felt this way about the "new" desktop in Windows XP. It'll be great to see Microsoft restoring some competition to the world of computing with this new strategy.
Nothing to do with Luck. Microsoft's mistake was assuming people wanted a desktop experience on a device too small for it to be effective. They have now come to their senses and come up with a good cell phone experience but now want to do the opposite and inflict a mobile interface on their desktop users.
As for Apple: The core kernel may be similar but their interfaces are completely different between desktop and mobile.
I think he meant to say 'simply awful'.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
A combination of luck and skill. Having the nous to take advantage of the luck.
The same can be said for any company which makes it huge, it's never entirely down to skill.
Open letter to M$... It's clear you're trying to copy Apple's success in the tablet/smartphone world by creating so-called unified interface for both them and desktops. But if Apple is such a clear leader and their vision for the future is so good, then why doesn't OSX look like iOS?
But I can't post the story as Slashdot is down!
who doesnt want to put fingerprints all over my freaking monitor?
... by Gates comments, until he checks apples share price, valuation and performance compared to Microsoft. Then he'll just laugh and go back to practicing his golf swing.
Way too complicated GUI for mobile. Steve jobs correctly decided a cell phone GUI was better.
Dropping mobile component prices would be advantageous to anyone involved in the mobile market. Touch screen technology could have been used by MS as well, but wasn't. Why did it turn out just to be "lucky" for Apple?
Happy people make bad consumers.
Twenty years ago most computers other than PCs were 'fully vertical systems where one company either makes most of the components or designs and manufactures the whole product'. So that's not much of a prediction.
Of course we then decided it was a bad idea because the more open PC was much cheaper than a Unix workstation built by a company with no competition other than different and incompatible Unix workstations. Took the best part of a generation for the wheel to turn back.
" 'It's evolving literally to be a single platform,' he said, referring to how Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 share a kernel, file system, graphics support, and other elements. At least in theory, that will allow developers to port apps from the desktop/tablet OS to the smartphone OS with relatively little work."
Hasn't Gates been chasing the dream of one Windows to rule them all for something like two decades now? The line of 'Handheld PC' and 'Pocket PC' devices didn't share as much low level architecture, because the hardware wouldn't permit it at the time; but did everything they could to drag a desktop UI onto a teeny touchscreen, and 'tablet' meant getting Windows for Pen Computing 1.0 with your Win3.1 back when meteorites were still mopping up the last of the dinosaurs....
Why did it turn out just to be "lucky" for Apple?
Lucky because Apple HR got the right "Steve" and Microsoft pickup up the wrong one. 50:50 chance.
A near thing, you realize.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I'm just ordering the parts to build another Windows PC for gaming. I'll need one eventually, and with Windows 7 vanishing soon I don't want to be stuck with an 'awfully simple' OS.
At current Windows release rates, hopefully a box built with high-end parts today will last at least until Windows 10.
i think you just nullified your premise "why doesn't OSX look like iOS?". If MS was just copying apple Windows, Surface, and Windows Mobile would not look or have similar interfaces. maybe Microsoft is trying to lead and dare I say on slashdot, innovate?
The summary puts "touch" and "future" together as if touch is a new thing.
Look up the HP 150. This was a desktop computer with a touch screen back in 1983. I'm sure Bill Gates saw this at the 1983 Comdex - a few booths down MS was demonstrating a vaporware product called "Windows". There are reasons we don't waste our money on touch screens for desktop computers, and they were all hashed out a long time ago. But somehow touch screens are magically new and the old reasons magically don't exist any more.
Because unlike M$, Apple borrowed code from the open source community (Linux) to make their OSX. Apple never invented anything, they just took what they saw was available and used it in a better way.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
My daughter got a Galaxy Tab 10.1 on x-mas when she was 20month old and been using it since.
BUT Nether she nor you average 3year kid need to be in 3rdp session + citrix containing another 4rdp session + running 10local apps at once.
I have to do that and windows 8 just seem like a pain in the as BIG TIME.
Okay you say, but then your mother, spause and child should run windows 8.
But then I have to support it and I say 'No way in h*ll'. I'ts hard enough to support a OS that you work in on a daily basis on a computer you don't know.
Android/ios is somewhat fine as they are decently locked down but in windows it will just get ridiculous. Just finding the shutdown in windows8 took me a good 20minutes before I by chance stumbled over it.
That wasn't a prediction, that was his business plan.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
In the same league as the announcement of the iPhone's curated app ecosystem. Today was the day that mainstream computing officially set a course for curation.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
There is always Luck involved in success. A good business will try to minimize how much luck is involved but it is there.
Apple got Lucky in a couple areas.
1. The Fruity iMacs were popular enough to get media attention. Which allowed for more buzz after job releases new products. These iMacs could have been seen as a cheap rip off and too insulting to the end user to buy.
2. The iPod was really popular. It could had just as easily been just an apple fan boy toy. While other markets expanded.
3. Failure of the iPod Killer. Microsoft, Sony, Ad-Lib... A bunch of big names tried to get to a strong spot even a close #2.
4. People hated Microsoft. Viruses were crippling home PC's. People started to switch to Firefox. A lot of people were going, my Next PC will be a Mac.
A lot of other things could have gone wrong. And hurt apple.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
They used to matter when he ran Microsoft.
Granted, his biggest decisions were usually taken to catch up to the market, not lead it - witness Windows 95 and the "focus on the internet".
Also, his track record on predicting the future is lousy - witness Microsoft Bob and "The Road Ahead".
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
You're welcome
Apple until they recently have tried to get involved in fabbing their own mobile chips does not manufacture their own shit QED.
More like a trojan horse for developers. Microsoft's decision to make WinRT-based apps appstore-only is a total deal breaker. There is no way I am going to write applications that I am not allowed to sell directly to the user. There is no way any user with half a brain would make himself dependent on an application that can only be installed through the appstore. Those are strings, Pinocchio, and if you voluntarily attach them to yourself or your business, you will get exactly what you deserve.
mmm, Apple is a leader . .right. Just like Rolls Royce is leading the automobile industry.
Yes and those Windows CE PDAs and WinPhones kinda sucked. Microsoft tried to do too much with the limited power of the embedded processors of that time. The low resolution screens made the window UI practically useless, but Microsoft refused to abandon it on the phones. Palm was a better PDA and Handsprings Phone/PDA had a much better user experience than the slow clunky Microsoft CE devices.
Microsoft was myopic with their "Windows Everywhere" ambitions. They still seem stuck in that mode. It just took 20 years for the hardware to finally be powerful enough to support Microsoft's goals.
You make your own luck and Apple put a lot of planning and risk entering the mobile device market. If you browse through their patent portfolio you'd see that they been working on the iPad for years before it was finally released to the public. The iPad had to take a back seat to the development of the iPhone. Apple had to engineer the battery life, display performance, and took a gigantic leap of faith when they decided how they will enter the wireless market (No other computer company has pulled it off). There was a "controversy" over Apple abandoning the traditional Window UI for an exclusively full screen application design. The lessons learned over the demise of the Apple Newton was behind all this attention to detail. Remember Apple was still a niched company and this was a HUGE risk for Steve Jobs.
Sure today the media falls over themselves to praise Apple and follow their every move. I think is to make up for them discounting the significance of Apple's release of the original iPhone, played up how Apple was risking too much by taking on entrenched phone manufactures and the large peanut gallery of pundits that announced the death of Apple.
Their poor forecast embarrassed them so now I think they preemptively are positive toward Apple (and Google, Microsoft, others) because they learned it looks better to praise a new technology/product/upstart and allow it to fail on its own and write articles investigating the reasons than it is to be skeptical and then eat crow when the company succeeds.
When everyone think about the good old days, they forgot about all the crap they went through to get to where they are today.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
apple borrowed from bsd, not linux
factor 966971: 966971
Who cares what the old man says anymore? As the Salesforce chap said,Windows is irrelevant these days.
What grade are you in, son? Freshman in college? Junior in high school? because it's pretty damned obvious that you've never seen the inside of an office building. Every single PC in almost every office (Ernie Ball notwithstanding) is running Windows. On desktops. And there are a lot more PCs in offices than in homes. That said, I'm running kubuntu at home and anyone who has seen many of my comments knows I'm no MS apologist, I much prefer the far superior kubuntu, but your comment was just moronic.
Irrelevant? Son, I feel sorry for you, having all that ignorance and such little knowledge of the world.
BTW, mods, his comment wasn't flamebait, it was just stupid.
Free Martian Whores!
Swiss Army knife! And we've all had experience with one-size-fits-all. It usually doesn't work very well.
The main pre-emptory objection to Windows 8 is change. Change for no apparent reason other than the whim of the same company that's had as many losers as whiners.
Why doesn't Microsoft understand that people want their tools to be configurable and give them the option for change? The Office and all its predecessors (and competitors) faciliated productivity nicely with keyboard equivalents, most of which were hang-overs from the command-line editors of yore. Microsoft buried, hid or obfuscated this functionality to the point where Office 2012 hides them completely. They still work if you know about them, but the interface doesn't even hint of their existence. WHY?!
The keyboard is still the fastest I/O device for text input, and until such time as there's an improvement, why does the big corporate productivity enhancer think it's a good idea to mess with the 'productiviy' they claim to enhance? I don't get it.
Does Microsoft have a neural interface in the works that they're not talking about? Does this explain Steven Balmer's strange behavior, or is he really just that weird? If Microsoft is working on neural inductance recognition, I can't wait to find out just how much that will improve Bing! Just think of all the new analytics data that will populate the cloud once M$ can read your mind....
But keep it clean.
Open letter to M$... It's clear you're trying to copy Apple's success in the tablet/smartphone world by creating so-called unified interface for both them and desktops. But if Apple is such a clear leader and their vision for the future is so good, then why doesn't OSX look like iOS?
Obviously what the system presents on its display represents exactly what is under the 'hood.'
Why does OSX look like iOS when I ssh to their respective devices?
So their roadmap is to make Windows like Linux? Wow. Totally innovative. You go girl.
God is imaginary
Also attributing it to luck doesn't really make sense since Apple had been planning the device for years, and only released it when the components had become cheap enough to sell the device at what they believed to be a reasonable price point. Also, cheaper components and better touch screens are insufficient to explain where the iPhone came from. Why is it that Apple was first to market with a device like the iPhone, and it took other manufacturers years to catch up?
The iPhone was not obvious. When it was first demoed, people responded in one of two ways: (a) "Holy shit, that's some amazing sci-fi tech right there and I want one,"; and (b) "No physical keyboard, less Exchange support than a Blackberry. Lame."
Gates: But you want to incorporate touch without giving up the kind of mouse, keyboard capability that's just so natural in most settings.
So what does Microsoft do with Windows 8? Remove the ability to easily use a keyboard and mouse with the OS.
A lot of other things could have gone wrong. And hurt apple.
Yes, but you forgot one important thing: If anything went wrong, that would've invalidated iScripture, which is impossible owing to it being infallible. You unenlightened types keep forgetting these minor important things. I can't imagine how; it's all there to read at your iChurch of choice.
Businesses require an OS with applications that allow for interactivity including ease of multi-tasking. The idea of an OS geared toward uni-tasked pipelined user consumption is only a one-way street. I knew it was bad, but having Bill Gates endorsement this paradigm is the final nail in the coffin.
From my POV, Microsoft Office 365 and VM'ed instances of Server 2012 is the only thing they have worth offering. The client side OS and computing platform paradigm is the antithesis of corporate productivity. Clearly they're abandoning this market segment. Either intentionally or not is irrelevant at this point.
Life is not for the lazy.
.
Is this the same Bill Gates who is once again talking about what the future brings?
Last night I looked through your mom's window, touched my interface and squirted my future on the wall.
Bill Gates' mother was on the board of the United Way with John Akers who
was CEO of IBM at the time.
Bill Gates was in the right place at the right time to take advantage of
stupid mistakes made by the entrenched companies in the computer
industry. If you are realistic and informed, you cannot name one single
product Microsoft ever offered which was superior to other offerings
in the marketplace. Microsoft achieved dominance not through superior
product offerings but through dirty business tactics.
My only question is this : why does a guy who really did make great stuff
get cancer and die when swine like Bill Gates lives ?
Maybe the old saying : "only the good die young" is actually true.
You just got trolled
Desktop & mobile sharing an OS is like putting the same controls on a skateboard as an aircraft carrier - sure you could, but you should really consider the other options first.
'It's evolving literally to be a single platform,'
It's a floor wax and a dessert topping!
Actually it was because Jobs was a marketing genius. (Yes I've owned some of their products) Never understood their popularity. IMHO, mediocre products at ridiculous prices. But his sales pitches were brilliant. We'll just have to wait and see how they'll get along without him. Personally I wouldn't buy stock in the company now.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
Apple borrowing from BSD was a brilliant move. OS9 (the predecessor to OSX) was absolutely horrible. Slow, prone to crashing, and it ran on PowerPC chips that were far slower than Intel chips. When Apple brought Jobs back it was partly because of the operating system that NeXT had developed that was based on BSD. It evolved into what is now OSX.
Apple did not invent BSD or Linux or UNIX but what they did do was take a very stable, open source, version of UNIX (BSD) and put a beautifully appealing graphical front end on it (AQUA). I would argue that OSX is the most user friendly version of any UNIX or Linux based kernel. It's very stable, it's easy to use and it looks nice. I would bet that a lot of Mac users don't even know, or care, that it's based on UNIX. They just know that it works and is enjoyable to use.
Apple hasn't invented a lot of things but they have taken what others have done and made it better. That's innovation. In the same way that Android looks and works very much like IOS. In the same way that nearly every modern smartphone uses a touch interface. Apple didn't invent the touch interface either, they just perfected it. Some people think that Microsoft "stole" the GUI from Apple, who in turn "stole" it from XEROX. Who knows?
In my view, none of that stuff is stealing. It's simply the industry realizing that there is a better way to do things and then everyone embraces it. Balmer and Gates have seen the writing on the wall. PC sales are down drastically. For many people, particularly in developing countries, a smartphone is their first and only internet enabled device. That's where the growth is. So Windows is going to have to evolve if it wants to stay relevant in the consumer space. Time will tell how successful it is.
It was lucky for Apple because they also had a vision. Or to put it another way, it didn't matter how cheap touch screens and mobiles got because Microsoft was too busy trying to stick a full blown crap OS on mobile and everyone else was making a different OS for each damn model of phone that came out. Before Apple, there was a pretty good chance whatever touch screen device you had was a dead end of some type and the manufacture wouldn't continue to put out updates for very long, or the next version could be completely different.
Vision. Apple had it, now MS is copying it.
Touch is great for accessing and consuming content.
Touch is currently horrendous for producing or modifying content.
These are not yet 'unified' avenues of usage as yet.
However it is possible. I have given content creation / editing (as in writing software) on both iPad and my Samsung Galaxy S3 the old college try. In many ways, it is this close to actually working and replacing my laptop. With my galaxy I've used both bluetooth and USB mice. I would break down the support for using a mouse on the latest version of Android as:
Hardware support: 95%
OS support: 75%
App support: 5%
The problem lies with the apps. They simply aren't written to take proper advantage of a mouse, or even a keyboard for that matter. For example, when I plug in a keyboard, the OS must recognize I'm using an external keyboard, and thus it doesn't show the onscreen keyboard. However, certain apps I've tried must be triggering it programatically at various times (for example when switching away and back to the app), and when the onscreen keyboard pops up in landscape orientation nearly all the screen real estate is wasted.
Yet even ALT-TAB works on the keyboard to allow switching between apps on Android, showing just how surprisingly complete external keyboard support is in some areas.
Text selection and copying is one of the big issues with mouse support, because at the OS level it is still being reduced down to simple touches. Thus you must click-hold to begin selecting, visual indicators designed for touch use are then unnecessarily large, etc. Can (and should) mouse based text selection work optimally on a mobile device, exactly as it does on desktop devices? Of course it can, and without having to change the existing touch-based behavior either.
Now Microsoft does have a chance to get all this right. Instead of mouse and keyboard support being hobbled on as an afterthought, which is how it has (VERY) slowly evolved with Android from version to version, Microsoft can have well thought out support from day 1. More importantly, they can require (or at least make it very easy or implicitly supported) for 3rd party developers to have proper support for these peripherals. Simple things such as not always assuming onscreen keyboards are being displayed, provide keyboard shortcuts, support for mouse scroll wheels, etc.
As others have already stated, the huge concern here is that MS is going to go off the deep end (as is their wont) and push a paradigm or concept too far. For example, if a touchpad or mouse is available, then I should NEVER need to actually touch the screen to do any standard OS GUI function.
Better known as 318230.
None of the GUI is borrowed from FOSS. This article is about UI, not kernels. And as others point out, BSD != Linux. Try harder.
Speaking in Absolutes, we are?
Not to discredit their diligent use of dirty tactics, but Microsoft got where they were through more than just skulduggery. They were sometimes at the right place at the right time, sometimes not at the wrong place at the wrong time, sometimes they saw a good thing and bought it out. The original Dartmouth BASIC was nowhere near as flexible as what Gates & Allen produced. You don't get that big through dirty work alone, even though it helps.
And I really hope you weren't referring to a certain other CEO recently departed as "good". He did finally qualify legitimately for his handicapped parking space, however.
Gates is no saint, but I'd say he's considerably less abusive and psychopathic than most of his peers, living or dead.
Gone are the days of desktops, and apps specifically developed for the desktops. These days,most apps can be run off a browser. The Android ecosystem has captured the low and medium ends of the tablet spectrum, and there are gazillion apps for Android, and Windows apps are miniscule in comparison. It will take a while yet, but highly likely that Windows and Microsoft will continue to slide into irrelevance sooner than later.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
....that's just so totally unsuited to a touch-based interface....such as Windows 8.
#1 and #2 aren't luck. They're just the way things happened. "Could haves" don't imply luck at all.
"correctly predicted?" Your timestamp says you posted this October 23rd, but it doesn't give a year. Are you from 2012, or some later year? Because back here, in 2012, computers can be assembled from parts made from many different manufacturers. If you are, indeed from the future, please send back something more interesting about the future, which might perhaps make everyone's life better (like, were there some terrible natural disasters we could prepare for?).
Thanks,
2012
I'm not sure touch interfaces are such a great idea. We risk oblivion if we ignore Douglas Adams' dire warning.
Apple didn't build that!
The problem was that they tried to make a unified OS and the end result was windows mobile was butt ugly and broken. You can assume Appl just got lucky but comparing the iphone to a blackberry and Windows mobile and it's not hard to see why it was so appealing and even Android was going down the route of being a blackberry clone until someone used their board room access to borrow some ideas.
He still needs to accept some responsibility for this turd.
What Microsoft really wants to do is leverage their desktop monopoly to mobile. They tried to do this by marketing 'Windows Familiarity' as a plus for WinPhone 6. But that didn't work, because as you stated, the desktop is a lousy metaphor for a phone. So now they're remaking their desktop into a clone of their phone so that they can tout the similarities between their desktop monopoly OS and their mobile offerings. This time it's the new desktop interface that's inappropriate for the form factor, but this time, they've got a captive audience and don't care.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
> Laptop with keyboard: Touch is just so-so
Surface has a floppy keyboard connection and no weight in the keyboard. If you try it on your lap and then swipe the screen it is likely to be a disaster.
Touch is currently horrendous for producing or modifying content.
Tell that to painters, or musicians. Touch is far superior for CREATION in those cases.
The world of creation and editing is not limited to words.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My only question is this : why does a guy who really did make great stuff get cancer and die when swine like Bill Gates lives ?
Jobs was a Buddhist.
Buddhists believe in karma.
Jobs was a dick.
Jobs got cancer.
I just think the Metro interface makes the whole touch screen experience better and it's unitifed with the Xbox 360 experience I've had. I like how easy the Xbox is to navigate and this seems to be coming reality for MS desktops.
Having developed for both, I can say that it's not easy to share code between the two. It's fairly easy to port code from one to the other (unless you're doing stuff with networking or threading) but it's not easy to get a single app to run in both worlds.
Gone are the days of desktops, and apps specifically developed for the desktops. These days,most apps can be run off a browser.
You might want to tell the millions of engineers and scientists and mathematicians and artists that use a desktop. And don't be surprised if they laugh at your ignorance. Try running CFD/CAD/Matlab/Mathematica/Octave/PaintShop Pro out of a web browser or app - and actually doing something useful with it. Go ahead and design a CFD mesh from your 'app' (yes, I know you can do it in command line, but many times the GUI is faster). I also don't think a lot of C/C++/Java programming is done using apps/web-based platform (I might be wrong, I haven't programmed in those languages in years).
Yeah, if all you want to do is trivial stuff, or basic office work (Google Docs), or play simple games, then ignore the desktop. Meanwhile, the rest of us have complex problems to work on, and don't want to sacrifice our desktop for your limited visions of the future.
Disclaimer: I am writing this on a desktop (Win 8), while my Ubuntu desktop is doing a nonlinear optimization. This isn't a rant for/against Windows 8 or the good/bad of a unified experience (honestly, I like the new experience since I use a dual monitor rig for both my computers. One monitor houses the metro stuff and the other houses the traditional desktop - I found that the new setup is quite nice). It is just a rant against the ignorance I hear from so many people - "I hardly use a desktop, tablets are the future!". While people are entitled to their opinion, all it takes is for one PHB to decide to cut the budget for new computers because of 'tablets rule' and my productivity would be severely impacted.
Sure it is.
A lot of time a company releases a product ahead of its time. It enters a market that just doesn't want it at the moment.
I remember back in 1994 about how Linux Multi-Tasks and the other guys big on DOS and Windows 3.1 were like why would you ever want to run multiple programs at the same time? It will just slow down your active program.
Or take a look at the Amiga. In most ways this was far ahead of its time... However it didn't catch on too well.
Don't forget about the Newton.
If you take a risk and push something new you risk releasing a product that fills a void that most don't need at the moment.
Lets just say I go back to 2000 with my iPhone.
It probably wouldn't have succeeded as well if at all. There wasn't a strong data infrastructure. Wi-Fi was a cool toy for nerds. The internet was full of crappy third party plugins... It may have good some interesting looks. But they would crave for the Razr Flip Phone.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Just host the .APPX file on your website, and give the user instructions on sideloading it. It's quite easy, actually, although they do have to enable sideloading first (a single Powershell command).
You'll probably make a hell of a lot more money selling through the Windows store than you will selling through your own site, or through traditional retail channels, of course. But you aren't *unable* to sell through those channels. It's just going to have less exposure to the users and require a less intuitive interaction on their part.
People are already hosting (non-commercial, homebrew) APPX packages on forums like XDA-Developers. Typically those aren't packages which are also going through the store - they're either pre-release versions or various sorts of hack - but some are perfectly acceptable apps that the author wanted to allow the community to use for free instead of requiring that they purchase them through the store.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Let me see. He's talking about 1 OS that can run any app from any device that runs that OS. Doesn't matter the CPU, just the OS.
Damn, Linux should of done that.
Be seeing you...
http://xkcd.com/875/
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
OSX is based on NextStep (which came to Apple with Steve Jobs return) which was in turn based on BSD. No Linux there.
Apple did adopt KHTML to develop WebKit but they've contributed back since it was GPL and the result is that there are other significant browsers in the market based on WebKit (Chrome for example) and since there are now several strong rendering engines, the MSIE hegemony has been broken. MS has borrowed plenty of code from open source too and have also contributed back where it suited them but of all the things Apple has done, OSX and WebKit are the things which have made a substantial change to the computing landscape.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
> Microsoft's mistake was assuming people wanted a desktop
> experience on a device too small for it to be effective.
Microsoft's current mistake is assuming that people want a smartphone experience on a desktop PC with a 24" 1920x1080 display. Unless I'm doing a large spreadsheet or watching streaming video, I usually do not want apps to be fullscreen. And no, I do not intend to risk RSI by sticking my arm out 2 feet and dragging my fingers all over the 24" screen.
I'm running linux with multiple workspaces. In my "Forums" workspace, I have 2 Firefox windows side-by-side. At 960x1080 they look a lot more natural than fullscreen browser windows. I have a workspace for a programming project. When in use, it has...
* an xterm window open with vim editing the source code
* a small window to execute the code
* a file viewer window to allow me to look at the input and output files
Fullscreen may have been appropriate in the days of 640x480 VGA displays, but it's not appropriate on a 1920x1080 display.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Actually, I work at one of the largest ISPs in America with over 10000 employees and there are a LOT more Macs on desktops than you would think. You will still see an occasional Windows desktop, but they are actually in the minority here.
Did you know that gullible is not in the dictionary?
Microsoft is definitely all-in on this one, if people adopt Windows 8 as a mobile OS, we may very well see Windows taking over the mobile devices market. If it won't, it's only a matter of time until desktop OS's (or at least Windows OS for most desktops) is obsolete, and so will be Microsoft. Only time will tell, but my money is on a colossal failure for Microsoft
This sounds plausible, except Microsoft will not fail so much as change, though perhaps with far less profit. Somewhat like Apple, Windows 8 looks like the largest desktop O/S is moving toward the computer as appliance. This suggests two things:
1) A trend to very slowly reduce the popularity of general purpose computers, shifting people to limited-task devices.
2) Year of the Linux desktop jokes aside, we really could be headed toward Linux/BSD as the main traditional desktop O/S. Not because of advertising or popularity, but because it's the only one.
The money and corporate power will be in the appliances. Independent power will be enhanced by individuals with traditional computers. There is no need for this generation to stock up on motherboards, but long-term thinking makes one wonder if that time will come.
MS-DOS which came with a task-switcher and Windows 3.1, which multitasked (however poorly)?
You must have been speaking with especially stupid people.
Really? Which of MS's dirty tricks can you now fail to recall? He's mugged entire industries, and he's a liar and a cheat.
Have you noticed Logitech's new touch input surfaces?
Pretty neat! Touch on a large or any monitor makes no sense.
http://www.logitech.com/en-ca/mice-pointers/mice/touchpad-t650
No fair! Apple got two Steves!
They weren't the first to market with a device like the iPhone.
This has been explained to the uninformed on Slashdot over and over and over ...
Required reading for internet skeptics
If you just said Gates made sleazy moves to get to where he was, few could disagree. If you claimed Jobs was a visionary, many would agree. But calling Gates a low-down scumbag and Jobs a saint ("the good die young"???) and wishing ill on another human being makes you a bitter, biased troll.
Maybe you heard of how Jobs stole from Wozniak? Or that he denied paternity on his first kid? Or that he didn't make charitable contributions? Not an idol that most people would worship.
So get over it - both of them did sleazy things. One of them made shiny trinkets that amuse you.
How to go about this? It's a two-page full colour ad.
What you see is a guy at a desk in an office; you are looking at the scene from behind, as if you were standing in the door opening. The guy is slumped backwards in a chair, head falling to the side, and a gun in his hand. It's obvious he just shot himself through the head. On the desk is a high-end looking keyboard, similar mouse, and 3 24" monitors in a multi-monitor setup. On the monitors you see HUGE Windows 8 tiles. There's a Windows 8 box on the table.
There need to be no words.
it ran on PowerPC chips that were far slower than Intel chips
I largely concur with your post, but this bit isn't true for the time period you are talking about, when OS 9 was current. PowerPC had an early speed advantage over contemporary Intel and mostly maintained that, though the projected advantage didn't increase in the way the PowerPC consortium had predicted. It was only once speeds hit around the 1GHz mark that Intel started to pull ahead decisively. The G4 of ~2003 was a pretty decent chip but Intel was at 3.2 GHz where the G4 peaked at around 2.2. The G5 was a stopgap that Steve Jobs begged for, and just about got, but it was too little, too late by then. But then we're well into the OS X era by this time. In the OS 9 days, PowerPC could runs rings around 386/486 Intel boxes, though part of the reason for that was the relatively unsophisticated nature of the OS which was willing to let code hog the CPU whenever it liked.
Copying Apple vision worked for MS in the '80s.
Bill Gates: sombody help me
HHHEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLPPPPP
I highly suspect this is one of these things that Microsoft is simply trying to do too early - technology, in particular mobile hardware, is not quite there yet.
I wouldn't be surprised if we reach that sweet spot and Apple jumps on it
Yeah, they are so irrelevant that 95% of all PCs run Windows. That other 5% is a serious threat!
apple borrowed from bsd, not linux
The first Linux I ever used was MKLinux which was a Micro Kernel version of Linux which ran on Apple hardware. Apple borrowed from both Linux and BSD. I ended up switching to PPCLinux since I really needed floppy support at that point in time. The principal developer of MKLinux was funded by Apple for some time. What they learned there is part of what allowed them to make OSX what it is for better or worse.
Your +5 is poor work on the part of the moderators. If you don't have a clue about the topic, please don't moderate. Seriously.
No he didn't. I honestly can't think of any time when he or Microsoft has ever wronged anyone. The only people who claim what you do are just sore losers who couldn't make it on their own so they needed a scapegoat as an excuse.
apple stole from bsd, not linux
FTFY
Gates is not a genius, just one lucky SOB who bought a lottery ticket and won, another 20th century robber-baron trading on his family connections. Gates thought 640KB of memory was more than enough; thought the Internet was a fad; ripped off the GUI and DOS; missed mobile; missed search ... the list is endless. Just basically a lucky, lucky stupid cunt.
+1. Palm dropped the ball. The TX was just a step away from being a smartphone. They got dazzled by RIM and went in the Treo direction then just seemed to implode. Apple was smart to move in there, no doubt but the prize was Palm's to throw away.
apple got lucky with the price of mobile components dropping to reasonable levels...
yeah, they just "stumbled" into being the most profitable company in the world. it's their manufacturing capabilities and their supply chain logistics that make this happen. there's absolutely no luck involved in this.
I bet you wake up crying every day because Steve Jobs is dead and you'll never get to suck his dick.
A lot of people were going, my Next PC will be a Mac.
Yes, that's why apple now dominates the laptop and desktop markets. Oh, wait...
Apple make relatively expensive niche computers (cue the Apple fanboys saying that they're actually cheaper than an equivalent PC from Dell) and wildly successful consumer electronic gadgets. Their success means nothing in itself, after all no one here ever liked Microsoft just because they were the most profitable tech company for a long time.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Gone are the days of desktops, and apps specifically developed for the desktops. These days,most apps can be run off a browser. The Android ecosystem has captured the low and medium ends of the tablet spectrum, and there are gazillion apps for Android, and Windows apps are miniscule in comparison. It will take a while yet, but highly likely that Windows and Microsoft will continue to slide into irrelevance sooner than later.
You are reinforcing the poster's point above about your lack of experience in the real world. There are not many companies out there who will be switching their office staff to tablets any time soon. You may think that work is like an iPad advert where you sit around facebooking amusingly ironic home videos to your best pals, but the simple fact is that most people spend a lot of time sat in front of computers entering text and numbers.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Steve Jobs seems to have been personally much more of a swine than Bill Gates. Anyone who deliberately parks in handicapped spaces because they think they're too fucking important to obey the plebs' rules is pretty much the definition of a douchebag.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Really? Which of MS's dirty tricks can you now fail to recall? He's mugged entire industries, and he's a liar and a cheat.
Gates was a typically ruthless businessman who was in the right place at the right time to exploit the sheer stupidity of most of the rest of tech industry (IBM in particular), but personally he's nowhere near the arsehole that Jobs by all accounts was.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You're giving reasons other than luck for all of those things, though. Luck has nothing to do with them. Timing, maybe? Or some kind of knowledge? Not luck.
If you're on the west coast that's not surprising. OT, but about your sig...
Free Martian Whores!
maybe Microsoft is trying to lead and dare I say on slashdot, innovate?
Oh, I wouldn't go that far. I hate M$ as much as the next red-blooded Slashdotter, but I also thought Windows 7 wasn't a half-bad piece of work. Win 8 and "Metro" (or whatever it's called this week) is an abortion right out of the gate. How hard could it be for the OS to detect whether it was installed on a desktop or a tablet and configure the appropriate interface?
They ain't innovating. They're playing catch-up because they think Apple has beat them in that area. And let me state I hate Apple too-- they jumped the shark long ago, long before they started with the lawsuits and patent trolling-- but the fact remains that Apple dominates the tablet market. My point though, is that Apple isn't rushing headlong to unify the desktop & tablet interface. They at least have the good sense to know that the two are completely different animals and ought to be treated that way.
Oh, and how's that Kool-Aid taste, Ubuntu?
I remember OS-9 for the Color Computer. Get off my lawn.
Hahaha...yeah the old Macs did have some good features. It's just that the OS became outdated so they had to move on.
But they were first to the market with an iPhone which was the first user friendly smart phone. Yes I had many smart phones, they were all terrible at web/email the apps were awful and inconsistent across devices and Apple finally broke the carriers down on data pricing.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
Don't be silly. Aging executives who could barely turn on their computer could use a BlackBerry efficiently and effectively. This is to say nothing of the zillion other smartphone brands that were also user-friendly.
You make it sound like using a smartphone before the iPhone was like flying the space shuttle! The truth is that most smartphones were easier to use than the average feature-phone at the time.
As for apps and web browsing being "awful" I recommend you read some reviews from 2005-2007. No one else seemed to thing that it was "awful".
Required reading for internet skeptics
Yup... it's easy to see that Apple was inspired by the T|X... pretty much the same screen as the original iPhone. And Palm had mastered the "doesn't slip out of your hand" technology that Apple still has not.
But it wasn't just the hardware or software that Apple did right. It was really the marketing. Palm was fairly convinced that only business people were significant users of PDAs, and only business people would use smartphones -- that's why the Blackberried up the Palm for the Treo devices. Apple was the first major company to go after consumers with a smartphone. And one of the best positioned to break that ice, since they already had that relationship with the consumer via the iPod.
Palm was really kind of clueless in those days. The T|X has the same SOC as the Microsoft Zune, and yet, it didn't even come with a media player (there were a few good ones available). They didn't even bother to apply the SDHC upgrade to the T|X, either... despite supplying that to the Treos that used the same processor. They were really a mess, jerked their customers around, and I was SOOOOO glad to be able to jump off Palm onto a nice, soft landing on Android.
But yeah, what could have been. They even had BeOS, which had already been mutated into BeIA, and would have made a fine basis for a modern smartphone OS.
-Dave Haynie
Workstation with large monitor: Touch is horrible. I don't want to move my 30" monitor any closer to me, and I don't want to reach way out to it.
Lay the monitor almost flat on the table. It would feel like drawing with pencil and paper. Upright is fine if it's mounted on the wall, and you're standing in front of it, like they they show in the movies
I need a keyboard to do my (professional) programming and (hobby) story writing. Laying the monitor flat directly in front of me as if I was going to draw on it isn't acceptable. I need my keyboard. That means I have to move the monitor some where else other than where it is easy to look at which means I'm going to get a crick in my neck if I hold my head like that for 8+ hours a day. (Ergonomically speaking, I learned a long time ago that I should keep my head resting on my spine by "looking straight ahead" when staring at a the monitor for long periods of time. If I tilt my head even a little bit and hold it there all day, my muscles work a lot. That means it gets very painful.)
I also need the mouse for precision pointing. I still work in the world of desktops / laptops and there's a lot of information that can't be programmed in a GUI without a mouse. When you're trying to squeeze a little more information on the screen, sometimes a few pixels make a big difference. Gesturing just a couple of pixels with a finger is difficult since you can't see what you're doing.
Also, on a side note, all of the monitors I've used in my life (translated as things that are larger and heavier than a tablet size device), typically aren't very flat on the back side because of the plugs, transformers, and stand. I haven't shopped for monitors in a while... is it now possible to get a 30" monitor that is only a few millimeters thick and lay it down?