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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.
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
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.
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?
who doesnt want to put fingerprints all over my freaking monitor?
" '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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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."
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.
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Is this the same Bill Gates who is once again talking about what the future brings?
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.
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