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Windows Chief Steven Sinofsky Leaves Microsoft
CWmike writes with this excerpt from Computerworld: "Steven Sinofsky, the executive in charge of Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system and the driving force behind the new OS, is leaving the company effective immediately, Microsoft announced late Monday. Sinofsky was also the public face for Windows 8 and its new Metro interface, posting constant updates in a Windows 8 blog that charted its development. His last post, fittingly, was entitled 'Updating Windows 8 for General Availability.' The OS was officially launched at the end of last month. According to the All Things D blog, there was growing tension between Sinofsky and other members of the Microsoft executive team, who didn't see him as enough of a team player. But Microsoft's official position is that the decision was a mutual one. Sinofsky had only good things to say about his former employer." Also at SlashCloud.
Ship.
chair hit you on the way out! Seriously, DUCK!
that the new interface in Windows 8 bombed at the box office....
the beginning of the end, indeed.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I'd hope this was a personality or really an interpersonal thing and not a strategy choice. If Microsoft starts going squishy on Windows 8 i.e. Metro they will blow a crucial part of their strategy. I don't see how they pick a different OS strategy at this point than ubiquitous computing. Releasing another new paradigm in 2014-5 will be a complete yawn.
The 2012Q4 x86 midlevel hardware has been really exciting stuff, innovative. As the hardware manufacturers start one another's ideas 2013Q1 laptops and even desktops are going to feel a 6 years ahead of 2012Q1. That's an impressive accomplishment and I'd hope that Microsoft doesn't walk it back because other divisions are getting cold feet.
Slashdot is a schadenfreude-driven site. We're gonna get our Two Minutes of Hate against Redmond Goldstein one way or another.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
...how once people get described as "a potential successor to Steve Ballmer" they mysteriously disappear...
Scott Forstall denied that he and Steven Sinofsky are forming a secret club with the aim of ".. getting back at all those people who just don't know any better and need to told how things should be done...".
It's rumored that the first meeting will be held in a tree-house in the back yard of Scott's mothers' house, and that "no girls or software company executives will be allowed", and pizza and soft drinks may be delivered.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Posting anonymously because... well...
Anyway, the guy had a Jobs complex. That sort of attitude may have worked in a "one trick" company like Apple (not trying to start a flame war on that, but Apple has a VERY stovepiped set of products as compared to Microsoft). All it did was piss people off in the other business groups at Microsoft, though.
Like many of the oustings at Microsoft over the last 4-5 years, this is a good one, and a positive sign for the company.
And lest there be any confusion on it -- at Microsoft, once you're Partner level, decisions to leave are always "mutual".
As an MS SQL developer, I thought I'd already seen the height of IDE inanity, but with Win8 they managed to make it ever worse, requiring even more clicks to perform even the most basic tasks, and frustrate users who simply want to 'get back' to where they started. It's good they fired the guy, Win8 may be different than Win7 (which does not totally suck, but it's still heavily MS'd), but I don't see it as an improvement, or an innovation, just... different. They way I see it, MS will continue down this point-click-click-click-click paradigm, forever making things more difficult and frustrating to do. They should be trying to SIMPLIFY their interface and experience, not 'Techify' it with junk that only makes the user work harder to do the same work. It's a wonder they don't get that.
How much Slashdot have you read? There are plenty of people here that think both Apple and M.S. are full of shit.
Apple is busy making their entire line a walled garden and M.S. is flaying around dodging chairs with no direction.
... hired by Apple and Google, to completely destroy Windows 8 and any chance of entering the mobile market.
Or - at least that's a hilariously plausible conspiracy theory. I'm going to pretend to believe it.
If you want to make it a plausible conspiracy theory, you need to say that he was an Templar plant put into Microsoft to take down Windows NT so OS/2 could win in the marketplace. OS/2 was definitely preferred by secret societies everywhere. When that plan failed he was left as a deep mole. When the Templar put Jobs back into power at Apple, to get mind-control audio technology out to the masses, they thought they had finally succeeded in global domination. But the rise of the superior Windows 8 represented a threat to the Templar control, so they awoke their deep sleeper agent. However, Ballmer (a long-line descendent of assassins) caught him in his nefarious acts and after scaling building 34, and throwing a few chairs, he made it clear that he had to go.
I suspect this will not be the end of the story ...
Very true. I'm planning on keeping a row of machines, whether virtual or physical, with XP, 7 and 8 running.
I know a lot of industries and scattered companies who have zero intention of upgrading. Their software works on XP, and they've bought both, so why upgrade at all? I'm hard-pressed to tell them they should fix what ain't broke.
It leads to a question of ownership: when we bought Windows, did we buy it "as is" without upgrades? Or buy into a stream of upgrades, possibly for a limited time? Or was it really a subscription for a number of years? If it isn't, maybe it is wholly legitimate for people to expect that Microsoft keep patching it for as long as people use it, which could be to 2042 and beyond.
With OpenGL gaining popularity windows is becoming more and more irrelevant, and I guess that's a good thing.
A few hours ago I downloaded Haiku-OS to give it a spin.
Windows 8 is a very disciplined direction. Doesn't mean: a good direction, but a unified GUI and an answer to ARM-based tablets was the strategy. Good? The market will decide.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
3. They've gotten over the moron factor. Apple used to be able to claim its GUI was so simple a child could use it, in contrast to Windows which was "complicated" and Linux which was "hard." Windows 8 is braindead simple as a GUI and has let wizards take over many of the less intuitive tasks of computer maintenance.
It's hard for me to compete with a corporate PR department, but here I go...
Windows 8 is braindead simple? How? It's exactly the same as Windows 7, except they added a whole new interface in addition to the old one. In other words, it is nearly twice as complicated! Worse, the two environments are nearly blind to the other. "Metro" apps don't show up on the taskbar and desktop apps don't show up on the (hidden) Metro taskbar replacement. Magic things happen when you move your mouse to certain corners, and some items don't come up unless you know the secret gesture. It is an unholy mess. You want to talk "computer maintenance"? There are now two places to find all of the various settings. How that got through your meetings, I'll never know. So now tablet users sometimes have to use the finger-unfriendly desktop interface to set up certain things (and to do file management), while desktop users have to go into the Metro interface for certain settings.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
During Windows Vista and previous development, private beta testers (not internal to MS) were given a constant stream of new builds to test. Microsoft was very responsive and bugs were generally fixed very quickly. I know this will surprise people, but at least for me, Vista was quite bug-free at launch because all the ones I found during the beta were fixed.
Sinofsky took over for Windows 7, and the change in testing procedure was jarring. We got a total of two builds over the entire program -- Beta 1 and RC. The effects of this were that many bug reports weren't reproducible on their much newer internal builds, so the bugs either didn't get fixed or testers were wasting effort. When the RC was released, Microsoft actually deleted many old bug reports and told everyone not to submit anything that didn't result in a BSOD or failed install, which let a lot of glaring cosmetic bugs get through. I can only imagine this was so they could reduce their official bug counts at launch.
The botched Windows 7 testing lead to the weirdest thing I could imagine -- in the middle of the program, there was basically a revolt among the testers. So much so that some took to labeling themselves "proud" testers in their signatures to separate them from the frustrated majority.
For Windows 8 -- we all pretty much knew it was going to happen -- there was no external testing at all. I guess after Vista's performance issues and the poor handling of 7, it was pretty easy for them to decide testers weren't helping them.
Sinofsky had only good things to say about his former employer
When I was laid off years ago, in order to get my severance package, I had to sign an agreement to *not* say bad things about the company in the press. I imagine this guy had $Millions on the line if he does say anything disparaging. Hell, if the MS lawyers are any good, they made sure that any companies that he forms within N years have to use MS products exclusively. (or at least for the public facing computers)
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
I have to disagree here. While I'm not a big fan of mobile computing, it is massively important. Most people who do not need a command line are using mobile computing.
("Using" is a relative term. They are using it for Facebook, shopping, Googling, etc. I doubt they're using it in the sense of running MATLAB or Visual Studio on it.)
Apple is currently in a bind because it has two OSes to support: iOS and OS X. Whether or not the desktop PC is dead (I don't believe that hogwash), the desktop PC is being somewhat displaced by tablets and phones and other mobile computing devices.
The ability for a company to develop one app for both will be a large boon, as will the ability for people to move their software between mobile and stationary computing.
My reps are contacting me and telling me CALs are going up a minimum of 50%. I know how this revolution is being fields, by shaking down enterprise customers.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Everyone else agrees that you're both a shill AND a troll.
Happy now?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
microsoft is mad and fires guy who was in charge of it. Seems plausible.
Man, fire up start screen, start typing 'print'. Nothing found.
On my system when I type 'print' I get 2 Apps 17 Settings and 508 Files.
Or maybe they're the rats on the "burning platform" described by another former Microsoft executive (http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/12/10/23/1658222/can-nokia-save-itself):
"When ex-Microsoft executive Stephen Elop took the reins of Nokia back in 2011, he memorably compared the Finnish phone-maker to a burning old platform in the North Sea. 'I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform,' he wrote in a widely circulated memo. 'And, we have more than one explosion -- we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fueling a blazing fire around us.'"
I accidentally opened a metro app and had to google how to close it. There is no excuse for that. But other than that I've been fine with just ignoring the metro part and treating it like a win 7 machine.
The last annual statements available doesn't even put them in the top 100 global companies by revenue. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2011/full_list/index.html and here are the global 500 by profits http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2011/performers/companies/profits/
I do believe, however, that Apple is by far the biggest company by hype.