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The Empire In Decline?
An anonymous reader writes "Pundits continue to weigh in on Steve Sinofsky's sudden exit from Microsoft (as executive head of Windows Division, he oversaw the development and release of Windows 7 and 8). SemiAccurate's Charlie Demerjian sees Microsoft headed for a steep decline, with their habit of creating walled gardens deliberately incompatible with competitors' platforms finally catching up to them. Few PC users are upgrading to Windows 8 with its unwanted Touch UI, sales of the Surface tablet are disappointing, and few are buying Windows Phones. On the Sinofsky front, Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley is willing to take the Redmond insiders' word that the departure was more about Sinofsky's communication style and deficiencies as a team player than on unfavorable market prospects for Windows 8 and Surface. Meanwhile, anonymous blogger Mini-Microsoft had suspiciously little to say."
After I read the summary and all the links, they could have just put up http://semiaccurate.com/2012/11/14/microsoft-has-failed/ and a period!
with their habit of creating walled gardens deliberately incompatible with competitors' platforms finally catching up to them.
Everybody from Apple to Comcast has a "walled garden" now. Even Canonical has an "app store". The New York times is thriving behind its paywall.
From what I can find around the web, he was asked to leave due to his way of working with people, not the products he created, which frankly are good. Windows 7 is good. Windows 8 is better (not perfect but better).
Now that may mean he gets the job done but they didnt like his methods, or they didnt like the job he did, and the methods. but whatever. NEXT
I'm a bit of a hardware power user. I hang an awful lot of hardware off my computer for a variety of purposes. As soon as there's a Linux distribution which supports my 3 slightly different nVidia video cards driving 6 monitors in a way that lets me merge them all into a single desktop that doesn't involve tearing my hear out with configuration files, I'd happily switch over and figure out the learning curve on everything else on my own.
On Windows, it's as simple as plug the cards in, make sure cables are connected, and open the control panel. I have yet to get multiple monitors working on any variant of Linux going back to 2008.
If anyone has suggestions, tutorials, or something along those lines I'd love to give it a shot - I hear nothing but good things, but my blocking criteria for a migration is "can use all the hardware installed in my computer right now".
Apple still does well with walled gardens all over the fucking place. Not that I approve of that, but lets not rip MS apart when the competition is fucking worse.
I have two thoughts on this issue.
The first is:
Pies.
Microsoft has stock in a lot of corporations. Lots of pies they have their fingers in. Don't count them out.
The second is:
Innovation.
That's dead there.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'm not fan of Microsoft. It's a huge bureaucracy that stifles the innovation of a lot of very bright people who work there. I would not be surprised at all to learn that their late-to-the-party tablet isn't selling well.
However, I've not seen any concrete evidence that Surface tablet sales are "disappointing." There were some vaguely-worded comments by Ballmer in a French magazine or something, and something about a few people returning the table after discovering that they couldn't run their existing apps, but that's about it. From what I've read, Surface seems to be selling. Does anyone have any concrete numbers?
Disclaimer: I am a nobody. A simple techie. I left Microsft last year because I felt they were in turmoil internally. Managment where I worked was heinous and ineffective.
MS has long seemed like it's playing catch up with the IT world. They don't seem to grok what people want. People WANT to move to the "cloud" -- as amorphous as that term is. When I met with customers I was expected to use Bing to look things up in the MS universe and say that I was "binging" this or that. I was asked to also bring up Office 365 at every opportunity.
What keeps MS alive is the corporate sector. What with Google and Apple eating MS's lunch at every turn in the consumer space, it doesn't matter why Sinofsky left. MS is an also ran in the Internet/device/OS world. They are becoming like RIM... irrelevant. Nobody cares anymore.
People want devices and software that are "now" and hip, that are scalable and easy to use. Win 8 is a point and click nightmare. I "lived" with the RP for a few months and was constantly going back to Linux to get real work done. No thanks, MS. I'm done with you. I've embraced better solutions for me and mine.
Come on now, what kind of crappy article is this. MSFT releases a ton of new stuff and has successful products and products that fail, for example:
Zune
Bing
Surface
Windows Phones
Windows 98, ME, Vista, 8
Tons of Server products that suck
But for each that sucks there are a ton that are great :
Windows 95, NT, XP, 7, Server 2003, 2008, 2012
Exchange Server, SQL Server, Sharepoint, ISA Server
XBox, Xbox 360
It's important to test new business models and related fields they may be able to compete in (search, mobile, etc.) but they won't win them all, they can't, else they will be balls deep in Anti-Trust suits again. Declaring the decline of the "empire" is horse shit.
Time for professional MS watchers to find another company to watch. I am tired of hearing about their decline. It has already happend and will eventually show in their balance sheet. Until then watchers will still watcher and haters gotta hate:)
I have read that this guy was fired for leaving the stupidest sounding conference I have ever heard of. Two solid days of watching each others' powerpoints. That is pure MBA masturbation. From the sound of it he basically got up, said, "All you need to know is on my blog" and then left the conference. Then he was labeled abrasive and not a team player. Well it sounds like he didn't follow their petty rules (the guy who successfully runs windows development). I suspect that he also sent some shock waves with other free thinkers saying, "Hey I am wasting my time here too."
.net anything, iPhone or Android to MS phones. iPad or a Macbook Air to Surface. Anything to Zune. VLC to MS Media. OpenGL to DirectX. I do like the XBox and my MS Mouse.
By saying that all they needed to know was on his blog it seems he was basically saying, Microsoft join the 21st century and get out of the 19th century.
I have seen teams that would appear to be dysfunctional people yelling and stomping out. But these teams produced wonders. I have seen other teams that were quiet and respectful of each other and were nothing but deadweight. I am willing to bet that there is an inverse ratio to the time showing people powerpoints and the genuine productivity of that team. The worst is when someone puts up a powerpoint and then starts reading it to you. Icing on the powerpoint cake is when you have a central item with other items surrounding it with arrows pointing to the central item. A perfect example would be a powerpoint slide saying "Team Player" in the center with items around it that are things that make a good team player.
So assuming this guy wasn't throwing feces at people I suspect that MBA types who had everything to lose spent the rest of this conference making sure that this guy was gone. My suggestion to him is to sell his MS stock sooner than later.
On a whole other page it could be that Windows 8 is a giant turd and this is one of the first heads to role. Either way I just don't see a bright future for MS. Unless they have a world beater about to come out of their R&D people nothing they have catches my fancy. In every category of product I prefer something else. MySQL to SQL, Linux to MS Server, Bean to Word, MacOSX to Windows, Sublime or XCode to Visual Studio, PHP to ASPX, C++ or Python or java to
If MS simply stopped selling products I would not be greatly inconvenienced. This is a massive sea change from say 1998. If they had vanished in 1998 I would have cried myself to sleep.
I wouldn't count them out due to one word: Inertia.
Enterprises still use the stuff, and will use it for quite a good amount of time. This gives Microsoft something that few others have: time to correct its screwups.
The debacle of Vista would have killed most other tech companies, but thanks to inertia and near-total monopoly, Microsoft had room to breathe while it fixed its messes. I think the same story will hold true here. This is similar to Intel having a chance to clean up all that NetBurst/RAMBUS bullcrap when the Pentium 4 first came out, as an example.
Now how long and how much breathing room? Hard to say, especially now that the competition has stepped up its game by quite a bit more than they had in 2006, and with mobile consumer devices forming a huge wildcard.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Ballmer needed to blame someone and started throwing him under the bus. Being a smart guy, he left before the bus arrived.
The board should have fired Ballmer and given Steve a huge bonus to return and run the place.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
followed by
If the second statement is to be believed, then why should anyone be worried that the person behind it leaving the company?
Alternatively, if you choose not to believe the second statement (though WP sales being high is certainly hard to claim no matter how you look at it), then the first statement is scary for Microsoft.
I was personally a bit stunned by Steve's sudden departure, but considering that the people that supposedly came up with the most hated pieces of Windows 8 took over for him, I doubt much will change (love it or hate it).
Hey!
Microsoft will sell to "Enterprise".
GM will ALWAYS fleet cars.
They just won't make a sedan you'd buy, yourself. Mazda and VW will trounce the value/dollar every day of the week.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
When you think about the innovation at Microsoft I can't see a decline. Rather Microsoft is drawn into the economic turmoil and will experience slower growth rates. I am a PC! Microsoft should reinvent itself and beat Apple with an open source strategy. That would win the hearts and mind of the ubergeeks.
On what class of platforms? PCs? I don't think so... That's the big change that's happening; the PC is not dead, but its growth is severely limited.
And it's not "ubergeeks" who buy most machines and make profits for hw/sw vendors, but consumers and corporate CIOs.
This has to be the second or third pundit I've read thus far that has proclaimed Win8, Surface, and WinRT a "complete and utter failure."
Dude - These products quite literally JUST CAME OUT. And yet, somehow, they have so much insight that they can proclaim that within 2-4 weeks of their introduction, MSFT has totally screwed the pooch this time and it is "dying."
Slow down for a second. No one expected MSFT to do Apple-like business on their tablets. Not like they're going to have people camping out overnight for a Surface. No one, including Microsoft.
It may sound like it but I'm not a slavish MS fan boy. They clearly do a LOT of crap, bu they actually are releasing numerous great products and even if they're disappointing in certain respects in the consumer marketplace - and if you can't hit it into the stratosphere like Apple you apparently can no longer compete, which is absurd - they're still quite successful and deeply entrenched in the corporate and government marketplaces. The Windows Phone is actually quite good but they are playing catch-up after years of Android and iPhones and are a distant, distant third. It doesn't mean the products are bad or that MS is "failing" per se - it just means it's going to take years and years for the Win Phone/WinRT/Win8 application ecosystem to catch up. The Windows Phone could go the way of the Zune (which also was actually quite a good product) but I don't see that happening until Microsoft has put years and years of time and effort into it.
It's unsurprising their steady movement to being an OEM has been a difficult and unpleasant one for their long-entrenched Windows OEMs. Given the very, very long relationship they've had the PC OEM hardware world it's not terribly unusual that they would react unfavorably to what Microsoft is doing.
Yes, tablets and smartphones are taking over the world - from a certain perspective - but the fact is that almost all real work gets done on either a Windows- or OSX-based laptop or desktop- STILL. Things are fundamentally shifting away from laptops and desktops for casual browsing, Facebooking, emailing, IMming, etc. etc. happening on mobile or tablet devices now - but, having said that, it's clear they're not just going to disappear overnight and it's clear more powerful PC-type devices aren't going to be disappearing just because some mouthy pundit thinks so.
That phrase you keep using, "walled garden", I don't think it means what you think it means.
There's really no alternative to Windows for most desktop and laptop usage, and there are "apps" to hide or disable the silly touch UI in Win so that the reasonable Win 7 UI can be used. Trying to use Linux on a laptop or desktop in a real work environment is a deadend, and Macs are a niche - so what's left?
Maybe he slept with his biographer.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Apple shares are now priced at 535 from 700 just a couple of months ago. Its market share in tablets has dropped to 50.4%, and its smartphones down from 23.1 to 14.9% in a couple of quarters. Its saving grace [as a company, not so good for its consumers] are its massive mark-ups on it products, but even those proving difficult to maintain, as its cost of producing devices has increased, driving its gross profits down. Its now announced that Apple themselves in a new step is letting 3rd Party retailers take a large profit in its "me too" device the ipad mini, in the hope it will gain traction in the saturated with great devices "small tablet" [or as Jobs says "Tweener"] market. Apple did awfully well under Jobs bringing in all the early adopter money, but now these markets are mature, and its arguably behind the opposition [Android] in both hardware and software; Apple are undeniably in decline.
In context of this article Microsoft is a "never was" in mobile, and still has a monopoly in Desktop, the fact that they are taking a safe [and lets be honest profitable] gamble on making Windows 8 a hybrid!? OS that fails in all areas. Following Apple into an established market with the same bullshit and bullying tactics [lol and Office] it always has, using New Apples [Old Apple would have tried to reinvent...or find a new market] playbook, taking everything people don't like about Apple [whatever the fanatics say] and pretend those are the things that made Apple successful, rather that being more Open; Standard orientated...and hell being innovative, and Cheaper...like say Android...Oh!
No one expected MSFT to do Apple-like business on their tablets. Not like they're going to have people camping out overnight for a Surface. No one, including Microsoft.
Really? You have a source for that?
Because from the pre-release hype, I would say it was expect to be at least the Second Coming Of Android. I didn't see any articles before the release saying 'look, we've got this new tablet, but it we don't really expect to sell many'.
When even Ballmer is calling sales 'modest', it's clearly a failure. He wouldn't say that if the sales had met expectations.
/. this is Charlie Demerjian, one of the biggest tech trolls out there. He has a personal vendetta against Nvidia, Microsoft, and Intel. Ignore the troll. They're called SEMIAccurate for a reason.
I see a lot of criticism of Windows 8, but I don't see a lot of folks that have actually tried to use it with a touch screen device.
I have played with the all in ones and touch screen tablets at the Microsoft store. As much as a cringe when a co-worker touches my monitor, I think there is something to this adaption of the tablet interface. I actually like the live data features of the icons, I get information without going into the apps. I get that this is a new take on the old widget concept.
I would not count Microsoft out.
This isn't really true at all. A GM car is fine in a fleet car - it has a dealer network, a steering wheel, instrumentation, pedals, and a shift lever... Just like every other car.
If Microsoft loses the consumer market, it will lose the corporate market as well. Microsoft owns the corporate desktop market, because users are familiar with it's products. Although it might be cheaper from a licensing and maintenance perspective to put everyone on Ubuntu, the cost of re-training all your employees to use LibreOffice and Unity greatly exceeds the cost of licensing the products.
If however, users become more familiar with another platform, it would start to make much more sense to simply employ that platform in your corporate space. Consider ChromeOS; it's cheap, easy, and readily available. If users become comfortable with that platform, there's absolutely no reason why most of the corporate desktop work couldn't be done on that platform. Microsoft would be in trouble.
Year of Microsoft Mobile 2013
Year of Microsoft Internet 2013
Seriously its not even funny any more; Microsoft continuing failure in these markets. Microsoft is not so much in decline, its the same horrible abusive monopoly it always was. Its just that even with its monopoly its failed to breaking to Electonics [Google, Apple] and the internet [Facebook; Amazon; Google].
Windows 8 is just its next attempt at using its monopoly on the Desktop to break into these markets. [whatever you think of that]
There's too much of a customer base for Windows, SQL Server, and Office.
But I do think there's a good chance they'll be acquired sometime in the next ten years.
Finding God in a Dog
I don't really understand why there is so much hatred of the Windows 8 interface. Why not just continue using Windows 7? Consumers have shown they are willing to learn new ways of doing things from their adoption rate of iPads and Android devices - the learning curve from a Windows PC to an iPad is steep, but made much easier because the usability of the iPad is very strong. There is little reason to think consumers won't also be willing to learn the Windows 8 metro way of doing things if they have a reason to.
Microsoft was forced to innovate by Google and Apple. Google and Apple have been going head to head for years. The competitive pressure has reached a point where both services offer fully integrated service offerings. You can use Google services for your whole digital life - office, media, maps and communications. These services are available on any Google branded device - phones, tablets and PCs. Google makes their money on you as a product for their advertisers. You can use Apple services for your whole digital life - office, media, maps and communications. These services are consumable on any Apple branded device - iPhones, iPads, and Macs. Apple makes their money from the devices you use (not on you as an advertising product).
Up until this you couldn't use Microsoft for your whole digital life. Microsoft's enterprise lock-in practices made it very hard to use office on a phone or a tablet, and Microsoft's media services were limited to the console market. Microsoft milked this for as long as they could and then realized they had to offer a full suite of services or risk loosing everything to Google or Apple. In doing this they also probably realized they were leaving a lot of profit on the table. Now you can also use Microsoft for your whole digital life and consume the services on a Windows 8 phone, tablet or PC. This puts Microsoft back in the game in a big way. They are now back as a realistic competitor to Google and Apple whereas 12 months ago you could have more or less ignored them.
They have also used their late entry to try to leapfrog over the Google and Apple offerings. They've done this in a compelling way and we will know in the next 6 months if they have succeeded. They have huge momentum with the purchase and integration of Skype and the 400 million Windows 8 PCs which will be sold in the next 12 month. Even with this they had no option but to build the Surface because they needed a tablet to compete with Google and Apple. Without a tablet there is no incentive for consumers to switch their digital service stack away from the other big two.
I don't know about everyone else, but the users where I'm at are way more comfortable with using something different than they've ever been. Sales staff push for services like salesforce. All kinds of users gripe that they'd prefer to work on a mac, both on the desktop and with laptops.
The remaining mental lock-in nowadays, where I come from, is really just Exchange+Outlook. Of course you can get Outlook to work with other combinations of services, and you can use different clients with Exchange, but what the users are used to is the utility afforded by using the two together.
Obviously this is just what I see at work... your situations likely differ.
As a former admin, I can say I've never heard of such training. For advanced 3d drafting software we sent people away for a week, but for office software people just figured it out. I also sat through the IBM shift to OpenOffice and Firefox, both occurred without training to 100,000+ people.
Nobody is trained to use consumer websites, but they still get considerable use. The web is like touch interfaces: Developers are wary of off-screen features (right-click, long, tap, etc). As these better rules roll out, the next major UI platform is going to be the web (on any architecture), because all people need is their software.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
as i stated before, ballmer never said that sales were modest, he said that surface had a modest distribution, i.e. only launching in a few markets.
The article is a huge sham, and makes all kinds of claims that it simply can't back up.
For example, the claim that Windows phones aren't selling. They've only been on the market for a couple of days, and 3 phones are on the market, and only one vendor has them. There is absolutely NO way to know whether or not Windows phones are going to be popular or not.
Based on initial reaction, however, and long lines outside ATT stores, it looks like they're off to a good start.
Likewise, the Surface tablets are only available online and in a few dozen stores so far. So there's no possible way to judge how well they will do overall once they're available everywhere. Plus, the more powerful Surface Pro's aren't even on the market yet, and many of the third party devices (like Sony's new models) have yet to ship.
Finally, we can see tell-tale signs of bias in the writing. "Unwanted touch interface"? Really? Who doesn't want a touch interface in a tablet? or Phone? And lots of people seem very keen on having a touch interface in their desktops.
There is an interesting class of internet troll that loves to find any outlet they can to claim that Touch in windows is unwanted, and this seems to be the case here.
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Eventually anything that gets big/successful will cause speculation that it's in decline.
I've been hearing it about America since I was a kid. IBM was in decline until they reinvented themselves a while back. I think they're supposedly in decline again. I don't remember when Microsoft started it's supposed downfall. Probably around the time of the dot.com bust. Apple was a walking corpse and then came back. I've heard they are in decline from several people in the last couple of years. Everything collapses eventually. I guess it's just human nature to try to be the first to predict the fall of successful endeavors.
> Few PC users are upgrading to Windows 8 with its unwanted Touch UI, sales of the Surface tablet are disappointing, and few are buying Windows Phones.
Enh.... not sure if I believe all that. As much as I'd like to see Microsoft become a much smaller company, I observe that Windows 8 hasn't been out long enough to tell yet what the penetration will be, same for Surface, and Windows Phone... well, he might have a point there. But I'm not sure I buy the "steep decline". I strongly suspect that Microsoft's decline, if it comes to that, will be slow and noisy. And hopefully somewhere along the line the board finally ejects Ballmer and gives Microsoft a chance in hell of producing products that people might want to buy.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I wouldn't count them out due to one word: Inertia.
Microsoft has a monopoly on two things: Desktop OS and Desktop Productivity. Every other market (Server OS, Database, Consoles, etc) has healthy competition.
Microsoft's problem is that the concept of the "Desktop" is in question. We are still going to use monitors & keyboards for a long time, but we're also going to be using tablets and phones/pdas. We want all of our data and work and entertainment to transfer seamlessly from one device to another. On top of that, we're going to want our session state to transfer, so we can resume things right where we left off. We want total hardware agnosticism.
Accomplishing this will require a UI revolution on the order of what windowing did to the command line, and nobody has invented it yet. The answer may not even come from one of the established players (although MS, Apple, and Google have the biggest head start). Whoever gets it right will win big.
Inertia only helps if your market is stable. Microsoft is, and probably always be, the King of the Desktop, in the same way that IBM was King of the Mainframe. Their problem is that their empire might be built on quicksand.
If Sinofsky had been around for over 2 decades with 'team player deficiencies', what does that say about Microsoft's management methods.
People have been saying that Microsoft is just on the edge of falling for decades now. If Vista didn't kill it, nothing will. After the complaints over the Metro UI deafen their ears, they will do what a lot of people in the company probably wanted to do in the first place. Ship Windows with an option for choosing Metro or the Classic Windows interface.
Apple benefited from Vista. It convinced more people to give Apple a try. I convinced about 4 people shopping for a computer at the time to stay away from Vista.
Apple will benefit again.
Interestly, Ubuntus is doing the same thing with Unity, which forced to discover how nice the KDE has become.
So in the end, everyone will win and Microsoft will still be here.
Investors don't care about inertia. They care about growth. Microsoft really has nowhere left to grow, at least nowhere that hasn't already been solidly claimed by another company. Their stock has been flat for 10 years. That's a long fucking time. Who wants to invest in a company without much real visible future growth potential? So the investors will pull out, and MS will coast on "inertia" for a while, but then what? What's their long-term plan for growth? I don't see them competing effectively in any market, at least with Ballmer at the wheel.
There is no problem submitting GPL based apps to the app store.
The only problem you will have is if the original copyright holder complains to Apple because they do not like GPL code being used in the App Store (like VLC or Gnu GO). But that's not on Apple, that's on the copyright holder.
Apple doesn't care if other people can see and use the source for the app you submit to the app store.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The article is a huge sham, and makes all kinds of claims that it simply can't back up. For example, the claim that Windows phones aren't selling.
I'm pretty confident that Windows phones aren't selling. in fact its still being outsold by Symbian and Bada...and RIM. Moving exclusivity to windows Phone destroyed Nokia.
Metro is a piece of shit. It's a tablet interface, and Microsoft is attempting to shove it up the asses of desktop users. Every time I point that out I get modded down as a troll or flamebaiting. Here we go again...
8 has only been out a month and already prognosticators know the future. BS
The problem with inertia is of using a familiar product. Once Microsoft forces you to use a different, unfamiliar product, that could even not fit in your way to use your computer, then alternatives start to play in the same field, Native desktop apps don't have the same prevalence than before, and the look and feel will change anyway, why not try something else?
People have been saying that Microsoft is just on the edge of falling for decades now.
The difference today is different. Microsoft with its monopolistic position and vast cash reserves, bullying tactics, and the usual things FUD; EEE etc could buy; bride; bully the competition into submission. Microsoft controlled the OS...so it was a Microsoft World.
Microsoft hasn't changed, the world has . Its competitors Apple; Google; Amazon; Facebook are in some cases bigger, and all are more successful in their fields, and have too much money to be bought; bribed or bullied. Its not stopped it trying, its just not really effective. The other side is computing has moved away from the OS its about the Internet whether you call it Web 2.0 or the cloud, and its moving away from the Desktop, and onto phones and tablets; Microsoft has been joke in those areas for a long time.
P
Well here we give in house MS Office training to those who request it, but we are a University and we give that training as a part of the business administration cursus, so that training only cost us the trainee time.
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
Ballmer Never said that SALES were modest, the quote is a " widely distributed mistranslation ".
Perfectly understandable, as the nuances with speaking Chair are very difficult to understand (especially when dodging).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why would there be lines several days AFTER the phones went on sale?
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Really what is the point in reading about Microsoft on slashdot. You only ever get the most negative side of the story and all there accomplishments never make it to the site. How many people know that Microsoft just demonstrated real time voice to voice translation using the original speakers own voice and the translated speech is in the correct order for the new language? (that is news for nerds as far as i'm concerned) But instead we have had six stories about how Microsoft is evil and forcing everyone to use a new version of windows that's completely broken and no one any where will ever be able to use it. Reddit is kicking your ass in journalism /.
Rocket Surgeon.
You're talking about previous versions of Windows Phone. Windows Phone 8 is a different OS, and the phones are actually decent now (hardware wise, on par with top android phones).
Windows Phone 8 has only been on sale a few days, so there is no possible way you could be confident in that.
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8 has only been out a month and already prognosticators
know the future.
BS
One month and its already unloved. The bottom line is the product is not going to change, and the opportunity to make an impact has gone. what is likely to change in future that will massively reverse its fortunes.
Ironically, they are just know starting to produce technically good products.
I'm no Microsoft fan (Windows 8 has my ire up currently), but some versions of Windows have been solid. Windows 98SE was a very nice blend of stability and speed. Windows 2000 was bulletproof. Windows XP was very strong after SP2. Windows 7 is actually a nice upgrade as well.
Office has a more checkered past. It has improved with age, but the ribbon gives it a major ding.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Its not just inertia, its the fact that other than the "Star Trek rule" stinkers (WinME/Vista/8) most folks? they are quite happy with Windows. And why shouldn't they be? After SP 2 WinXP was good, in fact its still being used over a decade after release because many are happy with it, and Win 7 is a damned good, rock solid OS with several features that make your work easier, breadcrumbs, jumplists, and superfetch just to name a few, so why shouldn't people just stick with what they like? XP is still good until 2014, Win 7 is good until 2020, why try to fix what ain't broke?
But as somebody that sells PCs and has since Win 3.1 I am really getting tired of the pundits and their "Post PC" horseshit, they have NO clue as to what is REALLY happening on the ground and nobody is replacing their PCs for a fricking cellphone!
I'll be happy to tell you what IS happening and what IS reality is...my dad. My dad is the perfect example of what is called a "typical user" today, he surfs, chats, uses FB, burns DVD, runs his Quickbooks, watches videos, he is as typical as you can possible get of an average Windows PC user. So when the price dropped on the Phenom IIs I thought to myself "Well it has been a few years since I built that cheap AM2 Phenom quad for my dad, maybe its time to build him a new system" so I set his PC to log his usage for a couple of weeks, then I came back and looked at the data. What did I find? 45%, that is what I found. Now we are talking a Phenom I with the TLB bug and a max speed of 2.2Ghz and the MOST he stressed that quad is 45% and that turned out to be a hung browser tab.
So the PC and MSFT are NOT going away, but when AMD and Intel hit the thermal wall and decided to switch from the MHz war to the core war the chips they produced, hell even for the low end like the Athlon triples or the first gen Core based Pentiums on the laptops, are just sooooo damned powerful the users just aren't stressing them so they just ain't needing replaced nearly as often.
I predict we have less than 3 years before we see mobile, which TFA thinks is to blame (Protip: Its not) have the same damned thing happen to it that happened to X86. i mean look at what is going on, they've switched to the core wars over MHz wars, and just like with X86 you are seeing a race to the bottom with even the low end starting to sport 1.2Ghz dual cores. i predict this time next year you'll see Android 5 dual core 7 inch tablets for $50, 10 inch quads for around $150, and just like with X86 everybody that wants one will have multiple units and will find there isn't any point in upgrading. The only except will be Apple, but as I've said before what saves Apple from hard times is they are NOT a tech company that makes fashionable devices but a FASHION company that just happens to make tech devices. That is why the only items you see people line up and camp out for are Air Jordans and Apple products, using last year's iPhone is as unhip as wearing last year's Jordans.
So MSFT and Windows won't be going anywhere, they just have to accept that people aren't gonna toss machines every 3 years like they did during the MHz wars. Hell as a gamer i used to have to replace my machine every year and a half like clockwork, now I'm gaming on an AMD Hexacore that was released nearly 3 years ago and see ZERO reason to upgrade more than the GPU. Hell even my low end system for the past five years have been a minimum of a triple core with 4gb of RAM and 500gb HDDs, what is the average user gonna do to slam that chip? Not a damned thing, which is why they'll hang onto it for years, if it ain't broke....
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The limited shelf space is due to Microsoft's rollout schedule, not anything related to stores. They've had the Surface for sale exclusively at their Windows Stores. No other brick and mortar store has been allowed to have them.
No, Windows Phone 7 phones have no bearing on Windows Phone 8.
There are a number of reasons for this. First, it's a totally different OS (it's based on the Windows 8 RT OS, not the old CE based OS. RT is the same code base as desktop Windows 8, just recompiled for ARM.)
Second, the previous generation of Windows Phones had largely substandard, low-end hardware that nobody wanted. The exception was the Lumia, but even that was not up to phones like the Galaxy SIII. The new phones are actually using quality hardware, with specs similar to high end android phones. For instance, the Samsung Ativ is essentially identical to the Galaxy SIII.
Third, Apps can now be shared between Phone, Tablet, and Desktop OS's, so you only have to uby it once and can use it in all three. Again, thanks to them sharing the same OS.
Nokia is not dead. Certainly, they took a hit, but they were dying anyways. They knew what was coming down the pike and they knew it would take time for the strategy to evolve.
Windows Phone 8 was announced on October 29th, but the phones didn't actually go on sale until November 2nd, which was 12 days ago. Almost 2 weeks, but not quite.
You seriously consider a review to be "Honest" when it claims that tablet and phone users don't want touch?
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It doesn't matter how horribly Microsoft fails because there are no competitors trying to take over. Microsoft wins by default.
This is why companies like Canonical are making a big mistake by trying to chase after the Apple crowd, when they should be going after the enterprise.
I think the complaint is touch interfaces on the desktop.
Windows 8 overall has some nice changes (I am currently running it myself) however what sucks are the so called "immersive" apps. Basically, any app that comes from the windows store.
When you have a large (in my case, 46") high resolution display, having apps take up the entire screen is downright stupid. Overlapping windows allow you to view multiple different things simultaneously, even if they aren't provided by the same app. This is why windows replaced DOS for the work environment (DOS mainly survived as long as it did due to being more efficient for games at the time)
The idea of throwing out overlapping windows in favor of an "immersive" experience is just...stupid. If this really is the future of windows, then windows has no future in the workplace, and probably no future anywhere else either as a result.
This is coming from somebody who has a traditionally favorable view of windows.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
The debacle of Vista would have killed most other tech companies, but thanks to inertia and near-total monopoly, Microsoft had room to breathe while it fixed its messes.
Vista peaked with a global market share of 20 to 25 percent.
Not half bad considering that most installs can be traced back to the retail purchase of a fairly muscular and expensive 64 bit OEM Home Premium system bundle.
... Although it might be cheaper from a licensing and maintenance perspective to put everyone on Ubuntu, the cost of re-training all your employees to use LibreOffice and Unity greatly exceeds the cost of licensing the products.
It is surprising to me (jaded as I am) that businesses and governments fail to recognize that the conversion effort and retraining needed to shift between the recent (read: last decade or more) "upgrades" of MS products is no different than that required to move to open platforms.
I moved from MS to Linux (and associated open applications) many years ago. I have saved hundreds (nay, thousands) of dollars in license fees by doing so. Open data formats have saved my bacon on more than one occasion. I've been able to rescue and reformat data for my friends and employers with open source applications on many occasions.
Cost of training is in lost productivity, not necessarily on actual training courses. I'm an admin with 10 years of experience. My productivity would suffer significantly if you gave me a Mac or asked me to manage an unfamiliar distro. A week of lost productivity would easily cost my company thousands of dollars worth of my time.
Spread that out over a company of hundreds, or thousands and the numbers really add up.
There is a huge misconception on this. I don't know who came up with this "Immersive experience" BS, but I've never heard Microsoft refer to it as that, and it's not the point of it all.
First, understand that Metro apps are designed to run in 3 environments, Desktops, Tablets, and Phones. All current Tablets and Smart Phones have single app per screen interfaces.
The original reason for this was so that app developers did not have to worry about different devices with different resolutions. That ship has long since sailed, but the app format persists.
The biggest reason, however, is that dragging windows around does not work well with touch interfaces. So making them full screen, with "sliding" windows based on gestures and taps is a lot easier to manipulate. This is the primary reason this interface is still the norm for touch devices.
This is also why they have large icons and buttons, because tiny menus just don't work with touch. Microsoft already tried that, several times, and it didn't work. Apple's approach took off wildly, and has been a great success.
So, Metro apps are designed to be used by both Desktops with keyboards and mice, and touch devices (some of which are also desktops).
FYI, Metro allows you to run two apps, using the Metro snap feature.
Remember, this is a 1.0 OS (yes, Metro.. also known as WinRT is an entire new OS running alongside Win32) and as with all 1.0 products, if you waited to release it until you had every feature you wanted, it would never get released.
Expect the next version to significantly improve multi-tasking ability.
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You're talking about previous versions of Windows Phone. Windows Phone 8 is a different OS, and the phones are actually decent now (hardware wise, on par with top android phones).
Windows Phone 8 has only been on sale a few days, so there is no possible way you could be confident in that.
2013 will be the year of Windows Phone :)
Maybe not, but it's certainly going to be a lot better for Windows Phone than previous years.
Nobody, not even Microsoft, expects Windows Phones to beat iPhone's popularity, or surpass Android in total units. But, it could put a huge dent in both's market share.
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So the investors will pull out, and MS will coast on "inertia" for a while, but then what?
Then they either succeed or fail, like any other company. They don't need investors with all the revenue they have.
What's their long-term plan for growth?
They are trying to transition into mobile. They still have a chance to convert their desktop users to mobile.
I don't see them competing effectively in any market, at least with Ballmer at the wheel.
I don't know why Ballmer gets all this bashing. Yes, he's a chair-throwing, sweaty gorilla yelling, "Developers, developers, developers!" But it's not like he's run the company into the ground, and Gates didn't have the Steve Jobs magic touch when it came to mobile or other consumer devices, either.
But, it could put a huge dent in both's market share.
I'm intrigued how. Microsoft Phone failed when it had positive reviews; Nokia still had reasonable market share, and a plan to convert existing users from Symbian it didn't work. Samsung and HTC and LG [now android exclusive and profitable again] were manufactures that didn't work. It had an opportunity to convert that tiny market share by growing its own group of fanatics; It threw them under the bus with an OS update. Arguing its an improved OS on improved hardware is not enough, iOS and Android both have improved hardware and OS's, and will not stumble. In all likelihood Microsoft will be less successful, and is less resilient to mistakes..
The bottom line though is right now people desire iOS and Android phones...but aren't interested in Windows Phone whatever the version or hardware. The new strategy looks a lot like the old strategy, with the exception of Windows 8 ecosystem [sic], and the treat to OEM's of first party hardware [whatever you think of that]. I personally cannot think of one single compelling reason why my next phone should be windows, and multiple reasons why not, and your arguments reflect that.
Really? I would never hire any admin that can't handle at least a handful of OS'es. If there is a new OS, as an admin, I am supposed to learn about it and get some hands-on experience. It's built-in to my job to learn new things.
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Everyone talks about growth as the be all and end all. Microsoft is already pretty big. As long as they remain profitable, they don't really need to grow to stay in business.
I know the thought process behind forcing the apps to be full screen, but the problem is that this model simply doesn't work for the desktop. Currently, the main reason for having a desktop as opposed to a mobile device (at least, to ma and pa yehaaw) is that a desktop is where you get real work done, e.g. drafting, creating a powerpoint presentation, etc. Touch devices (even with large screens) don't really work too well for that. The keyboard and mouse will be around for a long time to come for this reason. Likewise, the full screen app model simply will not fly on the desktop, that I am certain of.
A perfect example I can think of, is just now when I was entering in configuration commands into some cisco routers, I had three telnet windows open, an excel window which contained subnet layouts and IP addresses, one visio window which contained a physical network topology, another visio window which contained a logical network topology, and a web browser with a command reference page open.
How on earth would I do such a thing using metro? I'm sure you could, but it would be dreadfully slow and downright frustrating compared to being able to have multiple windows open at once. Imagine having to alt-tab through all of those windows each time I need to refer to something else. It would be a nightmare, whereas with overlapping windows I can simply glance at my references rather than figure out how many times I have to press tab in order to get what I am looking for.
While I'm aware of the ability to run two apps alongside one another (I think they might call that "modern UI snap" now? lol) it is really wanting in the face of having multiple windows open. Telnet and excel both depend heavily upon being able to have page width, and not height, which is what metro snap aims for.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
What are you on about saying the Ativ is a Galaxy SIII?
It almost identical to the a Galaxy SII. Dual Core CPU as well (SIII is QUAD CORE), EXACTLY the same case just bigger and silver. Fuck, even the Windows button is the same button as a Galaxy SII with a Windows Icon on it.
http://versusio.com/en/samsung-galaxy-s2-vs-samsung-ativ-s
http://versusio.com/en/samsung-galaxy-s3-vs-samsung-ativ-s
Galaxy SIII SHITS all over Ativ S.
... and MS needed a full screen offering to compete with Apple and its full screen Apps in Lion and Mountain Lion.
The logic must be:
typical user == someone on a laptop or 15 - 21 inch monitor
typical user of the near future == someone on a tablet or 15 - 21 inch monitor
Let's give these people full screen apps.
Power user = someone on a laptop or bigger monitor
We'll give them the desktop as another option.
Metro works nicely on handheld touchscreen devices. On the desktop? Meh. I have a couple of 2560x1440 panels. Windows knows that I have a mouse and keyboard and the monitors are not touch screens. It should be smart enough to come up with a better UI for this configuration. It's ridiculous that when I open the weather app, it goes full screen. Does Microsoft really believe four million pixels are needed to tell me if it's going to rain tomorrow?
As a developer, Metro sucks. Windows really are invaluable when programming. I want my IDE open, API docs open, the application running, a console tailing a log, and maybe even a chat window or email client running. I have more than enough pixels and I'm running an operating system called "Windows". Why can't I actually have windows?
No
A perfect example I can think of, is just now when I was entering in configuration commands into some cisco routers, I had three telnet windows open, an excel window which contained subnet layouts and IP addresses, one visio window which contained a physical network topology, another visio window which contained a logical network topology, and a web browser with a command reference page open.
With the greatest respect ... I don't think you are the kind of user Microsoft thinks of in design.
The typical users in my office do one thing at once in maximized windows. Look at outlook, now facebook, now type in word, now facebook, now type in word, now facebook, now outlook, now facebook .....
Each time they jump from full screen app to full screen app
Samnsung, HTC, and LG are not exclusive to Android. They all have Windows Phone 8 devices, either announced or already shipping.
Check the specs on these:
http://www.samsung.com/global/ativ/ativ_s.html#features
http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_windows_phone_8x-4975.php
People desire iOS and Android phones because Microsoft has done a shit job of marketing Windows Phones. That is changing.
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Sorry you should re-read my post. LG used to make windows phones, and was suffering as a result. Like Nokia is but Nokia were stupid enough to go exclusive. They are now Android exclusive and are now profitable again. I said nothing of the other manufacturers.
As for your new claim that Windows Phone is a failure because of marketing I'm not even going to bother to refute. Again re-read my post. Its not great but covers the main point new windows strategy looks like old windows strategy from a worse starting position.
I'm not sure where they got those specs, but many of them are wrong.
For example, I have a galaxy SIII 32GB, it has 16GB internal and a 16GB sdcard. The specs claim the galaxy has 32GB internal, which isn't the case, and the Ativ S has the same expandability.
Unlike Android, however, there's none of that dual brained BS with sdcards.
It's true about the dual core vs quad core, but I'd much rather have a faster dual core than a slower quad core.
The Ativ S does have navigation.
It's true the Ativ doesn't have Gorilla Glass. That's because it has Gorilla Glass 2. Sheesh.
It's true, there are differences, and the Galaxy does beat the Ativ in some of them, but the reverse is also true.
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You missed the point dude. It's not about whether or not someone is able to learn a new OS, It's about the cost of doing so. No matter how flexible you are, you are going to be slower work in an environment you're not used to. Lost productivity probably costs a lot more than you think.
I understand what this was all about. Microsoft's plan was to quickly force the RT environment on people so they would automatically be members of the new ecosystem and feel naturally inclined to buy the phones and tablets, especially once they realized you could do more with RT than with iOS. But as things stand now, every time someone is forced to use the RT interface against their will, they are reminded of how their options have been restricted. No matter how good RT is, if it serves as a reminder of a bad feeling, it will be tainted by that. Instead of bringing people into the fold, RTs involuntary start screen drives people away.
Even so, I think Microsoft can still rescue Windows 8 if it just does a few things.
1) Issue an apology and bring back the start button as an optional item, and allow people to boot directly to the desktop. (Yes I know... just like Start8 / Classic Shell) It seems to me that a huge percentage of gripes have been about those two things, starting long before RTM. Why fight against what your customers want?
2) Buy up a couple of good RT games and release them as free gifts to upgraders. $45 in free software! The OS pays for itself!!
3) Reposition Windows 8 as an improved desktop environment PLUS free games PLUS a Windows Phone 8 compatible OS skin which people can use or not use.
Yes, the restoration of the start button and starting desktop means RT use will grow more slowly, only at the pace that people want to try it out. But in the long run, it will make for a better user experience, one that people will want to return to.
The marketing of Windows 8 has been horribly arrogant. By pissing off geeks, MS has alienated its proselytizers and enthusiasts. By pissing off businesses, it has affected its own bottom line. Every day that this debacle continues is one less opportunity that MS has to set things right.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
If I show up on slashdot and finger dump my scorn and derision for ten frantic minutes to clear the pyschological slate to continue wrangling with aramid gloves the glass shards of a fragile technology stack (lets say Meteor on top and OpenCL on the bottom) for another long six hour half-day and in my flurry to vent I end two sentences in the same paragraph with "rapidity" I consider myself to be in bad form.
But I can understand the male psyche permuting the words "frightening rapidity" over and over and over again. Really, I can.
Other words: aspiration, modest, abject failure, carpal tunnel nightmare, scream market acceptance, tighter integration, abandon[ment], gushing, clueless, intransigent, and myopic
Carpal tunnel. That's so true. If you can't perform, your wrists take a beating.
Exactly. Everybody talks now about iPhone and iPad because those two products became a money printing machine for Apple, but the original iMac and the eMac were astounding products at its time. After all, the eMac became a consumer product by popular demand, not because Apple expected it to be sold outside the education market.
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This gives Microsoft something that few others have: time to correct its screwups.
You mean, enough time to screw up even worse.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
It seems to me that Microsoft considers the desktop to be a legacy interface, and that tablet interfaces are the way of the future. It's as if they only support having desktop programs at all just for backward compatibility reasons, and that everything new should use Metro.
What Microsoft's Windows team doesn't understand is that there are many things a desktop interface can do that Metro cannot. For example, have more than two programs on the screen at once.
Some of these restrictions are even done for nothing but Microsoft's benefit, in the name of security. Metro applications cannot use plugins, because all executable code has to be signed by Microsoft at application publishing time. Metro applications cannot do runtime code generation, making it difficult to write a browser that performs well. Metro applications cannot read or write any files except their own or the ones it writes.
There are many things that Windows 8 added that were really awesome even for desktop use, but it's just been polluted with this Metro crap. Let's see... UEFI booting, really fast startup, better security hardening, storage spaces... but you're forced to get the tablet UI on a desktop.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
In my work environment, everybody uses two or even three monitors because they have so many windows open.
Especially when we're working on UCS systems. You'll want the command center window open, in addition to the KVM for the individual virtual machines, as well as your obligatory excel document containing pinning assignments and other notes.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
You are not an admin. You are a regurgitator. I'm not trying to be a dick, I just want you to realize where you actually fit in the food chain.
An admin has no trouble shifting to new environments on the fly. He/she doesn't think twice about doing so, its just part of the job. No OS is so different that it matters, even the jump from UNIX to Windows is trivial if you are qualified to call yourself an admin.
Just because you have root on some boxes doesn't make you an admin.
Yes, there is a cost to the switch, but if that cost is significant for a given 'admin' then it shows that you are unable to quickly adapt to a new environment and find the resources you need to complete the job. Windows admin really isn't THAT different now days, the answer to any problem is almost certainly a Google away in any case you're likely to hit. I can safely say that because someone at your level isn't going to be doing anything that hasn't been done a million times before.
In my career, I've dealt with more than one person like you. Not that there is anything wrong with you, but you think you are more capable than you are in one respect while realizing you aren't in others. My typical treatment towards someone like this is to nudge them towards finding a 'higher paying' job else where and get them out of my umbrella. They'll generally fail, but then they also generally get the point and learn the difference, and their next job works out a whole lot better for them. This may not be 'nice', but being nice typically doesnt' get the point across or you would have realized it already.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
And how many business applications did you also move with you in your conversion?
Just because all you do is dick around and 'admin' your desktop so making the transition was nothing to you doesn't mean everyone else does jack shit on their desktops either.
I could spend $50k in licensing fees on an employee and it wouldn't be jack shit in comparison to all the other costs associated with an employee. If you think licensing costs for Windows and Office are 'huge', you've never ran a business.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Apple was certainly a viable company before the iThings culture, but the iThings culture is most certainly when they got their money printing machine installed.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Based on initial reaction, however, and long lines outside ATT stores, it looks like they're off to a good start.
Please who me one non-windows fan site that states that, and show me one picture of said lines where anyone in the line shows their face rather than looking like a setup photo.
The only lines I've seen are shown standing in an empty parking lot, where they would be ran over if there was actual traffic to the store, not wrapped around the store like would happen if the parking lot were full and had cars moving through it.
You've been trolled.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
i agree... how much easier would it be to figure out openoffice writer having used word 2003 compared to going from word 2003 to word 2007 (ribbons)
...and now with windows 8 users will have to cope with the metro icon screen and all that hidy screen edge bullshit (how about where they put the hutdown command?) would be the ideal opportunity to migrate to openoffice or libreoffice, which ironically still looks a lot like office 2003.
the microsoft magnets are application software that depends on things like sqlserver, and autodesk is basically a microsoft subsidiary so running autocad, inventor, 3ds, etc under linux or mac will become harder and more impossible
microsoft is getting cocky enough to discontinue sbs soon, which will force small businesses to "upgrade" to windows server (and one of the two top editions if they want exchange).
With the greatest respect ... I don't think you are the kind of user Microsoft thinks of in design.
And this is where Microsoft has failed, completely.
The typical users in my office do one thing at once in maximized windows. Look at outlook, now facebook, now type in word, now facebook, now type in word, now facebook, now outlook, now facebook .....
Are these users doing so on small monitors because no one bothered to get them large monitors they could be more productive on? The only time you see that behavior is on 15" monitors. Give people larger displays and that rapidly goes away.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The problem is ... who uses full screen apps in Lion/Mountain Lion?
So far, those versions suck as they basically just hide the menu bar, which is rather useful to most people.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Hardware was never the problem. Nokia hardware has always been very good, and HTC hardware is certainly not bad. The Lumia is a great piece of hardware; it's basically an upgrade to the MeeGo phone of yesteryear.
The problem is the software. Win Phone 7 phones didn't sell because people didn't want a Windows phone. At a glance (as someone who has played with them but not bought them), Win Phone 8 looks extremely similar, superficially, to 7. Why would the higher version number persuade me to change my mind?
I'm sorry AC but you are wrong and here is why: You have users that are doing tasks suitable for a compact car yet they have a fire burning funny car as far as performance goes!
The simple fact is writing software that can truly take advantage of even just two cores is REALLY hard, and to write software that can truly take advantage of 4 or more cores without having serious issue with stalls is INSANELY hard. But AMD and Intel have kept on adding cores, 4 cores on the Intel and 8 on the AMD. Hell look at the Steam specs page, even though we can have AMD 6 cores for $105 and Intel quads for less than $200 we see the number 1 setup being....dual cores, why? Because most games don't need more because again the software just hasn't kept up.
Will we see somebody come up with a way to use all those cores? Probably, but until we have a fundamental shift in the way software is built you'll have users with funny cars driving to the grocery store. Hell if they switched to quad cores tomorrow that would cover damned near every customer I have had since the Phenom I, that was...what? Five years ago? We just have more power, more RAM, more graphics, and more storage space than we know what to do with now.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If Microsoft loses the consumer market, it will lose the corporate market as well. Microsoft owns the corporate desktop market, because users are familiar with it's products.
That logic might apply for the Desktop OS, but like most MS bashers you seem to have not taken into account the monopoly MS has with AD/DNS/DHCP/GPO/Exchange/SQL/IIS and the corporate back office ecosystem that everyone knows and understands. There simply isn't anything that comes close to this*, and if you're not moving away from that, then you may as well make life easier for yourself and keep an MS desktop too. I don't see MS going anywhere. Worst case is Win8 flops, and MS maintain support for Win7 until they release a replacement, then life carries on. *Feel free to post a suggested replacement. But don't bother with a hodge podge home brew mix of unsupported free apps. Any viable replaceble has to have the same or better features, with the same or better UI, and the same or better support.
I have mod points but have lready posted in this thread, so I can't do it myself. That's a very interesting (and quite short) article, though.
TL;DR version: Distribution is modest (only in a few regions), but device is well received.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
>>>
You don't have to use or even like Windows 8.
>>>
You are 10% right, no make that 1%. It is practically impossible to find decent laptops or desktops *without* Windows. And please do not offer any links for Linux pre-installed. I have just gone through 3 dozens of them.
The only way you could be right is: you pay up and erase Windows. Hands up all of you that accept this approach.
They are embracing interoperability, just not in the way you mean.
Dynamics CRM, AX/NAV/GP, Sharepoint, Office and Outlook, Exchange, SQL Server (including SSAS and SSRS).
At the corporate level, the cost of software is not in the licenses. It's in the customisation to conform to your business processes (and the maintenance of those customisations).
MS have one technology stack that covers 80% of your business out of the box. All the pieces integrate with each other as standard (or at least MS are driving everything in this direction). They are making customisation simpler (read: less coding) with each iteration. And MS are the only technology company doing it.
Who cares if an operating system (or a foray into hardware) happens to be a poor performer?
Question everything?
Vista wasn't a failure. From a commercial point of view, it was a roaring success.
Since Microsoft has such complete dominance over the desktop, making money with Windows is about as hard as falling off a log. While desktops might not be the growth market they once were, Microsoft could put out a complete turd and it will still fly off the shelves because of OEM installs. Despite everyone moaning about Windows 8, it'll fly off the shelves. I've seen it all before; everyone moaned about the transition to Windows 95 and training costs, but it was still hugely successful thanks to OEM sales. Even Windows ME was a roaring success, commercially. Everyone moans, but OEMs still install it and MS are guaranteed to turn a big profit off even the worst version of Windows.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Bang on. but what we will be seeing is a convergence of tablet and ultrabook. With a proper docking station solution perhaps even tablet/ultrabook/desktop. And that's why I think that Windows 8(not RT...that's a solution to a problem that has already been solved a quadrillion times) and the touch centric approach is quite clever in the long run.
MS is quite painfully aware that Windows 8 is a non-event in the corporate world. Those have just upgraded to Win7 or are planning to do so in the near future. So they need to peddle Win8 to private users. People will get used to the new stuff when it is bundled with new computers.
In the meantime folks like Asus/Lenovo show the world the real potential of Ultrabook/Tablet hybrids with a touch screen. I guess MS is aware that the introduction of Win8 is a long-term effort. And they know, why they do it. And I think it is less of a gamble than people might think.
Also I don't see the need for more computing power for private users in the near future. So Intel/AMD will propably spend more time to scale down their CPUs to a level where they don't need so much active cooling.
By the time Win8 is fully established we will hopefully also have something similar for Desktop Linux. I have to admit I haven't followed Linux news for a long time but I know not of an effort to use touch screens with multitouch on stock desktop Linux. If somebody would care to enlighten me? I'm flirting with the thought of buying on of those i7 ultrabook/tablet mongrels that will be offered by Asus and Lenovo by the end of next year.
20 minutes into the future
So the PC and MSFT are NOT going away, but when AMD and Intel hit the thermal wall and decided to switch from the MHz war to the core war the chips they produced, hell even for the low end like the Athlon triples or the first gen Core based Pentiums on the laptops, are just sooooo damned powerful the users just aren't stressing them so they just ain't needing replaced nearly as often.
I predict we have less than 3 years before we see mobile, which TFA thinks is to blame (Protip: Its not) have the same damned thing happen to it that happened to X86.
Yes, and even less than that I'd bet. The latest ARM implementations, whether Cortex A15 or Krait, are already hitting a thermal wall. When benchmarking the latest Qualcomm quad-core S4 based on Krait on Nexus 4 and the cousin LG phone Anandtech saw some discrepancies in the benchmarks results that they eventually traced to thermal throttling. On one phone they had to run the benchmark is several goes due to software issues, and it had better results than on the phone where the benchmarks all run in one go. The only difference was due to cooling between tests on the first phone. To prove the point and avoid the effect they benchmarked both phones in a zip bag in a freezer :-P
Just as for PC chips we'll still see some incremental improvements with new processes and tweaks, but I expect this mobile next gen to be able to last for a while.
If Microsoft loses the consumer market, it will lose the corporate market as well. Microsoft owns the corporate desktop market, because users are familiar with it's products.
Your analysis is dead wrong. Microsoft owns the corporate market because programmers write business programs that will run only on Microsoft operating systems. If the applications could easily move, Microsoft would immediately fall. They have earned absolutely zero loyalty.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
and the look and feel will change anyway, why not try something else?
Because all the old software you still own, still works.
Your new computer works with the old software, and before you know it you've also learned the new UI. Now you have the best of both worlds.
In general growth is seen as essential because the world grows. There are more and more computers in the world, if MS keeps selling the same amount of OS installs, they are not stagnant, they are shrinking as measured by market share.
If your customers grow and you do not, you are shrinking.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
1080p is not "high res"
Nah office monitors work like real life desk real estate.
If you don't have the extra space you adjust by flip flopping through windows/piles of papers/folders and basically micromanaging the layout. It has a time and cognitive cost to do all that paging through crap to find what you want.
If you do have the extra space you make use of it more or less unconsciously/automatically. You will notice when it is gone however when you want it or notice you are spending more time fudging around flipping between things when you try to get work done.
If you do have the extra desk space/extra desktop monitors then you are able to spread things out more, support more stacks or smaller stacks and buffer information you want to be visible longer. It cuts down on visual search time and cognitive cost of searching because things are split (think sorting algorithms, same idea in a binary or similar search in that you already have multiple buckets when you start your search cutting down how much initial work you have to do to find something). 2d desktop spread allow you to your mapping memory more naturally.
It is not just pile X on monitor A and pile Y on monitor B but upper right corner of A has pile X but pile Y is in lower right corner of monitor B. All this is made easy because the human brain automates it without you having to think it through. It is leveraging the human brain ability to buffer information spatially.
This will be even greater with 3D desktops whenever that happens. The future for high bandwidth computer use is not even more restrictive 2d layouts (or in the case with metro 2d mapped to 1d -- ugh), but 3d desktops layouts. Currently we just do a 3d mapped/flattened into 2d but I would like to see a full 3d environment some day for desktop/tier 1 object organization.
a huge percentage of users on classic windows operates in full screen.
...is to update Windows 8 so it has a switch in the user settings area: optimize for touch screen input, or optimize for mouse/trackpad input. The former gives you the Metro start screen, and the latter gives you back the Start button. That's all they need to do and the main problem with Windows 8 would basically be eliminated. I think the idea of trying to create a single OS that works on both desktops and tablets is a good one; a couple of relatively minor tweaks and I think Windows 8 could be excellent.
That said, Metro on a tablet is awesome -- I just bought my wife an Asus Vivotab with RT and we were both blown away by how nice it is. I mean, it's the same concept as an iPad (sliding tiles around) but something about the way the tiles are grouped and whatnot makes it easier to use and more customizable IMO. (For mobile, I don't get the hate for Metro. The people who complain about the "learning curve" strike me as idiots -- it took me about an hour of messing around with it to figure out how to navigate everything pretty much perfectly.)
If the world were made of engineers and developers then your work environment would have been the driving force for the OS.
why are you not just using desktop apps then and using the start screen as an app launcher?
This applies to kitchens as an analogy. Do you want to prepare a Thanksgiving dinner in a kitchen with a little 3x3 counter in it or do you want a kitchen lined with a lot of counter space? With more space you can actively work on more things faster. Period.
In the real world, most organizations aren't blessed to be completely staffed by godlike cyber-warriors who can context-switch platforms without a financially detectable loss of productivity.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
And I could spend 50k licenses for an employee and it would be insane because they don't make close to that in one year, if not two. Not all businesses are large businesses with huge budgets, in some businesses saving $1000 here or there makes a pretty big difference.
You know what? This is what people don't get... you are right. Metro kind of blows for the desk top. Today companies develop applications for the desktop, or for the browser. They also produce applications for iOS and Android... Guess what? It won't change. Tomorrow companies will develop applications for the desktop or the browser. And they will also produce applications for iOS, Android, and Metro.
But here is the cool thing. Lets suppose I have a metro device (tablet, phone, whatever) that app I bought... ALSO works on my desktop. Yeah, it might not be the best experience, and eventually you might pony up and get the super duper mega desktop version. BUT the metro desktop experience blows the iOS desktop experience completely away... cause it doesn't exist!
By the time Microsoft is fixing the thing things that are wrong with the experience, Apple might be figuring out they need to me doing the same thing, and it will be too late.
While I agree that most desktops are way overpowered you are making an assumption that I don't believe holds true. You are suggesting that since most single programs do not use multiple cores effectively or at all, that all the other cores on a particular machine are sitting idle. Anecdotal evidence suggests many/most users run more than a single program at a time and in that context multi-core machines excel.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
"A Spanish speaker has no trouble shifting to new languages on the fly. He/she doesn't think twice about doing so, its just part of the job. No Romance language is so different that it matters, even the jump from Spanish to Italian is trivial if you are qualified to call yourself a Spanish speaker."
If you spot a problem there, I'd invite you to go back and re-read your post. Now ask yourself, would this Spanish speaker, with no professional exposure to Italian, be able to at least understand Italian (written or spoken)? Yes, they probably would. Is it reasonable to expect them to be up to professional standards within a week, and with no significant downtime?
Similarly, exactly who are these admins and what are they doing?
Ok so you call it a misconception and confirm that it is true, not a misconception at all. And you also confirm that aiming to do well in touch devices has hurt usability in regular devices.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Even when I jump from full screen app to full screen app, I do it by clicking the taskbar. AFAICT, the only way to jump to another app in Win 8 is to alt-tab for 15 minutes until you get to the one you want, or go to the Metro screen and find which of the 100 tiles you want.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Investors don't care about inertia. They care about growth. Microsoft really has nowhere left to grow, at least nowhere that hasn't already been solidly claimed by another company. Their stock has been flat for 10 years. That's a long fucking time. Who wants to invest in a company without much real visible future growth potential? So the investors will pull out, and MS will coast on "inertia" for a while, but then what? What's their long-term plan for growth? I don't see them competing effectively in any market, at least with Ballmer at the wheel.
What do investors or stock have anything to do with running a company. Do you think that the stock price going up somehow ends up with more money in Microsoft's pocketbook? It is simply gambling on what people think companies will do in the future. The only time a company gets money from stock is at the IPO. Someone can feel free to correct me if I got this wrong, I'm not really a stock expert. I just don't understand why companies care all that much about their stock price, unless they are looking to sell to another company.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
In the real world, most organizations aren't blessed to be completely staffed by godlike cyber-warriors who can context-switch platforms without a financially detectable loss of productivity.
Wait, what? Is that how your IT department works? Seriously?
If your IT department is even halfway competent, you get forewarning that there's going to be a change. More importantly, you get time to anticipate and adapt to it. It isn't like the boss stops by one day, plops a MacBook Pro on your desk and says "you get to work with this now".
If you don't want to take that lead time and put it to good use (even if it's done on your off-time due to a rotten schedule), then yeah... you really shouldn't be an admin.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The typical users in my office do one thing at once in maximized windows. Look at outlook, now facebook, now type in word, now facebook, now type in word, now facebook, now outlook, now facebook .....
Each time they jump from full screen app to full screen app
Really? Account Payable|Receivable usually has excel, web browser (to various bank accounts), email, and a 10-key calc app open all at once. During tax season, it gets even crazier. HR/payroll is often just as crazy, and don't ask what the engineers do all at the same time.
Here on the sysadmin side, yeah, it's a bit nuts (vSphere, a zillion instances of PuTTY, an RDP app with 10 different sessions on it... and that's just the remote stuff). On the other hand, most other departments also have multiple apps open at once, plus do a lot of cut+paste... and not just facebook and Excel.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
You're talking about previous versions of Windows Phone. Windows Phone 8 is a different OS, and the phones are actually decent now (hardware wise, on par with top android phones).
Windows Phone 8 has only been on sale a few days, so there is no possible way you could be confident in that.
They said the save thing about windows phone 7
http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2010/03/16/7-reasons-windows-7-phone-iphone-killer/
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/080811-windows-phone7.html
http://www.itpro.co.uk/627835/head-to-head-iphone-4-vs-windows-phone-7-vs-android
http://www.aido.com/blogs/my-blog--sanjays-blog/lg-windows-phone-7----the-iphone-killer
http://www.techulator.com/resources/4775-Few-Reasons-Why-Windows-Phone-iphone-killer.aspx
Linux/*BSD servers offer some rather flexible alternatives to these:
AD: OpenLDAP + Heimdal
DNS/DHCP: ISC Bind + ISC DHCP (with ddns)
GPO: OpenLDAP, PAM, RADIUS + your preferred hacks
Exchange: A capable IMAP server (i.e. Cyrus or Dovecot) + ICal server (Cyrus plus patches)
SQL/IIS: The usual suspects
It's easy to get into the mindset that a proprietary Ecosystem is hard to replace. If you take away the implied requirement that Microsoft has to exist on the Desktop (but but... it doesn't support Outlook Calendaring), the pieces start to fall into place.
In all cases, the open alternatives offer a more flexible solution, and in most cases, a far more efficient one.
Whatever flexibility you get from a graphical interface (Server Manager) is going to get trumped by a well honed script.
Because when the stock price declines to much, the stock holders vote in new people to run the company in hopes that new management will be able to make the company more profitable (and raise the stock price).
Yes, Microsoft is in decline because of history and now the cloud. The internet has given us information about companies for years, good and bad. MS's history track record has shown us a lot of bad things nerds don't like: Requested Backdoors, holes that make it easy to attack with scripts, wonderful DRM, Trusted computing, UEFI BIOS and a LIVE Cloud based OS that pours your every day life, up to the minute on the Start screen right in your face all in bright coloured ugly boxes. The desktop where you used to have your wallpaper that showed you photos that you cherished, like mother that had just passed away or the trip you took to the top of a volcano or scuba diving off the islands or your favourite game background. Your temporary sanity instantly removed at start-up by MS before the long tedious job ahead clicking or rubbing the screen for 8, 10 or 16 hours. Most Slashdot nerds don't like the cloud or finger prints but they use it. They want their own cloud at home and not at Microsoft. Oh, here is the new Windows 8, setup your identity with all of your emails and proceed to the next screen and we will full-fill your every wish on the new Start Desktop. MS got in trouble years ago when they allowed outsiders tell them how to do their business, the Federal and local government, the Movie and Recording Industry and worst of all, the Advertising Industry and not to miss mentioning crapping all over their hardware suppliers. Acer has every right in the world to hold off on the MS monopoly BS and the impact on their products. Hats off to Acer, you found some balls. Too bad the others haven't followed you! These changes above has also effected Linux and Apple machines. MS is doing everything to limit the damage caused by these other two wonderful Operating System's but can't seem to stop them. Linux and Apple phones and tablets have taken over Microsoft’s grip. Android has made Linux number 1 today and most people don't realise android is Linux. Linux is NOW and MS knows it. With PlayOnLinux, you can run .exe files in Ubuntu and it works great. Canonical is going in the right direction and their product is getting very easy to use. Apple too, even with their overpriced hardware. Canonical needs to make a simple easy to set-up Ubuntu Personal Cloud for the Home and stop wasting to much money buying hard drives for their cloud. Ubuntu One is fine but keep at 5 gigs. Home is where the heart is.
Intel is feeling the pinch. ARM is the future. AMD is on the rocks and this sucks too. I personally have tried to contact AMD to show the how stack computer chips but no reply. IBM has just developed on-chip liquid cooling and I can show them how to stack them. Contact me.
Good Luck MS especially after destroying the desktop. I'm not at all afraid to say, I won't miss you, been a ride for 18 years, I have moved on and not looking back.
Maybe after MS is gone we can progress and expand our knowledge and the computer.
A special thanks to the free minded people around the world for writing code. You are tied for second place with Scientists only after Doctors and Nurses that devote their lives to saving humanity.
I see this too AND Exchange+Outlook CAN be broken. So Microsoft better keep trying to come up with some new stuff that people might actually want.
Where Microsoft actually has a monopoly is in small businesses at least with their servers. You know small businesses are getting rarer than rocking horse poop.
I disagree with you completely. The more proficient your team is on a specific operating system, the more expensive it's going to be to move to a new one. My focus is on RedHat based distros, since that's what's used in the business world. If you asked me to admin a Debian site, or a Freebsd site, or a Solaris site, I'd be absolutely able to pull it off, but my productivity would suffer for a while.
For example, right now I could build a Cobbler host and Kickstart a hundred machines inside of a day or two. If you asked me to do the same with Jumpstart or FAI, the same simple task would probably take me a week. I could absolutely do it, but as a consultant the real cost to my company for moving from Centos to Debian based on that project alone, would be thousands of dollars.
I did switch from Fedora to Ubuntu on my desktop machines. There was definitely a learning curve, and I'm a little slower with system management tasks. It was justified, since Fedora was fairly broken on the equipment I was using. I'm happy I made the switch.
On the other hand, if I was fairly Junior, the cost of switching OS would be lower. Since I'd have a learning curve ahead of me either way, it wouldn't really matter which way we went.
None of this is a complaint about Debian, or Solaris, or BSD. They are all competent and powerful operating systems. It's just an illustration of the potential issues.
I'm very very surprised by the strong reaction I received to my original post.
BTW... You still kind of missed the point. It doesn't matter if there is fore-warning - you are still spending time learning a new OS, that you could be spending on other productive tasks.
As well as Superdave80's points, stock is a nice perk for management and employees. It's a far better incentive when it's likely to appreciate in value. I wouldn't expect to join MS today and become a millionaire through stock, but I would like to see that options granted (or stock offered through discount schemes) would do more than remain largely flat for years on end.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Enterprises still use the stuff, and will use it for quite a good amount of time. This gives Microsoft something that few others have: time to correct its screwups.
Possibly, but I really don't see them asking enterprise what we want so they can give it to us as far as a desktop PC OS goes. We don't want great changes or neat tricks. If anything we want small slow changes so that users will probably never notice in the enterprise situation and if they do, will figure it out themselves or can be trained easily. We want our programs to work and not to have to upgrade them because of an OS*. The best thing they have done is made it more secure, which when judging that MS great leap forward is in security, you can make of that what you will.
*We don't want to have to upgrade our OS because of programs either, but that is another rant about how enterprise wants stability rather than endless upgrades and updates with new features that all include new bugs. In the end, enterprise wants something that installs and works until there is a ROI reason to upgrade, which in some stable fields, might take decades because they're mature and not going anywhere soon, because constant upgrades are a costly pain.
Totally agree. I'm a software developer, not a big gamer, but my 4-year-old HP 8510 dual-core laptop does everything I need it to. Proper mobile CPU, not a PC one. I usually have several apps running at any one time - Photoshop, .NET IDE, Eclipse IDE, both Firefox and Chrome, while SQL Server 2000 and 2008 work away in the background, not to mention various little TSR helper apps. This on XP Pro, not even Win7. Mostly goes on stand-by, reboot oh once or twice a week, never a problem.
And I can also play Skyrim respectably. I keep it clean inside, temp is never above 45C. Upgraded the hard drive, otherwise not so much as a dead pixel. Great little lappy. I'll upgrade when the plastic starts to go brittle. :)
The simple fact is writing software that can truly take advantage of even just two cores is REALLY hard
Sure, but aren't those cores handy when you're running several *different* apps at the same time? I assume a demanding app might tax one core, and another demanding app will attach itself to another core, yes? So multiple cores are good for people like developers or designers, who might have several big apps going at once, as well as SQL Server, IIS, etc.
And then you can fire up Skyrim without having to shut everything down. :)
Any operation benefiting from a context menu seems pretty much impossible on most touch interfaces, due to lacking extra mouse buttons.
How so? On both old-school Windows Mobile and Android operating systems, a long press on a control opens a context menu.
I remember Macs used to come with a single button mouse and wonder how they solved that problem.
When context menus were introduced in Mac OS 8, Ctrl+click activated them. I believe some web browsers supported the long press paradigm as well.
I don't see a lot of folks that have actually tried to use it with a touch screen device.
A touch screen oriented vertically like that of an ATM or a Redbox kiosk, so that you get gorilla arm? Or a touch screen laid flat on your desk, so that you have to crane your neck down to use it?
How do "successful people of means" obtain a lawfully made copy of the film Song of the South or the television series Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea?
I only use Windows for games and video editing [...] And, as the articles pointed out, if you switch to 'cloud' apps then you don't need Windows at all.
Let me know when 'cloud' games* and 'cloud' video editing become practical.
* To avoid doubt, I'm not referring to any Square Enix product.
What apps & file formats are you stuck with that you can't migrate to another OS ?
As a hobby, I develop video games compatible with the Nintendo Entertainment System. Nintendulator, a player for .nes files that supports debugging, works only under Windows, and not under Wine. FCEUX works under Wine, but only without sound, and the SDL version (what you get when you sudo apt-get install fceux) has no debugger. Several music editors for classic console synthesizer chips either don't run (TFM Music Maker) or run inconsistently (FamiTracker) under Wine. So I have to choose either sound (FCEUX for SDL) or debugging (FCEUX for Windows) for a particular development session on my Linux laptop or wait to go home and use a desktop PC running Windows.
Why would there be lines several days AFTER the phones went on sale?
I seem to remember there being long lines for Xbox 360 and Wii months later, to the point where people were auctioning off just the console's packaging so that other people could pretend that they managed to score one.
In general, if a platform makes it painful to be a developer, then few people will feel like overcoming said pain to develop for that platform, and users will reap the detriment of having fewer applications to choose from. The exception is video game consoles, because console licensees are large companies exploiting a captive market who have shown (by their purchase of a console as opposed to a media PC) that they are willing to ignore indie games.
All current Tablets and Smart Phones have single app per screen interfaces.
Why does this continue to be the case? My Nexus 7 tablet's screen is roughly the same physical size as two and a half 4.3" Android phones' screens. So why can't I hold a tablet horizontally, split its screen down the middle, and Snap one app to each half of the screen? Windows 1 could do this.
It isn't like the boss stops by one day, plops a MacBook Pro on your desk and says "you get to work with this now".
So if the boss stops by one day to announce a deployment of a fleet of Macs next month, how is one supposed to learn how to administer a Mac and continue working at full efficiency after the deployment other than by buying one for home use?
And how many business applications did you also move with you in your conversion?
That can be done in stages. Ideally, the conversion to a free software environment would begin by using free applications on an existing platform, such as replacing Microsoft Office with LibreOffice or IE with Firefox or Chrome on Windows, and then replacing Windows with Xubuntu later.
Microsoft owns the corporate market because programmers write business programs that will run only on Microsoft operating systems. If the applications could easily move, Microsoft would immediately fall.
To make Microsoft fall, continue to improve Wine.
That is why the only items you see people line up and camp out for are Air Jordans and Apple products
That and video game consoles, because they fear that their current console will no longer be supported by new games, and online play with strangers will no longer be possible. Case in point: As soon as the Xbox 360 and Wii came out, the supply of new Xbox and GameCube games dried up. In addition, PS2 games' online play is routinely switched off (DNAS error -103), as was Xbox Live for original Xbox.
Anecdotal evidence suggests many/most users run more than a single program at a time and in that context multi-core machines excel.
Over the time span of one second, a user will interact with one program at a time. Only one program can have the keyboard focus, and only one program can have the mouse over its window. The rest are blocking on user input. So until multithreaded programming becomes easy, I'd like to see a strong justification for more than two cores: one for the application with the frontmost window and one for the antivirus and all other tasks.
Sure, but aren't those cores handy when you're running several *different* apps at the same time?
Yes, and they're all blocking on user input. Please read my reply to Karzz1.
I assume a demanding app might tax one core, and another demanding app will attach itself to another core, yes?
Assume that the first thread of the frontmost window will attach to the first core. Now if a machine has one user at a time, and this user is interacting with only one application at a time, and each application uses only one thread for anything CPU-bound, a single core will suffice. Even if an application performs a task that requires a progress bar, as long as this task is disk- or network-bound, it won't use a lot of time slices on the CPU. For example, web browsers tend to be network-bound, and compilers in my experience are disk-bound, allowing make -j2 to speed up compiles even on a single-core machine. Only running more than one CPU-bound task in the background really requires a CPU with more than two cores.
several big apps going at once, as well as SQL Server, IIS, etc.
I don't know about Microsoft SQL Server or IIS, but MySQL and Apache+PHP tend to be disk- or network-bound at least as often as they are CPU-bound.
So multiple cores are good for people like developers or designers, who might have several big apps going at once
It is disputed that there are enough "people like developers or designers" to justify making the mass-market machines good enough for "people like developers or designers".
Hey!
Microsoft will sell to "Enterprise".
GM will ALWAYS fleet cars.
They just won't make a sedan you'd buy, yourself. Mazda and VW will trounce the value/dollar every day of the week.
Enterprises will not be buying W8. They took years to move from XP to W7. They will stay with W7 because the hardware they just installed a year ago has 9 more years of life. And since most software is using browsers as an interface, there will be no need to continue with Windows.
LibreOffice and OpenOffice can both read and write MS Office files. Ergo, time to move forward. MS will have to decide to continue supporting W7, or create a W8 that is fully compatible with W7. As far as I have read, W8 will require every software to be installed on it to be MS certified, or pass through the MS app store. This requirement is intolerable for enterprises.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
In my current public sector employer the trend is to move people to smaller and smaller desks, or a hot desking set up. Large monitors and dual monitor setups cost too much in office accommodation. We expect most of our office workers to be on laptops or single 19'' monitors by 2016. Cram em in and have them use one app at a time is the flavor of the day.
I wasn't talkin' Win8
Sharepoint/Exchange/MSSQL/Server*
You know. The crap.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I would give you a detailed reply, but I'm afraid tepples said everything better than i ever could. All I would add is here at the shop I see pretty much every kind of computer user and what you are describing isn't even 3% of the population, even the gamers I know don't run a bunch of heavy apps while gaming because the HDD quickly becomes the bottleneck. Heck I have a customer making his living designing insanely complex robotics in the latest version of Solidworks...is he on an Ivybridge? or maybe an Octocore Bulldozer? Nope he's running a Phenom I X3 I built him nearly 5 years ago and with the GPU taking the load on model rotation he is VERY happy with his performance.
Hell I often transcode WHILE gaming and even with that kind of load I don't peg out all 6 cores of my Thuban, and I paid a grand total of $110 for this chip a year ago, even a multitasker like me can't keep this chip fed for long, its just got more power than I can come up with tasks for it to do...don't mean i don't brag about having a 6 core though ;-)
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Riiiight, because nobody needs to type, email is a myth, and instead they'll all try to hold a screen with one hand and a BT keyboard with another. sigh,try to go without a PC today, just try. Hell one of the Apple loving pundits tried to go a month with just his iPad and iPhone...he failed and gave up after just 8 days because he said even with a BT keyboard it got to be too big a PITA to do anything.
Phones are good for instant on the spot info, what time does the movie start, how do I get to the place i'm going, tablets are good for media consumption and time wasters, but the SECOND you actually need to get anything done your ass better have a desktop or a laptop, or you are gonna be in a world of hurt.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
CreateThread is very easy to use if you don't touch the same data with the threads.
The whole difficulty of multithreaded programming is the fact that avoiding a situation where you "touch the same data with the threads" is easier said than done in a nontrivial program.
You're also apparently overlooking the fact that Operating Systems run background processes as well.
Do enough of these background processes, tray icons, etc. run at the same time to require multiple cores?
I have currently 158 threads going across those 8 cores.
Big whoop. I have a 1-core 2-thread Atom N450 CPU in my laptop, and I have 177 processes on that (source: ps aux | wc -l returns 178, including the headings). How many of these processes are running and how many are blocked? Xfce Task Manager shows that the vast majority of these processes stay in state S (sleeping/blocked) rather than state R (running) the majority of the time. As I type this, the only processes that go to R are Firefox (because I'm interacting with it) and Task Manager (because it's animating).
What you need to measure is the number of threads that want the CPU. The "processor queue length" or "load" is the number of threads that are running or waiting to run at any given time. Linux makes a metric called "load average" available through the w and top; this is the average processor queue length over the past 60 second, 5 minute, and 15 minute windows. I'm not in front of a Windows box, but Google tells me Windows has a processor queue length monitor as well. Only when the 60-second load average exceeds the number of cores are you bottlenecked. And even then, Linux slightly overestimates load because it includes processes blocked on disk I/O, such as build steps called by the aforementioned make -j2.
I bookmarked this post, just so I can point and say "Look at #2" because until you pointed it out I honestly thought people would know what I was talking about. that is what I get for being in front of the damned machines too long, you assume that when you say "multi-threaded' that they will understand you mean true multithreading, to me coarse might as well just be two programs running on the same machine, if they aren't dealing with the same data...hell like you pointed out pretty much anybody with a copy of VS can bang out a program that does that.
But TRUE multithreading, without stalls and race conditions? that is DAMN hard to do, that is why most of the programs taking advantage of GP-GPU are just slicing up the data like transcoders, try to calculate how long each piece of the data will take AND not end up with a race or stall is damned difficult to pull off.
And as far as Win 8? Like I said when I get people that walk into my shop and I haven't seen in years and haven't said a single word to about win 8 go "Man what is UP with that? I tried out some laptops with Win 8 and its terrible!" you know you got a stinker. Hell I had more people try Vista and like it when I had the beta running in the shop...well until the stupid "Cancel/allow?" dialogs started bugging them, than I ever have with Win 8. In fact I have yet to hear anything but backhanded compliments like "It might be good on a tablet" which of course implies "But it sucks on this desktop".
At the end of the day you can use simple math to show why Win 8 is doomed. The last figures I saw had 300 million computers sold last year, lets say that is the average okay? Since I have been selling X3s or better since 2007 that is 5 years at 300 million computers or 1.2 BILLION computers that have more than enough power to run Win 8, so far so good right? Here is where the math bites Ballmer in the ass. Now even the cheerleaders of Win 8 have said "You really need a touch screen to appreciate Win 8" and I wish I had bookmarked it because one actually wrote "And it even works great on old systems! Here we have this touch screen Athlon laptop from 3 years ago.."LOL, like THAT is what the average PC is! So what IS the average PC as far as touch? Well the last figures I saw were 4% but that included kiosks and POS units, when you removed those you had MAYBE 2%, which if my back of the napkin math is right you are looking at around 24 million out of 1.2 BILLION that have a touchscreen!
Hell go to Best Buy, Staples, any B&M and actually count how many touchscreen desktops and laptops are there for sale VS how many that do NOT have touch, at my local wally world out of 27 units they had on display there was ONE that was touch, an HP iMac clone. desktops? Nope, Laptops? Nu uh.
And it is THIS that kills Win 8 like Raid kills bugs, you have a UI centered around touch yet fewer than 2% of the units in the world, both on sale now and that have been sold to date, actually have touch. And why the hell would the customer WANT touch, who wants fingerprints on their pretty new laptop? greasy smudges on their desktop screen? Tablets are treated like "cell phones that don't make calls" so nobody cares if they get Cheetos stains on their Android but they DO care if that nice new glossy laptop looks like shit!
So at the end of the day the math simply don't work. MSFT thought they could ram a UI down everyone's throats that wasn't designed for what it was running on and even the layman can take one look at win 8 and see the suck. Hell I'm "Mr Bleeding edge" and after a month of running the damned thing I wanted to gouge out my eyes with a spoon, and I KNOW all the keyboard shortcuts! Can you imagine what its like for the user that has spent over a decade learning everything by "clicky clicky" to use Win 8? Well wonder no more because here is video proof and it was THIS that I saw in my shop, only with more frustration and cursing than this sweet little old lady.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Do enough run to load the system or cores completely? Yes.
And how many would that be, on average over the past minute?
are all of those threads on 1 core? No.
I will grant you that threads use more than one core; they use the "one and a half" cores of my laptop's CPU. But you still haven't demonstrated that the difference between two cores and six cores is enough for the average user of a mass-market PC to perceive.
So do coarse multithreading when possible.
I agree with you that coarse multithreading is good for background tasks. But the user is not interacting with background tasks and is less likely to notice variations in their performance.
Some things can't be put on threads and have them improve performance
I agree. My point is that in a mass-market home or office PC, there are enough of those single-threaded "some things" that six cores aren't noticeably better than two.
Backgrounded daemons/services
Which sleep until a request is made of the service.
Trayiconized apps
Which sleep until the user interacts with the notification icon.
Taskbar minimized ones
Which sleep until the user restores them or at least pulls up their Windows 7 jump list.
Drivers (I overlooked this myself but am not now)
Which sleep until an application makes a request to send data through that device or until data arrives in that device's buffer.
As well as threads of execution from the OS itself & yes, it can spawn more as needed (there are even settings to make it have MORE "helper threads" in Windows):
Most of which sleep most of the time.
What you need to measure is the "load" or "processor queue length", the number of processes that want to run (not sleep) at any given moment. UNIX and Linux make it easy to view that with the w and top commands. Under Windows XP, it's Adminstrative Tools > Performance > Add > Performance Object: System > Processor Queue Length. By default, Windows applies 10 points for each process so that the graph shows up better with other that are scaled to a 0-100 range. I see load averages around 20 points (2 processes) on the desktop PC running Windows XP that I use at work. And you can cut down your browser's contribution to that by adding advertisement, tracking, and social recommendation servers to your computer's .../etc/hosts file. So with a load average of 2, there wouldn't be much of a benefit to more than two cores.
From what you said you're running?
What I said is that most of them are sleeping, which means they won't be scheduled on the CPU until they need to handle an interaction with the user or with a device.
Since you claim MOST of your apps are in idle states? Then, why on EARTH do you BOTHER with multiple core cpus then??
Because multicore CPUs have become cheap. A bargain-basement Atom laptop either has a 1 1/2 core hyperthreaded CPU or a true dual-core CPU. In either case, two cores (one for the interactive task, and one for background tasks) should be enough for the mass market until computer science figures out how to make multithreading of a single interactive task easy for programmers.
Oh, on what "floors me" here? Python & Delphi apps I wrote that WAIL on strings... it's expensive, & filebound on loads (init. loads & then TONS of stringwork)...
At work I have big batch processes written in Python that wail on flat-file data feeds with hundreds of thousands of rows. These run on a quad-core server several times a day. But I'd guess the average home or office user, the user targeted by the sort of mass-market products sold in Walmart and Best Buy, is what you call a "grandma does email only user".
Also, people ususally run more than one app at the time, having a multicore cpu will help with this.
Just because an application has a window open doesn't mean it's running. It's probably sleeping more than running. How many apps receive input from a PC's user over the course of one second? And how many apps do a lot of computation when they're not receiving input from the user?
Given a job of digging a ditch, would I get it done FASTER, with only 1 arm (core) OR N multiple arms (cores)?
A task like yours, which involves merging and sorting big DNS blocking lists, is easy to parallelize. So might a task like mine at work, which involves comparing active listings at several different online storefronts to the current inventory levels using one process per storefront. And so might loading ten different web pages in new tabs if your web browser uses a process per tab like Chrome does. On the other hand, nine women can't make a baby in one month. I guess our argument is just over whether the workload of the mythical "median user" is more like digging a ditch or more like making a baby. The speed of the interface to RAM is also important, especially if your working set doesn't fit entirely in the CPU's cache, and multiple cores share one interface to RAM.
Especially if prices are right??
I agree with you: if the price is right, shop for a multicore CPU sized to match your load average. But hairyfeet has found that for a lot of people, the price of buying a new computer isn't right. If the single, 1 1/2, or dual core machine that someone already owns already handles his workload, why spend more than $0?
You may not believe it, but it spans MILLIONS of rows (short ones though, 2 items each)
I might try your hosts file manager on my quad-core Windows 7 box sometime. Do you have a version for Linux as well?
It just amazes me how many here have already forgotten their history, specifically the Pentium 4. Intel had originally designed that chip to hit 10Ghz, in fact if you search the net you can still find talks and papers from Intel where they state that was the goal from the start, and I know several people that managed to get Pentium 4 late models and Pentium Ds over the 5Ghz mark...so what happened?
HEAT is what happened, it was quickly realized that to get a P4 to 10Ghz it would need its own AC unit just to keep from frying! And in mobile its that much worse because you are squeezing the chips into this thin slice of plastic and glass, which is why we now see companies putting out 4 and 5 core ARM chips, to try to get the performance up without melting the device.
And just like with X86 now that they can't brag about "even faster!" we are starting to see the race to the bottom begin, just last year ANY tablet you got for less than $200 was just garbage, now there are several in the $100 range running 1.2Ghz chips and Android 4 and from what I've been told they are very nice to use. so what we are gonna see is no different than what we saw on X86, when the OEMs couldn't sell more units based on speed they sold on price to keep capacity up and we had a race to the bottom.
That is why I predict this time next year you'll see dual core smartphones and tablets in the $50 range, the quad cores in the $125-$150 range, and since they won't be able to make more than minor tweaks as you pointed out because of the thermal wall people will try them and go "Meh, this feels no different than the one i already have" and they'll just stick with what they have until it breaks.
Again the only one who won't face this, or at least not nearly as badly is Apple, because with Apple its as much about fashion as it is the device. that doesn't mean they are bad devices, just that its as unhip to be using last year's iPhone as it is to wear last year's fashion as far as Apple fans are concerned. But even they may feel some pain, as it seems Cook can't build the buyers into a frenzy like old Steve could, just look at how many "Meh" reviews there were for iPhone 5 and the iPad mini.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
isn't that the actual job requirement of the old school sysadmin though?
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
Care to name something better than Exchange? Lotus Notes is an abomination and I don't know anything else that has the same features and integration in this space. We're not talking just email here, but full Corporate Messaging/Calendaring/Contacts with all the third party support, features and integration. I've been around the blocks and even the most zealous Linux freaks I've met admit that Exchange does more for less effort. They'll still say they hate it, but I've never heard anyone name a better product.
The problem with this approach is you're cobbling together a whole bunch of stuff from all over the place which requires special skills/knowledge and a lot of time and effort to make work. Then the more important question is how do you support it? Great if you've got the gun who knows all this stuff and stays on top of all the dependency issues and update hell, but with MS I can get any one of a thousand guys at a moments notice who can come in without any documentation or prior knowledge and immediately understand how the environment is put together. By going the ecosystem path, a license fee is a small price to pay to know that everything works out of the box. I've worked in support organisations and this is the biggest complaint I used to hear for the Linux teams. Home brew solutions which take a month just to figure out how the hell the original admin put it all together. As an example the last admin at the place I'm working now has a 32 page script for managing network drives, printer mappings and some other stuff. I spent about 3 hours trying figure it out and gave up. It was dumped and replaced with a standard group policy setting in AD that did the same thing. The bonus of this approach is when I leave, the next guy will know exactly what is going on.
it isn't painful though...it is DIFFERENT.
get over it.
I was responding to the claim that Metro apps are designed to be used on desktops with mouse & keyboard *and* touch devices by pointing out big problems with Metro on the desktop.