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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."
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
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?
Canonical offers an app store which just a package manager prettied up. if you think that's a walled garden then all Linux distros are a walled garden.
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.
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.
try using Arandr, it does the hard work for multimonitors for you.
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
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..."
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?
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!
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.
Desktop Linux is a garden without a wall. The easiest and safest way to install a program is the official repo, but i can add third party repos easily, or compile packages for source myself. You see, it's the wall that makes the walled garden a problem.
A walled garden is a system where the user is somehow prevented from using anything outside of the intended system. Let's see now, on Ubuntu (or any other modern Linux distribution) you can:
- Add/remove repositories for the package manager
- Install local packages using only the installation tools
- Unpack archives manually or otherwise manually add software to the system
- Compile your own software
It's not the presence of a package manager that makes something a walled garden; it's the absence of other methods of installing software.
--
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 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.
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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Canonical's "garden" has no "walls." The use of "technical measures to limit access" (if I may borrow some DMCA-speak) against the user is the main distinguishing features of walled gardens. If you let the user do whatever they want, it doesn't make any sense to call it a walled garden. It's just a garden.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to 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.
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.
But isn't the point that Windows 8 is to force change. Most of the new Windows 8 tablets and PCs come with touch. The interface Windows 8 is built for and seems to work fairly well on (at least as well as Android or iOS). I see no sign that Microsoft ever hoped we will also use Windows 8 on equipment released before October this year.
The point of Windows 8 is to force change...I suspect their goal should have been to meet users needs. As for Windows 8 working well. You need to use it. It is trying to be both Wimp/Widgets+Launcher at the same time and ends up a mess; its awful for both Mobile and Desktop users. Comparing it to the mature products of both iOS and Android [or even earlier versions of Windows] is an insult to both.
The sad fact is maybe if they hadn't used Windows 8 to force change you could have ended up with two better products, one for mobile and one for desktop, whether these would have been as good as the alternatives is a different matter, but then its about Microsoft forcing itself into the mobile market, not about quality of product, and it shows.
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.
> 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.
If you think students are going to write 10,000-word-essays, or corporate types will do large spreadsheets or reports, or programmers will code 10,000-line-programs with a touchscreen device, you are totally out of it. And no, I'm not going to pay twice as much for a Surface as for a real PC, and then go out and buy a bluetooth keyboard plus mouse.
In the mid-1980's, the MS-DOS PC walked all over VT100 terminals as far as getting serious work done was concerned. That's why it was adopted so fast. Touchscreens are so-so for 140-character tweets, or short Fecesbook updates. They suck for real work in the corporate world. Windows 8 is going nowhere, fast. MS better release a "back to the future" Windows 9, or simply start charging for Windows 7 service packs.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
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...
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?
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
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.
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.
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
>I don't really understand why there is so much hatred of the Windows 8 interface.
Because on anything other than a tablet, it's shit. It's a schizophrenic interface that tries to deprecate the desktop interface in favor of this new touch bullshit.
The thing is though, keyboards and mice are better input devices than touch. Touch is only useful when you have no other way to input, have an enviroment that is hostile to other input devices, or external input devices are inconvenient, even if it's just a stylus.
Microsoft is chasing this mythical beast called the "universal interface" which doesn't friggin' exist. They've been doing this shit since trying to force a desktop metaphor onto tablets and PDAs, eventually finding out that people don't like poking at tiny icons with a stylus which can be lost down a catchbasin. But instead, we have error in the opposite direction - forcing an interface suited to tablets and phones onto the desktop, where it SUCKS.
Also
>new account
>buzzword bingo
Shill.
--
BMO
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.
Also
>new account >buzzword bingo
Shill.
-- BMO
I'm not a shill I just bothered to finally set up an account after years of reading slashdot. My main point was that Microsoft had to create the Windows 8 interface in order to compete with Apple and Google - they needed something that would get them into the tablet space so that people would start using their stack of services. If the Windows tablet looked just like another iOS knock off most people would just say ... meh. With Win 8 they at least have something that people will say ... "oh shiny, maybe I should give this a go". I think this is that same as Amazon needing to skin Android for the Kindle Fire - it creates a necessary point of differentiation.
I couldn't care less if people buy stuff from Microsoft, in fact I have a hard time understanding why they would when they can get the same basic functionality for free from Google
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.
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 :)
OK, so I'll take that back, as you're reasonable.
It's been happening a lot lately though (the new-account shill thing).
With regards to your argument that 8 is for tablets. Microsoft *had* to go to a touch interface for tablets . I agree, totally, that touch is needed on tablets, PDAs, music players, and phones. It's even better than vocal control. What Microsoft has done is continue on this path to their mythical "universal interface" that totally ignores the fact that people use different sized devices for different purposes. What they did instead was take the touch interface for tablets and shoehorn it into a desktop operating system. This goes against every study over the past 40+ years showing that people don't like holding their hands in front of them with light pens or their fingers touching a screen. SAGE is dead. Light pens are dead. Touch on the desktop never took off, and that wasn't because of a lack of touch software or touch enabled monitors (NEC had a great one in the mid 80s). Touch winds up doing data collection on factory floors, industrial equipment, and POS terminals, tablets, PDAs, and phones, for the reasons I listed in my previos message.
Anyone who has seriously interacted with Metro on the desktop hates it and it's not like you can avoid Metro. And you can't claim that I don't know what I'm talking about, because I've used it ever since the same day the Developer Preview came out. People have been talking about this for over a year.
Yet Microsoft refuses to listen to the desktop and laptop users, because they have an agenda to push, and they think that pushing touch on desktop and laptops will get people to do everything on tablets. The first sign that they don't give a shit about the desktop and laptop users was when they ripped out, the start menu registry entry and the code tied to it just to make sure.
Touch on a desktop or laptop? Not a chance. I'm not rubbing my greasy fingers all over a 27 inch monitor. I'm not doing CAD on a tablet. No.
The hate for 8 (hey that rhymes) is not unfounded. It's from people who have screwed around with this Frankenstein Monster since 2 Septembers ago. And despite all the naysaying of the Windows shills that "Microsoft's gonna fix that" even past the RTM, the root criticisms of 8 were never addressed. Instead, the reaction was more like the reaction from the Gnome 3 devs - "Fuck you, we know what we're doing."
8 is a failure on the desktop. It is inconvenient to the point of unusable.
--
BMO
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
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?
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.
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.
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
In the Windows 7, Vista, XP, and Mac OSX world (so, almost all users), the standard method of installing software is still:
1) Go to the website
2) Download the installation file (or get a disk if you're feeling retro)
3) Run the installation programme
This works in Ubuntu too- you go to the website, and download the .deb package. Double click it, run it. You don't have to be a geek to do this; the fact that mobile phones don't let you do this doesn't mean it's been scrubbed from the users' skillset quite yet. And as long as this remains an option, it is fundamentally not a walled garden.
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.
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.
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.
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.