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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."
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'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.
I have two thoughts on this issue. The first is: Pies.
That's my first thought on any issue.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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?
He was asked to leave due to politics. Metro was the brain-child of the bitch succeeding him. He wanted to ditch it after the feedback came in and the suits told him "No" in no uncertain terms. He tried to spell it out for them what a disaster it would be and was asked to leave because they have already pulled the trigger on the project, and put too many dollars into it.
At a company like M$ once a decision is made to go with something you back it until it's well and truly failed.
I think uptake of windows 8 is going to be so fucking horrid that they're going to issue a patch to remove metro, add the windows store as a regular program, and quietly fire their new Melinda. Unfortuantely for the new bitch her lover(Ballmer presumably) isn't as rich as the last Melindas and could lose nearly everything if he pisses the board off too much.
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.
--
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.
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.
I agree with everything you've said here.
My problem is, what's the foundation of any desktop operating system? The UI.
Windows 8, on a desktop, stinks. Metro is horrible on a desktop. The fullscreen "start menu" is horrible and useless as a standard launcher. Things like the network menu give me hives. The difficulty in getting out of the metro interface? Why can't I turn that shit off? Why is the default music player a metro app? Did no one suggest to them that maybe it'd be a good idea to have "metro mode" instead of kludging the two together? Separate file associations for when I'm in desktop mode & metro mode. Now that would work well.
I know, if you're not using the keyboard to find&launch apps you're an idiot, but my dad doesn't use the keyboard, and likely never will as he's prone to forgetting what the app he wants is called, it's just not relevant to him. I would recommend someone learn the OSX interface than learn the Windows 8 interface (although I wouldn't want to support either).
All the technical brilliance of Windows 8 doesn't matter, I didn't wonder where those features were in Windows 7 and I'm not going out of my way to expose them in Windows 8. It's the UI that matters.
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.