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Microsoft Blames PC Makers For Windows Failure
rtfa-troll writes "The Register tells us that Microsoft has begun squabbling with PC manufacturers over the reasons behind the failure of Windows 8. Microsoft is 'frustrated with major OEMs who didn't build nearly enough touch systems.' PC manufacturers have hit back, saying that they 'would have been saddled with the costs of a huge pile of unsold units,' claiming that customers actually avoided higher-end touch products which were available and instead bought lower-end, cheaper laptops while 'Microsoft is not blaming itself for' the failure of its own touch device, the Surface RT. The PC manufacturers' claims that touch is the problem seem to be backed by reviews, and some educational rants from users and opinions from user interface design experts. However, Microsoft sees this differently. Microsoft is planning to strike back at the PC vendors in February with Surface Pro; with a shorter battery life and much heavier than a normal tablet, this is being seen as a direct competitor to traditional laptops. By using its desktop operating system franchise as a lever, Microsoft will be able to enter the lower-specification end of the laptop market with a cost advantage which make make life difficult for former partners such as HP and Dell. We've discussed previously how some PC manufactures such as Dell have failed in generational change whilst others have diversified to survive market changes; Samsung with Android and the (still) bestselling Chromebook. ASUS with their successful Nexus tablets. We also discussed the ergonomic problems which are claimed to make touch screens unsuitable for PC use."
Last I checked Dell and HP are both very much still MS partners. This is more akin to a lover's spat than a breakup.
My ten year old daughter was in tears because she couldn't figure out her new windows 8 laptop.
Now the laptop was underpowered, but it couldn't play DVDs out of the box and she couldn't figure out how to run her software on it thanks to the removal of the start button. Also, Toshiba added its bonus software which seemed to take over the whole computer periodically since pop ups now take the whole screen.
I was frustrated trying to use it until I found a start menu hack and added it back.
I installed VLC so she can play DVDs and she has a start menu and now is very happy. Perhaps MS shouldn't have tried to do too much too soon?
Yes, it feels like soon they'll devolve to blaming the consumers for daring to not consume their products. "This would have been a success if only more consumers jumped on board!" No shit, Sherlock. They took a chance in going in a new direction, and the lost the bet. Now they're just trying to use their size to muscle the change in anyway instead of backtracking, because that would be admitting failure.
The hallmark of those truly incompetent. To be found on the very left side in the diagram showing the distribution for the Dunning-Kruger effect.
How MS could mess this up so badly is quite astonishing. The only reasonable explanation is really, really bad leadership.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I hope this isn't the end for Ballmer, He is doing a great job running Microsoft into the ground
Creating new markets isn't bad. It is truly the only way to grow.
However while you can use touch for everything. Making it the default interface is the bad part.
Having a fairly consistent interface across platforms isn't a horrible idea.
Desktop should have touch as an user Interface OPTION. I can see uses for touch on the desktop just not all the time.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Windows 7 is stable, usable, and a sufficient progress over windows XP. WIndows XP dominated the last 10 years, and my prediction is that 7 will dominate on PCs in businesses the next 10 years. The company where i work has finished the Tests and adoption of windows 7 last year and is now rolling it out as the new standard system. And no - i dont belive that they will consider Windows 8. Reducating the employees to the Ribbon interface in office was already something they liked so little that they have their own solution for adding the old menus temporarily.
There is no visible advantage of touch in the office, and that is where MS truely domiates. The idea of touch-pcs is somthing which MS dreams about since at least the mid - 90s. Then they had an epic fail, now they hope they can ride in the waves of the ipad and android.
You have obviously never used multiple windows at once. At work, I have two 24" screens and regularly have lots of open windows at once. If even one of the programs I use are a "metro" program, I am not able to use regular windows programs at the same time. This problem will only get worse with time, and is a showstopper for me.
Windows 8 is the solution to Microsofts problems, not the users' problems. That kind of disrespect for your customers never pays off.
Try introducing it to 4 people who know what they're doing and see how you go. It's a crippled piece of shit.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
That's nice, but there's a problem:
Metro is being shoved in our faces, even on the desktop. Metro apps are supposed to be the new de facto standard for Windows.
Yet, it seems that nobody ever thought about keeping the desktop working as it always did, but better. No, they needed gratuitous changes, like removing the start button (Why? It's still there, serves a similar purpose and doesn't bother anyone), replacing the network pop-ups with a metro panel, moving the power options to the same stupid metro panel...
Metro isn't the problem. The fact that it bleeds into the desktop is.
If you have big investments in Microsoft or Microsoft products, you should be worried. The inability to recognize their failure means they will keep trying to ram themselves in to the ground.
This reminds me so much of the 98 Internet Explorer "Integration" fiasco. You WILL install it and you WILL use it regardless if you want it or not. The only reason they did it was to crush their competitor. But eventually they realized that even this was a mistake and somewhat backed down from it.
They even canned Microsoft BOB fairly quickly, and you don't see much of Clippy any more either.
But if they really don't realize they made a mistake here, then you will see no improvements in Windows 9/10/11 etc and further product degradation in to an even worse mess of useless crap.
This reminds me a lot of another group of people who have recently been claiming their failures on the need to "educate" their target audience. And fail to realize that, for better or worse, their respective audiences feel that they have all the "education" they need.
Sometimes, when you Build It, they Don't Come. Sometimes you can't get a "great idea" to trickle down if you ram it with a plunger. Sometimes, in short, it's worth considering a different approach, rather than simply doubling down.
It would be ironic if the Year of the Linux Desktop finally arrived courtesy - not of improvements in Linux - but because Microsoft pushed its primary drug dealers, er, hardware manufacturers, into the waiting arms of the Penguin. Fortunately for the folks in Redmond, whatever disease this is seems to be widespread these days, as Linux has developed its own ways to fend of new arrivals in the form of Unity and Gnome3.
> Touch is a nice extra, but as the main input for a system that needs to be productive it doesn't justify the costs.
And that is the big problem with touch. It is a waste of money. Why should I spend extra on a desktop monitor or laptop that has touch? I have no use for it, and it does not help get work done any faster/easier. It even gets nasty when finger prints are all over it! It looks cool? So what? The economy is still in the shitter and most people have to watch every dollar they spend.
Calling viewing works created by others "consumption" makes me think of tuberculosis. Anyway:
Consider three kinds of users: people who only view works, hobbyists who create works, and professionals who create works for a living. A dichotomy between devices for viewing works created by others and devices for creating works makes it harder for people to start creating for at least three reasons:
Having to re-buy If a viewer device is not suitable for creating, then someone who wants to step up from viewing to creating will have to buy a separate device. Lack of economies of scale Because fewer people will be buying devices capable of creating, they won't be able to take advantage of the intense price competition in viewer devices, causing a general-purpose device to climb far out of the price range of a Christmas present or something on which to spend an income tax refund. Gatekeepers Finally, once the sticker shock has scared away most hobbyists, certain gatekeeper entities will gain control over who is and isn't allowed to possess a device for creating. This gatekeeping has been seen since the mid-1980s in the video game market, with a dichotomy between "retail consoles" for home use and "devkits" for use only by professionals who have already proven their "relevant video game industry experience" and "financial stability" by moving to Austin, Boston, or Seattle for an apprenticeship of several years. Initially, this was needed to reassure brick-and-mortar retailers of the value of inventory and shelf space in the wake of a 1984 recession in the North American video game market, but as I wrote elsewhere, the constraints of retail aren't so important since the fourth quarter of 2006.Each of these three hurdles deters people from creating as a hobby in the first place, which tends to turn people into "sheep that passively graze on what others make available to them," as free software advocate Richard Stallman put it when he decried the word "consumer".
[Devices for creating works] usually need a full complement of input devices, a full keyboard, a good mouse, larger the screen it is better. But [viewing them] does not need all these user input devices. Oftentimes, a tap, a touch, a click is all that is required to passively consume content. Ch+ , Ch-, Vol+ and Vol- buttons cover 99% of the usage in a TV remote!
If a viewer device isn't artificially restricted, it's a doddle to upgrade the latter into the former by buying a $15 keyboard and a $15 mouse. But if market-segmenting cryptography is in play, people who want to step up from viewing to creating might not be able to afford dropping $700 on a Mac.
Microsoft first missed the boat in creating a simpler device for [viewing].
Then what's the Xbox 360 console? In countries where the law allows, Microsoft even established a public "Indie Games" route to market using the XNA framework so that anyone with a $300 PC can create games for the platform.
It's not even a "nice extra". It's a pain: breaks the flow, leaves smudges on the screen, requires learning yet another way to handle a PC.
It's a step backwards that MS is trying to force on desktop users in the hope that training users to the MS version of Touch will give MS an opportunity to recover from their big fail in tablets and smartphones.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
The biggest issue for me is the whole "full screen only" apps and the context switching issues in Win8... and the waste of screen real estate.
Sorry, that got a bit "Spanish Inquisition" there...
Seriously though: whenever I 'let a coworker drive" my pc, they always go to full screen on each program - and since I run multiple 1920x1200 screens, it just drives me BONKERS to see that much screen wastage.
When I need to go to theirs, its amazing how many folks run their stuff in full screen - I don't know how they manage... it just doesn't work for me.
Doing developer support means that I often have 3 or 4 copies of visual studio running at once and am switching between them (customer's solution open in one and two or three boilerplates or other projects where I've solved similar problems for others open and copying/pasting or comparing things between them) along with a text editor and maybe two or three different browsers (esp. if I'm testing a web app) all the while with email and IM and phone queue management apps sitting on the side where I can see if they need attention.
I'm sure Win8 is ok on a touch device or something, but the abysmal handling of context switching is a deal breaker for me on a desktop. Windows 2000 pretty much had the perfect (for me) UI except for a couple of the nice convenience features of Win7 like a New Folder button in explorer by default (Oh how I love thee), and the search built right in.
I've found taht taking Win7, shrinking the icons a bit, installing UltraMon and using Classic Shell and turning off all that Aero stuff gives me a perfect (for my needs) UI. And I don't mind that it takes a little time to get set up initially. What I care for is that I can hammer it into a great UI for the way I work, MS seems to be taking a "use it our way" mentality with Win8 which is just a giant deal breaker for me. I'm hoping that they'll come to their senses with Win9 and that Win8 is just MS Bob 3.0 (2.0 being Windows ME)
Hell, I prefer VISTA to Windows 8... seriously that should show how bad 8 is right there.
The Digital Sorceress
If I had to guess, I'd say OS X is probably better positioned right now to benefit fom Microsofts missteps. I'm seeing a larger corporate uptake of Mac and iOS. I also think Mac as a line is hitting hat magic saturation point where individuals and corporations will consider adoption. Even our own IT shop, which is notoriously pro MS just penned a support contract with Apple. Surprising, as previously, support for Apple hardware was via 3rd party and was best effort or typically addressed through MS for things like ActiveSync issues (MS would escalate issues to Apple when Apple was at fault). I'm seeing nothing on the Linux front.
On that related note, are other IT shops as averse to open source as ours seems to be? This has always puzzled me in my current company. We use server applications (Apache, etc.) but almost never any desktop apps. When I ask, I'm told that support and IP are always concerns. I can somewhat see this stance (spent a large amount of time and resources deploying some desktop app only to lose it due to litigation against the developer) but is a corporation really at risk in these cases as far as ongoing support if the app is in limbo? Can they be forced to stop using an app, or be unable to get support if the developer loses a lawsuit?
THIS.
And even if it didn't smudge up my screen, I still don't want to touch my screen. The ergonomics are just not there. Touch is good for very small screens, like on my Android phone. Not large ones. I bought a 23" monitor for my main PC and the last thing I want to do is have to touch any part of it to operate the machine. I'm typing this on a Thinkpad with a 14" screen and even that is too big for touch.
Oh fuck no! HELLL FUCK NO!!!!!
Linux advocates have been using the argument that their their kids and grannies take to a new OS just fine. That argument was NEVER good enough for the Windows fan base. I'll be damned if a fucking Windows fan thinks he can use it on me!!! You leave me no choice but to retort with the same response you gave Linux users all these years:
Face it, Windows 8 is just not ready for the consumer market.
I want this account deleted.
My two bits are, after running the 8 betas and using a surface tablet is if you have a tablet with it or even a desktop with touch, it isn't too bad. If you don't have touch, it is a horrible interface paradigm and you need to tweak it to make even the basics usable (not extensive tweaking or anything, but I would go nuts to use it on a non-touch surface as designed).
What kills me is touch surfaces on laptops are insanely expensive, and start around $500 for 780p, and you are still at 780p in the $1000 range. At about $1100, you can find one with touch, 1080p... and Intel dedicated graphics. Somewhere around $1300 start the touch with dedicated graphics. Meanwhile, dedicated 1080p laptops with dedicated graphics start at around $500. Even some tablets have higher resolution and dedicated graphics better than the Intel GMA 4000 (but yes, Intel, you're finally not completely crap). Conclusion? The touch interface has too little bang for the buck at this time, and progress in LCD panels for computers is WAY behind phones (worse resolution, much higher price).
My niece really wants a touch screen laptop with DVD drive. She doesn't care about graphics resolution or hardware. Cheapest I found? $750 with an i5 and 780p graphics. The identical laptop configuration sans touch? $350. Is touch worth $400? Even throwing in intangibles (I don't know the RAM CAS, for instance), does touch add $300 in value? $200? I don't think I could justify more than $100 (and I've seen USB aftermarket for that for TV screens).
My two bits are, after running the 8 betas and using a surface tablet is if you have a tablet with it or even a desktop with touch, it isn't too bad.
You know what else isnt too bad? Chronic acne. Doesnt mean that youre happy when you find out you have it.
Microsoft has this horrible problem that they desperately want to be hip, and they will never be hip. Every time they try, it is a catastrophic failure. Want some hillarious / awkward examples?
How about Microsoft showing how you could throw a super hip Win7 launch party
Or Microsoft's attempts at relevant advertising with Seinfeld
Or their venerable MS-DOS 5 commercial
Someone name me a time that microsoft has actually succeeded in generating anything resembling "buzz"?