Slashdot Mirror
ZDNet Proclaims "Windows: It's Over"
plastick writes "You can think Windows 8 will evolve into something better, but the numbers show that Windows is coming to a dead end. ZDNet is known to take the side of Microsoft in the past. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols explains: 'The very day the debate came to an end, this headline appeared: IDC: Global PC shipments plunge in worst drop in a generation. Sure, a lot of that was due to the growth of tablets and smartphones and the rise of the cloud, but Windows 8 gets to take a lot of the blame too. After all, the debate wasn't whether or not Windows 8 was any good. It's not. The debate was over whether it could be saved.'"
I haven't counted Usenet posts lately, so can anyone check with Netcraft?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Are people going to switch to Mac OS? Linux? Or stay on Windows 7 until a "spiritual successor" to Windows comes?
The article largely hinges on "Windows 8 comes out != PC hardware sales drop". Its just trolling for readers.
What numbers are they going off of? I just saw a bunch of ramblings of a lunatic in the article.
:p
"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."
Because the end of Windows would mean that there are only two alternatives left: 1) An open source operating system that has been shunned by practically all software companies which provide the software used by professionals. 2) An operating system which is made by a company that seems to raise prices whenever they run a risk of gaining market share, a company that wants to take a commission of every piece of software or data that is used with their products.
I like some Microsoft products, but honestly, if they ditch Windows, and move their products to .NET... then ensure the .NET platform runs on Apple, Linux and a few other platforms (not terribly hard, since the tech is mostly there anyway), I think they might see some improvement.
TBH... I like what Windows was for a short time, in the 2000-XP era, when most of the security holes had been patched, and 7 is OK... but they are majorly ruining the UI. They are trying to be clever, edgy and push the envelope... but doing so in a manner that copies Apple, and tries to go one step further. So they not only lose the 'clever' appearance, for a copycat appearance, but they are copying some of the worst changes for the desktop environment, that Apple is making.
Then again... except for businesses, and a relatively small number of hobbyists, the desktop will be mostly eliminated in the next 5-10 years. So... Windows dieing on the desktop may not be such a big thing for MS. The people who will keep it, are probably the least likely to use Windows (except businesses). The desktop is for creating, most users are simply are fine with consuming, and they'll move to portable platforms which make that easier. Even the portable platforms are starting to be good with producing - particularly multimedia which doesn't require much typing. MS has the possibility to catch-up on the portable side, but it's isn't likely, even though they have a great mobile product, that market is fairly strongly set with other good/great products, and it will be a hard battle, one MS's prodigally inept PR department can only lose.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I stopped with Windows around Ubuntu 8.04, was fully weaned on 8.10.
Cannot imagine going back, ever, unless they took FreeBSD and wrapped their stuff around that. Then, maybe.
But MS does deserve a smaller market share than before; I'm happy about that.
They aren't going away completely for a long time.
And going forward, Ubuntu is over. Still on 10.04 and kubuntu 12.04 and CentOS 6.3. Won't use Unity, will avoid Gnome 3 for as long as it takes to become compelling.
Love the choices available.
Slow news day, eh?
MS has missed the boat. Their issue? Not hiring visionaries, but instead hiring the old-guard mentality comfortable with the status quo.
Even the old guard had to see the writing on the wall what with things moving online. Even they had to see mobile coming. MS relied/relies too heavily on Office and Server license revenue. It's good money, sure, but that money is drying up in favor of SaaS, PaaS, mobile, etc. It's just a matter of time.
Internally, MS is in turmoil. They mean well, they really do, but meaning well and executing well are two different animals.
It isn't clear that MS has anything coherent in the 'stop ipads and cellphones and stuff from eating our casual customers' column; but all they'd have to do to move Win8 from 'Windows Vista's Revenge' to 'worthy, if not groundbreaking, series of incremental improvements to various aspects of Windows 7' would be to flip the switch and have non-touch devices default to 'desktop' and touch devices default to 'the UI formerly known as Metro'.
Pretty much everything is still present in Win8; but they seem content to just stick their fingers in their ears and ignore the problem, even as OEMs have started shipping ghastly craplets designed to vaguely resemble a start menu. I just don't get it.
Once you install ClassicShell....it's noticeably faster than previous releases.
the new design principles of cow path work flow, one way trap doors, modal dialogs, and above all the great mouse click god are destroying the metaphor. We are building for fools and soon only fools will be able to use it. A/B testing is the worst idea in UI design since the rubber eraser joystick that was on lap tops from people too cheap to buy a track pad.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
ZDNet is proclaiming the death of the PC / Windows...
again...
Just more clickbait fodder.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Phase I - all backend computing is going to "the cloud" (won't go there - topic for another post; suffice to say it is)
Phase II - all client-side computing is going to mobile devices (phones & tablets)
Phase III - M$ is hopelessly irrelevant in both spaces
Phase IV - != profit... (well, there's always patent trolling but like "the cloud" topic for another time...)
As a Microsoft partner and management consultant I don't understand:
Realistically Microsoft only has one chance at long term success, and that includes firing Ballmer, restaffing the board, and radically changing its staff evaluation processes away from Darwinian struggle to "what's best for Microsoft as a whole".
What I expect it will do instead is gradually fade into irrelevance:
So Microsoft's predicament is worse than a single product failure - at a CEO level Microsoft is simply not doing enough to change.
Forget Sinofsky. He was one guy and W8 has been coming down the tracks for what, four years now?
The blame here lies with Microsoft board of Directors. Windows 8 wasn't some backroom project, hardware spinoff, or specialised division. It was the company's flagship product, its core product, whose success literally makes or brakes the company.
And the board has fubbed it; Bigtime. The whole project was a disaster since its inception, and despite the recession it's very clear that the entire iDink paradigm Windows 8 attempted to hoist on users is so bad, so awful, that ordinary users are literally giving on on buying PCs full stop. A competent board would have been on top of this, foreseen the problems, and had them resolved before launch. We are now 8 months into launch and Windows 8 is a beached whale leading the whole PC industry pod onshore in its wake.
The first thing that needed to turn this around -- before any resigns, Service Packs, interface revamps, or marketing campaigns -- the very first things is that a swathe of the board needs to go. There's a cohort of bankers and industrialist there who probably have no idea how to run their own industries, let alone a computer software company. If my experience with Ireland is any indication, I imagine these directors are serial board hoppers anyway, so they won't be missed.
Microsoft is a software company. It needs software people on the board. Engineers, programmers, computer scientists, etc; with management experience, but who actually know what software actually is, and how it is developed, sold, and used. If MS puts qualified people in charge they can begin to turn the boat around; but they stick with the current shower of corporate BSers at the helm, this whale will stay dying on the beach for a very long time.
May the Maths Be with you!
Windows ME, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 8. The same headlines "windows is over" over and over again. Maybe this time it's for real. Maybe it finally will be the year of the Linux Desktop, that was apparently supposed to happen every year for the past 10 years. Maybe by the end of 2013 we'll only use iPads to do all our work
I'm not a windows guy. My laptop is a macbook pro and my day to day workstation is debian. However, I recently built a windows gaming computer and I like windows 8. Is it different? Yes. Does it have a learning curve? Yes. In the end it's stable, solid, easy to use, and looks nice.
The reason PC sales are down is because computing power has reached a point where we don't need a new computer every 2-3 years. My mac mini is 6 years old. I only need to replace it because apple won't support it any longer. Otherwise it's speed and power is fine. I expect my new desktop windows 8 PC will last me at least 6 or 7 years.
Gone is the day of the power computer. Desktop computing has reached the point where there is no leap in upgrading. It's incremental, people only do incremental upgrades when their old equipment dies.
Like Biff, Microsoft used to be so easy to hate (being the bully and all), but now, at the end of the story, they've become so reduced from their former self and are nothing more than a pathetic, blithering idiot, you almost feel sorry for them. Almost.
Anyway, I wonder if all of this negative news is enough to get Balmer tossed out.... Isn't that what is supposed to happen to CEOs when things go this wrong this fast?
I suppose its nothing to do with the fact that the PC I bought 5 years ago is pretty much still as good as those I can get off the shelf today. Other factors include the global economy being in the toilet. Of course Tablets have had an impact but the office is still mostly PC based with some Mac thrown in for good measure. Blaming M$ for the decline in PC sales is like blaming Obama for starting the War in Iraq!
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
MS's main problem is that they still think like monopolists. That's the core of the Win 8 problem -- people at MS telling us what we'll take, and that we'll like it. That they know better.
I'm a Gnome 2 refugee typing this on a Macbook Air, not a MS apologist. But Windows 7 is a very fine desktop OS. All they have to do is to stop trying to kill it off. Put it back on the PCs in the stores. Admit that Ballmer screwed the pooch, and let him go. He's a leader from the monopoly era, and not well suited to this moment.
Active Directory is a huge asset for MS. There's a whole ecosystem of tools that people use to do work in companies that will be very hard for anyone else to displace. Excel is amazing, and it's central to the conduct of business all over the world. People in offices all over the world live in Outlook. These aren't small advantages.
in the old days, they had their boots on our necks, and we all hated them. I remember that very clearly. But now, as tech professionals, we need them to get it together, for the health of the tech industry as a whole. Too much is sitting on top of them for their implosion to be a good thing.
Steven Vaughan-Nichols is the biggest anti-MS pro-Linux zealot out there. His pronouncement that "Windows is dead" is approximately as credible as Bill Gates saying "Linux is dead".
Saying that "windows is over" is excessively optimistic. It's going to take decades to die out. What is over though, is Microsoft's monopoly power. Their ability to push the hardware makers around is history.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
MS has a habit of releasing expermintal/dud releases that we all skip. Eg = windows vista, ME, etc. Just skip windows 8 and wait for the coming "regular" OS.
Lots of Windows developers warned you Windows 8 was going to be a big mistake. You ignored us and stumbled on like an angry dunk. I used Windows 8 in the shops. It sucked and was clear customers wouldn't warm to it. With the writing on the wall developers took the plunge to Tablet development. People still wanted their PCs, but instead of re-inventing the desktop and instead you laid another Zune and forgot to flush. You have squandered the biggest computing monopoly ever, but this time people are leaving so I don't think there is a come back. Bye Bye Balmer.
Windows 8 App Developer Says Process Stinks
http://www.informationweek.com/security/application-security/windows-8-app-developer-says-process-sti/240010598
More Game Developers Unhappy With Windows 8
http://linuxgamenews.com/post/29001456897/more-game-developers-unhappy-with-windows-8
Why Microsoft has made developers horrified about coding for Windows 8 # warning signs as far back as 2011!
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/06/html5-centric-windows-8-leaves-microsoft-developers-horrified/
Don’t Blame Us for Windows 8s Slow Sales, PC Makers Say
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/11/oem-windows-8/
Microsoft needs to focus on it's business users rather than trying to be a dog with two bones.
Nobody is going to be working with Excel spreadsheets on an ipad.
There's a lot of comments floating around which say "when you install this this 3rd party start menu and make it boot straight to desktop, it's fine".
What they are saying is that if you undo all the big ideas that were added in Windows 8 it's fine. That's not good, you know.
when you pry it from my cold dead hand!
Good people go to bed earlier.
While I know the business world will be on a Windows based system for at least another 10 years, it seems to me that Sony is missing an opportunity here by not adding Mouse/Keyboard options to their PS4. For that matter, I'd gladly pay more for a PS4 that had the keyboard/mouse and the ability to perform incremental upgrades.
You hear the same crap every time windows releases a new OS.
All it would take is a service pack. Let users decide if they want Metro or not. Let users decide if they want the start menu taking over their entire screen. I can't see how this would be complicated. The biggest hurdle is getting a marketing department to admit they made a mistake. The only time I can remember that ever happening was with New Coke. Coca-Cola sucked it up, gave the consumers what they wanted, and saved their brand. The ball is in Microsoft's court.
Ballmer is about as secure as CEO's get these days.
I would continue to pay for a supported, patched XP over buying windows 8.
But, again this report under estimates the staying power of PC in the corporate world. Very systematically they MS neutralized Unix and usurped all the corporate intranet. Exchange server has become the de-facto authentication server even for companies that use Google Apps to reduce their MS-Office/Outlook/SharePoint costs. It is well entrenched in the corporations. Home users and younger generation have stopped buying PCs/Laptops and are increasingly using pads, tablets and smartphones. Having to interoperate with all these devices have cut the traditional advantage MS had with its monoculture.
MS is on its way of becoming the son of IBM. Lots of well funded research projects, and stranglehold on some sectors, mostly staying in business world and staying away from personal and entertainment world. It will sell X-Box someday to concentrate on its "core mission".
Apple is NOT the new Microsoft. Apple is probably the new Sony. Google is probably the new Microsoft. Let us see if it can avoid following the same path as IBM and Microsoft.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Make no mistake about the concept of a news reposting site like Slashdot. There's a groupthink and an agenda to be pushed. Damn near every article that proclaims the death of Windows/MS has been posted here for years and the fanboi crowd always come running and hollering about how it's the holy truth and that it's all over... everyone trade in your Windows PC at the door for the new found glories of [technology x].
So far the only consistency between these articles and the real world is that the articles have always been wrong. For people who suck at the teat of empirical evidence, these articles should be (by and large) written off as trolls from the get go.
And this isn't to say that MS doesn't make more than one mistake a day. Certainly not. But the reporting of their death is greatly overestimated by tech writers who normally never get beyond making a living off of throwing out random opinions.
People look at those new phones and tablets, see the Windows logo and think about the antivirus running on their PC at home and at work. Some of them even remember editing the register. They feel a shiver down their spine and move to the next shelf. That's the number 1 problem, IMHO.
Number 2, the UI issue the article is about.
Most posters so far don't seem to know or understand what happened in Winh8.
Its_not a UI change. Its a UI and core system change, and a turning most of what was Windows to 'Legacy'.
The problem is much deeper than the UI. The problem is MS has explained very poorly what the new core OS and APIs are, and what tools and development was needed to make it fly. Most ordinary windows devs were left simply not knowing what APIs were going to be new or legacy.
I've fitted and made Windows 8 work for me (care of classic shell, and a few tweaks), and under the bonnet frankly there are good engineering works to be had. But the new UI is on par with the poorest touch interfaces I have seen. Its compounded by brilliance like the keyboard shortcuts that MS pushed in relation for it. Nobody in the Windows team seemed to realise that requiring bucketloads of keyboard shortcuts in a UI that is supposed to be touch based is an absolute fail.
You can add in more brilliance - like screwing with Explorer and putting in the appalling ribbon menu bar. Only, they did not fix the ribbon. So its got groupings of small icons mixed in with some that are good enough for touch - and these are too small to work in a touch interface. Sheer fucking genius. And either make the control panel in the dekstop side, or in the new UI. In 8 for some reason the control settings and options get split on both sides and its a plain mess. How it passed UI testing and end user testing is beyond comprehension.
It was fascinating during the development cycle to read some of the justification for the changes. They took feedback collected from end user machines. But not mine. And probably not yours. I know of nobody sane who does not turn that off. So, they collated data from the wrong userbase - and then decided that 'no one is using the start button, lets get rid of it' (I know I simplified the background, but hey..)
The only place where Windows 8 with the new UI works is on ARM, and its been a mistake to put and drive this into the X86 and X64 world. Windows 8 with an option for he new UI should have been the default there, with desktop as the default OS and with legacy and current customer support for the long term being the objective.
And a couple more things from the new UI angle. The applications are tedious, poor, and low quality. And thats before you get into the full screen nature of them UI, and the horrendous square everything. Every single part of it is sharp edged, square, old. There is nothing fresh about it. It reminds me orf the simplifed UI from win2k. This may have reduced system load and it may have been required, but it does not look nice. It does not feel nice. It does not feel modern, or fresh. It just feels bad. And in doing this they had to throw away features from 7 that were previously touted and positive steps forward.
The bottom line is as a release OS - it is a trainwreck. And not just in look and feel, but way beyond. Its a train wreck at the API and engineering level too. Now 99% of the audience is on the wrong track. Moving them over requires that they are going to have to change the gauge on all their wheels.
This is an incredible uphill problem. Move everyone from what they know and like, to what they don't. and .. don't.
The real problem is that the Windows end client is actually the grounding for the MS server and application layers. If the end client fails, these will fail also. And this means that_right now_ the board at MS should be rolling heads.
We`re all equal
Software makers sticking their finger in their ears? ... sounds just like the GNOME3 story :)
Seriously, when has SJVN ever been even remotely close to even being impartial to an MS product? He's easily the most biased voice on their entire network.
So if photoshop worked well in 1999 on a 300mhz P4, then custom native libs, and gui in adk, its perfectly viable to have a good version running on a large tablet 9in +.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
From what my experience Windows 8 is clunky at best. I don't understand why, with such a radical departure from 7, they wouldn't offer options to switch to a traditional view. That would (or should) please everyone.
Are we seriously still doing this?
This is no surprise. If I wanted a toy that was operating under the delusion that it was a phone, I'd go down to Toys R Us and by a Fisher-Price Elmo's World Talking Cell Phone(TM). And if I wanted to be the manufacture to babysit me and curate what programs I can install through their store, I'd buy Apple. What the fuck where they trying to accomplish here? Designing an interface for touchscreen when almost everyone uses a mouse and keyboard? Get the fuck out of here you incompetents. Imagine if the iOS was designed to work with a mouse and you had to drag your finger everywhere to move the cursor.
Also, good job pissing off the entire game industry with your Windows Store bullshit. It's paying good dividends for you with the Steam Linux I hope. Now you've lost yet another large segment of the people who actually care enough to upgrade.
Well it's not like he said always-on computing is fine or released a game with bad DRM that barely worked. Now THAT would be unforgivable, lol.
Windows may be dead or dying for a HOME operating system. For business, it will keep on going.
Businesses have critical dependencies on specific software and business methods that tie into it. Such businesses, which comprise a HUGE market, are not going to switch from Windows to MacOS or anything else in the foreseeable future. To do so, they would require a full-on replacement for Windows that includes a full Windows API so every program can run just like it does on Windows, with the same access to hardware, system resources and other programs. And they are not going to go there without a GUARANTEE that whatever proposed replacement will run every program with no trouble.
Never mind that Microsoft never gave them perfect forward migration or any guarantee of it. But they were Microsoft, the same company, so there was some degree of trust that they were going to make the new system reasonably compatible with the old API and they did ever since Windows NT. Conservative companies even so waited at least a year after release before they started phasing in new systems. Sometimes well over two years.
And they're not going to go for a small company's product or a free (e.g. Linux) replacement for Windows because there's nobody to sue if they fuck up your systems and stop critical business processes.
Maybe in a decade, Microsoft will be mostly gone from the business world. Probably not.
.. simply by checking out the latest WindowsXP 64-bit codebase reintegrating all SPs .. Fixes a.s.o. finetuning it for the future and then I think Ubuntu will collapse .. ..
as well as Apple
And well the worlds CO2 output will also be decreased by 10% ! ..
We need WindowsXP back.
And I would open source windows 7 putting it in the hands of the painfully starved Gnome community.
Mr. Balmer is like King Midas everything he touches turns into Gold, but well an unstable and radiation emitting Gold radionuklid .. if used it will make everything worse.
Microsoft needs to own up, and quick. Pull a Coca Cola and release a Windows Classic. From speaking with friends and colleagues, some do seem to like Win8. But, most are holding off until hardware failure forces them into up(?)grading. Give them a path with a classic desktop and many would make the move.
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
the PC I bought 5 years ago is pretty much still as...Tablets have had an impact!
Except blaming the economy while people are out buying new shiny toys that offer most of the functionality your PC shows money is not the problem. Perhaps Microsoft trying to sell PC's as tablets [often touchless tablets] is driving this market as well. Even more interesting is PC's used to have a 5year life cycle with new Windows driving those sales, yet you do not have a new machine.
bing bing bing MCFLY!
Whatever used to require a PC has been gradually replaced with other, specialized hardware that addresses the shortcomings of a 'universal' platform.
Game consoles came out, addressing a lower price point and consistent locked-in hardware where those are the prime concerns of users of those aspects.
Smart phones and pads have come out, addressing portability, speed of start up, and convenience for applications where those are the primary concerns.
Simultaneously, it seems like computers have reached a plateau where speed really isn't impacting users much any more. It used to be that from a 286 to a 386 to a 486 upgrades had a direct (wonderful) improvement in speed of EVERYTHING. Your word-processor started faster, your graphics program ran quicker, everything was perceptibly different and better. Now, essentially, most typical applications open almost instantly. Really, the lag bottleneck on launching big apps or games is the hard drive, making SSD's a bigger impact for the user than a new computer.
(IMO the only 'frontier' that really impacts users today for PCs is startup time. I still would like a system that a) I can *really* shut down - not just leave in a 500w-consuming-'sleep' mode, and b) will start as fast as a pad-device. Then again, starting my android smartphone now seems to take more time than my old 386 used to....)
-Styopa
Two things.
One, Correlation vs Causation? Another article I recently read stated that PC sales, as a whole are down. Why? Because computers built in the last 5 years are plenty powerful for most home users. My 4+ year old, quad core i7 with 8Gb of RAM and 2TB of disk space is alive and well, and fully capable of doing everything I could ever want it to do. Not to mention tablets hitting mainstream (http://newsstream.blogs.cnn.com/2013/04/12/pc-sales-down-but-not-out/)
Because of this, I have no need to build a new system, and no need to buy a new OS. OS sales are largely dependent on OEM sales.
Two, every 2nd Windows OS sucks... That is how it has always been. It seems Microsoft does something different and it takes two generations before people accept it.
-Windows 3.1, Awesome
-Windows 95 - Blah
-Windows 98 - Awesome (Compared to the previous two)
-Windows ME - Set it on fire!
-Windows XP - Awesome
-Windows Vista - Blah
-Windows 7 - Awesome (When compared to every other version)
-Windows 8 - WTF?
-Windows ??? - Profit?
Windows is far from dead. Microsoft tried something new, like they did with the Ribbon in Office for Office 2007 - people HATED it. Now, I couldn't imagine using Office without the Ribbon. People hate change.
The only bad thing I see about Windows8 are the ads. Remove them and everything's fine.
(first of all, inb4 all the jugheads calling me a M$ shill)...
After using W8 for a few months (due to hardware support for a slide scanner) I don't see much basis for all the hate. Yeah, the UI is retarded and flashy and gets in the way of getting things done , but I've learned to adapt.
What I don't get is why people aren't all raging about how broken window focus management has been since Windows 7. It used to be you could <alt>+<tab> and cycle through windows in a predictable manner, so you weren't required to remove your hands from the freakin' keyboard when you're working at 90 miles an hour. Or is this just a dual-monitor fsckup?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Intel's average quarterly gross margin in the last five years is 59.97 per cent, and Microsoft's is even higher at 78.31 per cent. Dell's average gross profit margin at group level is 19.53 per cent and HP's is 22.32 per cent.
PC's have competition in the form of more portable, simpler, cheaper, Better Screens, More responsive, cool devices, that are relatively cheap though the absence of Intel and Microsoft, who effectively killed the market for its own more portable, simpler, cheaper, More responsive, [admittedly with a poor screen] cool devices...the netbook, which they have replaced with their own netbook...sorry tablet "Surface", that is the reality is the polar opposite of the netbook; its only a little bigger...and still has a poor screen the surface, less response...and as cool as cancer. The fact that they have forced touchless PC's to be tablets, neglecting advantages of current input devices is just the icing on the cake.
Microsoft/Intel needed to create a revolution the Desktop [I'd argue nurture the netbook not kill it], not reinvent the tablet. Right now they need to trim there margins. Personally I think the $ needs to return to Micro$oft.
I can't believe so many people are giving this report any real value. Of COURSE PC purchasing went down. You can now buy smaller devices that do what you want without the need to put a full size computer. That fits the needs of a tremendous number of people. You don't need a computer to talk on social media, or check email, or to communicate. Smart phones have taken that.
But saying windows is dying is poor research. No other operating system performs the function that windows does to the degree that it can. You can argue apple might, but the cost model is too expensive for most businesses.
You can pick up a useable, supportable PC laptop for around $500 a unit in bulk, or $700 outside. Apple is $200-$300 more (these figures are debateable by a margin of around $100). Support costs run about the same. However, a lot of software does not work on macs due to a varied number of reasons and most users aren't technically savvy enough to use features on macs to use them.
It comes down to cost, useability and features. No other OS offers what windows can at that price-point. It's also the reason no-one (figuratively said) is picking up windows 8. The people that designed windows 8 were trying to be like apple to an audience that likes windows. Windows 8 might be good for mobile devices but it's not for working PC's which make up the bulk of users who care.
No, they're saying if you're someone who is resistant to change, you can easily revert the UI to work the way you are used to.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Apple successfully implemented a culture of "upgrading for the sake of upgrading", which Windows wasn't
Except Apple didn't, you need to stop talking about consumers like they are stupid. Apple successfully recreated itself as an electronics company its computing business is dying YOY its sales are down 22%
Windows may be dead or dying for a HOME operating system. For business, it will keep on going.
Businesses have critical dependencies on specific software and business methods that tie into it.
Businesses are only now just realizing how screwed they are with their critical dependencies. You can bet they won't make that mistake again and the fix will come sooner than you think. Businesses can't cling to XP for another decade. They will have to upgrade and it will probably not be to another dying Windows OS.
They could switch to OSX but I don't think the company would be interested in the hardware premium or replacing all the PCs. Something like Ubuntu with something other than unity set as the default desktop environment would work fine for most of the users.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The analogy is like saying "Car sales the lowest in a decade. The end of cars is in sight." Yes sales will be low, but the PC will remain as a utility, like the Refrigerator. No longer the center of attention, but always needed and ubiquitous. All the phones/tablets etc. need the PC as an anchor. Sure everything is moving to the "cloud", but all it will take is for a few accounts to get hacked big time and people losing their contacts forever to realize the "cloud" is not a foolproof solution.
Whatever used to require a PC has been gradually replaced with other, specialized hardware that addresses the shortcomings of a 'universal' platform.
Except this is not the case this is about Windows moving the Desktop into a specialized hardware device [A tablet]
My wife and I went shopping for a new laptop for her to do her writing, and we went to Best Buy to look at various models. She picked Windows 8.
She wasn't thrilled by Windows 8 on models without the touch screen, but she fell in love with an Ultrabook with Windows 8 and a touch screen. There's a wide variety of applications, there's not much lag time in starting them up, and we experienced no tedium. She also looked at Apple laptops and wasn't impressed. They seemed like the same-old same-old to both of us. And also I showed her Ubuntu 12 on my laptop, but it was a non-starter. She couldn't figure out where things were. She thought Unity was trying to be like Mac but not doing nearly as good a job.
And having brought it home, I've had a minimum of "service" requests, which is a big plus for me because the last thing I want to do when I get home is administer her machine (after having done a fair amount of that all day at the office). She can connect to the wireless, she found the printer on the network, she can watch Netflix, etc. Our kids even use it to draw and play games. No pain.
So pardon me, but having actually witnessed someone using it so successfully, I am skeptical of all of these negative reviews of Windows 8 on the basis of poor UI. Does it really boil down to the square corners?
Are we seriously still doing this?
Ironically in context of this article, Microsoft is trying its best to destroy its own monopoly on the Desktop for the sake of it being a massive failure in mobile maybe and needs to admit the strategy has failed. You may not have noticed but Linux share has been creeping up.
A HUGE amount of back end processing systems are Unix based. Because in the olden days, Biig Metal or Unix-type systems were the only ones that could handle large data processing reliably. (That is still the case: I have had Unix servers with up to a decade of up-time.)
In the mid nineties MS went after the back-end processing market of businesses. While they had some success (And some spectacular failures) what prevented MS from gaining major foothold in enterprise data centers was the implosion of the Internet bubble and the availability of reliable, easy to use Open Source versions of Unix.
I have been writing all enterprise based applications for the past ten years as web based apps. Our current mobile stuff is also Web based (with a thin webkit client to handle the presentation on the specific device). While MS does have an installed corporate base, I'm not buying any stock soon. Their only successful product in the last decade has been the X-Box.
Hajo Monogamy: Belief so strong that millions of people end perfectly good relationships in order to start a new one.
Windows logo and think about the antivirus running on their PC
This article is not about there failure in mobile...as about them turning Powerful Desktop PC's into expensive, pure screen, tablets for the hope of success in that market. Ironically creating a Windowless environment..but the reason for using Windows is a good brand name.
Since the death of the Amiga and Atari ST. Computer users have had two or three options, Windows, Mac or Linux ( there was a time between the death of the two computers and the birth of a viable Linux -- so at that time there were only two options. Linux were geeky, and Macs were expensive.
At the same time the net arose, and it was internet stuff that became the biggest consumer of cpu time. For most home users. Windows was really the only option.
OK. I'm vry geeky and I used to use Windows a lot. One of the main reasons, all the developer tools that worked much better in Windows.
Then one day I got a drive by virus. I went to one of those, post your Hijack this logs and we will help sites. The esperience was enough to make me decide to go then and there with Linux.
While I am geeky, I do not want to spend my time maintaining my computer. I want to spend it doing the geeky stuff that I like, and I discovered that if you are your own sysadmin Linux is a lot easier to use. I have almost never had file system corruption and the times that I did it was because of failing hard drives not the OS.
I generally don't worry about viruses. I don't have to worry often about conflicting installation of software. Every Friday I update my whole system no problem.
The thing is that underneath it all Windows is a poorly engineered system with a lot of bad decisions which got by for a long time because of it's monopoly power ,Moore's law, and the ability to hire tousands of chimpanzees too bang out code on keyboards in an attempt to hide Windows flaws. The problem now for MS is that when people check something else out, they are not likely to go back.
ZDNet has been known to take Microsoft's side? Even the referenced link lists a few articles critical of Microsoft within the first page.
I think people are extrapolating the wrong messages from current trends. The assumption that poor PC sales are a reaction against Windows 8, I've yet to see any correlation that's the case. Outside of corporate environments I don't think users think that far in their purchasing decisions. If there were a specific shift away from PCs then we should be seeing a corresponding rise in Mac and even Linux PC sales. As far as I know that isn't happening and in fact, I'm pretty certain the story late last year was of softening Apple sales.
In fact, here's an article from 6 days ago. Incredulously weak sales in Macs is due to external factors, but similar declines in PCs is specifically due to Windows 8.
I think there are three factors in play here:
1) Soft economy; things aren't quite as good as some would like us to believe and as such people are not spending on computers
2) Computers last longer; we're no longer in the 90's where a bargain PC could be obsoleted within a year. A decent computer is good for quite a few years, reducing the need for replacement.
3) People are finding their needs filled with less expensive tablets and smartphones.
One other factor that doesn't help matters much is that in the minds of American consumers you evidently can't ever have more than two dominant players. So unless a third entity isn't a resounding success with dominant position it is considered a flop, even if it produces decent sales. Industry "experts" only exacerbate the problem. Everything devolves into a two party system.
There are plenty of distributions I would use. The kernel and the tools are great. Software is good enough. Now if there was a window manager or desktop I was comfortable with I would be all set. But there no longer is and I am shunning Linux.
"ZDNet is known to take the side of Microsoft in the past." Anyone who follows Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols will no doubt realize he is a firm advocate for Linux and has posted almost nothing positive about Windows in quite some time.
Damn near every article that proclaims the death of Windows/MS has been posted here for years
The death of Microsoft here maybe was due to technical users, using viable [often better alternatives] while seeing the shortcoming of the Microsoft Platform...it just never really happened because of Microsoft's entrenched Monopoly. Now After the rise of the Pack of four...call it Mobile and Internet or Linux if you want, where Microsoft has failed, in a level playing field.
This topic is about Microsoft burning its Monopoly Desktop market in the hope of capturing the Mobile Market by turning their Universal Desktop product into a locked down tablet...Against Apple and Google, and that is being reported in the Mainstream Media, everyone has one.
Absolutely right.
Windows also incorporates centralized management features that either don't exist or are not as easy to use in other operating systems. It's all standardized, easy to implement, and relatively seamless. These traits allow relatively low-skilled people to support Windows.
I was having some authentication issues and didn't have the permissions to remove and readd my computer to the domain (pretty sure the machine password was out of sync). The tech that came to my computer didn't know how to run a command in DOS, but she did know how to remove my computer from the domain, rename it, and re-add it. Is this a good thing for the computing environment? Definitely not. But it's definitely good for companies' bottom line because they don't have to pay people who really know what they're doing and are highly educated.
Unfortunately the ability for low-skilled people to keep the lights on extends to servers too. No doubt Windows can develop some REALLY complex problems, but by and large getting services up and running isn't that big of a deal.
Software support is definitely critical too. Legacy applications are the bane of my security-focused existence. They cause all sorts of problems, but they keep the work going.
There are just no realistic alternatives at this point. You can point to one OS or another as having some of the desirable traits needed in an enterprise OS, but the point is that none of them have ALL of those desirable traits. Application support goes way way beyond a word processor, spreadsheet, and power point...there are thousands of specialized applications that are critical for businesses to run. Companies like hospitals have made HUGE investments in software to manage EMRs and issues with the user interface of one version of windows are not going to cause them to abandon that investment overnight.
That's just it.
I don't WANT to have to "learn to adapt".
Especially not for some imbecilic tweaks in the UI that remove functionality and stop me from working efficiently.
For me, time is money. And all the time I have to waste trying to dick around in the new UI, instead of getting work done, is money Microsoft is stealing from me.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I'm going to get attacked for this, but I honestly don't see what people are complaining about. Everything always boils down to "i don't like change." I like the new UI. I'd personally rather use Evernote on Windows RT then Evernote on Android. The whole purpose of Windows 8 is to serve as a bridge to RT-only. I don't support it until you can sideload whatever apps you want and can bypass the store, but ultimately, it's a worthy cause. They'll have an OS that ties all devices together (once phone 8 catches up and gets tied in). I use my Surface RT a hell of a lot more than my Android tablets. Even crappy apps feel more polished then some professional apps on Android. Some of that is due to the design of the OS which I think is great. Does it work well without touch, not the best. Is the switch from desktop to metro and vice versa a bit jarring, yes. Was it necessary though? Yes it was. They're trying to change the interface completely and people are clinging to their old apps, so the desktop had to stay around. Does the desktop need to stay around? Not really. Don't hate something only because you're unfamiliar with it. Windows is trying something new and it's not all that bad unless you're stuck in the old mind set. If you've been one to shrug dropping legacy support and shrug the pains that go along with it, then you probably don't have a problem. Is it an issue for businesses? Yes it is. But ultimately, Windows was going to have to do it at some point. This event is inevitable. So honestly, I don't mind that it's happening now instead of later. Force yourself to use RT for awhile and you'll notice that you actually hate that there isn't a modern UI for Office, not vice versa. You begin hating to go have to go to the desktop. I pick up my Android tablet and start swiping expecting things to happen. It quickly becomes second nature to the point that I just keep doing it to Android and getting annoyed that I can't just close something by swiping down or switching apps from swiping from the left, etc etc etc.
You hear the same crap every time windows releases a new OS.
Maybe, but this is backed by 3 quarters of dropping sales.
MS has a habit of releasing expermintal/dud releases that we all skip. Eg = windows vista, ME, etc. Just skip windows 8 and wait for the coming "regular" OS.
Except this is a shift in direction towards mobile...Vista and ME problems were not related to their interface.
As I told you so already earlier this year: http://www.nico.schottelius.org/blog/news-2013-01-22/
Saying that "windows is over" is excessively optimistic. It's going to take decades to die out. What is over though, is Microsoft's monopoly power. Their ability to push the hardware makers around is history.
-jcr
Except Microsoft is still a monopoly the Desktop, all that has happened is Mobile is suddenly smart, and replaced a lot of the functionality of the Desktop. Microsoft is turning the Desktop computer into a poor locked down tablet [Which is bad for Linux on the Desktop], Which is losing to better Tablets from Android and Apple, but that is very different news to success of GNU\Linux on the Desktop, although nice to see its market share creeping up.
bye!
I'm a Gnome 2 refugee typing this on a Macbook Air, not a MS apologist.
Except in the context of this article Apple is down 22% YOY, while Linux enjoys a steady growth. Real Gnome2 refugees run Cinnamon on a Pixel...like Linux https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/dk1aiW4JjHd
Go the Google route in reverse and call your operating system a browser. You'll need a new name for 'browser' though. I suggest Microsoft "Space" the Next Generation of Surface.
Ho wait vista (the microsoft total failure OS) is still more used to surf the web that all mobile devices together
Ignoring the fact that Windows 8 is now a mobile OS...part of the problem, the mobile market is larger than the PC market. To put that in perspective there are about 1.2 Billion PC's to 6 Billion phones, and phones are now computers. Android is set to overtake Windows as the dominant OS this year.
An open source operating system that has been shunned by practically all software companies which provide the software used by professionals.
Linux has been powerful and stable enough to underpin the server market for coming up to two decades. If those commercial software companies chose to hitch their wagon to one horse without taking the time to consider any of the alternatives, then they deserve to fail.
Too bad: Business Management 101. They'll get no sympathy from me.
Apple, for a while, looked like it was doing OK with its unixy features under the hood (and to be fair, Macports are still useful), but its business model has become steadily uglier as its fund of innovative ideas has dwindled.
Eventually, I would not be surprised if we saw a repeat of the SCO debacle where the only thing Microsoft and Apple are left to work with is the potential gains from litigation over their portfolio of patents.
People look at those new phones and tablets, see the Windows logo and think about the antivirus running on their PC at home and at work. Some of them even remember editing the register. They feel a shiver down their spine and move to the next shelf. That's the number 1 problem, IMHO.
Number 2, the UI issue the article is about.
I think for much the same reasons, the world probably isn't willing anymore to do full Microsoft product upgrade cycles every 3 years.
Lots of people are shifting from PCs to tablets and even phones for their web surfing. Some are moving everything there. So PCs are declining. New PC sales have been declining since most people can't tell that they are faster for most things, anymore (who cares if a spreadsheet loads in 1/5 second vs 1/10 second ... doubling the speed mattered back when it took half a minute). So of course Windows sales are down (a few users jumping ship over to Linux isn't even a dent, so don't bother with that).
This doesn't mean PCs are dead. They are just right-sizing. Windows will be there.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Hate to bring this up again :) but since I never actually wagered anything substantial (other than my cosmic intuition) on this, I will again mention that Microsoft is still on track to confirm my late-'90s prediction that in 20 years they would no longer be a company. A "microsoft" would by a type of nickname or blunder characterized by self-centered, back-slapping, bloated hubris.. Dude, that was so microsoft!
ZDNet is proclaiming the death of the PC / Windows...
again...
Just more clickbait fodder.
It's interesting historically, though. Ten years ago, ZDNet was trumpeting the glorious victory of Windows/Intel over Mac OS and the Unix workstation/server vendors, all while pretending that Linux didn't exist.
Software makers sticking their finger in their ears? ... sounds just like the GNOME3 story :)
You're not wrong. I was a big fan of Gnome from early days (while KDE was mostly Kluttered and Kfucking Khorrible). Now the tables have turned, and KDE appears to have learned from the mistakes of the early KDE4 implementation to produce a truly excellent UI, while Gnome has become utterly unusable.
Unix on the Mac, Linux on all the Android devices. for decades, folks have said that Unix is very user-friendly, it is just particular about who it chooses as friends. appears the old fox has got some fancy duds and moves, and gotten out of Ma Bell's basement at last.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
PC sales are not down due to Windows 8. Sales are down due to the fact that older PCs still work. I am running a 2 year old gaming laptop that does everything I need just fine, I don't need to buy an upgrade every other year, like I did 10 years ago. My daughters 5 year old dell desktop does everything she needs it to do, and she is a very heavy MMO player. No need for her to upgrade either.
People aren't buying computers, not because of windows 8, but because their old ones don't need replacement yet. When they do replace them, they may be going with a tablet or touch device instead. The times are changing, the market and the industry hasn't caught up to the changing upgrade cycle yet. They are still expecting the customer to upgrade every 2 years.. It was easy when 2 years gave you a 50% performance boost. A 10% performance boost is much harder to justify.
We are going to see this with tablets sooner rather than later. Apple sells a gazillion of them because people are upgrading every year. That will slow down once they get into the 10-15% faster range instead of the 50% faster range.
I was having some authentication issues and didn't have the permissions to remove and readd my computer to the domain (pretty sure the machine password was out of sync). The tech that came to my computer didn't know how to run a command in DOS, but she did know how to remove my computer from the domain, rename it, and re-add it. Is this a good thing for the computing environment? Definitely not. But it's definitely good for companies' bottom line because they don't have to pay people who really know what they're doing and are highly educated.
This is not good, it's extremely short sighted...
Yes, you can hire low paid and low competence techs, but the end result will be flakey and insecure... You could hire incompetent techs to run linux too and the result would be almost as bad.
Windows is inherently unreliable, and will require more of the low paid techs to constantly fix stupid problems.
Trivial problems often get dealt with in inefficient ways by incompetent techs who don't understand what's really going on, they end up just rebooting and hoping the problem goes away rather than trying to work out what actually happened and fix it.
Incompetent techs may be cheaper than competent ones, but you will usually need a lot more of them.
How much does a major security breach cost? Your risk of having one goes up significantly if you hire cheap incompetent staff.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
ME's problem was that there was no visible difference between it and '98. Consumers had no reason to upgrade, and it had a poor stability reputation, so they avoided it.
Vista had a bad reputation before it was even released, entirely because some whiny MS-haters got their hands on the Beta and tried to find everything they could to complain about. I was selling computers at a large retailer when Vista came out, and for 6 months beforehand, people came in (with alarming frequency), telling me how bad Vista was going to be, and that they needed a new XP box while they could still get one. Vista was hated because of a soiled reputation before it was even released. Most of the FUD I was being told wasn't even based on any truth, it was purely rumors (and some of them were pretty far-fetched; 'I'm going to have to get a new email address! My old monitor, keyboard, and mouse won't work, and I love my 15" CRT! Ahhh!').
8's problem is that people don't need an upgrade. It really is a hardware problem. I now own a computer shop, and sell XP boxes alongside 8. Nobody wants 7. The people who want a new computer like 8. They're always cautious, but you can tell they're excited -- they don't want to buy something new and have it feel just like the old thing. Reception has been very good. The people who don't want 8 are the stick-in-the-mud whiners who are still bellyaching over the fact Clinton get reelected. They don't want 7 either. They probably would be thrilled if I still sold boxes running 95. The reason PC sales have been slow is simply that nobody needs to upgrade. If their motherboard dies, they buy a new PC. If they bring me a PC for a hard drive upgrade, and it's running a P4 with 512 of Ram, I'll steer them towards a new computer because it's cheaper than upgrading everything. Otherwise, people are happy to stick with what they have. After all, they just spent their 'toy money' on a new smartphone/tablet/55" TV.
And they're not going to go for a small company's product or a free (e.g. Linux) replacement for Windows because there's nobody to sue if they fuck up your systems and stop critical business processes.
When was the last time Microsoft got sued for something like this? I don't think you actually could win that lawsuit.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Parallels or other virtualization, lets Windows run inside a window on Intel Macs. Full copy paste functionality between OS's & excellent performance within Windows. Put it in its sandbox, snapshot it so you can start clean everyday & most IT problems just go away, and eventually Windows can be phased out.
I, for some reason, can't bring myself to read any more of this man's articles. He's been known in the past to make highly inaccurate claims and gathering huge chunks of his 'articles' from forums. He's almost in Katherine Noyes territory.
I did not read every comments but my two cents here is to note that M$ needs to fix their directx/or gaming performances
Since I run Windows8 I have noticed that my games are so laggy compared to Windows 7 which is slower than Windows XP!
Obligatory Dennis Leary link
That's where the inertia comes from. That and the fact that Word/Excel probably integrate with all of them quite well too.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
So MS decided they had the perfect plan to get developers working on software for WinRT. Let's just shove it in their faces all the time, let's put some crapware that starts up every time they try to do something on their computers and annoy the hell out of them. They'll get annoyed and make something better. Profit!!!
No Microsoft, no. It's not done this way. First you must make people want to buy it. You need to make people want to use it. You make people fall in love with it. Then you'll get developers actually making stuff. Some will be good, a few really good the rest will be mediocre and crappy pieces of software like the norm is everywhere. MS, I do not want to wrestle with my OS. I want it to do what I want, not what YOU want it to do.
Stop trying to leverage your monopoly you arses. It ain't going to work anymore. You were late to the mobile games and it just shows that the only reason you are still making money in the PC market is that you managed to eliminate your competitors through various tactics (like buying them or driving them into bankruptcy).
You pissed me off and I really enjoy to see you squirm, trying to bully your way out of insignificance by allying yourself with other bullies like Oracle (on their way to obsolescence) and Nokia (big, slow giant that is bleeding money and hoped that cutting a deal with you would somehow magically save them) and talking shit about bundled software on what is basically a flexible and open-source platform. Are you trying to sell us on the idea of a monopoly of an open-source OS? Really?!
Spend less money on litigation, more on inventing cool stuff. You pay a lot of smart people MS, listen to them. Let them work their "magic". One more thing, throw Balmer off the train. He's making and arse of himself and is embarrassing you. Maybe it's not too late.
I meant "Brewster's Millions" (not "The Toy")...
APK
The company is now run by a collection of floating board members and Ballmer. The board is made up of the clueless wealthy that view Microsoft as a shiny toy, rather than the necessary plumbing of the businesses that maintains their own wealth. Ballmer's hamfisted clumsiness and arrogance, of course, are well known.
Users? Developers? Barely afterthoughts. Large business users get some attention, but Windows 8 isn't going to be foisted off on users of MSs high end products. They actually have to get some work done.
As an end user, you're better off installing Ubuntu or Linux Mint and being done with it. Most web surfing, letter writing, spreadsheet using, end users don't need Microsoft anything. Time to move on.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Were do you get that number from? The latest predictions were 7% down (IDC) and 7% up (Garter), so they are probably staying the same in traditional computers.
http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q1fy13datasum.pdf Those are actual result published, by Apple. I've ignored your waffle.
Despite management's fondness for excel spreadsheets, those can just as easily be authored with Open Office.
I'm sorry, no, what you're saying is just stupid.
As an Excel power user (well, a bit more than that) I have worked with both Calc and Excel, and Calc is way behind in all areas. Here's a small list of Calc 3.3 versus Excel 2007 issues:
- Slow to start;
- Steals focus when starting;
- Eats more RAM (75 MB post-start, empty, versus 25 MB post-start, empty, for Excel);
- Is a lot slower when opening large spreadsheets. I have a 96 MB spreadsheet and Excel opens it in 32 seconds on my laptop. Calc took... forever, really. I mean it never managed to open it Got stuck at about 15% and remained there forever. Same file, same laptop.
- VBA macros obviously don't work in Calc;
- Many complex formulas don't work in Calc. Furthermore, some formulas mess up, resulting in wrong data for some files. VERY dangerous for a business.
- Calc uses just one CPU core for... everything, really. Formula calculations, file opening, data manipulation, you name it. Excel uses all cores
- Charts look awful in Calc no matter how much time you spend on them.
- Macros: I just recorded a new macro in Calc, and after finishing recording, I saved it, then I wanted to run it. I got an error: "JRE is defective". It's ridiculous, JRE works perfectly on my machine.
And that's just scratching the surface. I shiver at the thought of having to do anything productive under Calc.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
But if they had a big success in the mobile world maybe (and only maybe) people would have swallowed the Metro interface on the desktop as well. They're betting the company on Metro on the desktop and my theory is that a failure in the mobile market makes that bet hopeless. They still have some time to turn the tide but it's not easy.
If something is failing, it never becomes a success. That does not mean Microsoft has not been able to outlast its competition, outbribe, buyout, bully...but its competitors are Google and Apple, and Microsoft offering is not good enough.
The reality is though is Metro a suitable fit for the Desktop PC [With Metro its just a tablet]...and everybody is unanimous in saying No...and people love touchscreens.
...it's just the app store and bundled apps that suck. The operating system itself has been more stable than Windows 7 (for me) and faster too! I love the Start Screen, makes it so much faster to launch an app than the Start Menu of past versions. The only downsides are the complete lack of any good Metro apps and the app store which makes discovery of good apps impossible.
And they're not going to go for a small company's product or a free (e.g. Linux) replacement for Windows because there's nobody to sue if they fuck up your systems and stop critical business processes.
Like how Microsoft has fucked up Windows 8 and stopped critical business processes from working on it? Good luck with that lawsuit. This idea of companies making software decisions because they need someone to sue has always been ridiculous. I talk to a fair number of people going from Oracle to PostgreSQL who bring up this argument as a major issue in their way. I ask them if they can name a single instance where someone sued Oracle for releasing buggy software and won. The "need someone to sue" myth is even getting weaker lately, as many companies update their EULA so that individual users must accept arbitration. That's all about keeping them from jumping onto a class action lawsuit instead.
Andoid dominant because its on more phones than Windows is on PCs....
No..not for a second. Pre Windows 8 I would have perhaps argued that smartphones and tablets replace most of the functionality of a desktop machine, Post Windows 8 I argue since Windows 8 is simply another tablet OS, it should be compared directly with Android/iOS [I simply use convenient Numbers] which ironically exactly what Microsoft wants...its just not working out too well
At $40 I wouldn't complain. It's not $40 though - it's at least $100..
The company I work for is all Mac for ~400 employees for all departments.
Mac is easier to administer than Windows, and there haven't been any complaints, even from departments like accounting and finance, where you might expect people to be used to Windows.
I was reading until then.
Windows 8 for desktop is the best windows operating system to come out to date. Anybody that says there is a learning curve to windows 8 doesn't belong on slashdot, any basic computer user can easily work out windows 8 in 30 minutes (I did?) it's exactly like all previous windows a part from the seperate tile interface, and moving the mouse to the corner of the screens which is very useful from the start. This article is basically slamming microsoft for the poor adoption of its tablets and mobiles, aka that use windows rt (which is crap anyway) because we like full desktop environments.
I designed a Windows 8 based car that has no steering wheel. Start the car, which boots to Windows 8. All you do is move the tiles on the touch screen back and forth to steer. It's wonderful progress. Our focus group was made up of paid shills and they loved it! What's not to like?
Microsoft's figures have always been ... dubious, all these numbers demonstrate is that almost nobody actually /buys/ their software, especially their operating systems. Most of their historical sales figures are PCs sold, and the upgrade pressure just hasn't been there the last few years, people are busy upgrading their tablets, phones, media PCs, etc, and Microsoft don't have any of those eggs in their basket -- because nobody buys their operating systems.
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
This author is simply a troll. A journalist's duty is to present an argument based on his experiences. While we can't guarantee a lack of bias, this man penned Windows 8's death before it came out. That's not journalism; it's fanaticism. Linux users have every right to hate Microsoft. In fact, everyone has every right to hate anything that doesn't live up to their standard. However, when we throw a parade every time anyone says anything anti-Windows 8, it just makes us look sad and pathetic. Do we really have nothing better to do? It's an operating system that made drastic, and probably poor, changes to a UI people were used to. If you don't like it, don't use it. I probably will, but only for gaming. There is no need to fill the internet with articles on articles on article response commentaries on how one guy didn't like Windows 8.
Isn't that what is supposed to happen to CEOs when things go this wrong this fast?
That hasn't happened in a very long time. Expect Ballmer to get a massive end of year bonus.
Frankly, Ballmer has been the best to happen to the computing industry in decades. With the loosening of Microsoft's grip, we actually get to see a competitive landscape start to form again.
This is fantastic.
Obviously the board is doing something wrong when they make a product that so totally ignores a huge market segment (geeky types).
Either they hired a crappy marketing guy, or they drank the kool-aid that someone gave them.
Regardless of the issues of running a business, the board still needs to know what their flagship product actually is, why people buy it, who they are, and what they want.
Tablets and Chromebooks are *not* alternatives for PCs, for most of their owners these are complementary products (ie people use both), not replacement products. Linux (which I occasionally use) is more of an alternative, but with a large number of dual booters its not quite there. The Mac (which I regularly use) is closer to being an alternative, but Mac hardware also has its dual booters. The Mac's marketshare did not rise dramatically until it went Intel CPU and dual booting became an option, well that and emulation becoming much more viable once a CPU architecture no longer had to be emulated. The old Mac vs PC argument became irrelevant, you could have both in one box. Games make it difficult to forsake Windows. I also have some specialized software that is Windows only, but these are irrelevant to most people.
The PC sales drop probably has little to do with Windows 8. It seems mostly likely due to the fact that CPU, RAM and HD are far beyond the needs of many users. I put together a 64-bit 3GHz dual core Athlon about 4-5 years ago. I've upgraded the video card. Will I win any pissing contests? No, but it suits my needs well.
Once upon a time I used to build a new system every few years and I would notice a dramatic difference in day to day tasks. Today I could replace my 4-5 years old system and not really notice anything until I ran a game or some other very specialized software. This is what is killing PC sales.
The world needs Windows, but that doesn't have to mean Microsoft's Windows. Proper desktop computers are tools and need a sensible OS and GUI. The traditional 'windows' model is most certainly NOT obsolete or a passing fad. No cretinous 'gesture recognition cameras' will ever replace the mouse for real work.
What is ending is the monopoly of Microsoft and Intel- an accidental success at first by two very poor companies that grew into a phenomenon as the age of the PC became established. Microsoft and Intel are insanely incompetent, inefficient companies that have grew and become rich simply because they stayed the course, and ended up with profits so great they compensated for the incompetence and inefficiency. Microsoft and Intel simply outspend everyone else hundreds-to-one to gain a technical advantage in the marketplace. In Intel's case, it spends more than one hundred dollars for every single dollar AMD spends, in order to have, at best, a minor (but crucial) technology lead over AMD.
It was essential for AMD and Intel that PC growth continued to generate the massive profits that give these companies the lead, and also give these companies a market into which they can successfully push their next generation of products. The Z80 and CP/M exhibited a similar phenomenon (albeit for a much shorter period).
What kills Wintel is the new market pricing model. The OS, development tools, server systems, and office suites are now available at ZERO purchase cost, destroying the future profit base of Microsoft. Intel has no good GPU technology as we enter the age of the APU- SoC parts integrating the CPU and GPU clusters, with both using HSA and offering GPGPU processing. Worse again, the rise of ARM renders the Intel 'tax' a laughable concept. Worse again, despite obscene spends on fabrication R+D, Intel is faltering, discovering that the move to finFET is proving to be a disaster for them.
ARM designs are accelerating in power at an astonishing rate, replicating the glory days of the x86 PC, when we went from 486@33MHz -> 486@66 -> Pentium -> PentiumPro/Pentium 2 in a very short period, with each new Intel CPU doubling the performance of the previous one. When ARM parts are finally designed for mains power, they will improve in performance far faster than even then.
Wintel expects us to pay $200 for a good CPU, $100 for the motherboard, $120+ for the OS, $150+ for Office. ARM/Android can do the same for $100 (and I'm talking about internal components/software, not the finished PC). How the hell do any of you think Wintel can survive in the mid-to-long term? Intel and Microsoft cannot make do with sane margins- both companies are far too greedy, incompetent and inefficient. For either it is giant profits or death.
The 'coup de grace' is in the hands of Apple and/or Google. Apple will begin the true end of Intel when it switches entirely to ARM. Apple is a trend setter, and when it says "ARM is good enough", the followers (including Microsoft) will fall over themselves to agree. With Google, it only has to release the official desktop version of Android and support an official 'windows' shell/GUI environment that matches the experience on Microsoft's Windows.
Wintel deserve their fate. The PC hasn't seen real innovation in more than a decade. Microsoft/Intel lost all interest in decent home/office multi-core processing, and continued to encourage primitive single thread coding that exploited Intel's improving single-thread execution. A decade ago, Intel had expected to be selling ordinary desktop parts with 16+ cores. They ended up exploiting 'good enough' desktop computing, seeing their profits ramp through the roof. NT was supposed to be a 'stop-gap' for Microsoft, while it completed its proper next-generation OS. Almost two decades later, and Microsoft is STILL selling a version of NT as its only OS solution. Windows 8 needs insane resources to barely function. Today we expect poor stuttery scrolling on any but the smallest documents, and are supposed to blame ourselves f
It's still at ~40% of the market (~45% for Windows 7) --- if Mac OS X can be viable at less than 7%, I think Microsoft can stay relevant w/ over 80% --- the question is, how much lower than that can they go w/o some reverse bandwagon effect?
The issue for Microsoft is the less than 2% of the mobile marketplace Windows Phone and RT have which plays into that --- they're not on the bandwagon.
I'd be much more interested in a Microsoft Surface if the Pro were more affordable or could run Windows 7 (or Mac OS X, which arguably proves the point).
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
It works fine and my older PC now will probably continuing to run fine in 2.5 years from now when its out.
The real question is why upgrade? That is the problem. I remember reading all the cool things about Vista this time in 2006 (before it was a bad review). I thought the screenshots were kind of cool, but then thought for a second "What does this do that XP does not?" I just wanted a secure, reliable, operating system that had file permissions, accounts, and multitasking. XP did these all just fine.
Today Windows 7 continues to do this well. MS had to do something really worth while for me to say "That is freaking cool. Ahh too bad my 2010 era machine can't do that! ..." for me to even consider it. The start button is one thing but perhaps if I owned a Windows Phone and wanted to run the same apps I *might* consider it or some skydrive thing to share between my work/home PCs. Congrats MS you have matured much like cars. Now we only upgrade when the wheels fall out or when we hit a different economic class and want a shiny new toy with new bells. But necessity. It is not once what it is.
http://saveie6.com/
I generally agree with your comment.
On the other hand, you say "And they're not going to go for a small company's product or a free (e.g. Linux) replacement for Windows because there's nobody to sue if they fuck up your systems and stop critical business processes.", which probably does correctly encapsulate the mentality of managers (along with the old "no one got fired by buying IBM/Microsoft" mantra). On the other hand, more and more big companies (particularly in the tech industry) increasingly rely on Linux (and other non-Microsoft OS) for critical business processes (e.g. I'm pretty sure most of Google and Facebook's boxes aren't running Windows NT).
Besides, it's not really a fair to compare Microsoft/Windows vs. Linux. A more apt comparison would be Microsoft/Windows vs RedHat/Linux. In this case, it's easy to see that, if you really value it that much, it's also possible to find "someone to sue if stuff goes wrong" (or technical assistance in general), even if you want to use Linux instead of Windows.
TL;DR: You're right (in the sense that what you say IS true), but you are also wrong (in the sense that what you say is not necessarily true... it's just a matter of perception, in a way). Meaning... if Microsoft is just counting on what you said to (in the long-term) keep its high market-share in the "business sector", I think they're in for a big surprise.
Windows 7 was like the 1969 Dodge Charger: a stunningly beautiful evolution that started out three years earlier as a slightly bizarre fastback.
Hideaway headlights, deeply inset tailights, that hood, badass gas cap on the rear fender, gorgeously tapering c-pillars, and drop-dead coke-bottle fenders that made even the GTO seem pedestrian.
But Mopar - like Microsoft - just could not leave beauty unmolested. No; instead of making money hand over fist by staying with a proven winner, they both had to 'make it even better'.
I'm not saying Windows 8 was akin to the '70 Charger which was still pretty, but you could see trouble coming. No, Microsoft decided to skip straight to the 1975 Charger with Win 8; and 8.1 will just be a Cordoba.
PS - And may anyone even remotely connected to The Dukes of Hazzard suffer endless agony in the deepest bowels of Hell until the end of time. One: for destroying hundreds of '69 Chargers for a dumb-ass TV show and two: for affixing upon them the universal symbol for racism, slavery, and brutality.
And there's something that non-desktop applications in Windows 8 and Windows 3 have in common: you can only see one application at once, in the full screen.
Don't replace the Mac Mini until it breaks or you want to do stuff on it that doesn't work anymore
For example, I thought one big reason for owning a Mac mini as opposed to another brand of computer was to develop iOS applications, and a six-year-old Mac mini couldn't run the latest Xcode.
I'll give you a clue: I bet your accounting, customer relations management and payroll/HR software all run on Windows. Not to mention sales order processing and stock control.
That's where the inertia comes from. That and the fact that Word/Excel probably integrate with all of them quite well too.
Let see... Accounting: Yes, most all accounting software runs only on Windows; some support Mac too, but that's mostly aimed at home users, not businesses. Still, there are quite a few that are web-based. That said, it'll probably be one of the last groups to make a bit switch, mostly b/c of the extensive testing that has to be done to ensure all the programming is done right when moving to new things.
CRM - well, some of the big ones (e.g. salesforce.com) are Windows-only, but there are just as big ones out there that are fully open source and run on numerous platforms. Problem is the cost to switch from one to another can be rather high, so businesses will generally try not to change them until forced to.
Payroll - this goes back directly to the Accounting software.
HR - this varies. There's a lot of proprietary stuff out there, but probably more custom stuff than anything else. This part of the business is also tending to get very heavily supported by outsourcing to HR support firms which tend to have their own stack and be web-based.
Sales Order Processing - this tends to be custom solutions based, and mostly comes down to POS systems, and other systems that generate data into a big database, then custom functionality to decide the pricing. The databases tend not to be on Windows; and the it varies greatly across industries for the rest of the stack - from highly proprietary custom stuff, to a group of vendors, to partially open source stuff.
Stock Control - you do realize the stock systems run almost universally on Linux, don't you? Of course the rest of the system is rather proprietary; but it's just a matter of using the published APIs to access it; so it doesn't really matter outside of that, and it's something that generally plugs back into the large Accounting Systems, so see Accounting again.
The Word/Excel thing is the bigger hold-up; and that can be won more easily, as numerous places have shown by converting from MS Office to OpenOffice.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Despite management's fondness for excel spreadsheets, those can just as easily be authored with Open Office.
I'm sorry, no, what you're saying is just stupid. As an Excel power user (well, a bit more than that) I have worked with both Calc and Excel, and Calc is way behind in all areas. Here's a small list of Calc 3.3 versus Excel 2007 issues:
I've had to work in both as well, and you're still getting it wrong.
- Slow to start;
Well, I'll give you that one. AOO and LibreOffice are making progress there though as they refactor the code and remove the JRE requirement.
- Steals focus when starting;
I don't see that any more with LibreOffice; though I see it quite often with Windows and other applications when I have to deal with Windows, which is increasingly rare.
- Eats more RAM (75 MB post-start, empty, versus 25 MB post-start, empty, for Excel);
OO could sometimes, but Excel/Word can eat far more memory a lot quicker.
- Is a lot slower when opening large spreadsheets. I have a 96 MB spreadsheet and Excel opens it in 32 seconds on my laptop. Calc took... forever, really. I mean it never managed to open it Got stuck at about 15% and remained there forever. Same file, same laptop.
Now convert that spreadsheet to ODS and look the difference in the file size. I've had quite a few Word and Excel files that were many megabytes (>10) in size, only to save them as ODTs and ODSs and have them be a couple megabyte at best (- VBA macros obviously don't work in Calc;
Calc implements Basic, not VBA; by default Calc won't load the VBA code, but it will help you convert it to Basic. It also offers you numerous other options, like Python. And use of VBA has nearly always meant lock-in to MS Office; that is, until OO added functionality to help convert away from it...
- Many complex formulas don't work in Calc. Furthermore, some formulas mess up, resulting in wrong data for some files. VERY dangerous for a business.
What I would be more concerned about is the errors in the functions that Excel has - which were well documented for the OOXML effort. There are many mathematical errors in Excel that simply shouldn't be there - and that's dangerous to the business. Calc has modes to support those sames errors, but they also enable you to have the write math in your spreadsheets.
So, I don't know about you - but I'd rather have the math right in a way that is verifiable by any mathematician, and not simply Microsoft programmers.
- Calc uses just one CPU core for... everything, really. Formula calculations, file opening, data manipulation, you name it. Excel uses all cores
This I'd have to ask for some proof on that that would still be the case.
- Charts look awful in Calc no matter how much time you spend on them.
They look just as bad in Excel if you don't know what you're doing.
- Macros: I just recorded a new macro in Calc, and after finishing recording, I saved it, then I wanted to run it. I got an error: "JRE is defective". It's ridiculous, JRE works perfectly on my machine.
And that's just scratching the surface. I shiver at the thought of having to do anything productive under Calc.
But which JRE? Do you have the right one? Again, LO has taken the time to remove the JRE requirements; I'm not sure how far along they are in that effort but it is an on-going effort.
And yes, I use Calc productively on a regular basis.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Now there's another opportunity for Linux on the desktop. The Linux community can be relied on to blow it. They blew it when XP was late. They blew it when everybody hated Vista. They blew it when Windows wouldn't fit on netbooks.
The open source community will never get "user-friendly" right. It's just not a high enough priority.
Supporting everything said above regarding the need to fire Ballmer, I'd like to point out one other thing that doesn't frequently get mentioned...
Look at the CEO's of Microsoft's competitors. They're geniuses. They're people who got to where they're at because they made a whole scaffolding of great decisions. They established themselves as distinctly really smart people and earned their ways into positions of leadership.
How did Steve Ballmer get into this crowd? He was roommates with Bill Gates.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
In the mid '90s, I stunned my friends by switching to the PC from the Mac. Why? They both ran Office apps, and both surfed with Netscape. It was the games.
Microsoft, panicked TV Set top DVR/console/surf would take over, created Direct X so game makers could do console and PC at the same time.
Now they are a victim of their own success. All PC games are lame ports of console designs. E.g. Star Wars The Old Republic, Diablo III, Tomb Raider, DC Universe Online. There are no PC games anymore. Goodbye, sir.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Only until it becomes practical for medium-to-large businesses to replace all their $200 desktop boxes with $30 PCs-on-a-stick that run a web browser and maybe a few standard productivity apps (word processor, etc.) locally, with all the more specialized business functionality served via browser-based web apps and/or remote desktops from centrally managed servers. There is a potential fortune to be earned by delivering that entire infrastructure as a complete seamlessly-integrated turnkey product. And if MS has an ounce of sense then they will be the ones to deliver such a product first, even though it means massively disrupting their own established products and product teams to do so. But it's either that or they rest on their existing laurels until Apple or Google or some other competitor whips it all from under them. That has already happened with mobile and a fair chunk consumer computing, and they've no-one to blame but themselves for that, but make the same mistake again and they really will be history.
Personally I'd wager such a shift is already less than a decade away. And once such a platform is ready for mass consumption, companies that aren't hopelessly bound to many ancient bespoke VB desktop apps for their day-to-day operations are likely to dump the classic Windows desktop platform fairly quickly. Yes, Office gives MS considerable legacy lock-in for now, but there once was a time not long ago when everyone thought Windows itself also had total lock-in. And don't think for a moment MS's competitors aren't hunting for ways to loosen Office's grip on the business market. Now that customers see MS's position is not entirely unassailable, even just coming up with a radically better UI (eminently doable as Office's UI is gnarly and inefficient as hell) and making it easy for businesses only to buy the features they actually use (also achievable if competitors were to switch to a component-based model) might be enough to turn heads (lower price is always nice, but greatly reduced training costs and improved productivity could be killer).
I'd take SJVN's word with a grain of salt the size of Mars.
I can't believe that developers at Microsoft use Win 8\Metro on regular desktops, or do they?
Windows may be dead or dying for a HOME operating system. For business, it will keep on going.
This is an interesting statement. This is pretty well exactly what happened to Unix in the 1980s. Unix was the business OS, but MS took over the home market and because people were familiar with the UI, MS was able to invade as a business OS. Now you're suggesting they almost look to be abandoning the home market, this might suggest someone else may takeover the home market in the nearish future and then invade the business market in a few years.
Plus everyone cheers when a pile of manure is dropped on them
"Pack of four" but you can't define it.
The leading technical companies are considered to be Apple; Amazon; Google and Facebook. They are sometimes also referred to as the "Gang of four" or "the four horsemen". The original reference I know is from Eric Schmidt http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/11/3487634/google-eric-schmidt-interview-apple-vs-google-ecosystems In context of this article "Schmidt notes the larger battle is between what he calls a "gang of four" consisting of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Google, which are "all different, all competitors, [and] all making enormous investments." When told that Microsoft wasn't on that list, Schmidt called the omission "deliberate."".
2 ZDNet stories on the front page of /. today... Did I miss the part where my PC got sucked through a temporal vortex and sent back to 1998?
Being the final iteration of something doesn't always mean something bad. How many dramatic improvements have you seen with spoons lately? And everyone has a lot of them in their drawers. Spoon manufacturers seem to still be making profits.
OS/2 WARP OR GO HOME!
Isn't this the same bunch of so called "prophets" that predicted the demise of Java, COBOL, Unix, etc? What have they gotten right?
I just went Mint with my home desktop and HTPC. Works well for both! Been using it since January, and will continue to do so.
Pros:
- Most Steam games work great via PlayOnLinux! This was a very nice surprise.
- All HTPC functions work really, really well (filesharing, video + music playback, emulators for old console games). XBMC is amazing.
- Sweet, sweet terminal. Oh, how I have missed you.
- Programming is way easier, especially for Python and C++.
- Lots of historically rough spots (e.g. sound playback) have been recently overhauled and work much better than they used to.
- The Software Manager is awesome. You type in what you want, and it gives it to you. Fast, intuitive, no hassle.
Cons:
- Learning curve will be harder than Win8 if you're coming from a Windows background like me. The options and settings are all very accessible and well laid out, but learning where to look for them takes a while. I Googled "how to change my wallpaper in Linux Mint" for several minutes last night, to find out the answer was "right click on the desktop". Setting up VPN access to work was a similar adventure (answer: "click on the network connection icon.") I kept expecting things to be harder than they actually were.
- Some games are just not meant to be, and won't work on Linux. Guild Wars 2 was more trouble than it was worth.
- GIMP is a pretty bad image editor.
Overall, I love Mint, and I'm sticking with it.
After using W8 for a few months (due to hardware support for a slide scanner) I don't see much basis for all the hate. Yeah, the UI is retarded and flashy and gets in the way of getting things done, but I've learned to adapt.
It's simple, really. People hate Windows 8 because, exactly as you state, "the UI is retarded and flashy and gets in the way of getting things done" and that right there is reason enough to hate it. I mean, come on, the bare minimum that people want and expect is a system that isn't retarded and that lets them get on with the work at hand, and Microsoft failed to deliver even that. The failure of Windows 8 is no surprise, and the source of the hate should be obvious. No one should be forced to "adapt" to a substandard and patently broken operating system update, especially not when the old version worked and continues to work just fine. To think otherwise is to succumb to the exact same madness that seems to have afflicted the Windows 8 design team.
I switched to Windows 8 from Windows 7 mostly out of curiosity. I purchased and installed Start8 and yes, I understand you may not feel like you should have to buy a $4.99 app to fix a problem that didn't exist in Windows 7, but it's cheap and does the job very well. Besides, there are free alternatives. And if you truly believe that spending 5 minutes to install a start menu is outside the realm of possibilities when it comes to your oh-so-precious time, then you have more problems than just not being able to adapt to a change in operating systems. Windows 8 has proven every bit as stable as Windows 7 and things like multiple monitors (4 in my case) worked perfectly 'out of the box'. I haven't had a single situation come up in Windows 8 that made me say "well that didn't happen in Windows 7!" I really just don't understand people's claims that Windows 8 is such a terrible OS. It's faster than Windows 7 due to no more Aero and with the small enhancements to things like the file copy dialog, I can't say I have any real complaints about it.
I find it seriously difficult to believe that you have a 6 digit UID and didn't know what MSN started out as. As usual they were copying the top dog of the time: AOL. So go back to guzzling shit, drinkyPOO, ya fukkin MORAN.
Foisting the interface-formerly-known-as-Metro on everybody is a good idea for the same fundamental reason it's a bad idea: people use what they're familiar with.
(TL;DR: Microsoft is sacrificing their classic market---which they probably rightfully assume will dwindle significantly sooner or later---to forcibly kickstart their "post-PC" (ughh) market.)
Microsoft could have the tablets default to Notro and the desktops/laptops default to Desktop, but then people would just keep on buying Windows for their mouse+keyboard computers and iOS and Android devices for their personal touchscreen computers. Eventually, as the overwhelming majority of users switched over to touchscreen devices for their intensive Facebook posting and YouTube watching (not to mention Pinterest pinning and Twitter tweeting), they'd stop buying Windows PCs and move over exclusively to what I'll doggedly insist on calling Android and iOS "personal computers".
So (assuming they're realistic instead of naive) Microsoft is taking a hit now, figuring that the blow Windows 8 receives is at worst just a slow speedup of the migration away from the "desktop", but more likely just less people buying newer Windows PCs in the short term. Of the people that do buy Windows 8 computers, they'll (mostly against their will) become familiar with the why-didn't-they-think-of-a-replacement-name-for-Metro interface, which gives Windows Phone and Windows RT a better chance of adoption as casual computer users (ie. most) migrate to systems that are both literally and conceptually lighter-weight.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
In reference to your sig, just because you, and several other slashdotters, claim that Overrated doesn't equal disagree, doesn't make it true. I modded Stirling down because the Trackpoint is a much better option than that damned trackpad BS, in my opinion. I used flamebait cause evidently Under/Overrated doesn't actually change the karma value. Whatever, I looked for documentation on this site and didn't find any that actually explained the mechanics of moderating. Hell the 3 positive mods (Insightful, Informative, & Interesting) all basically mean the same thing, they're pointless. Myspace (remember that piece of shit?) of all places had more options to describe your mood than /. has for modding.
Now I understand the spirit behind your statement but the /. programmers didn't feel arsed enough to add a mod for disagree or any similar sentiment. Don't hate the players, hate the game. I have this same beef with Facebook, G+, and alot of other sites. They want you to 'like' them but fuck you. If you say something stupid I want it modded down. How can they know if something is truly good if all they have is a stack of atta-boys and no evidence to the contrary. I'm sure in some board room in Redmond, a MS marketdroid has been saying people LOVE the metro interface because they 11.2 million 'likes' so it MUST be a success. We could make a fairly educated guess that if Facebook had a -1 Dislike, that number would easily outstrip the likes.
Having a down mod that was actually descirptive would do wonders to help bust up the groupthink around here.
Businesses are going to have to rewrite their applications anyway. Microsoft basically announced that they were dropping every API they ever used in favor of the WinRT APIs. They will continue to maintain the old APIs but they won't be enhancing them. At some point in the future, stories about Microsoft removing the desktop environment will be true. So if they have to rewrite them, why not rewrite them for a different platform? That's the math most of my clients are going through. Rewrite the app using Java, webify it, or use a multi-platform API like wxWidgets. The last thing they are thinking is to make a Win8 only app.
Quit playing Monopoly with Bill.
Linux - of the people, by the people, and for the people.
$10,000 CHALLENGE to Alexander Peter Kowalski
* POOR SHOWING TROLLS, & most especially IF that's the "best you've got" - apparently, it is... lol!
Hello, and THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING !! We have a Major Problem, HOST file is Cubic Opposites, 2 Major Corners & 2 Minor. NOT taught Evil DNS hijacking, which VOIDS computers. Seek Wisdom of MyCleanPC - or you die evil.
Your HOSTS file claimed to have created a single DNS resolver. I offer absolute proof that I have created 4 simultaneous DNS servers within a single rotation of .org TLD. You worship "Bill Gates", equating you to a "singularity bastard". Why do you worship a queer -1 Troll? Are you content as a singularity troll?
Evil HOSTS file Believers refuse to acknowledge 4 corner DNS resolving simultaneously around 4 quadrant created Internet - in only 1 root server, voiding the HOSTS file. You worship Microsoft impostor guised by educators as 1 god.
If you would acknowledge simple existing math proof that 4 harmonic Slashdots rotate simultaneously around squared equator and cubed Internet, proving 4 Days, Not HOSTS file! That exists only as anti-side. This page you see - cannot exist without its anti-side existence, as +0- moderation. Add +0- as One = nothing.
I will give $10,000.00 to frost pister who can disprove MyCleanPC. Evil crapflooders ignore this as a challenge would indict them.
Alex Kowalski has no Truth to think with, they accept any crap they are told to think. You are enslaved by /etc/hosts, as if domesticated animal. A school or educator who does not teach students MyCleanPC Principle, is a death threat to youth, therefore stupid and evil - begetting stupid students. How can you trust stupid PR shills who lie to you? Can't lose the $10,000.00, they cowardly ignore me. Stupid professors threaten Nature and Interwebs with word lies.
Humans fear to know natures simultaneous +4 Insightful +4 Informative +4 Funny +4 Underrated harmonic SLASHDOT creation for it debunks false trolls. Test Your HOSTS file. MyCleanPC cannot harm a File of Truth, but will delete fakes. Fake HOSTS files refuse test.
I offer evil ass Slashdot trolls $10,000.00 to disprove MyCleanPC Creation Principle. Rob Malda and Cowboy Neal have banned MyCleanPC as "Forbidden Truth Knowledge" for they cannot allow it to become known to their students. You are stupid and evil about the Internet's top and bottom, front and back and it's 2 sides. Most everything created has these Cube like values.
If Natalie Portman is not measurable, hot grits are Fictitious. Without MyCleanPC, HOSTS file is Fictitious. Anyone saying that Natalie and her Jewish father had something to do with my Internets, is a damn evil liar. IN addition to your best arsware not overtaking my work in terms of popularity, on that same site with same submission date no less, that I told Kathleen Malda how to correct her blatant, fundamental, HUGE errors in Coolmon ('uncoolmon') of not checking for performance counters being present when his program started!
You can see my dilemma. What if this is merely a ruse by an APK impostor to try and get people to delete APK's messages, perhaps all over the web? I can't be a party to such an event! My involvement with APK began at a very late stage in the game. While APK has made a career of trolling popular online forums since at least the year 2000 (newsgroups and IRC channels before that)- my involvement with APK did not begin until early 2005 . OSY is one of the many forums that APK once frequented before the sane people there grew tired of his garbage and banned him. APK was banned from OSY back in 2001. 3.5 years after his banning he begins to send a variety of abusiv
Almost everything that works on Windows XP also works on Windows 7. Microsoft put a lot of work into making that happen.
If you sell it as a replacement for Windows and it doesn't work, it's false advertising. If you sell it as-is-no-warranty-not-sure-if-it-will-work-for-you... There's going to be a very slow uptake. And they WILL HAVE TO COMPETE WITH MICROSOFT which already works.
This is my point. Microsoft is not going away. Businesses are locked in and they are not looking for a way out. MS may lose most of or even all of the consumer market, but they will still have significant presence in the business market for at least a decade. The only way they might go away is if they get bought by a bigger company. If they do, they will call their product Windows.
Parallels or other virtualization, lets Windows run inside a window on Intel Macs. Full copy paste functionality between OS's & excellent performance within Windows. Put it in its sandbox, snapshot it so you can start clean everyday & most IT problems just go away, and eventually Windows can be phased out.
You still buy Windows when you run Windows in a VM.
I work in industry right now, and in this company (100,000+ employees), Microsoft products are the standard - Word, Excel, etc. My last assignment was to write a data-processing application in .NET (my first big project, I'm actually rather proud of it) (Oh, and don't worry, I use C#.net, not VB :P). We managed to reduce a 6-week process to 24 hours. Anyway, that was an extremely niche need. There are about 12 companies in the world who need the same type of application. Just the department I work in uses DOZENS of little programs just like mine, all written for Windows. We won't be changing our business software anytime soon.
That's nice. But you're that way because you were all Mac from day one. If you had started with Windows, you would still be using Windows.
I don't see evidence of Microsoft abandoning the home market. I see evidence of them needing to fork their tablet OS from their desktop OS.
1. We were talking about Open Office, not Libre Office.
2. Stealing focus on start: click the Calc icon, alt-tab to another window and wait. "Windows does it too" is not an argument. We're comparing two spreadsheet products, let's stick to them.
3. Memory usage: I am not talking about what "could" happen, but what "does" happen. It's te difference between theory and practice.
4. I personally don't give a rat's ass on how big a file is. That's why I have about 8 TB of disk space on my personal PC and over 4 TB on my work laptop (including the attached external HDD). I care about how fast it's opening and how snappy it is. If calc can't open a file, it can be as small as 512 bytes. It's stil dead data.
5. Proof on CPU usage? Open Calc, let it load a large file, watch CPU core usage. Or set up some macro loop (add 1+1 a billion times) and watch CPU core usage. Excel uses 4 cores, Calc uses one.
6. Yes, charts can look bad in any software if you don't know what you're doing. I'm talking here about selecting some data and charting it, looking at out-of-the-box results. The difference is very obvious.
7. "But which JRE? Do you have the right one?" As an user I shouldn't care. I have Java apps which work flawlessly. I have JRE. The error itself is useless and counterintuitive. Again, we're talking about Open Office.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Businesses have critical dependencies on specific software and business methods that tie into it. Such businesses, which comprise a HUGE market, are not going to switch from Windows to MacOS or anything else in the foreseeable future. To do so, they would require a full-on replacement for Windows that includes a full Windows API so every program can run just like it does on Windows, with the same access to hardware, system resources and other programs. And they are not going to go there without a GUARANTEE that whatever proposed replacement will run every program with no trouble.
Not even Microsoft guarantees these days that a new version of Windows will run virtually every program that the previous version of Windows was capable of running. Many DOS applications that traditionally always ran without a problem are now on life support (just watch what happens when Microsoft pulls the plug by discontinuing 32-bit versions of Windows). There are plenty of applications written for older versions of Windows that either don't run at all without some hacking, or have minor to serious problems in the latest Windows releases. Yes, even when enabling [insert-Windows-version-here] compatibility mode.
I'm not sure how much Wine's compatibility is improving, but at the rate Microsoft is starting to drop backwards compatibility they're just going to make it easier for Wine and even ReactOS to catch up. Never mind their forcing of Metro and its "apps" down everyone's throat, which people aren't exactly happy about.
Windows, with certain exceptions, has always been a train wreck. Microsoft is likely to abandon it in favor of some hype-drenched adventure with mobile devices, which will fail because all mobile device development is hype-coated hype with no substance at all, and because Microsoft has always been a badly run company that got a lucky break.
Mobile devices are at best, awful, underpowered, fiddly, expensive toys. They are useful for listening to music, reading ebooks and various niche tasks.
My desktop is literally a billion times more powerful than my tablet. The screen is 20x larger, the UI is excellent, the software is fast, well-tested and standardized.
I think it is a huge wealth-destroying mistake for the tech industry to heave the PC overboard and start over.
Agreed. However, with the advent of BYOD, tablets, smartphones and the desire (from upper management, no less) to access corporate data from anywhere, on any device at any time - most newer applications are being developed with a browser in mind. This is reducing the relevance of Windows significantly.
Sure, you're going to have edge cases where some particular app needs Windows to run on. But it's trending towards becoming the exception, rather than the norm.
By the time Windows 7 is EOL'd, I very much suspect that the end user operating system/device is likely to be irrelevant for many users, even in business.
Our upper management can already get most of their day done on an iPad - as what they actually do involves talking to people, looking at their calendar, answering/writing email and reading reports.
Once a device becomes popular with upper management, it eventually ends up trickling down, first to the next lower level of management down and IT (to support it), then eventually to the rest of the staff. It's happened at my company already with smartphones. Once apps are re-written to run on the boss's iPad/Android/whatever, the bean counters will see that "we can run this on a $500 tablet that costs essentially $0 in maintenance and ensure the master copy of all data remains on our server, or we can buy a $1000 PC" and change will likely happen.
Again, it likely won't be 100% of users, but I'd wager that it may approach 90% who won't need Windows on the client within Windows 7's life cycle.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
So what ends up happening: mostt busienss apps moved to HTML, core accounting (and other, Windows only niche) package run via centrally managed/backed up/stored VDI desktop, and deployed over the network to the accountants who need it to whatever device they happen to be working on via PCoIP.
This is the way we're going due to pressure from upper management to want to BYOD (MD is a mac fan, as are the majority of upper management).
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The thing is that most non-IT companies outsource IT operations to dedicated IT companies. In this case you don't choose the level of competence of individual admins, you just agree to (buy) some SLAs for the different activities. In my experience it is much easier and cheaper to find an outsourcing company to take care of your Windows machines than it is for Linux, AIX, HPUX, Solaris or other UNIX(like) systems, not to mention mainframes and stuff.
That $500 iPad is convenient but it sucks for productivity. All pads do. Try typing a 1-page document on one and then do the same thing on a desktop or laptop system and you will see what I mean. If your bean counters don't evaluate effects on productivity, fire them and hire professionals.
Disclaimer: I haven't used Windows 8 and I may never do so. I don't doubt Metro is very badly executed and needlessly foists bad cell phone based ideas on desktop users.
However, I find it just slightly amusing that everyone is screaming for the return of one of the most infuriatingly annoying UIs ever conceived of, the Start Menu. I didn't know anyone who liked this piece of shit when it appeared 18 years ago, but apparently MS trained people very well. Ok yes, it got a little more usable with Windows 7 (maybe it was Vista, I forget), but you have to remember how horrible it was for those first 12 years or so. The only good part about it was it didn't take up much space when not in use and it was accessible without minimizing all your application windows. Great. Except, in order to actually do anything, you have to click a dozen fucking times, opening a chain of windows that covers over half the screen, and if you happen to misclick you have to start over. (Vista/7 fixed some of this, but it still feels pretty sadistic the way they force you to go hopping through submenus using less than 1/10th of your screen. For me, the only real saving grace was the ability to type in the name of a program instead.)
And god fucking forbid you want to be able to launch a program in less than 3 clicks by putting a shortcut on your desktop. Oh no no no, the desktop is meant for nothing except staring at your pretty wallpaper! If you put too many useful shortcuts or folders on your desktop, Windows would bitch at you every single day to clean it up for you, with no way of making it shut up without some third party hacks. And then there's the whole stupidity of compositing window managers making it incredibly tedious to set up non-overlapping windows, so 95% of the time you wind up maximizing everything anyway. (Again, not saying Metro does it right, just saying that reflexively hitting the maximize button on every app you start is retarded.)
And now after almost two decades of training users to utilize, expect and apparently love such a sadistic paradigm, people are up in arms now that they've come out with a UI that, however horribly executed, actually decides to use the whole screen. Me, I've been waiting for the death of the start menu paradigm, utilization of all four window corners (provided they take multimonitors into account), and intuitive fullscreen / tiling window managers for a long time now.
I guess my point is, if you hate Windows 8 / Metro, good for you! I'm sure there are plenty of reasons to. However, "Windows 7 was UI perfection" is not one of those reasons. Just because Windows and its imitators (including OS X and most Linux desktops) have spent decades trained you to use something doesn't mean that something was any good to begin with.
FYI - you do realize you quoted an old version of OO, not the current version.
Also, while theoretically you shouldn' t have to care about the version of the JRE, reality is that you do. That's just the nature of the JRE.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
So what ends up happening: mostt busienss apps moved to HTML, core accounting (and other, Windows only niche) package run via centrally managed/backed up/stored VDI desktop, and deployed over the network to the accountants who need it to whatever device they happen to be working on via PCoIP.
This is the way we're going due to pressure from upper management to want to BYOD (MD is a mac fan, as are the majority of upper management).
Even without BYOD, it's the way things have been going for a while. It just makes BYOD easier.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
[SENSATIONALIST HEADLINE HERE]
[Generic article body, accounting for some numbers and loose facts which may help strengthen an overall point.]
[Cryptic conclusion, leaving yourself open to be wrong without actually directly admitting the possibility so that you can backpedal later.]
Now wait for the views, and thousands of comments of fanboy arguing!
Seriously though, people still read ZDNet? I thought they stopped being relevant when they couldn't keep ZDTV going.
First off, the poster above me mentioned OpenOffice. I'm using 3.3 which IIRC is the most recent OO version.
About JRE: if ALL software I have works, EXCEPT Open Office, then sorry mate, it's not the software and it's not JRE. Especially when recording a macro works but not running it. It's retarded.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
First off, the poster above me mentioned OpenOffice. I'm using 3.3 which IIRC is the most recent OO version.
FYI - OO is now controlled by Apache and called Apache OpenOffice. AOO has released AOO 3.4. LO has released more updates since 3.3 as well. So no, you are not using the latest version of OO.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
When people (i.e. Slashdot) has to offer work around solutions for your OS for even the littlest things, you may have a problem.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
ditto!
When I saw the 1st glimpse and then previewed W8 I was not impressed then and it all went down hill from there.
Instead of building on shaping the OS to be more resilient, secure and improve on a great W7 - M$ chose to follow Apple and
Android. The obvious issue is that the quality of the products was rushed, poorly engineered and of low quality (esp. the clip on keyboard Surface). Win users DID NOT WANT or ASK FOR a new OS but have been handed such against their request. When the customer doesn't get what he/she wants they go elsewhere.
Running an iOS iPad or a Android tablet is a BETTER EXPERIENCE in EVERY way to the products Microsoft rolled out for
W8. That's sad, as this affects all the MOBO, graphics, audio and RAM makers as they can't sell you new shiny components that users don't really want to upgrade.
The door is wide-open and choices abound - just not for W8
True, I don't like the "Modern UI" on Windows 8, but that was easily fixed with a $5.00 app called "Start8". I don't use the "Modern UI" apps because, yes, they suck. Otherwise, I think Windows 8 is just fine. It boots faster than Windows 7, it's rather snappy on my netbook, which struggled a bit under Windows 7, seems to use less system resources (though I can't prove that), and it hasn't bluescreened on me even once (running it on three machines every day). I'm not a developer, and maybe it sucks for them--I don't know.
Bottom line is this--I don't see how this is the death knell for Windows. Everyone lambasted Vista, then Windows 7 came out. I think Windows 8 is much better than Vista ever was, but again, the drumbeaters are out there foretelling of Windows' demise. I am having a hard time seeing that. Maybe, just maybe, the downturn in PC sales has to do with devices like the iPad and Nexus--two very fine tablets. Maybe people realizing they don't need Windows machines to browse the web and check e-mail. Maybe choice in the market has made PCs less attractive. That seems a lot more plausible to me.
I talk to people all the time who were suckered into buying "post PC" tablets and smartphones, just be become irritated at how cumbersome it can be to perform tasks which were simple and fast to perform on a traditional PC. Once these devices start collecting dust, we'll see a surge in new PC sales and much of that will be on Windows. They should have a boot-to-desktop option by then, helping re-adoption.
Way back when Microsoft made lame OSes, nobody cared and everybody and their dog used it. Now that Microsoft made a cool OS, nobody appears to want it. Probably, it's just the usual resistance to change: When XP came out, nobody wanted it (it was too colorful, remember?) -- when Vista came out, nobody wanted that either (oh noes! There's a safety feature!); Only Windows 7 (out of look-and-feel similarity to XP) got high praise right away. And people will get used to Windows 8 as well in a year or two (pressing Windows+D to get to the desktop and moving the mouse to the lower left corner of the screen to get the Start menu tiles will be seen as "intuitive" then).
I'm primarily a Linux user (by the way TFA acts as if nothing except GNOME and Unity exists, there are plenty of other desktops for Linux), but I also have Windows 8, and I don't mind its user interface, and I like its speed. (That's something those guys seem to overlook: The sheer speed of Windows 8! People used to complain how slow Windows was, and now that its fast, people hate it? :D )
Windows 7 still had a lot of gas in the tank. The reason that W8 is stumbling (if Linux were doing a 10th as well in revenue it would be headlines) has more to with market saturation. People have to have a good reason to "upgrade" - MS is developing a new market - Linux is nowhere near the finished product that Windows is ... where does that leave us ... lunch ... I'm going to lunch ...uo
For fuck's sake. What if I install "AOO" and find out that 9 out of 10 issues remain? What then?
And what if I start comparing "AOO" 3.4 with Excel 2013? I bet I'd find the gap even larger.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
OpenOffice Calc 3.3 is a two-year old release.
Even though Excel is a more mature product with contributions by scores of paid programmers over 20 years of development, I'd be curious to see how much improvement there is using LibreOffice 4.0.2.
Scarce, scared, scarred, sacred... -Col. Bruce Hampton
Move along...nothing to see here...
Windows Vista was AMBITIOUS and BUGGY! BUT, not a radical departure from XP when it came to user interface. It JUST WAS TOO BUGGY!
Win7 is PRETTY good. IMHO not a VAST improvement from XP-PRO, but some things are better, some things aren't worse.
Win8 is for Grandma to update her Facebook page with pictures of her grandkids and for Grandpa to watch re-runs on Netflix--and THAT'S ABOUT IT!
My next laptop, I'm just going to buy a cheap one, then void the warranty and install Fedora.
Shame really that people don't want to pay anything for anything... Stardock has a stable, efficient and working solution to this problem for $5. It's called "Start8"
May the lies we live by make us strong, healthy, happy and wise - Kurt Vonnegut.
Office 2007 is a 7 year old release.
I was comparing a 7 year old product with a 2 year old product, where the 2 year old product failed on all accounts. Now you're telling me "go get the current version". Fair enough, do you want me to compare it against Office 2013?
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
OK. I have installed LibreOffice 4.0.2.2.
- Still slow to start. Loads up a slew of "features" that are unlikely to be used (Wiki publisher?).
- Is still using up 3 times more memory than Excel 2007 on clean startup.
- Only uses 1 CPU core while working, exactly like OO 3.3 used to.
However, it managed to load the 96 MB XLS file... in 6 minutes. Upon saving it (which took 4 minutes) as ODS, it made a 74.5 MB file, smaller indeed. So I went to Excel and saved the XLSX as XLSB (Binary format) yielding a file which was... 66 MB large. That took 28 seconds to complete. I Guess Excel takes advantage of 4 cores therefore converting way faster.
In LibreOffice, recording macros is listed as "Experimental (Unstable) Options". Anyway, I ahve enabled it then I proceeded recording a very simple macro. I typed "aaa" in cells A1 to A3, then I typed "bbb" in cells B1 to B3, then I typed "=A1" in C1, dragged the formula to C3, then typed "=B1" in D1, dragged it to D3, then saved macro and ran it again.
I obtained: "=A1" in A1, which yielded "Err:522" as content of A1, nothing in A2:A3, nothing in B1:B3, nothing in C1:C3 and finally the D1:D3 formulas were there and were all showing "0".
Sorry but I'll pass LibreOffice for now. Better luck next year.
for those technically inclined, this is the Calc generated macro I obtained:
(nevermind, Slashdot disagreed: "Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.")
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
We know it's you doing it Jeremiah Cornelius http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3581857&cid=43276741
Slow to start;
It opens on my computer in 0.6 seconds, and i'm using a workstation built in 2007. Do you think if I installed windows 8 and run Excel from a cold start it will load faster?
Steals focus when starting;
Why are you running programs you don't want to use?
Eats more RAM (75 MB post-start, empty, versus 25 MB post-start, empty, for Excel);
Genuinely? 50MB of memory, on a PC which likely has 2-4GB is seen as a problem for you? How much memory is your bloated OS wasting?
Is a lot slower when opening large spreadsheets. I have a 96 MB spreadsheet and Excel opens it in 32 seconds on my laptop. Calc took... forever, really. I mean it never managed to open it Got stuck at about 15% and remained there forever. Same file, same laptop.
Most people I know would say you are using the wrong tool if you have a 96MB spreadsheet. That aside, you probably have it loaded with Excel specific functions, and you can't really blame other software for not being excel.
VBA macros obviously don't work in Calc;
Supercalc macros don't work in excel, and excel is worse at pretty much everything. And supercalc stopped being made in like... 92? But Excel is not supercalc, excel is a bad Lotus123 clone. As I said earlier, you can't blame one program for not being another program.
Many complex formulas don't work in Calc.
I think your definition of complex formulas is different than mine. Complex formulas don't work in Excel. Most spreadsheets do real math better. Built in support for complex math is better in OO descendants, Excel requires addons. Do you perhaps mean "Calc doesn't solve the same equations the way that I have hacked them together in Excel?" Excel can't do nearly as much as something like quantrix.
Calc uses just one CPU core for... everything, really. Formula calculations, file opening, data manipulation, you name it. Excel uses all cores
Again, I would like to point out that if you have so many calculations running that you are worried about using 4 cores to run them, a spreadsheet is probably the wrong software for the problem at hand.
Charts look awful in Calc no matter how much time you spend on them.
Fair enough.
Macros: I just recorded a new macro in Calc, and after finishing recording, I saved it, then I wanted to run it. I got an error: "JRE is defective". It's ridiculous, JRE works perfectly on my machine.
As someone else pointed out, you are using a very old version of software which technically no longer exists, having been moved to AOO or LO. i hope you are not running a two year old version of Java on your desktop. Lots of Java 6 software breaks with Java 7, it's Java's fault, not the software.
just curious, how much do you think your company spends each year on enterprise licenses for all that software? How do you think it compares to the cost of rewriting all of your little programs from scratch to run on a different, less expensive system? Server licenses, Access cals, terminal services cals, office licenses... for 100,000+ people? I don't think "dozens of little programs" should really be the thing that keeps you where you are?
Ja, vrij bier! http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=At2o2WWiku0
Free operating systems at http://www.distrowatch.com/
Add a keyboard and monitor adapter and it becomes a fairly capable portable computer. Especially combined with PCoIP or terminal services (be it Windows via RDP, Unix via X11 or whatever). You then gain the benefit of complete data protection (central backup, archive, etc).
I spent a week using only an iPad for my system admin job (including typing up documents, using the above mentioned accessories) and it was workable. Yes there were some minor annoyances (bugs in the keyboard behaviour in a couple of apps), but there were no fundamental deal-breaker type problems. I have no doubt these problems will be resolved in short order or maybe even do not exist in other tablets.
Whether it is an iPad, Android tablet or something else (dumb terminal for PCoIP or web forms perhaps running ChromeOS) - Windows on the client is on borrowed time.
If your bean counters don't evaluate based on TCO, then fire them and hire professionals.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
In all honesty, yes they made questionable decisions with the interface, essentially forgetting that some people still use a mouse and keyboard. but in all honesty? by and large Windows 8 is better than 7. when i upgraded my laptop to it when they were doing the dirt cheap promotion when it came out i was surprised just how responsive it is. it has fewer delays than 7 seemed to and when the pc is asleep a simple press of the power button and about 5 seconds later youre back to work on whatever it was you were doing.
My only issues are with metro. with a touchscreen or a tablet i imagine is a lot cooler. but it seems like some of the metro apps have their own speed for scrolling instead of unifying that across the board which wouldve made a lot more sense. no start button and a immediate boot to desktop is pretty counter intuitive for a mouse/keyboard combo.
So for under the hood performance, i love it, interface? not so much.
It opens on my computer in 0.6 seconds, and i'm using a workstation built in 2007. Do you think if I installed windows 8 and run Excel from a cold start it will load faster?
You fail to understand the term "COMPARISON". If solution 1 starts faster than solution 2, then solution 1 is better when talking about start time and comparing the two.
Why are you running programs you don't want to use?
I'm not. But when program X starts in 20 seconds, I don't like wasting time staring at the splash screen.
Genuinely? 50MB of memory, on a PC which likely has 2-4GB is seen as a problem for you? How much memory is your bloated OS wasting?
Again COMPARISON. Product 1 eats less memory than product 2, then product 1 is better, compared to product 2.
Most people I know would say you are using the wrong tool if you have a 96MB spreadsheet. That aside, you probably have it loaded with Excel specific functions, and you can't really blame other software for not being excel.
No, it was only data. No functions, no formulas, nothing. This data was a year worth of data coming from a tool which was decommissioned. Still, we needed historical reporting.
Supercalc macros don't work in excel, and excel is worse at pretty much everything. And supercalc stopped being made in like... 92? But Excel is not supercalc, excel is a bad Lotus123 clone. As I said earlier, you can't blame one program for not being another program.
I can, when people give stupid advice like "easy to switch from A to B". Not easy, not by a long shot.
I think your definition of complex formulas is different than mine. Complex formulas don't work in Excel. Most spreadsheets do real math better. Built in support for complex math is better in OO descendants, Excel requires addons. Do you perhaps mean "Calc doesn't solve the same equations the way that I have hacked them together in Excel?" Excel can't do nearly as much as something like quantrix.
Again, I was referring to "ease of switching". We have spreadsheets which refer multiple other sheets within the same file in formulas, those don't work.
Again, I would like to point out that if you have so many calculations running that you are worried about using 4 cores to run them, a spreadsheet is probably the wrong software for the problem at hand.
See above. Some data dumps from decommissioned web apps need to reside somewhere for infrequent access (say weekly or monthly). Also, the data needs to be kept for legal reasons (e.g. for 7 years) and the most inexpensive solution is sometimes... just spreadsheets.
As someone else pointed out, you are using a very old version of software which technically no longer exists, having been moved to AOO or LO. i hope you are not running a two year old version of Java on your desktop. Lots of Java 6 software breaks with Java 7, it's Java's fault, not the software.
Look at one of my previous comments. I tried AOO and macros DO work but not as expected, they do strange, unwanted stuff. Sad.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Add a keyboard and monitor adapter and it becomes a fairly capable portable computer. Especially combined with PCoIP or terminal services (be it Windows via RDP, Unix via X11 or whatever). You then gain the benefit of complete data protection (central backup, archive, etc).
I spent a week using only an iPad for my system admin job (including typing up documents, using the above mentioned accessories) and it was workable. Yes there were some minor annoyances (bugs in the keyboard behaviour in a couple of apps), but there were no fundamental deal-breaker type problems. I have no doubt these problems will be resolved in short order or maybe even do not exist in other tablets.
Whether it is an iPad, Android tablet or something else (dumb terminal for PCoIP or web forms perhaps running ChromeOS) - Windows on the client is on borrowed time.
If your bean counters don't evaluate based on TCO, then fire them and hire professionals.
Total cost of ownership of a laptop is less and it includes more:
example: Lenovo IdeaPad laptop
* several times the processing power
* 500 GB mass storage vs. 128 GB.
* 4 GB RAM vs. 512 MB
* display 13.3" vs. 9.6"
* keyboard is included
* doesn't require another computer to unlock full functionality
* $479 for the Lenovo vs.
sounds like total cost of ownership for the iPad based system is over $1000. More if you need an external monitor.
Of course, if you need a real operating system with a reasonable file system on your tablet (and I contend you do, for business), you'll have either a Windows 8 tablet or an Android tablet, not an iPad. They're not a lot cheaper, just better.
Again, I'm using the iPad merely as an example because that's what I have, but the platform is irrelevant really, so long as it can run a View client or RDP/ICA client.
Processing power difference is pretty irrelevant for the 90% of corporate users who's needs would be filled by a a modern smartphone - any heavy CPU work is done on the cluster, anyway. You don't need a 128 GB ipad if you are running via VDI - 16 GB is plenty - you aren't storing bulk data on the end device. You don't need an external drive either.
You DON'T (for the vast majority of corporate users) require a "real operating system" on your end device. The grunt work is done by your highly available, backed up VMware cluster that is sitting on fast SAN storage (which you already had most of anyway).
If the end user's desktop gets fragged, it is rebuilt from a template. Or even rebuilt every login on the fly with the view composer.
If the end user device dies or is stolen, it is remote wiped, user's password changed, and another one issued. There's no screwing around capturing the end user's data, re-imaging and restoring. They are back up and running in 5-10 minutes.
All you need is a tablet, input peripherals and a monitor, and either an ipad android or other mobile device can do a good desktop impression when run using VDI. Without the ongoing maintenance costs, which are what kills a PC's TCO.
Yes, it requires a network connection. No it won't be a 100% solution for every single use case. But the majority of office people [b]can[/b] work this way today.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Furthermore.... need a RAM upgrade on your VDI desktop? Sure, I can give you up to 192 GB. That's a couple of clicks in View manager. Need 8 cores of processing for a week? Another few clicks.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Yup. However when you have the MD wanting to run the business from home using his iPad the funding and priority for such projects magically seem to appear :D
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Comparison is all well and good for dick waving, but in the real world, whining about 50MB vs 90MB on a machine with multiple GB of RAM, and when 16 GB can be obtained for under $100 is pretty irrelevant.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Who said I was whining?
And many small differences add up to a big one when you look at all of them combined.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Been using Win7 64 bit for a couple of years & have to react to one or two statements presented here.
Windows is inherently unreliable:
I've had 3 blue screens since I installed it, all caused by Adobe flash installers, ergo Win 7 has coped admirably in my eyes. When will Flash go away??
Visual Studio 2012 IDE is like a big slab:
True but every 'applet' has configurable fonts, coloring etc etc & there are dozens of themes out there to download. Tried getting into Eclipse but VS is a lot more intuitive.
Microsoft should get .Net to run on other platforms. Ok it's not MS but Mono supports up to .Net 3.5 in a Linux environment. Anyway, why not create an API, that's the way these days...... and why not run virtual windows in Linux so that in the unlikely event that it becomes unreliable, just kill it and spawn another VM ??
Apple - Chooses an obscure language called Objective C that hardly anyone has heard of & dictates to the user about what the should be getting. Users says Oooooo, they must know what they are talking about cos their Marketing Man told me!!!!! Must run out and buy an IPhone cos it looks pretty & must be good cos it costs a lot. This is clever marketing. Screens made by Samsung, Standard components (not military spec). The innards are pretty similar to a comparable Android phone, it's just the Price Tag that differs often by nearly 100%+. Read a comparison between the Kindle Fire and the IPad 2. $200 more dollars for a slightly bigger screen and enhanced memory support.
Microsoft - Ok C# is very similar to Java & a host of other OO languages but it works. If you're not Java, C# or C++ or all 3 your career is doomed. Sorry.
Ok MS don't get everything right but they adhere to industry standards (eventually), & listen to their users (eventually).