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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
The 15% drop in PC-sales last quarter, that's the numbers they are talking about.
But the real numbers are of course that 92% of desktop users world wide are using Windows. Hell, they could lose almost half their users and they still wouldn't be over.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
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/
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.
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.
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
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
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.
That's completely true. But that actually is more of a problem with the entire model around selling and developing software than a problem specific to Microsoft. Photoshop for example has been "complete" for years. I hope for Adobe they have a list of "killer features" in a drawer somewhere so they can include one in every new release and hope to sell some copies, but in reality the software is simply finished. Which makes a lot of sense after 20+ years of development.
Software-as-a-service is where the money is in the long term. But unluckily for Microsoft that mostly means web applications right now. And they don't care if you run them on Windows or not. Microsoft doesn't want to do business in that world, so they simply try to keep the "sell a new version of the same old stuff every X years"-boat afloat for as long as they can.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Around win3.11 and Win95 - people seemed to be quite excited about those.
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!!!
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.
Followed by...
Yeah, the UI is retarded and flashy and gets in the way of getting things done , but I've learned to adapt.
What more reason do you need.
People don't hate Win 8 because it's UI is so crappy. they hate it because the previous version wasn't crappy and MS ruined it.
All Microsoft needed to do with the UI is *nothing*.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
All Microsoft needed to do with the UI is *nothing*.
Justice be told, there's one good thing about the Metro UI in that behind all the flashiness it's a move towards the geekiest of GUI paradigms: a tiling window manager. Hard core command-line programmers usually love those, but in this case they're all hating it, and deservedly so. I think the actual problem with Metro then isn't that it's a TWM, but just that it's a bad TWM. In a few iterations it might become good but so far it's Microsoft's equivalent to Windows 1.0 (which also was a TWM) in terms of refinement and ease of use, i.e., altogether lacking in both.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
It used to be you could + 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.
I finally found out wtf they did with alt-tab. Turns out, they keep the first 6 apps in the usual MRU order we're used to (and that's sensible and can be remembered). Then they inject the desktop into the 7th slot (because ignorant people clutter their desktop with all kinds of crap), and then every application after the desktop is in alphabetical order. By window title, I believe.
The most wildly useless arrangement they could think of that still has some sort of order to it. As if I remember my programs by window title, especially when there's absolutely no consistency in titling. Some programs prefix their name with the open file. Some suffix it. Some don't list the open file. So where the program falls in the list may (or may not) depend on what document you have open at the time. One of their stupider ideas, which successfully sabotaged an interface that worked, for the people that knew about it. And there's no registry key to turn off the braindead sort order, either. You can disable it entirely, and go back to program icons only. (And you can set registry settings to change the spacing of the application image thumbnails. 'cause that's what needed to be customizable...)