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Microsoft's "New Coke" Moment?
theodp writes "Remember New Coke? Twenty-eight years ago, Coca-Cola replaced the secret formula of its flagship brand, only to announce the return of the "classic" formula just 79 days later. Had it launched in 2013, Coke's Jay Moye suspects a social media backlash would have prompted it to reverse itself even sooner. In a timely follow-up, ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols points out that Microsoft is facing its own New Coke moment with Windows 8. 'Does Ballmer have the guts to admit he made a mistake and give users what they clearly want?' Vaughan-Nichols asks. 'While it's too late for Windows 8, Blue might give us back our Start button and an Aero-like interface. We don't know.'"
The corn syrup thing is just a myth. They switched from sugar to corn syrup five years before the introduction of New Coke.
If you have web software that requires IE on Windows to work, the problem is on your end.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
http://www.classicshell.net/ I recommend this to everyone who's complained to me about Metro. For a bonus it customizes the Start Menu and Explorer. No Windows 8 isn't bad, just the forced mobile GUI was a bad choice. You lost the mobile war M$. Foisting your mobile GUI on desktop users isn't going to increase the love.
The other 2 central principles of Discoverability and Visibility, Metro fails at both of these as well. I accidentally opened a PDF in metro and after 5 minutes had to google how to close the app.
Yeah I been making some nice money wiping Win 8 for 7, just like I did Vista for XP, but in this case i really wish i wasn't. Oh don't get me wrong, Win 8 is still a POS and I can totally understand why folks want me to put win 7 on these laptops, and I still think that "refresh my PC" added "feature" was put in to keep people from noticing they had a show stopping corruption bug they couldn't get a handle on before RTM, nope its the fact that I'm seeing a shitload of Worst Buy and Wally world "specials" which are AMD E1800 laptops.
Now this is coming from somebody that has built AMD exclusively for over 5 years and has his whole family on AMD but putting Win 8 on an E1800? Let me put it this way...if you thought Vista capable was bad, you ain't seen shit until you see how Win 8 "performs" on a Bobcat dual core. You wanna talk about painful, the poor things just whine and whirr and drag and drag and draaaag along. If you want to put an end to the "Win 8 is faster" bullshit just hand them one of those E1800 laptops and say "here ya go Sparky, have fun". take that exact same system and put on Win 7? its quite nice. oh it won't win any speed records but it makes a good netbook whereas Win 8 on one of those is in permanent slo-mo.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
OP is not at all wrong, and it's bullish of you to suggest that a business should simply change its entire operating strategy to account for the limitations of the install base of the operating system. I worked as a CTO for a niche retail business (wine) which had certain custom measures to track in order to maintain basic levels of inventory management (e.g. multiple vintages and sizes use the same SKU). The stores had already deployed Macs for their POS due to the business decisions of my predecessor. I spent months trying to find a POS system that could handle anything beyond the "my first retail system" level. I found three retail POS systems at all. One of them we were already using -- and it didn't work, one of them was similarly barebones and locked down all of the database material so I couldn't export to something like Quickbooks, and then there's Lightspeed, which is big, costly, and spends more time and energy on advertising "It Works on Mac!" than it does providing any utilitarian function whatsoever. I gave up and installed Windows 7 on the systems through BootCamp, opening up at least 30 wine-retail specific POS systems for my pleasure.
Nearly all cross-platform software suites don't talk to one another. Quickbooks won't talk between Mac and PC. More specialized office applications and database applications won't talk to one another. There might be a FEW that will provide interoperability, though it's often buggy beyond belief, and most don't provide critical features necessary to certain businesses. Try and find an actually usable service-based POS (QSRs and restaurants). There are none. I'm sure that's because the Mac hardware is not touchscreen, which makes the OSX unusable to an entire industry.
If the general topic is about replacing your fleet of bulldozers with pickup trucks, parts commonality between the trucks and bulldozers is a pretty important metric.
"How Stuff Works" isn't the best reference for recent metabolic research. Try Pubmed.
A small amount of sucrose is broken down by stomach acid and absorbed into the bloodstream, so you'll feel that quickly (but glucose is the preferred sugar for diabetics who need a quick shot of sugar, because it does not need to be metabolized first, ignoring the 5-6 fructose conversion).
The majority of sucrose is metabolized by the sucrase produced at the microvilli of the small intestine.
HFCS is like consuming pre-digested sucrose. The fructose and glucose are both absorbed fully and quickly and the liver gets easily overwhelmed by the fructose. There are studies where they do side-by-side comparisons of the two and measure the triglyceride levels in the blood shortly after - it's a stark difference. Check out the research.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The problem with Zune wasn't that it was a bad product. When it was released it was probably the best MP3 player if you ignore the ugly brown color.
The Zune was not a success for multiple reasons. First of all was MS execution. MS really botched the marketing and advertising on it. MS thought that being obscure and mysterious would make them seem cool. MS just doesn't know cool. Looking at the commercials for the Zune you had no idea it was a music player from MS. It could have been gum.
Contrast this with the first iPhone commercials. They were 30 second demos and actually very minimalist. Each of them covered the basic information the consumer would want to know: What is it? (A new smartphone). Who makes it? (Apple) Where do I get it (Apple or AT&T stores). How does it work? (A simple hand using fingers is used to operate it).
The other issue with the Zune was that the main feature, squirting was so crippled by DRM that it was not a feature. Without it, Zunes had a very power hungry alternative to syncing with a cable. Later Zunes even omitted squirting as a featire.
Mostly the main issue with the Zune was it was designed to beat Apple's last generation iPod not the next generation. When Apple released the iPod Touch, it was game over for the Zune. Unlike the Zune, the Touch had the interface/design to be a portable computing device. Wireless wasn't a useless feature as users could surf or email with OOTB applications. It also had a strong 3rd party app ecosystem which Zune never had.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.