Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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.