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Microsoft Stock Drops 11% In a Day
Taco Cowboy writes with news that Microsoft's stock price dropped over 11 percent yesterday. The selloff was the biggest since 2009, and during the day the price was down more than 12 percent at one point, making it the biggest single day drop since April, 2000. Analysts believe the drop was due primarily to the company missing its quarterly earnings projections in addition to taking a massive, $900 million write-down on unsold Surface RT tablets. "Microsoft’s decline is both a consequence of the changing dynamics of the tech world and the incredible surge in its stock price this year. Shares in the maker of Windows had rallied nearly 30% this year, leaving both the broader stock market and the technology sector in the dust. It was, it seemed, Steve Ballmer’s year. Until Friday. The sell off was sparked by fears over the declines of the PC market. Gartner data show PC shipments fell for the fifth consecutive quarter in Q2, this time tanking 10.9% to 76 million units. Being the world’s largest software company, 'over 80% of its revenue and nearly all of its profits continue to be derived by its ubiquitous Windows OS, its server business (Windows Server), and the business division (Office),' according to UBS. And indeed that decline in the PC industry is hurting the company’s bottom line."
Microsoft has tons of cash and is making more. Nobody thinks they're going out of business this year. The panic is that they clearly have no viable plan for participating in the mobile revolution. They have lost control of the platform.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Metro itself, isn't a terrible idea, its the way they implemented it that we hate. If Metro had been done like OSX App Store and Launchpad, NO ONE would be complaining.
Good-bye
The problem, and the real reason the stock is down so much, is because Microsoft's new direction isn't catching on. The iPad was an instant success, but the Surface RT isn't selling at all. This combined with the declining PC-market makes investors nervous, as it seems Microsoft is unable to be successful in the future.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Is probably not helping the companies long term prospects. That said, this earnings report motly reflects a period before Snowden started talking.
Writing off almost a billion dollars in a quarter and slashing prices by 33% within the first year of launch isn't a success by any standards.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
HA HA, TIME TO CHANGE THE COMPANY TO HARDWARE AND SERVICES. UH OHHH
Steve SERIOUSLY fucked up hard.
I wonder how long it will take for people to vote to kick him out.
Not only are people NOT buying their hardware, barely anyone is buying their services either.
Meanwhile their OS and Office apps are still the thing that makes them even exist.
And the one thing they depend most on, the business types, THEY SHAFT THEM ENTIRELY WITH THE NEW OS.
Great idea Baldness, great idea. Doing the company proud. And then Technet got killed. Up next, MSDN on the chopping board.
Not to mention Xbone. I seriously thought the whole 180 reversal on the DRM was some sort of reverse bait and switch, "hey, have our shitty product!", everyone hates it, "HAAA, gotcha, here, but seriously, have our less shitty product! We removed the really good features and the really bad features!".
They seriously never done that though, they ACTUALLY designed it like that, and after Don was eliminated from the company floors, that further proves it. And the many thousands to million servers they had for Xbone now being touted for Azure instead probably.
We won't see Microsoft die any time soon, but they will eject the monkey in control if this gets any worse.
Linux will become more popular on the desktop as more games are moving to it, which will take a large chunk of gamers out of their income.
Steam already has a decently large number of games supported now, and it is growing.
People are seeing through Microsofts bullshit, took a while, but finally they are seeing them for what they are.
So the Zune was a huge success as well then, according to you?
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
The stock market isn't based on the real value of a company anyhow. It rarely involves evaluating the technical expertise, the research and development, the long term product development plans, the current or future rational profit projections of the company, or anything like that.
Instead, it's now a bunch of automated systems buying and selling at a furious rate based on statistics and very small margin profits for the trades.
In other words, legalized gambling with the biggest players gaming the system to their advantage.
When I think about how solid or worthy a company is, the last thing I consider is their stock price.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
If Surface RT is selling so well, why then the price drop? Why the write-off? Why doesn't anyone I know have a Surface RT?
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
And crappy tablet.
No g3/4 or even GPS?! What kind of crap is that if I cant get directions or weather reports on the road? Metro is not bad but its implementation on the desktop. Taskbars and start menus are really fine with big screens ms. Nothing to fear folks and they work when you have 20 apps and files open. The cell phone UI cant handle this.
MS is still thinking like a monopolists because it worked. Bad release. .. Oh just wait. NT failed, IE failed, xbox failed failed, etc. Because they were ms they just gradually fixed them and monopolized the market later.
Guess what? Those days are done. Apple, Google, Mozilla, and others will eat you for breakfast while you wait for the next version. Look at IE as an example? Gosh darn it hell froze over and IE 10 and soon IE 11 are great browsers now that Google and Mozilla
slapped IE 6 crazy but who cares? People do not feel comfortable picking MS and IE as a brand now. Windows will go the same route.
They really need to try to be better. Not catch up and assume people will use it because its from MS like they did in the
http://saveie6.com/
Anything is better than Launchpad. I always delete it. Even on machines I buy for other people. I just blow it away immediately.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Don't worry; Steve Ballmer's reorg will fix all of this. All of the product groups that analysts used to compare quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year have disappeared. Products have been shuffled around into new groups organized around "engineering." The upshot is that money-losing products like Bing are now going to be lumped in with big breadwinners like Office. You won't be able to look at the Xbox and Online Services divisions anymore and say "they lose money." All those failures will be hidden in the new structure. Without an instance like Microsoft writing down almost a billion dollars on the Surface RT disaster, it will be harder for anyone to gauge how it's doing, at least for the next few quarters. Problem solved!
Breakfast served all day!
How do you know it "sold well"?
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
The Surface is nothing. We lost a full billion on Microsoft Kin. That was at least a full round number.
How many of the online services you use dependent on any particular platform? The mobile revolution played some role in splitting the nut open and allowing the internet to grow. Now we have an internet built around open standards, and with HTML5, the services we use will be less dependent on the use of any particular company's platform. I think Ballmer's use of the term "devices and services" is an accurate description of where everybody's head is at now. If I just want to use a computer for light work and communications, who cares whose platform I use? I went back and read Negroponte's "Being Digital" recently to see what was in it. I am going to start doing this more because I'm amused by tech prognostication and guruism. One comment in there stayed with me, however, to the effect of , one company can leverage a proprietary technology or standard for a while, but sooner or later, open standards catch up with them. In 2000 I was using IE to use the web. Now there is a range of browsers, iOS, and Android, and they all seem to function well enough or better for most peoples needs.
heh? Surface RT was a failure plain and simple. The fact that users are happy does not prove anything. People will jump into cacti because they are happy to do it. Don't believe me? Head over to youtube and search for cacti guy jump. My point is that everybody loves products that other people hate, that is called statistics. Whether or not it is successful depends on adoption rate.
Case in point, desktop linux, not happening. I like desktop linux and use it all the time, but that don't make it a success even though I am happy. On the other hand server side Linux is a huge success and now getting to the point where people only release for Linux. EG Redis... Sure I can use it on Windows, sort of, kind of, maybe.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
No, the Zune was bit of a failure. It didn't sell at all. But there still are some users (even on Slashdot) that say it was a really good product. So it's more like 50/50. However, Surface RT actually sold quite well and that's what makes it different from Zune.
The zune sold more than a million units in its first year, compared with 35 million IPODs sold in that same span, and yet it is universally considered to have been a failure.
The Surface RT and Surface Pro together sold less than a million units int their first year, while the IPAD sold more than 22 million units in that same period. It sounds to me like the surface and zune fall into the same category of failure...
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
I think Win8 slowed PC sales. It's just anecdotal; but you hear people say they were at the store and didn't want to buy a machine unless it came with Win7. Otherwise, they're waiting to see if MS can get rid of the New Coke OS and replace it with Classic.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The traditional PC market has had 5 consequential quarters of decline. This is Microsofts core market, where it makes much of its money.
On top of that Microsoft has essentially failed to gain any traction in the the new growth markets of smartphones/tablets.
So it is understandable that like the PC market, which is adjusting to some new smaller number of annual sales, Microsoft which makes it's income from those sales will adjust down to some new lower level of earnings, and a correspondingly lower stock price.
Instead it's more of the same old Ballmer monkey tricks.
However, Surface RT actually sold quite well and that's what makes it different from Zune.
By what standard did it sell well? Maybe Microsoft was moving some units at first, but months after launch we kept hearing the same figure for the number of units sold. A month would go by and someone would quote the same figure, again. That's not indicative of strong sales. By some channel figures, in Q1 of 2013 Microsoft and its partners moved less than 2 million Windows RT and Windows 8 tablets. That's not just Surface RT, not just Microsoft, that's every vendor of Windows tablets combined. Meanwhile, Apple sold nearly 20 million tablets in the same period; one vendor. So I ask again, by what standard has Surface sold "quite well"?
Breakfast served all day!
but perhaps that is part of the problem?
what would have happened if they had spent all that energy on making the desktop better, people haven't stopped using the desktop, but damn not that many are upgrading to windows 8 because it offers an inferior desktop experience(I'm a win8 user, all the time in desktop, I got one piece of sdk that doesn't run in win7 so I have to use win8 at least somewhat). their share price drop has a large connection to their metro ideology, that pushing the shit metro ui on people is their golden ticket to appstore goodness money. but that's a shit idea.
if windows 8 offered a reason for people to upgrade their pc's maybe the pc sales wouldn't be declining either, but as it is it looks like they're either out of ideas or on purpose dropping them so they can push metro because it's the company policy(tm) dictated by an executive decision(tm).
doing something upgraded, more flexible ui's, yeah, that's the correct decision. BUT THAT DOES NOT MEAN METRO UI IS CORRECT DECISION. you just fell into the same thought trap that ms execs fell into, that because it's not desktop friendly it's good for MS, which is just stupid bullshit.
coming up in windows 8.11 - ability to run metro apps windowed by default.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
What "reports"? Surface RT sales being weak is reported all over the internet. Literally nobody is saying it is selling well at all, including Microsoft themselves.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Metro UI is designed to combine both PC and tablet UI's. So because Microsoft saw that PC sales were declining, they wanted to compete in the tablet space. That was against everything that Slashdot users said back in the day when Metro UI was introduced, and they called it a huge mistake from Microsoft.
Just because M$ had an actual plan doesn't mean that the plan was any good. It was a mistake for M$ to try to force their way into the tablet market. It was doomed to failure. Worse yet, it has continued a long string of M$ screwing its loyal customer base in an ill-advised attempt to convert customers from one market into another. M$ has to learn that it cannot mess with its loyal windows customer base. It cant leverage its existing monopolies for new markets because it is no longer the 800Lb gorilla of all things tech. The more they pull crap like this, the more rabid haters they create. How many people will put up with a fair amount of inconvenience just to run open-office. How many people were willing to switch to Firefox when it offered only marginally better value over IE (both were free after all). A large number of people (myself included) switched to these other platforms and solutions for no other reason than because we hate M$. I do still run some M$ products because the alternative is not really practical, but every time a good enough alternative comes along, I switch away from yet another M$ product. How many others are out there like me?
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
I was under the impression that the only Windows Phone sales were from Nokia, and they (Nokia) aren't doing too well last I heard. Is there a web site with stats on the windows phone sales vs. Android vs. Iphone? I would be curious to see if they (Microsoft) are doing any better.
No, the Zune was bit of a failure. It didn't sell at all. But there still are some users (even on Slashdot) that say it was a really good product. So it's more like 50/50. However, Surface RT actually sold quite well and that's what makes it different from Zune.
zune was a failure so they took the zune guys ideas and made windows phone 7 and then took the ideas and made windows 8. it's a failtrain all around. the stock price drop might be indication of that people are figuring out that they need some big change of decision choosers to not failtrain any further - like heck, what are they going to failtrain next, the xbox one?
good product indicator in ms products is sales, zune wasn't particularly bad but it wasn't great either and downright annoying in few ways. what ties all these products together is that they feel "ok" if you use them for 3 minutes - they all have that dazzle over complex function quality, movie OS quality. for the money dumped into zune marketing it sold pretty badly, same goes for the other two products in the failtrain. they sold a "lot" if you compare them to say, how much beos sold, but nobody would take you seriously if you did that.
people didn't consider surface rt as good value for money, hence they got stuck on the shelves. don't dance around it, nobody really wants them. I've heard dozens of people trying to justify how it's a great product for someone else though.. all of them being devs(the kind of who do only .net) or people otherwise married to ms. and normal people, like my mom? they don't know what the fuck surface rt is, heck, even ms reps fail at knowing what's the difference.
though why am I replying to someone who says that surface RT sold well just days after MS admitting that they failed to meet the projected sales so much that they took a 900 mil beating with them....
I don't know a single person who bought surface RT, not one! anyone I heard had one got it for free for the sake of porting. it's not a product you would spend your own money on and no corporations are spending their money on it either and people with them are not recommending them to others, freaking 100 bucks shit tablets are doing better. hell, even the padfone is doing better.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Hindsight is 20/20. Here are a few things Microsoft should have done:
Instead it's more of the same old Ballmer monkey tricks.
Somewhere it helps to be ahead of the curve and not chronically behind it. Listening is good, yes, but who was Apple listening to when they created the iPhone? MS completely lacks anything close to that kind of vision or innovation. They wait for others to innovate, see if its making money, then jump in and try to grab marketshare. That worked in the '90's. It doesn't work now. A moron could see the RT was DOA.
Apple was listening to people that wanted a better way to browse the web while mobile. Everything else followed.
Good-bye
Windows Phone has 4% global share. 85% of that is from Nokia. Nokia's margins on Windows Phones is -14%. That means it is not mathematically possible for Windows Phone to be returning a profit to the average builder. Nokia can't keep this up forever. Other builders don't sell enough units to make it worthwhile to continue to produce units. All of Windows Phone ecosystem sells about as many smartphones as Coolpad. Have you heard of them? No. Nobody talks about Coolpad, but everybody talks about Windows Phone and Nokia.
One fun person to read about these with is Tomi Ahonen.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The real problem, at least with the Prism spying, is not on your computer. Well, it might be if you run Windows (the idea of secret backdoors seems more real than ever now), but that's beside the point. It's the fact that the government has chosen to parasitize its chosen host companies directly, right on the Internet, installing splitters right at the source: between the host company and its ISP, with top-secret government-controlled datacenters in between for long-term storage of all of their traffic... everything that goes in, everything that goes out. The only way this can be avoided is by choosing services whose providers are *not* in the United States and therefore not subject to this FISA court crap. I have been running Linux since 2006, but trust me: Linux is no protection against this. The government has penetrated the Internet itself, right where it counts: at the pipes of all the major U.S.-based world-wide communications providers' connections.
QuickSilver is your answer. I go a couple of steps further, since I am a very light spotlight user, I remap spotlight to CTRL-OPT-Spacebar, and then map QuickSilver to Cmd-Spacebar, and I don't look back. I'm a keyboard junkie - I also use Cmd-Tab and Cmd-` (the tilde key above the Tab) to move between apps and move between windows of the current app, respectively. Shift will reverse the order on those last two. I also rarely use Expose, and map my F keys to be real F keys. On my MBP I use the Func key to control the brightness and audio if needed.
Personally, Apple made wrong choices with Spotlight. It is both too powerful, and not powerful enough. I have over 10TB of internal disk space, mostly full, and as I develop software, we're talking millions of files of all types, along with a Gb of mail over many years. Spotlight is next to useless systemwide, although it works well enough within Mail. Maybe the real problem is its integration with Finder. Since I'm adept with shell commands, I've never bothered looking any further.
Other than that - the UI works well enough, stays out of my way, and with QuickSilver, I haven't had to change how I work with OS X since the Panther days.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
The key difference is in attitudes:
Apple: Likes to take risks - "We can grow into new markets and augment our OS strategy."
Microsoft: We live in fear - "We can't grow into new markets because that will cannibalize our existing Windows+Office sales!"
It isn't Computer Science - it is basic business planning & execution with the focus on User Experience. Something Microsoft has been terrible at for the past 10 years.
And don't forget the Kin phone Microsoft released a couple years ago (2009/10 IIRC). You know, that was pushed in the commercials where the awkward dude stalked the girl, took pictures of her, and geeked out on his computer about it, while she gives the final "Go To Hell" look at him? Yep, the Microsoft Kin -- the cell phone designed for stalkers.
@Follow Meeee, you are on crack. Microsoft has absolutely failed at mobile devices, including the Zune, Zune HD, Kin, and Surface RT. Considering they have only sold 900,000 Surface RT & Pro tablets with an estimated 6 million unsold devices on hand, nobody can declare their Surface tablets anything like a success. As a retail product, as well as a technology demonstrator to spur other manufacturers to produce Win 8 mobile devices, it is an absolute failure. No other manufacturers are getting behind it.
I do a lot of business traveling in Europe on trains, and just about all the passengers are fiddling with some electronic gadget or another. Business folks? Lenovo ThinkPads. Cooler business folks? MacBooks. Regular folks? Andriod tablets and iPads. Folks not wanting to be left out of the gadget party? Samsung Galaxy phones.
I have never seen a Microsoft Surface of any breed or color.
Of course, your mileage may vary. But I would have expected to have seen at least one. The only one I have ever seen, has been in a store.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
If it was so great, I'd know what the "RT" stood for. So much for MS's marketing genius.
-Kinsey
There is one other thing they could of done.
* Instead of sitting on their ass throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks like changing the UI in Vista and again in Windows 8 for now good reason, they should of taken a cue from Apple who built and _expanded_ upon a good foundation -- every OS X release from 10.0 to 10.7 (for the most part) just got better, more polished, faster (!), added neat features, and kept it consistent and simple.
Microsoft had 10 years to TRULY advance the state of the UI by removing the stupid close button being placed next to the maximized button, by recognizing people want to have TWO (or more) spatial groups in the task bar for the SAME program, by removing the screen-wide title bar that just wastes screen vertical real estate, by providing an API so users can skin the UI, by allowing users to choose an option LESS then "smaller" 100% UI scaling in Control Panel Display, by polishing the UI, allow people to pick a ZERO pixel window border to maximize screen usage, by getting feedback from UI & UX experts along with power users for how they could make the computer EASIER _and_ more FASTER, etc.. i.e. It only took Microsoft how many years to allow people to add custom favorite folders in the Explorer view ??
People want 1) consistency, 2) features, 3) simplicity. In that order.
The fact that Microsoft constantly has to re-arrange & re-name almost every element in the control panel every other version of Windows tells me they don't know what they hell they are doing with UI - namely respecting and building a positive Out-of-theBox User Experience. That is why the majority no one gives a shit about Microsoft & their products anymore. They don't understand hardware, they don't understand software, they don't understand user experience. Apple is by no means perfect but at least they seem to (or used to) understand the basics extremely well. Microsoft has NEVER understood UI.
Microsoft: Just another me-too company with Apple envy. No one gives a crap about your physical Store. LOL.
For Microsoft to change they need to:
a) learn to be humble
b) acknowledge that they don't understand UI / UX. (proof: Clippy)
c) communicate with people
d) get off their arrogant attitude & stop pushing things down people's throats that people don't want: Zune, WinCE, Windows Phone, Surface, a dozen different versions of Windows, refusing to sell Windows XP for $20, etc.
e) treat customers with respect
Sadly, that will never happen. Microsoft will die a slow death of becoming irrelevant all the while wondering where the fuck they went wrong.
Very few sheeple noticed that Microsoft OFFICIALLY cancelled Metro (sometimes called 'new UI' or Windows RT interface). Microsoft merged the phone and tablet divisions, and in a public statement declared that Metro was EOL, and that a new unified phone/tablet UI would be released ASAP (end of 2014 likely). The new UI is also likely to be a major 'selling' (snigger) feature of Windows 9.
However, Microsoft has a new round of tablets (x86 and ARM) released later this year based on Metro. So Microsoft is about to launch a product line they have already pre-announced is obsolete. This is the biggest disaster in Microsoft history. Confidence in developing for Microsoft mobile devices, already at rock bottom, will totally vanish.
The NSA spying platform, the Xbox One, makes this particular situation even worse. There is ZERO migration path for casual games from Microsoft's phones/tablets to the console. Small games developers are told by Microsoft to "get bent" when they inquire about getting their work on the Xbone.
The response to universally hatred of Windows 8 was for Bill Gates to instruct Microsoft to replace large chunks of the OS with the deepest NSA hooks yet seen in an operating system, and this is the form of Windows 8.1. Windows 8.1 can be thought of as the Windows with the in-build NSA keylogger, if by 'keylogger' one means dozens of compromised ultra-low-level services. Bill Gates boasts that almost any software running on Windows 8.1 provides a constant stream of keyboard entry data to 'advertisers' so that the user will receive targeted ads - and like Google, 'advertisers' is a cover word for NSA, even though both do make a lot of money from the ad services as a by-product.
So, using 'Notepad' on Windows 8.1 with an Internet connection means later seeing ads later based on your private text, and your private text ending up on an NSA server, even if you never actually transmitted the contents over the Internet in any form.
Problem is, Bill Gates boasts about his NSA spying at meetings with 'elites' all across our planet. He boasts about his love of eugenics. He boasts about how he intends to place every detail about every sheeple child on his new database system- a system built with his mate Rupert Murdoch (yes, Bill Gates is a partner of Fox News- Murdoch's proudest propaganda operation). You sheeple are told Fox News and Bill Gates are diametric opposites- how your masters howl with laughter at your stupidity and nativity.
But the problem is Bill Gates is too 'in your face' even for the sheeple to take. The public perception of Microsoft is terrible and getting worse. Gates' desire to build the pervert's dream by installing always on camera systems into the bedrooms of millions of children is going to backfire horribly. Bill Gates is on the verge of being known as a 'Jimmy Savile'-like monster on a planetary scale.
The Wintel project, at the time of its greatest threats, has lost all sane leadership. Microsoft and Intel are going to plummet like lead balloons. This should be the age of cheap, functional PC computing, but Intel is off chasing ARM, and Microsoft is off chasing Apple. No-one is flying the plane, so it's gradually turning into a perfect nose dive. The success of Wintel across the last few decades have gained a lot of 'altitude', but neither Intel or Microsoft are constructed to accept a gradual decline.
We should be happy about the turn of events though. Wintel had chosen to allow the PC to stagnate for maybe the last ten years, choosing to milk the public by keeping the average yearly cost of PC ownership far, far too high. Basic PCs should have been built into the keyboard at least 5 years ago, hooking up to external storage. These devices could have been sold for as low as 50 dollars for Internet and homework/small office use. But the major PC players did everything they could to prevent a repeat of the calculator and digital watch phenomena, where the basic item would sell dirt cheap. Microsoft alone wanted far more than 50 dollars per unit.
You refer to Microsoft as M-DollarSign, so that indicates you're an anti-Microsoft zealot...
More of u$ agree that M$ blows chunk$ every day a$ can be $een in M$ being flat on it$ back $tock price wi$e for 13 bloody year$.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
By their reports and having seen many people owning them. Almost as many as iPads, actually.
That is some John Travolta level denial.
I know a guy that has a zune and he loves it. Only one guy but hey, that's one happy customer.
Me, too! I didn't know you knew Glenn.
You accidentally included your response inside the quote.
He's using RT. Proper closing tags are only available with the Pro.
It's obsolete because it has a weaker CPU, a weaker GPU, less RAM and a lower resolution screen than the Nexus 7. It was also released later and costs significantly more.
- Listen to users before releasing Win8, not wait until Win8.1 to start "listening"
Microsoft is only pretending to listen with Win 8.1. It's still 95% the same train wreck Metro interface.
I did go to Youtube and search for "man cacti jump."
The internet delivers as promised.
Yay. Same price as it was in 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012. (Split adjusted)
Great investment!
https://www.google.com/finance?q=msft&ei=iyXrUYjTG8LBqAHJnwE
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Somewhere it helps to be ahead of the curve and not chronically behind it. Listening is good, yes, but who was Apple listening to when they created the iPhone?
Creating new products on your own without having your users to ask for everything is great -- ultimately, they won't know if they like it until they can get an opportunity to use it a while and see if it helps them be more efficient or makes life easier for them. A product that has enormous benefits for you, can still make you feel very uncomfortable or annoyed at first, before you have gotten used to it: change is hard.
Apple had an advantage with the iPhone. Noone had ever used a touch screen smart phone before, so people had no established patterns; Apple as first creator could essentially define how people do things on the platform. Once people are used to those ways change is harder and likely to be resisted.
Apple has made no fundamental changes to the iPhone, since the 3GS. Yes, they made a few incremental improvements here and there --- notification center, multitasking, push notifications; lock screen changes; stacks of apps.
However, they've made no major user interface changes -- if you were familiar with the iPhone 3GS; you will be pretty darned comfortable with the iPhone 5 and beyond, because there's no major changes to the way you work.
I dare say the number of "controversial" changes were relatively small on the face of it --- things like replacing the Google Maps app.... Yes virginia, you do have to get your maps from a different place now, and it kind of sucks, but noone's switching platforms over something so minor as that.
On the other hand.... Metro isn't minor. It's not minor not because it can't be minor, but Microsoft has chosen to present Metro in such a way that there is no way to circumvent it --- the difference is a major impact, and likely to move users to different platforms; That is, if those other platforms provide a more true traditional Windows experience than Windows 8 does.
If Microsoft wants to dabble in completely new OSes, that's great, as long as they keep providing upgrades and support for businesses using their most popular products, so that they are not forced to switch platforms.
That's not how Microsoft's treating Metro; it's "The next version of Windows", that you have to move to, whether you like to or not, because we're not going to be selling Windows 7 anymore, or providing updates anything like it.
Windows Phone has 4% global share. 85% of that is from Nokia. Nokia's margins on Windows Phones is -14%. That means it is not mathematically possible for Windows Phone to be returning a profit to the average builder.
It is mathematically possible if the remaining 15% are sold at 80%+ margin. Realistically possible no, but mathematics have never concerned itself with what is practically possible.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Windows sales are not down because of weak PC sales, PC sales are down because nobody wants the new Windows.
It would have been funnier if it dropped 8.1%
"Realtime", as opposed to Windows 7, which must be intended for mainframe batch processing.
The bizarre thing is that they sell home computers and even tablets with the mainframe version pre-installed.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I think there are a lot out here like you. In my case, I enjoyed using Microsoft products until I bought a Vista laptop, it looked great but ran very slowly. Then I had to jump through activation hoops to install XP on the laptop which improved the laptop greatly although it didn't look as nice as Vista did. A few years ago my son and grandkids visited and he said "You have to try Linux Dad, it's made me interested in computers again." I have been using it since not giving Microsoft another thought until I read about this secure boot nonsense which I believe is to force people to use only their product and not the OS we choose. With the Vista experience and knowing I have no choice but to buy a Windows machine to replace this one with a locked down BIOS was the last straw. I no longer wish to be a Microsoft customer. Thankfully my son said he can build me a computer without that nonsense and with the OS I like.
And they watched Star Trek too.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/PADD
it's amazing how people forget that the iphone wasn't at all the first smartphone and that it was a relatively small evolutionary step over something like the palm treo and not a revolutionary epiphany that they get credited with. almost everything that the iphone did, the palm treo could do - up to and including an app store. apple just did it slicker.
They're not just throwing stuff and seeing what sticks; it's more insidious than that --- back when they explained the reason for removing the start menu -- they were showing data using the customer improvement program; about how the start menu is rarely ever used.
Fact is that people don't use it _often_: Once to start each program, once to shut down the computer. That's not often. The problem is that these very few uses are absolutely essential to the user.
Somewhere it helps to be ahead of the curve and not chronically behind it. Listening is good, yes, but who was Apple listening to when they created the iPhone?
Decades before Apple came out with the iPod/iPhone/iPad, they came out with the Apple Newton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)
It wasn't Apple which came out with the iPod/iPhone/iPad, it was Mr. Steve Jobs that made it possible.
Apple, without the late Mr.Steve Jobs, is not that much better than Microsoft.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
it's amazing how people forget that the iphone wasn't at all the first smartphone and that it was a relatively small evolutionary step over something like the palm treo and not a revolutionary epiphany that they get credited with. almost everything that the iphone did, the palm treo could do - up to and including an app store. apple just did it slicker.
Yea, whatever. But they had a vision of how to pull all that together and make superior product that started a revolution. And of course caused Balmer to laugh out loud, saying it would never sell. And Where the fuck is palm?