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Windows 10: Can Microsoft Get It Right This Time?
An anonymous reader shares this article about what Microsoft needs to accomplish with Windows 10 in order to make gains in the mobile market and everywhere else. "Later this week Microsoft will provide more details of Windows 10, most likely focusing on how the new operating system will look and feel on smartphones and tablets. According to Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft is likely to unveil a version of Windows 10 that's expected to work on Windows Phones and smaller Windows tablets running ARM and perhaps Intel processors. Microsoft will be hoping that by making it easier for developers to build for tablets and smartphones it can take some of its dominance of the desktop world and port that to the mobile world. That may help a bit, but will not in itself create the breakthrough that Microsoft wants: when it comes to mobile, Microsoft's Windows Phone is still a distant third in a two-horse race."
Right now, as the underdog, their focus should be marketshare. But right now, their mobile stuff is too damn expensive. I looked at a Surface tablet over Christmas. Nice piece of tech, but at $800 I just laughed and walked away. Similar Android tablets are less than $200.
They need to be pretty much giving this stuff away right now to pry the market away. Maybe do something like when they gave all MSDN subscribers a Pocket PC (I think that was around 2002) to get it out there. But they also need to make it competitive with Android stuff. Cheaper even.
After they capture market share, then there will be more people developing for it which will lead to more apps for it. But first they've got to get it into people's hands. That's not happening right now. There's a huge potential for Windows on all devices, PC and mobile, but they are acting like they already own the mobile space and instead they are a weak third party in the mobile game. They really should be questioning the wisdom of cannibalizing their desktop OS in a mad gamble to build mobile marketshare. I think they are going about it backwards.
It's not about mobile. Windows 8, as a purely mobile, touchscreen OS, was okay. No major complaints there. The problem was that Windows 8 on Desktops, or even laptops with a touchscreen, tried to enforce an extremely oversimplified interface onto desktop users. Then to add insult to that, they had two parallel paradigms (Windows and Metro) and half the settings are in one place and half in the other. The solution is simple: they have to support both. The reason is just as simple. Right now I'm using my Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro as a laptop. So I want it to behave as a full featured desktop OS with all the power, control, widgets, bells and whistles I need to do all the things I need to do. As soon as I flip the screen around into a tablet mode, I need to be able to use it as a tablet.
I pretty much am at that state now with some 3rd party software, although again, half the settings are in Metro and half in classic Windows. So it's not like it would be all that hard for MS to get this right. They've just done the same thing they've done over, and over, and over. They take a paradigm or design philosophy, and push one or two steps too far.
The other big issue with Windows 8 is it had to bridge the divide between classic laptops, and the next generation laptops that have touchsreens. Metro with only a mouse? Awful. They force that on people, and the users hated it. Personally, I've only ever ran Windows 8.1 on my own machine that also had a touchscreen, so it wasn't nearly as bad.
Better known as 318230.
Just throw classic shell on it, 8.1 is way better than 7. XP was great in it's day - as windows goes - It's day was just stretched a bit longer than it should have because Vista.
That's not QUITE true. The requirement for CPU and firmware features changed between Windows 8 and 8.1, even if the actual performance requirements did not. That mostly means that 10 year old+ Athlons and Pentium 4s aren't going to be running Windows 8.1, but it's entirely possible to find machines as new as Core 2s that can run 8 but not 8.1 because they're on a motherboard with an older Intel chipset
I have a Surface Pro and while it's nice it's still clunky as hell, Windows 10 will not fix this because honestly Windows is 100% crap for a touch interface. The software and OS are not designed for touch and therefore will be clunky.
Windows 10 for laptops.
Windows Touch for touch devices.
Stop trying to unify the two because IT WILL NOT WORK. windows 8 sucks horribly on a laptop but works nice on a tablet. windows 10 is awesome on a laptop but SUCKS on a tablet. (Yes I tried living with it on my surface pro for 4 weeks. it sucks as much as windows 7 does and windows 8.1 does when using non touch apps)
So unless they fire all their management and design teams and start over with people that understand that the two ecosystems are different and need to remain separate nothing will change.
Proof that your touch UI and OS is crap when your users of your flagship device use a mouse and keyboard with it most of the time.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
On the contrary, I think the BEST thing that happened to computers was to have a monstrously dominant OS to build upon. That allowed programmers to create programs that targeted a single OS - and would have immediate access to the vast majority of different platforms. Pre-PC days, you had to develop for a specific target OS/machine combo, and if you wanted to port across it was nearly impossible (even dealing with things like little/big endian systems). Having a common platform to build upon was what allowed the golden age of the PC to explode.
Problem is nobody cares. All anyone cares about is the apps and when the app you want or need to run is a traditional PC UI it will not translate to a touch UI automatically.
So windows will suck on touch devices like it always has, because of the apps that we want and need to run.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Or more precisely - Microsoft has been in too much hurry pushing new OS versions after Windows 7 with no real user benefit.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Correction. The "Modern" tiled interface didn't frustrate users "transitioning to Windows 8". It is simply bad. Horrible. The worst UI in the history of Windows, and since that history includes Windows ME and Vista that's saying quite a bit. It would be more appropriate to say that the UI in question is what PREVENTED the transition of users to Windows 8--not because they couldn't figure it out, but because they simply deemed it garbage.
Look at your own experiences with governments, phone companies, cable companies, banks.
The kind of focused, reasonable analysis needed to produce workable products seems to end when the greatest concerns in the organization are self serving personal behavior and organizational preservation.
Which means that Microsoft is at the mercy of some dimwitted manager who's had a brainwave and somebody's ear. The results are usually disasterous (e.g. Windows 8 interface, Powershell interface instead of VBScript.net, the lack of realistic automated language migration from something like Winforms to ASP, WPF, etc. which could have been avoided with forethought and better design...). Somebody wanted their good review and their bonus. That's all it's about now at Microsoft, or any large organization.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Most of the complaints I hear about Window 8 come from people who've bought a new PC, booted it up, and have no freaking clue how to use it. 'WTF?' they say, 'I thought this thing ran Windows?'
Not trying to start a flame war, but what would companies use instead?
This is exactly the problem, and I'll underscore it with an inquiry to anyone who echoes the grandparent post...
Amongst the reasons Exchange is as readily used as it is, isn't because Exchange itself is some awesome piece of software. Exchange is part of a bigger ecosystem that incorporates a few major pieces:
--ActiveSync - and more to the point, ActiveSync support from billions of phones and tablets.
--Active Directory - single sign-on through Outlook from a domain user, and the reverse: creating a mailbox also creates a user in AD.
--Outlook - a mail/contact/calendar/task client that has a handful of competitors that excel in one area or another (IMO Zimbra coming pretty close), but still a program whose replacement will require a barricade on the door to keep out the execs who wish to use their torches and pitchforks.
--Self-Hosted - Gmail and company don't count.
I've seen plenty of great answers to one or more of these solutions. I'm a fan of the super-easy-to-use-and-manage IceWarp, but the Icewarp mail client is lacking pretty notably. Google is great if you're okay with them having your mail (many are), but unless there's an on-site version of Gmail, it's not a fair comparison fight. Univention makes a pretty good PDC replacement, but using for its mail server isn't the greatest and mobile device support is lacking. Zentyal and ClearOS are also great for small environments, but scaling becomes a problem.
So, to those who say "Exchange Sucks", I say "fine. Show me a better system that satisfies all of the above criteria, and I will be MORE than happy to take a long, hard look at it." I don't like Exchange, or its CAL structure, either...but "worst except all the rest" seems to apply here.