Microsoft could probably make a good packaged phone, but the technology that is ideal is something they don't work on. For the Surface they sourced their materials, put it into an elegant and pretty package, and shipped it.
For a phone they need a better camera (Nokia has the edge on everybody here), they need good QA testing due to its usage (again, Nokia excels here), they need to have carrier relationships (they don't), they need to understand the market (they don't -- it's interwoven with the carriers), and they need to have displays they work on that exceed what's out there.
If anything, Nokia *is* the "MS Phone". While the ecosystem is going to need time, the hardware of the Lumia 920 (and more specifically the camera/durability) is why I'm buying one. The apps I need are already there. And a lot of people are in that boat. I don't want to carry around a DSLR when I can get pretty good pictures with my phone, and only Nokia truly allows for that. It's something an MS Phone won't be able to do, and there's nothing really that makes them stand out in this arena beyond what Nokia is already doing.
If anything... I'd say MS purchases Nokia and uses them to make their phone, in the same way Google purchased Moto.
But the problem is that they operate like one. And as such, should be regulated as one.
Right now there is no recourse if people want to get their money out/back/etc, and if they were a normal bank they'd have to provide a method to extract money and some regulations around their "review" process.
Sure, you can work for one of a thousand places that deal with healthcare IT, ethical hacking (and penetration testing/security companies) etc that would be fine with your morals and your paycheck.
The military can take young kids who don't have a lot of options and train them to become soldiers through the use of discipline and time. To be a great computer hacker you need to screw around as much as possible because it's the curiosity that makes somebody really good at it. You can't teach that. You have to pay for it. And that's why good IT folks are generally ahead of the unemployment curve and paid very well to boot.
Why would you hire an expert computer hacker/programmer/systems guy/girl if they can get paid 3x the amount working in a private company?
If you want to create an elite set of 'ubergeeks' you need to pay them a lot of money, allow them to work in jeans and tshirts, endless supply of mountain dew and snacks.
The more entertaining thing is that most movie studios have abandoned Final Cut for Avid, because Final Cut X became a piece of shit product that was trying to cater to neophytes rather than professionals. So all the pros left, and the only morons still using Final Cut are outdated academics (surprise surprise) and people who still think that Macs are the best for video editing.
Now it's just as good on PC. And you still render to Linux:P
First, Windows 8 is just as open as Windows 7. The only difference this time is that it ships with a built-in competitor to Valve's Steam platform.
Second, while Linux gaming may or may not be as good as PC gaming, Valve alone isn't going to make up the market, and they will continue to support Windows regardless. They have only a handful of games nowadays; Counterstrike, DOTA 2, Team Fortress, Portal, and Half Life (though everybody has already beaten those).
They have to convince everybody else to do the same thing. So they need to get Call of Duty, Battlefield, and all the other big franchise games to port to Linux. This likely won't happen unless they see a monetary gain in doing so. The only company that truly benefits is Valve, because of their platform. Porting to Linux is their hedge against the MS App Store. While I could see that down the road in Windows 9 or 10 that the app store becomes the primary way to deliver apps, most developers are going to embrace that model. The developers don't make money on the distribution, unless they are a distribution platform like Valve. What EA has done with Origin is more a DRM scheme than a distribution model, and I don't think they will mind switching.
Ultimately while Valve and I'm sure a few other major developers will hate this model change, a lot of people are going to embrace it, and be successful with it as well. You don't think Angry Birds did so well because it was a Triple A title distributed through Steam, do you? It was an indie title distributed through the Apple App Store. And with the dev tools for MS software being pretty easy to use and learn, I think we will see some more success stories of people adopting the "new way" of doing things vis a vis MS's OSes.
And if they don't.... we'll see what the future holds. But Valve isn't a big enough player to corner this market on their own, and right now, there's no indication of any open support for them to make this move either.
The fact that this is modded insightful shows the groupthink of anti-MS hatred without even looking at the facts..NET is wildly successful, even if you believe it not to be true.
If you develop a Windows 8 Metro style app -- it will work immediately on the tablet.
The amount of apps that I expect to see will be large, because Windows already has a huge developer ecosystem.
But time will tell. I'm not in a need for any tablet as of now (have my iPad 2) so I'm fine keeping that for a while.
Re:To post something a bit to the contrary here...
on
Can Nokia Save Itself?
·
· Score: 1
You realize my Slashdot ID is lower than even yours right:)
Re:To post something a bit to the contrary here...
on
Can Nokia Save Itself?
·
· Score: 1
My hope is that we'll see a 922 on Verizon in pretty short order. I'm with you on the AT&T situation as well... I can't stand them.
But the US isn't their only market, and across Europe they are available on multiple carriers.
Re:To post something a bit to the contrary here...
on
Can Nokia Save Itself?
·
· Score: 2
Sorry to break it to you, actually... but the Lumia 900 is pretty damned well built. I only expect more of the same for the 920.
To post something a bit to the contrary here...
on
Can Nokia Save Itself?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think Nokia and the WP8 ecosystem will do well, and there are a few reasons.
First, they have the best device. Forget the OS -- the best camera, it's built solid (nokia solid), looks slick, wireless charging, and a very high PPI (even more than the iPhone 5).
Next, the Windows phone ecosystem is going to grow pretty rapidly when they release Windows 8. Right now only a handful of devs have the dev tools for WP8, but when the floodgates open and the new API that is shared between WP8 and Windows 8 (Windows RT), you'll see a lot of apps come around.
That said, keep in mind that while people think that the "apps" aren't there, there's over 100k apps now. It's not small potatoes, and they managed to do it faster than Android hit 100k apps as well.
The way I see it, I want MS/Nokia to succeed. They have a very good mobile OS (I'll be buying a 920 myself, specifically for build quality and camera), and having more competition is good for everybody.
A 3 Bedroom in the Bay Area (my inlaws are out there) in a reasonable neighborhood is over 700k. It's ridiculous.
Comparably, where I live, in the tristate area and working in NYC, I paid a little more than half that for a 4 bedroom house with two car garage and full basement. Taxes are higher, but with the price of the house, who cares? Plus, my schools are immensely better here as well. Cali schools suck, unless you live in Cupertino.. but the those houses are $1 million+.
Because it's in Redmond. The other companies are in the Bay area largely, and that's the most expensive place to live per square foot in the country. Gas and everything else are more expensive too.
But it's entertaining to see the armchair quarterbacks here on Slashdot yelling about Elop and MSFT collusion to force Nokia to fail.
Firstly, CEOs make money when the company succeeds. Elop makes decisions and strategy that are going to try to put Nokia into a positive market position, because if he does that well, he makes a shitload of money. That's first off.
Secondly, would it be the opinion of people here that Nokia would have been better served by sticking with Meego, which was barely in a finished state? Or switching to Android, where they'd be pitted against people who could make a phone a lot cheaper than they could, plus Google throwing its weight wholly behind Motorola?
Elop chose a strategy where they are the biggest fish in a little pond. I'm not saying this is a winning strategy, but it's probably one of the best ones at their disposal.
The Lumia 800/900 were mediocre phones all around. They were basically the exact same body with a different OS, and nothing spectacularly different than their Symbian counterparts. It's not a big wonder that it didn't sell.. Microsoft screwed up Windows Phone because v8 has a lot more features and v7 is a stopgap that doesn't upgrade. Not a lot of people are going to jump onto that bandwagon, and as a result, you should think that Joe Belfiore and Sinofsky should have been canned, along with Ballmer.
The 920 is really a great piece of hardware. It's got the best camera, hands down, of any smartphone. Has the best PPI (better than the "Retina" display). It has the extreme Nokia durability we've all known to love. And with Windows Phone 8, it should be a good contender.
However, to knock it down before it's made it out of the gates because it's associated with Microsoft is just silly. I skipped the 900 because it was mediocre. I want the 920 because it's a stellar phone. And because it's really durable. It has more to do with being a Nokia, than it does with anything that MS has to do with. And that still plays very well for Nokia. I think they have a shot, they have carrier partnerships and relationships worldwide that other companies envy, and they can make a good push back into the market because they weren't afraid of tossing a POS operating system out (unlike RIM, whom will find themselves in the unemployment line soon) and going with something that is pretty good. Yea, I said it -- Windows Phone is pretty good. I have owned an iPhone for 5 years, and after seeing Windows Phone up close and personal -- I don't see any real benefit in staying with it. The Windows Phone OS is very slick, very fast, and very nice to use even on mediocre hardware. Battery life is good too.
So while I know it's fashionable to lay down the MS hate early on, let's at least wait until Nokia brings out the 920 and see how it is received worldwide. I think most folks here will be surprised that people actually think that the phone itself is better than most out there, in almost every way.
96% of Google's money comes from search. They can try to get into other areas that MS occupies "directly and indirectly" but they don't make a profit off of it. Microsoft still does. And that's a HUGE difference.
If they can get a new host of developers by making it "cool" again, losing legacy developers won't be an issue. Or, those legacy developers will turn around and write code that MS will get behind. Win win for MS.
I highly doubt they will take away the ability to sideload applications, but they *do* want developers who write for Windows 8 to get "certified". Those certifications ensure a rigorous check against performance, uninstallation, etc.
And I've spoken to quite a few friends inside MS that tend to think that Sinofsky is of the opinion that Dell and other OEMs fucked them over with crapware baked PCs. It's no wonder MS introduced the "MS Signature" line, that has zero crapware installed by default under his reign. I'm not discounting they aren't happy about the money, but I do think they realize that a declining marketshare is more important to address than what they'd make up in the app store.
And that is really, to get rid of "legacy" apps entirely. I think Microsoft is pretty tired of having third parties (hence, the reason for the surface) and OEMs give their hard work a bad name. So what they are doing is introducing a new API (Windows RT) that requires "certification" (Minecraft didn't want to do this for whatever reason to "stick it" to Windows 8), which means that they require that if you have an app in Windows 8, it uninstalls *completely* and *cleanly*, among other performance indicators and things like that.
Microsoft is trying to retake its OS, under threat of the web, Apple, Google, etc. Windows 8, far from popular belief on this site, is actually a really good OS -- better in many ways, than Windows 7 is. It's faster (by a LOT), it's smooth, and its extensibility and APIs are still very good. The experience between "Metro" and the "Desktop" however, is extremely jarring. While I've written (and been modded up!) in the past about how bad the transition between the desktop and metro are, and how much better they "could have" done things, looking at a variety of information since then and forming a new opinion leads me only to think that they don't WANT it to be better. They want it to be jarring. They want you to start hating desktop apps and going to their store so you can get crap-ware free apps, that uninstall FAST and CLEAN, that don't bog down your computer, and have the additional benefit of getting a cheap piece of hardware to put it into like a Dell/HP/etc rather than paying two times the price for an Apple product.
Whether this is a good strategy or not, remains to be seen. Microsoft uses a LOT of data and telemetry to make its decisions in terms of UI design, API improvements, usability, etc. As much as I'd like to say that Windows 8 is just a boneheaded move, the performance of the OS is just too damn good to think that. And I know us here on Slashdot will revile the new UI and its use (though honestly, the loss of the start menu was no big loss for me as I adjusted to the new way in about 3 seconds). There are things that definitely need improvement even in the metro UI, but I feel we'll get that with a few patches.
The bottom line is that Microsoft is tired of having an unfriendly "BSOD" image, and they want to take steps to nix that, even if it means alienating a whole bunch of developers. I think they feel that their platform is still better on the whole than OSX (and I'd tend to agree here), and developers will still flock. By Windows 9, you won't see any more desktop apps being released... and that's the plan MS is heading for.
Just a warning before you flame me though, I'm not ENDORSING this idea, I'm simply stating that this is where I think MS is going.
People pay a premium for Macs because they are well marketed and "pretty."
PCs have to be budget machines in comparison, and they will make up on the numbers game. If I am looking at a $1200 Ultrabook or a $1200 MBA, and the MBA has better specs... why the hell would I go to an Ultrabook when I can put Windows on my MBA and have it run just as well, in a prettier package?
The benefit of undercutting on price is that if Microsoft can convince people that Windows 8 is better than OSX, they have a very valuable proposition for retaking some of those they lost. I'm not saying they will... but it's a game they can play. If only Windows 8 was better than it is... I mean, I like it in terms of Metro but it's very jarring between that and the untouched "desktop" interface. They really could have done a better job. Maybe Windows 9?
With iOS6 and it's very evolutionary nature, and with Google's Android and MS's Windows Phone as competitors, plus the fact IDC and Gartner both put iOS as becoming less relevant with time... what does your gut tell you about the landscape? And what do you think about the competitors to iOS? I would say "iPhone", but my interest is more in the software than the hardware.
Windows 8 isn't buggy... it's unfinished and unpolished. What is there works well.
The desktop and metro side by side experiences make you feel like Microsoft put a lot of effort into getting the system running fast, smooth, and seamless, and then forgot to do anything with the desktop, or bring over any of the options. I posted about this yesterday, but suffice to say, Windows 8 is really great in terms of technical prowess, but the UI is unfinished, unpolished, and jarring, to say the least. And this is coming from somebody who actually *likes* Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft could probably make a good packaged phone, but the technology that is ideal is something they don't work on. For the Surface they sourced their materials, put it into an elegant and pretty package, and shipped it.
For a phone they need a better camera (Nokia has the edge on everybody here), they need good QA testing due to its usage (again, Nokia excels here), they need to have carrier relationships (they don't), they need to understand the market (they don't -- it's interwoven with the carriers), and they need to have displays they work on that exceed what's out there.
If anything, Nokia *is* the "MS Phone". While the ecosystem is going to need time, the hardware of the Lumia 920 (and more specifically the camera/durability) is why I'm buying one. The apps I need are already there. And a lot of people are in that boat. I don't want to carry around a DSLR when I can get pretty good pictures with my phone, and only Nokia truly allows for that. It's something an MS Phone won't be able to do, and there's nothing really that makes them stand out in this arena beyond what Nokia is already doing.
If anything... I'd say MS purchases Nokia and uses them to make their phone, in the same way Google purchased Moto.
And in the brilliance of the building engineers, the generator is in the basement.
Which is now filled with 13 feet of water.
It's going to be fun cleaning up.
But the problem is that they operate like one. And as such, should be regulated as one.
Right now there is no recourse if people want to get their money out/back/etc, and if they were a normal bank they'd have to provide a method to extract money and some regulations around their "review" process.
Sure, you can work for one of a thousand places that deal with healthcare IT, ethical hacking (and penetration testing/security companies) etc that would be fine with your morals and your paycheck.
The military can take young kids who don't have a lot of options and train them to become soldiers through the use of discipline and time. To be a great computer hacker you need to screw around as much as possible because it's the curiosity that makes somebody really good at it. You can't teach that. You have to pay for it. And that's why good IT folks are generally ahead of the unemployment curve and paid very well to boot.
Why would you hire an expert computer hacker/programmer/systems guy/girl if they can get paid 3x the amount working in a private company?
If you want to create an elite set of 'ubergeeks' you need to pay them a lot of money, allow them to work in jeans and tshirts, endless supply of mountain dew and snacks.
Or otherwise work for Google.
About 70%. Just as many people who have Java installed.
Sorry to ruin the hate parade here.
The more entertaining thing is that most movie studios have abandoned Final Cut for Avid, because Final Cut X became a piece of shit product that was trying to cater to neophytes rather than professionals. So all the pros left, and the only morons still using Final Cut are outdated academics (surprise surprise) and people who still think that Macs are the best for video editing.
Now it's just as good on PC. And you still render to Linux :P
First, Windows 8 is just as open as Windows 7. The only difference this time is that it ships with a built-in competitor to Valve's Steam platform.
Second, while Linux gaming may or may not be as good as PC gaming, Valve alone isn't going to make up the market, and they will continue to support Windows regardless. They have only a handful of games nowadays; Counterstrike, DOTA 2, Team Fortress, Portal, and Half Life (though everybody has already beaten those).
They have to convince everybody else to do the same thing. So they need to get Call of Duty, Battlefield, and all the other big franchise games to port to Linux. This likely won't happen unless they see a monetary gain in doing so. The only company that truly benefits is Valve, because of their platform. Porting to Linux is their hedge against the MS App Store. While I could see that down the road in Windows 9 or 10 that the app store becomes the primary way to deliver apps, most developers are going to embrace that model. The developers don't make money on the distribution, unless they are a distribution platform like Valve. What EA has done with Origin is more a DRM scheme than a distribution model, and I don't think they will mind switching.
Ultimately while Valve and I'm sure a few other major developers will hate this model change, a lot of people are going to embrace it, and be successful with it as well. You don't think Angry Birds did so well because it was a Triple A title distributed through Steam, do you? It was an indie title distributed through the Apple App Store. And with the dev tools for MS software being pretty easy to use and learn, I think we will see some more success stories of people adopting the "new way" of doing things vis a vis MS's OSes.
And if they don't.... we'll see what the future holds. But Valve isn't a big enough player to corner this market on their own, and right now, there's no indication of any open support for them to make this move either.
The fact that this is modded insightful shows the groupthink of anti-MS hatred without even looking at the facts. .NET is wildly successful, even if you believe it not to be true.
If you develop a Windows 8 Metro style app -- it will work immediately on the tablet.
The amount of apps that I expect to see will be large, because Windows already has a huge developer ecosystem.
But time will tell. I'm not in a need for any tablet as of now (have my iPad 2) so I'm fine keeping that for a while.
You realize my Slashdot ID is lower than even yours right :)
My hope is that we'll see a 922 on Verizon in pretty short order. I'm with you on the AT&T situation as well... I can't stand them.
But the US isn't their only market, and across Europe they are available on multiple carriers.
Sorry to break it to you, actually... but the Lumia 900 is pretty damned well built. I only expect more of the same for the 920.
I think Nokia and the WP8 ecosystem will do well, and there are a few reasons.
First, they have the best device. Forget the OS -- the best camera, it's built solid (nokia solid), looks slick, wireless charging, and a very high PPI (even more than the iPhone 5).
Next, the Windows phone ecosystem is going to grow pretty rapidly when they release Windows 8. Right now only a handful of devs have the dev tools for WP8, but when the floodgates open and the new API that is shared between WP8 and Windows 8 (Windows RT), you'll see a lot of apps come around.
That said, keep in mind that while people think that the "apps" aren't there, there's over 100k apps now. It's not small potatoes, and they managed to do it faster than Android hit 100k apps as well.
The way I see it, I want MS/Nokia to succeed. They have a very good mobile OS (I'll be buying a 920 myself, specifically for build quality and camera), and having more competition is good for everybody.
People who work at MS don't live in Redmond necessarily, but the suburbs around MS are pretty well priced. Same with NJ, as opposed to NYC.
The entire Bay Area is really expensive though.
A 3 Bedroom in the Bay Area (my inlaws are out there) in a reasonable neighborhood is over 700k. It's ridiculous.
Comparably, where I live, in the tristate area and working in NYC, I paid a little more than half that for a 4 bedroom house with two car garage and full basement. Taxes are higher, but with the price of the house, who cares? Plus, my schools are immensely better here as well. Cali schools suck, unless you live in Cupertino.. but the those houses are $1 million+.
Because it's in Redmond. The other companies are in the Bay area largely, and that's the most expensive place to live per square foot in the country. Gas and everything else are more expensive too.
But it's entertaining to see the armchair quarterbacks here on Slashdot yelling about Elop and MSFT collusion to force Nokia to fail.
Firstly, CEOs make money when the company succeeds. Elop makes decisions and strategy that are going to try to put Nokia into a positive market position, because if he does that well, he makes a shitload of money. That's first off.
Secondly, would it be the opinion of people here that Nokia would have been better served by sticking with Meego, which was barely in a finished state? Or switching to Android, where they'd be pitted against people who could make a phone a lot cheaper than they could, plus Google throwing its weight wholly behind Motorola?
Elop chose a strategy where they are the biggest fish in a little pond. I'm not saying this is a winning strategy, but it's probably one of the best ones at their disposal.
The Lumia 800/900 were mediocre phones all around. They were basically the exact same body with a different OS, and nothing spectacularly different than their Symbian counterparts. It's not a big wonder that it didn't sell.. Microsoft screwed up Windows Phone because v8 has a lot more features and v7 is a stopgap that doesn't upgrade. Not a lot of people are going to jump onto that bandwagon, and as a result, you should think that Joe Belfiore and Sinofsky should have been canned, along with Ballmer.
The 920 is really a great piece of hardware. It's got the best camera, hands down, of any smartphone. Has the best PPI (better than the "Retina" display). It has the extreme Nokia durability we've all known to love. And with Windows Phone 8, it should be a good contender.
However, to knock it down before it's made it out of the gates because it's associated with Microsoft is just silly. I skipped the 900 because it was mediocre. I want the 920 because it's a stellar phone. And because it's really durable. It has more to do with being a Nokia, than it does with anything that MS has to do with. And that still plays very well for Nokia. I think they have a shot, they have carrier partnerships and relationships worldwide that other companies envy, and they can make a good push back into the market because they weren't afraid of tossing a POS operating system out (unlike RIM, whom will find themselves in the unemployment line soon) and going with something that is pretty good. Yea, I said it -- Windows Phone is pretty good. I have owned an iPhone for 5 years, and after seeing Windows Phone up close and personal -- I don't see any real benefit in staying with it. The Windows Phone OS is very slick, very fast, and very nice to use even on mediocre hardware. Battery life is good too.
So while I know it's fashionable to lay down the MS hate early on, let's at least wait until Nokia brings out the 920 and see how it is received worldwide. I think most folks here will be surprised that people actually think that the phone itself is better than most out there, in almost every way.
96% of Google's money comes from search. They can try to get into other areas that MS occupies "directly and indirectly" but they don't make a profit off of it. Microsoft still does. And that's a HUGE difference.
If they can get a new host of developers by making it "cool" again, losing legacy developers won't be an issue. Or, those legacy developers will turn around and write code that MS will get behind. Win win for MS.
I highly doubt they will take away the ability to sideload applications, but they *do* want developers who write for Windows 8 to get "certified". Those certifications ensure a rigorous check against performance, uninstallation, etc.
And I've spoken to quite a few friends inside MS that tend to think that Sinofsky is of the opinion that Dell and other OEMs fucked them over with crapware baked PCs. It's no wonder MS introduced the "MS Signature" line, that has zero crapware installed by default under his reign. I'm not discounting they aren't happy about the money, but I do think they realize that a declining marketshare is more important to address than what they'd make up in the app store.
And that is really, to get rid of "legacy" apps entirely. I think Microsoft is pretty tired of having third parties (hence, the reason for the surface) and OEMs give their hard work a bad name. So what they are doing is introducing a new API (Windows RT) that requires "certification" (Minecraft didn't want to do this for whatever reason to "stick it" to Windows 8), which means that they require that if you have an app in Windows 8, it uninstalls *completely* and *cleanly*, among other performance indicators and things like that.
Microsoft is trying to retake its OS, under threat of the web, Apple, Google, etc. Windows 8, far from popular belief on this site, is actually a really good OS -- better in many ways, than Windows 7 is. It's faster (by a LOT), it's smooth, and its extensibility and APIs are still very good. The experience between "Metro" and the "Desktop" however, is extremely jarring. While I've written (and been modded up!) in the past about how bad the transition between the desktop and metro are, and how much better they "could have" done things, looking at a variety of information since then and forming a new opinion leads me only to think that they don't WANT it to be better. They want it to be jarring. They want you to start hating desktop apps and going to their store so you can get crap-ware free apps, that uninstall FAST and CLEAN, that don't bog down your computer, and have the additional benefit of getting a cheap piece of hardware to put it into like a Dell/HP/etc rather than paying two times the price for an Apple product.
Whether this is a good strategy or not, remains to be seen. Microsoft uses a LOT of data and telemetry to make its decisions in terms of UI design, API improvements, usability, etc. As much as I'd like to say that Windows 8 is just a boneheaded move, the performance of the OS is just too damn good to think that. And I know us here on Slashdot will revile the new UI and its use (though honestly, the loss of the start menu was no big loss for me as I adjusted to the new way in about 3 seconds). There are things that definitely need improvement even in the metro UI, but I feel we'll get that with a few patches.
The bottom line is that Microsoft is tired of having an unfriendly "BSOD" image, and they want to take steps to nix that, even if it means alienating a whole bunch of developers. I think they feel that their platform is still better on the whole than OSX (and I'd tend to agree here), and developers will still flock. By Windows 9, you won't see any more desktop apps being released... and that's the plan MS is heading for.
Just a warning before you flame me though, I'm not ENDORSING this idea, I'm simply stating that this is where I think MS is going.
People pay a premium for Macs because they are well marketed and "pretty."
PCs have to be budget machines in comparison, and they will make up on the numbers game. If I am looking at a $1200 Ultrabook or a $1200 MBA, and the MBA has better specs... why the hell would I go to an Ultrabook when I can put Windows on my MBA and have it run just as well, in a prettier package?
The benefit of undercutting on price is that if Microsoft can convince people that Windows 8 is better than OSX, they have a very valuable proposition for retaking some of those they lost. I'm not saying they will... but it's a game they can play. If only Windows 8 was better than it is... I mean, I like it in terms of Metro but it's very jarring between that and the untouched "desktop" interface. They really could have done a better job. Maybe Windows 9?
With iOS6 and it's very evolutionary nature, and with Google's Android and MS's Windows Phone as competitors, plus the fact IDC and Gartner both put iOS as becoming less relevant with time... what does your gut tell you about the landscape? And what do you think about the competitors to iOS? I would say "iPhone", but my interest is more in the software than the hardware.
Windows 8 isn't buggy... it's unfinished and unpolished. What is there works well.
The desktop and metro side by side experiences make you feel like Microsoft put a lot of effort into getting the system running fast, smooth, and seamless, and then forgot to do anything with the desktop, or bring over any of the options. I posted about this yesterday, but suffice to say, Windows 8 is really great in terms of technical prowess, but the UI is unfinished, unpolished, and jarring, to say the least. And this is coming from somebody who actually *likes* Windows.