Contractors don't care about that stuff. They're there to build something as quickly as possible that meets the minimum spec so they get paid. Bugs just mean future work.
You're absolutely right. I work as a programmer for the government and I see the same thing. The stuff that's built in house by any department (not just ours, but I think we do good work) tends to be better. We don't get paid extra to fix bugs - we just get unhappy users and lousy performance reviews for having lots of bugs. As part of the department we actually learn the business and can thus do a better job.
The stuff made by contractors is made to specification, if you're lucky. The problem is that the specification is usually wrong, because non-technical users don't have a clear grasp on what it is they actually need. The successful projects are very much iterative ones, because as soon as you give users something they'll be coming back with changes and new requests and other business areas will be impacted. It's inevitable.
The contractor model is great to make the friends of politicans a lot of money. It's a failure if you want good software.
A lot of the market is consumption devices. People who don't type long blog posts and don't do much work. They read Facebook, watch Youtube, and play games. You know what's great for those people? Tablets. They're much lighter and more portable then laptops are.
Traditional PCs are much better creation devices and will still be used for that, but their days as the device of choice for consumption are numbered.
Corporate users will do what they've done before and just stick with the previous version.
Home users are starting to stay in increasing numbers that they don't actually need a desktop PC. A crappy version of Windows as the only thing on the market only helps speed that trend up.
That's because W2k wasn't a home user OS. It wasn't shipped on many PCs that were sold in stores to home users. People leave out NT 4 for the same reason.
W2k happened to gain more traction in the home market then MS originally intended because of how good it was compared to Mistake Edition, but it wasn't until XP that the NT line really took off at home.
That's because to most people Microsoft isn't some evil entity that needs destroying. It's just a company. If Windows works for people using it to do their jobs, they don't care about changing to something else and disrupting their work for some goal of destroying Microsoft.
The problem is that Microsoft wants to get into the phone & tablet markets, where their marketshare is more like 1%. Metro in that market by the accounts I've heard from people who have a Windows Phone 7 is pretty good.
It's a really bad strategy when you take a tablet UI and force it on Desktop PC users though. That's where I agree with you. They're screwing up the market they have to try and create a unified platform for a market they don't have, and I don't think it's going to work.
They can get away with this in the corporate world because their corporate customers don't upgrade every OS version anyway. They can (and IMHO will) ignore Windows 8. It'll be a huge flop in the Enterprise. It doesn't matter a lot because those customers will use the highly capable Windows 7 instead. When Windows 9 fixes most of the suck, the natural slow upgrade cycle can do its thing.
For home users? Maybe? If you want a PC your options are pretty limited, but if people (particularly not tech-savvy people) hear that their friend got a new computer and had to relearn how to use the thing, they're not going to be eager to run out and buy. It may turn them towards other options, or away from PCs entirely and towards tablets instead. A lot of what goes on at home on the computer is just surfing and social networking, and those things work perfectly well on a tablet. I know the absolute last thing my dad ever wants to do is learn Metro and then have to keep track of the UI switching back and forth constantly like it's prone to do in Windows 8 (particularly since for serious business apps Metro stuff just won't exist for quite a while, porting to something that almost no Windows systems can actually run is not going to be a popular option).
In the mobile space? If Windows 8 is a failure on tablets, by time they can try again the other players will be so entrenched that dislodging them will be incredibly difficult. That IMHO is why they're throwing everything in Windows 8 at the tablet experience. They can't afford to screw it up the way they can get away with screwing it up for corporate users.
Personally I expect Windows 8 to be a failure precisely because Metro is lousy on desktops. People who try it are going to remember that part and project the experience onto tablets, even if it's better there. Consider how fast "Vista sucks" became common knowledge even amongst people who never touched Vista. That'll happen again and it'll poison the tablet sales simply because people don't differentiate between "Windows 8 on tablet" and "Windows 8 on desktop" in the mass market. "Windows 8 sucks" is all-inclusive.
Maybe. Or maybe the negative reputation that Windows 8 is getting in the corporate world for the asstacular new desktop UI will cause decision makers to also shun it on tablets, particularly since x86 tablets won't have very good battery life and ARM based Windows 8 tablets can't join Active Directory domains anyway (nullifying one of the advantages).
I don't see how it can take off as a corporate tablet OS at the same time as it's being shunned as a corporate desktop OS, and you're NOT going to see significant deployment of it in the corporate world over Windows 7 for a very long time (if ever).
It means they want to disparage Android in some way, but can't do it on the basis of sales since it's infinitely more successful then Windows Phone (and Windows Mobile for that matter, but unlike WP7 Windows Mobile was actually relevant in the market at one time).
"The cloud" doesn't get rid of the need for computers at the office, or networks, or people to support it. It also doesn't elimiante the need for people who understand how all this "cloud" pixie dust works, and most importantly someone who knows what to do when "the cloud" goes down randomly like last week and your website suddenly doesn't work.
Less people running small data centers? Probably, if the hype can be believed. But a lot of people aren't sold on this.
It's also a matter of small sample size on the part of the people doing the survey. When I grew up my family had a Honda Civic. We drove it heavily, and it still ran perfectly at 400,000KM. Body was still in good shape, very little beyond standard maintenance ever required on it. One advantage is that it was a fairly basic model without power everything, so there was just less stuff to break, but we also took good care of it.
So when I think of "Honda" now, I remember that car. With a sample size of one car, my opinion of Honda is very high. That's the problem with judging cars: most of us actually get experience with so few of them that an individual can't draw good comparisons.
In order to avoid that splash screen while my game loads off the hard drive, I'm going to try to run it over the magical cloud instead! This is practical, right? Because once my local copy is loaded we can resync it with all that magical stuff the cloud version was doing, assuming I managed to connect to a cloud instance and actually do anything before the local version loaded?
And that's assuming I don't mind paying extra in order to fund this magical cloud version that I'll be using for all of ten seconds.
I'd also like to know what phone he's using where apps have no load time. Here in the real world, load times exist even on phones.
This article is pretty awful. "Show me a screenshot of the UI"? Please. Splash screens are telling me something helpful - the app is loading and isn't ready yet. Showing me something that pretends it is ready when it's really not is just bad UI and will only confuse people.
You have to wonder what special kind of fail Ubi management is when they've failed to notice that they're breaking their own product for their actual customers while the pirate edition continues to function perfectly well.
I mean, even your average MBA isn't this stupid. These guys must be top of their class.
It's cute that you talk as if the Republicans are any better.
The two parties are very similar on this point, since politics these days is dominated by sound bites and trying to get special interests to rally voters to specific causes rather then broad based support for anything. Oh, and campaigns where you promise people things that can't possibly be delivered, because voters are dumb enough to demand that, complain about it between elections, then demand more promises next election. Democrat/Republican? Doesn't matter on this subject. It's just business.
Honesty is pretty rare. Saw a bout of it recently in New Brunswick, Canada. The Finance Minister got up and said that dumb campaign promises were bankrupting the province, like the ones his own party made in the election. That was a rare bit of truth.
At the end of the day, this is small potatoes for TPP. The real barrier to Canada being taken seriously in these talks is the outrageously protectionist supply management system in dairy, and the 300% tariff wall that goes with it. Since the supposidly "conservative" and "pro-trade" government is quite in favor of keeping that price gouging system in place to placate farmers in Ontario & Quebec, Canada's not going to be making much progress in TPP.
Yes, another device to setup to solve the problem of too many devices. That is pretty much exactly why geeks shouldn't be allowed to design this stuff.
Because non-geeks want less crap in their living room, not more. They want one device that you just plug in and have it work, not a myriad of stuff you have to figure out how to connect and get to play nice together and oh god which three remotes do I need to watch a DVD?
If a Smart TV can eliminate the set top box and the need to hook up a PC to get the Internet on your TV, it's accomplishing something useful.
My current TV works fine. I have no interest in spending large quantities of money on a TV that does the same thing only with a bunch of extra crap tacked on.
Now if you get me a TV that eliminates the need for a separate box from my IPTV provider, then we'll talk.
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Contractors don't care about that stuff. They're there to build something as quickly as possible that meets the minimum spec so they get paid. Bugs just mean future work.
You're absolutely right. I work as a programmer for the government and I see the same thing. The stuff that's built in house by any department (not just ours, but I think we do good work) tends to be better. We don't get paid extra to fix bugs - we just get unhappy users and lousy performance reviews for having lots of bugs. As part of the department we actually learn the business and can thus do a better job.
The stuff made by contractors is made to specification, if you're lucky. The problem is that the specification is usually wrong, because non-technical users don't have a clear grasp on what it is they actually need. The successful projects are very much iterative ones, because as soon as you give users something they'll be coming back with changes and new requests and other business areas will be impacted. It's inevitable.
The contractor model is great to make the friends of politicans a lot of money. It's a failure if you want good software.
A lot of the market is consumption devices. People who don't type long blog posts and don't do much work. They read Facebook, watch Youtube, and play games. You know what's great for those people? Tablets. They're much lighter and more portable then laptops are.
Traditional PCs are much better creation devices and will still be used for that, but their days as the device of choice for consumption are numbered.
I'm sure there's people in Microsoft who do know that, but the internal politics over there are pretty crazy.
Corporate users will do what they've done before and just stick with the previous version.
Home users are starting to stay in increasing numbers that they don't actually need a desktop PC. A crappy version of Windows as the only thing on the market only helps speed that trend up.
That's because W2k wasn't a home user OS. It wasn't shipped on many PCs that were sold in stores to home users. People leave out NT 4 for the same reason.
W2k happened to gain more traction in the home market then MS originally intended because of how good it was compared to Mistake Edition, but it wasn't until XP that the NT line really took off at home.
That's because to most people Microsoft isn't some evil entity that needs destroying. It's just a company. If Windows works for people using it to do their jobs, they don't care about changing to something else and disrupting their work for some goal of destroying Microsoft.
They're too busy doing more important things.
The problem is that Microsoft wants to get into the phone & tablet markets, where their marketshare is more like 1%. Metro in that market by the accounts I've heard from people who have a Windows Phone 7 is pretty good.
It's a really bad strategy when you take a tablet UI and force it on Desktop PC users though. That's where I agree with you. They're screwing up the market they have to try and create a unified platform for a market they don't have, and I don't think it's going to work.
They can get away with this in the corporate world because their corporate customers don't upgrade every OS version anyway. They can (and IMHO will) ignore Windows 8. It'll be a huge flop in the Enterprise. It doesn't matter a lot because those customers will use the highly capable Windows 7 instead. When Windows 9 fixes most of the suck, the natural slow upgrade cycle can do its thing.
For home users? Maybe? If you want a PC your options are pretty limited, but if people (particularly not tech-savvy people) hear that their friend got a new computer and had to relearn how to use the thing, they're not going to be eager to run out and buy. It may turn them towards other options, or away from PCs entirely and towards tablets instead. A lot of what goes on at home on the computer is just surfing and social networking, and those things work perfectly well on a tablet. I know the absolute last thing my dad ever wants to do is learn Metro and then have to keep track of the UI switching back and forth constantly like it's prone to do in Windows 8 (particularly since for serious business apps Metro stuff just won't exist for quite a while, porting to something that almost no Windows systems can actually run is not going to be a popular option).
In the mobile space? If Windows 8 is a failure on tablets, by time they can try again the other players will be so entrenched that dislodging them will be incredibly difficult. That IMHO is why they're throwing everything in Windows 8 at the tablet experience. They can't afford to screw it up the way they can get away with screwing it up for corporate users.
Personally I expect Windows 8 to be a failure precisely because Metro is lousy on desktops. People who try it are going to remember that part and project the experience onto tablets, even if it's better there. Consider how fast "Vista sucks" became common knowledge even amongst people who never touched Vista. That'll happen again and it'll poison the tablet sales simply because people don't differentiate between "Windows 8 on tablet" and "Windows 8 on desktop" in the mass market. "Windows 8 sucks" is all-inclusive.
Maybe. Or maybe the negative reputation that Windows 8 is getting in the corporate world for the asstacular new desktop UI will cause decision makers to also shun it on tablets, particularly since x86 tablets won't have very good battery life and ARM based Windows 8 tablets can't join Active Directory domains anyway (nullifying one of the advantages).
I don't see how it can take off as a corporate tablet OS at the same time as it's being shunned as a corporate desktop OS, and you're NOT going to see significant deployment of it in the corporate world over Windows 7 for a very long time (if ever).
It means they want to disparage Android in some way, but can't do it on the basis of sales since it's infinitely more successful then Windows Phone (and Windows Mobile for that matter, but unlike WP7 Windows Mobile was actually relevant in the market at one time).
"The cloud" doesn't get rid of the need for computers at the office, or networks, or people to support it. It also doesn't elimiante the need for people who understand how all this "cloud" pixie dust works, and most importantly someone who knows what to do when "the cloud" goes down randomly like last week and your website suddenly doesn't work.
Less people running small data centers? Probably, if the hype can be believed. But a lot of people aren't sold on this.
What, you mean some company doesn't impose their pathetic puritanical standards on their customers? OMG alert the presses!
It's also a matter of small sample size on the part of the people doing the survey. When I grew up my family had a Honda Civic. We drove it heavily, and it still ran perfectly at 400,000KM. Body was still in good shape, very little beyond standard maintenance ever required on it. One advantage is that it was a fairly basic model without power everything, so there was just less stuff to break, but we also took good care of it.
So when I think of "Honda" now, I remember that car. With a sample size of one car, my opinion of Honda is very high. That's the problem with judging cars: most of us actually get experience with so few of them that an individual can't draw good comparisons.
In order to avoid that splash screen while my game loads off the hard drive, I'm going to try to run it over the magical cloud instead! This is practical, right? Because once my local copy is loaded we can resync it with all that magical stuff the cloud version was doing, assuming I managed to connect to a cloud instance and actually do anything before the local version loaded?
And that's assuming I don't mind paying extra in order to fund this magical cloud version that I'll be using for all of ten seconds.
I'd also like to know what phone he's using where apps have no load time. Here in the real world, load times exist even on phones.
This article is pretty awful. "Show me a screenshot of the UI"? Please. Splash screens are telling me something helpful - the app is loading and isn't ready yet. Showing me something that pretends it is ready when it's really not is just bad UI and will only confuse people.
We've now reached the point where even the people writing the article summary don't RTFA.
If they won't offer this for business customers actually willing to pay for it, it seems highly unlikely they'll offer it in a free service.
Just like all that Android malware is also taking over Linux desktops, right?
You have to wonder what special kind of fail Ubi management is when they've failed to notice that they're breaking their own product for their actual customers while the pirate edition continues to function perfectly well.
I mean, even your average MBA isn't this stupid. These guys must be top of their class.
It's cute that you talk as if the Republicans are any better.
The two parties are very similar on this point, since politics these days is dominated by sound bites and trying to get special interests to rally voters to specific causes rather then broad based support for anything. Oh, and campaigns where you promise people things that can't possibly be delivered, because voters are dumb enough to demand that, complain about it between elections, then demand more promises next election. Democrat/Republican? Doesn't matter on this subject. It's just business.
Honesty is pretty rare. Saw a bout of it recently in New Brunswick, Canada. The Finance Minister got up and said that dumb campaign promises were bankrupting the province, like the ones his own party made in the election. That was a rare bit of truth.
I'm not sure if I should mod this as offtopic or insightful, because it's somehow both at the same time.
At the end of the day, this is small potatoes for TPP. The real barrier to Canada being taken seriously in these talks is the outrageously protectionist supply management system in dairy, and the 300% tariff wall that goes with it. Since the supposidly "conservative" and "pro-trade" government is quite in favor of keeping that price gouging system in place to placate farmers in Ontario & Quebec, Canada's not going to be making much progress in TPP.
Yes, another device to setup to solve the problem of too many devices. That is pretty much exactly why geeks shouldn't be allowed to design this stuff.
Because non-geeks want less crap in their living room, not more. They want one device that you just plug in and have it work, not a myriad of stuff you have to figure out how to connect and get to play nice together and oh god which three remotes do I need to watch a DVD?
If a Smart TV can eliminate the set top box and the need to hook up a PC to get the Internet on your TV, it's accomplishing something useful.
My current TV works fine. I have no interest in spending large quantities of money on a TV that does the same thing only with a bunch of extra crap tacked on.
Now if you get me a TV that eliminates the need for a separate box from my IPTV provider, then we'll talk.