Jeff Atwood: “In the post PC era, Microsoft is betting the company on Windows 8, desperately trying to serve two masters with one operating system. The traditional mouse and keyboard desktop is no longer the default; it is still there, but slightly hidden from view, as the realm of computer nuts, power users, and geeks. For everyone else, the Metro UI puts an all new, highly visual touch and tablet friendly face on the old beige Wintel box. Will Microsoft succeed? I’m not sure yet. But based on what I’ve seen so far of Windows 8, its pricing, and the new Surface hardware – I’m cautiously optimistic.” So am I. However, a lot – and I mean a lot as in ‘everything’ – will depend on the quality of the Metro applications. So far, the quality has been utterly abysmal, both for first and third party ones. Microsoft is promising Metro application goodness for RTM, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
The question is, how much money is needed for people to care?
To make my point clearer. Microsoft is making a risky bet, almost bizarre. The reasoning is something like:
1) Even if most people refuses upgrade to Win8, People will get Win8 desktops with new computers.
2) A lot of computers will be sold (300 million next year according to MS).
3) Since Win8 for PC will have Metro, and since users will be able to purchase “extra appplications for it”, this represents a huge market.
4) Developers will, then, run towards writing these kind of apps given the huge market means huge money, even if they are apps that will be run on regular PCs, not tablets.
5) Somehow, the apps written for PC will then be ported to run on tablets or (future) phones and microsoft will be able to beat Apple and Android.
Out of this reasoning, point 4 is bizarre. Will people really write apps for this platform? Most importantly, will PC users buy Applications meant for a tablet/phone UI? This is super weird.
Having hundreds of millions of users and throwing a market at them isn’t a warranty of success, and an example of that is Chrome Store, or even Google Play (and the browser is definitely the most used app in the desktop).
Will be nice to see how it turns out..
It’s a dumb plan.
Pissing off enterprise in a sad attempt get more tablet sales.
I honestly think business schools will look back and ask how two idiots could be such suckers for trends and not in touch with their customers.
Ballmer and Sinofsky will look like the biggest idiots in tech when this is all over. Sinofsky might even get there before Windows 8 is released
OOPS JUST A SEC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1zxDa3t0fg
Microsoft should be ran by bean counters like IBM. I’m totally serious. It’s much safer than being ran by a clueless dolt who thinks he is the next steve jobs.
I’m optimistic about Windows 8, too. I mean, I expect a Vista style debacle where for about two years on, there will be calls for Windows 7 rollbacks (though whether or not Microsoft will bend to that is another story), but I think, if Microsoft can make it remotely usable with a keyboard and mouse, there may be some promise for Metro yet.
Throwing an app store at the problem is no guarantee of success, though, and users of Windows are probably well entrenched in the traditional way of getting programs. Googling for them, installing three fake ones full of malware, and then giving up. (Source: I work in a computer store, and the number of computers I have to “fix” after someone has tried to convert media files is astounding)
Well, people might not be in line at launch day to buy Windows 8, but why would there be calls for rollbacks? Vista was pretty much broken out of the box, and a resource hog compared to XP. But anything that worked in Windows 7 should still work in Windows 8, and it’s not SUPPOSED to be any slower. And it’s not like you have to use Metro… just hit the ‘Classic’ icon and you’re good to go. And there are still new features other than Metro:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_8
So I can’t imagine anybody who gets it on a new PC is going to be pissed that they’re not running Windows 7 still.
And there’s still the possibility that Metro might catch on with the tech tards, who might prefer it over classic, if it can do all of the basics that tech tards normally want to do. Afterall, you don’t need 8gb of RAM or ‘true multitasking’ to do your taxes or organize a photo album. Sure, it may seem a little far-fetched that ANYBODY would want to use Metro on the desktop, but considering people stood in long lines to buy the first iPhone before it could even run apps, I never underestimate the stupidity of the average consumer anymore. Truth is, us geeks are terrible at predicting what will catch on with the mainstream, so we’ll just have to watch and see what happens.
Edited 2012-07-10 05:51 UTC
As I’ve said before, I believe that Average Joe and his peers will possibly whine a little at first, but eventually they’ll just settle in to Windows 8. And that’s actually a good thing: with Windows Store being now an integral part of the OS Average Joe and his peers will quite likely start looking there for apps first and only then on the Internet, meaning that they’re much less likely to catch malware or viruses.
Overall I do not see a huge “I want that!!” – reaction from the crowds like they mostly have for the iPhone, for example, but no “I definitely do NOT want that!!” either.
Agreed and MS’s dominant position on the desktop will give them a way into the new mobile technologies smart phones, tablets etc, or so they hope. The Average Joe will be used to Metro and will want his phone / tablet to work in the same way. Developers will develop for Metro – because it’s the dominant desktop platform and these apps will be ported to Metro mobile giving MS the advantage it needs to catch up in this area.
Using your dominance or monopoly in one are to leverage dominance in another is the Microsoft way.
A lot is riding on this for MS and Nokia, if it’s a disaster like Vista, MS may be in a terminal spiral of decline.
This I disagree with Canonical does seem to have a vision and a plan, whether it work I don’t know, but I hope so. This would be good for not only Canonical but Linux and Open-source.
Yeah, Canonical and about 400 distros
Sinfosky and Shuttleworth are birds of a feather. Both are Steve Jobs wannabes who chase trends and don’t look at hard numbers.
Remember how Ubuntu thought netbooks would take over? Remember how Linux users would ‘get used to’ unity but yet Linux mint instead took #1?
Canonical has a plan but it changes every year based on the latest zdnet tech trend.
What a disaster, the 3rd most used OS… Second Edition of which (but using a marketing trick of “lucky 7” in its name) is the most popular ever, and quite universally adored.
So you seem to think that they won’t like it right away. Now there’s a fucking great business strategy. Release an OS that the majority doesn’t like and try to make everyone get used to it.
Why should we not assume that this will be another vista? Why???? I’m just not seeing the logic. The polls say NO THANK YOU. Why should we assume that average joe is going to like invisible buttons and two explorers? Oh and don’t forget the TUTORIAL.
Windows, now with a tutorial and invisible buttons. And it now pisses off enterprise.
This is going to be studied by flopologists in the future.
Vista sold 180million copies in its first year of GA. I hope it is another Vista.
Stupid revisionist history.
Most funny-sad is how the adored & best ever Windows “let’s use lucky 7 marketing trick” is basically just VistaSE …I think even largely the same people really actively adore the former and loathe the latter.
You probably should have tried windows 8 before writing about it.
The start menu isn’t there and neither are the gadgets.
You are forced to boot into metro and use it when you want to search or launch a program from the start menu.
If you think metro is a functional equivalent to the start menu then you don’t use that many programs. It really is as simple as that.
Windows 8 will fail and Jeff will be one of the few Windows bloggers who didn’t call Windows 8 a piece of crap.
I just use an app launcher. Wrote one myself, but Launchy is a nice pre-made one.
So I can install Windows 8 and use hacks to bring back functionality that I already have.
Or I can keep Windows 7 along with DVD/Blu-ray support and not waste any time dealing with the upgrade.
Gee whiz I wonder what enterprise will do.
The worst part of Windows 8 is that all these limitations are entirely needless. It’s all Sinofsky’s vision but unlike Jobs he is a clueless hack who doesn’t understand his customers.
Or you could use free tools that are already out now, that offer more functionality than what is currently built into Windows 7.
On second thought though, maybe you should just stick with Metro, along with the rest of the tech tards. If you’re bitching about the Start menu being taken away, you’re obviously not that computer savvy anyway.
Omg the gadgets ! Someone think of the gadgets!
Ridiculous.
I’ll start playing with it at work after RTM next month. That gives me 5 months to decide whether it replaces Windows 7 or not.
When we migrated from XP to 7 after the last RTM, the switch was a total no-brainer. Now; I have no idea.
Hopefully OS developers realise that having two separate shells is okay. People can survive using different operating systems at the same time.
Not a productivity app (unless you’re an artist), but Fresh Paint is a good first-party app (and a steal if it continues to be free upon release).
http://www.microsoft.com/freshpaint
It started as an MSR project called Project Gustav.
It’s interesting comparing the UI then against the current Metro implementation.
http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/nicfill/an-extended-look-at-project-…
Thom, optimistic that it will survive?
you realize that microsoft is just doing a lot of harm right? tech world would be much better off with MS as a small unimportant player, right?
The bigger share thats open source, the better for the users
I hope MS die, or at least suffer huge damages, and that linux and open/freeBSD takes over most of the market.
Well thats just dreaming I guess,..
Yes because lots of people want to be compiling KDE from ports on FreeBSD.
This is off topic and maybe you were just trolling, but unless the defaults are not okay, nobody needs to compile anything (see http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/packages-…).
To install KDE all you need is:
pkg_add -r kde
RT.
it was a a bit of trolling, I was making the point really that FreeBSD would be too much for someone to bother setting up.
It was a trite response, because tbh andih is a massive freetard and Microsoft hater.
As Linus says: “Microsoft hatred is a disease.”
Frankly I find it boring and dismayed that any thread that is either about Microsoft or Windows has lots of people loathing it.
Edited 2012-07-10 13:36 UTC
Not on PowerPC! 9.0-RELEASE has exactly ZERO binary packages for PPC. I tried putting FreeBSD on a G4 iMac I found at the recycling center, but between the green and blue channels not working at all for color in console mode (pink on white is possibly the worst colorscheme for a backlit terminal in the history of mankind) and the lack of binary packages, I gave up and put Debian Wheezy on it. Everything works flawlessly now, including sound, Firewire, and 24-bit color depth.
Indeed, that’s just a pipedream, Linux simply ain’t good enough yet. And I am starting to doubt it ever will be, either, simply because there’s so many different small groups pulling things in different directions and no coherent long-time plan whatsoever. Not to mention missing drivers and/or features; both of my laptops and my desktop would lose a few handfuls of hardware-features were I to transition to Linux, for example.
I’ve come to realize that Linux has the same fragmentation issues that made companies run away from commercial UNIX systems to Windows NT, before Linux was good enough to be used in the enterprise.
Then keep dreaming.
If Microsoft goes away, it will just get replaced by the next one. The same way as Microsoft took IBM’s place, or IBM used to deal with DEC before.
There will all be companies like Microsoft. They just happen to be the current one that everyone loves to hate.
“In the post PC era, Microsoft is betting the company on Windows 8, desperately trying to serve two masters with one operating system.”
Classic mistake. Have they not read Matthew 6:24? (The desktop is getting the short end of the stick here, methinks.) And in contrast to some others, I’m blatantly un-optimistic about Microsoft’s next OS. 😛
Category guidance (Metro style apps)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh868274.aspx
Designing UX for apps
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh779072.aspx
I don’t know if MS’s 1st party apps live up to those guidelines (I’ve not done anything with W8), but Microsoft has said that they’re going to continually update those apps, following the mobile app model, so those apps won’t be static anyway. Same goes for 3rd party apps.
I think it’ll take some time for devs to wrap their heads around metro, similar to how it takes a year before you start seeing great games for a new video game console. Not the the initial apps will suck, but the ones that will totally shine will generally be “2nd generation” apps for any given platform.
Edited 2012-07-10 02:35 UTC
I believe in betting the company on new technologies.
I think MS is out of its mind however with Windows 8.
I ran the Dev preview and the consumer preview. It was absolutely the most confusing “experience” I have ever encountered with an operating system.
First Windows release that I can say I am not interested in. I used to get excited about new Windows releases. The most exciting part about using Windows 8 was when I realized I didn’t have to deal with this insanity and deleted it.
MS can’t afford another ‘Vita’
Steve Ballmer is on the best f*cking drugs ever (apparently) and the MS Titanic is heading straight for an iceberg.
because Microsoft did so badly with Vista …
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2007/04/vista-office-…
You do know how much Vista sold, right? It was an imaginary failure. Vista sold a record number of copies.
That’s where I wish they fail miserably. Not because I hate MS, but because I hate this “post PC” stuff. I prefer to actually own my computer, and not be restricted with what I can do with it.
You will get what you want then.
Windows 8 will be like Ubuntu/Unity. Ignoring the polls and chasing iPad owners will just result in a fail of the ages.
I don’t know about you, but for me it’s very hard to take seriously anyone using this cliche, so could we please drop this whole “post PC era” nonsense and put things into perspective instead?
Here’s a quick recap:
PC units sold in 2007: 271 million (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=584210)
PC units sold in 2008: 302 million (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=856712)
PC units sold in 2009: 306 million (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1279215)
PC units sold in 2010: 351 million (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1519417)
PC units sold in 2011: 353 million (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1893523)
Forecast for 2012: 368 million (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1944914)
Forecast for 2013: 400 million (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1944914)
In other words: repeat a lie often enough and it quickly becomes the truth. Sure, the PC market’s growth rate doesn’t lend itself to hyperbole but, let’s face it, this is typical for any mature technology. And yes, margins in the PC industry are razor thin, Apple is worth a gazillion trillion, yadda yadda yadda.
Still, assuming the forecast is right, PC shipments worldwide are going from 271 million in 2007 to 400 million in 2013, so: what is this post PC era everybody seems to be raving about? 😉
RT.
Edited 2012-07-10 11:37 UTC
I think this is spot on.
It seems that Microsoft is frothing at the mouth to get a piece of the iPhone/Android action, probably because they see the control that Apple has over their whole computer ecosphere. This is of course completely opposite to the PC philosophy most people know and love.
I’ve mentioned it before, but it seems to be worth repeating: Microsoft, it appears, does not understand it’s own real assets. As the above post demonstrates, the PC is not going anywhere.
We have a lot of mobile devices in my office, but I can assure you that when the B.S. stops, and people want to get work done, they all return to their Dell workstations, fire-up Solid Works, Unigraphics, Altium, In-Design and a plethora of other “serious” PC applications that could never hope to be ported to the mobile style platforms.
Why not focus on continuing making *this* experience the best?
With that said, I still think the idea of a “mobile component” to Windows 8 is smart (for those notebook/tablet hybrids) but instead of pushing Metro to the front, it should have simply been another part of the OS that can “fire-up” when needed.
In the rush to appear hip and relevant, they are once again (IMHO) making a mess of things. I guess only time will tell if I’m right…
The experience you outline above is in the clear minority, and in fact, still possible with Windows 8. People just enjoy concern trolling.
Clear minority, perhaps, but it’s the most important part of Windows.
If I want a toy, there are plenty of other options. Yes, it’s possible to still work these apps in Win8, but the next version?
It doesn’t take that much foresight to see where we are heading and it shouldn’t be called trolling.
I think it is concern trolling. Microsoft could remove desktop applications from Windows 9, or they could decide to become a tire company. No one knows, and its silly to knock Windows 8 for an imagined future that hasn’t manifested itself yet.
The very definition of a concern troll.
Yes, because there is a equal likely hood of Microsoft becoming a tire company, compared to removing, crippling or otherwise monetizing features that Windows now has for free and which many people depend on.
Calling it “concern trolling” does not delegitimize this argument. It’s just a nasty ad hominem attack.
I think placing an upper limit on speculation of that kind is arbitrary. Why is what you say within bounds but not what I say? Conversely would it be just as right to say they’ll do the exact opposite and leave desktop apps in tact?
I believe that while Windows 8 will start the transition to depreciate Desktop apps,it won’t be done for a few release cycles. Its hard to imagine Microsoft one day just breaking backwards compatibility.
Do you have trouble making educated guessed about things before they happen? Do you just sit on the sidelines and let things happen to you? Is it not rational to make an educated guess about what might happen? (This is the fun part of posting on OSnews!!!)
A little example: Before the 2008 “global financial crisis” many people saw the problems with the world economy. These people were ignored or ridiculed. Smart people – people capable of bit of lateral thinking and not just following the herd – took their advice, got the hell out of the housing and other markets before it was too late.
There is a difference between the sort of speculation where you can “read between the lines” because you have enough experience with the subject matter at hand, and just wildly guessing about something you simply know little to nothing about.
I’d like to think that after being involved with computers for over a 1/4 century that I’ve got a rough idea of how things work and how many of the big players react to situations. It is just speculation? Of course, but there is nothing wrong with it, I did not intend trolling, but rather I added “my two bob” with the hope that someone, somewhere might get some value out of it.
Hence my original post ended with: “I guess only time will tell if I’m right…”
Wait, is this speculation I am reading from you? Not “just the facts ma’am” ??? 😛
In all seriousness, if you had just responded with this, we could have saved ourselves two posts each because I actually somewhat agree with you here.
Where I differ in opinion is the pace at which Microsoft intend to break backwards compatibility. If Metro is in anyway a success, I expect things will move along rather rapidly. I think they are super keen on the “appstore” concept and they are desperate to move to this model because, well, just look at Apple’s profitability!
The problem is, Microsoft is not Apple and cannot do things exactly the way Apple does and expect the same results. I wonder if by pushing Metro too hard, too fast they are in fact ignoring jewel in their crown (that is, IMHO, the traditional desktop interface) in the process hurting themselves, much like they did with Vista (say what you like I don’t know many people who stuck it out with Vista, XP downgrades was a popular past-time.)
Especially various ~CAD stuff could be great on large touchscreen (going “back” to the concept of drawing boards – we lost some good things when they were largely abandoned – and building upon them in ways which ~desktop OS cannot), making the experience *much better*. You really don’t see that?
Yea but those are numbers. Post-pc isn’t about numbers, it’s more about headlines.
Sinfosky doesn’t work on numbers and Ballmer lets him do was he pleases.
Numbers are overrated. Man got on the moon by reading headlines and feeling the space age.
Now I’m off to the casino to make 10 million dollars.
You really have an odd obsession with Sinofsky. Your comment history is pretty telling.
Its very impressive how you’ve managed to make me discover a new way to scratch my head with your nonsensical comments.
You’ve gone off the deep end, I’m afraid. Microsoft never embraced the post PC philosophy, in fact, their approach has been decidedly more inclusive than others.
People conflate the reality that mobile form factors are becoming the norm, with an acceptance of an Apple talking point.
This fall will be just as satisfying as it was watching the Vista haters squirm when Windows sells hundreds of millions of copies.