“Imagine a phone that could run real Remote Desktop. Real PowerShell. Anything that can run on your desktop PC. Imagine ‘phablet’ form factors, similar to today’s Samsung Galaxy Note 2, which could dock to a desktop setup and utilize an external display, keyboard, mouse, and other peripherals. Imagine a single set of APIs that work everywhere. Imagine that Phone isn’t a whole separate platform, but an app. An app that runs on Windows. Real Windows. The Windows Phone team could never make that happen. But the Windows client team? You betcha. Make it happen, Microsoft. It’s time to take the phone seriously.” I have never agreed with Thurrot as much as I do right now.
Well, I agree less.
Why hook up all kinds of stuff to your phone, turning it in to a not so powerful desktop computer? What do you do when you receive a call?
I think devices should play to their strengths. A phone should be small and ultra portable, not huge trying to be a mini tablet, because that’s what tablets are for. And they shouldn’t be small, because that’s what phones are for. Nor do they need keyboards, because that’s what laptops are for.
Smart phone, tablets, laptops, desktops. They all have strong and weak points like size and portability. Turning a mobile phone in to a desktop PC takes away its mobility and makes a crap desktop.
It makes more sense to have your data the cloud (I really dislike that term) and have it synch to all your devices. When you’re on the move access it using your phone, when you arrive at the office use a desktop or use a tablet on the couch in the living room.
People are always offering the cloud as the go-to solution to this, but you make the same mistake as everyone: data caps that apply in both directions and upload bandwidth. Those two are enough to make this suggested solution entirely useless for anything but the lightest of uses — no home videos, no large family photo collections, no nothing. Plus it would place all these files in jeopardy, either due to no/poor encryption that would allow an attacker access to everything, or proper encryption that would render the files inaccessible once Average Joe forgets his credentials.
This solution just ain’t workable until things change radically.
Yes, hackers are a danger, but so is hardware failure at home, fire at home or someone stealing your stuff either at home or on the move.
Most stuff you need, I think, is actually really small. Contacts, todo, agenda, bookmarks, “office” files, etc… they easily synch over Dropbox. Someone I know has a Synology box and he showed pictures that were located on it (sweden) on his iPhone (in The Netherlands). It quickly shows thumbnails, touch one and the picture comes up. It worked fast and he has thousands of pictures on it.
For music you have stuff like iTunes Match, Spotify, Internet radio.
That leaves (home) movies. Then I ask myself, where do you watch those? Most likely at home. If you are planning to go somewhere and watch them there or on the train simply put them on your mobile device.
Having a super Windows phone hooked up to a mouse, keyboard and screen makes a crappy desktop and it won’t hold all your data, music and movies. It’s also easily lost/stolen/broken.
I think the rise of tablets is mainly due to phones being too “small and portable” to be comfortable to use. Add to them a tablet, which is too heavy and cumbersome to carry around, and you’ve got to get two gadgets that each are slightly useless at what they’re supposed to do best. They don’t actually have different uses, although the interface needs some tweaking for screen size, so why should you need two?
I’d rather see phones just smaller than phablets replacing the current low-powered tablets, and serious laptops being merged with tablets in the way Asus does with the i7 based evolution of their Transformer line: a small, portable device for connectivity and information, and a real computer for actual work, with a detachable screen for when you have to walk around a bit while working.
As it is, we need far too many gadgets that do far too little, and aren’t nearly good enough at it. And I don’t see tablets having any strengths whatsoever.
I think people who do so much with their phone that they think it’s too small just need a tablet.
When I’m on the move I don’t have the time/possibility to stare at my phone so long, let alone actively use it. I used to to read emails, news, look up something, send/read messages, even make a call sometimes. But these are all quick actions. On the move I want something that easily fits in my clothes and hands.
I have an iPad with no 3G, because that didn’t make sense to me. I use it at home, at work or in hotel lobbies. WiFi is everywhere. But I don’t go wondering the streets with it. Not just because it’s too big for that, but also because it would be overkill.
When I roam the streets I never see tablets, while I see many at work, in people’s homes. That’s their strength: portability and ease of use in a relaxed environment (when you can sit).
For serious mobile work I’d for for a laptop and for serious static work the desktop is king.
Devices like the Transformer or Surface with detachable keyboards are nice, but I think it is also more cumbersome. My iPad keyboards are seldom used. Attaching a keyboard ruins the tablet experience.
To be honest, I have never used (or seen) a Surface or Transformer, so they may work better than an iPad with keyboard.
This is all of course my personal preference. I just thin each device category has it’s strengths and weaknesses that are clear. If you come up with hybrid devices that sit between categories they tend to inherit more of the weaknesses than strengths of their bordering categories. A tablet with a keyboard loses its portability strength, while not gaining the power of a laptop.
Creating a Windows phone with real Windows and hook it up to a bunch of devices destroys its portability. It’s not longer a mobile phone and a terrible desktop compared to a desktop.
I don’t think it’s about the hardware, it’s about the data and the software. If I can get at my data with <any> device I can simply pick the right device for the right situation and access my data.
So I’d rather have Microsoft make a great phone, regardless on what it’s software internals are based, and someone else make a great computer.
Like I said it’s my personal view and the Microsoft Surface commercials are full of happy people so I guess there are people in both camps of the argument.
No one needs a tablet. It’s got all the things that make a phone suck except one (size), replacing that one drawback with the exact same in the opposite direction. It’s too large to be really portable, but suffers from still being just a touch screen, which, for all its hype, is a terrible interface.
People want tablets because their phones are too small.
I got a Nexus 4 (4.7″) just today. It’s still slightly too small, but actually a lot more pocketable than my old Nokia N9 (4″), due to its slimness and rounded edges. A lot can be done for pocketability just through sensible design.
Oh, I agree no one needs a tablet. A laptop is much more powerful and it’s also portable.
But a tablet can be very convinient. It’s easy to pick up, instantly usable and massive battery life. My laptop usage has dropped to almost zero since I bought an iPad.
For quick Internet access it’s too much hassle to power up a laptop, but grabbing a tablet is easy.
Sent from my iPad
“People want tablets because their phones are too small.”
I think a good deal of iPad users bought one because it does everything they used their PC for but it’s easier/safer/slicker (their perspective) and more sofa friendly… not saying many on here would consider it a replacement for a computer but it sure is for someone who only bought a Windows system to browse the web and check e-mail.
Edited 2013-02-15 01:04 UTC
If tablets are too heavy and cumbersome to carry around, you must not leave your house much because I see people toting them around everywhere. And you don’t think they have different uses? Phones are primarily communication devices, tablets are primarily media consumption devices… and that’s pretty different. I travel often and never see people watching a movie on their cellphone, but I see it all the time with tablets. I never see people making calls with their tablet, but I see it all the time with cell phones.
I’d like to believe in your theory but my real world observations paint a totally different picture, so……
And I have a question: WHY should we want “one device to rule them all” when we’ve seen time and time again these companies do NOT have any interests but their own at heart?
I mean as it is now I can have an Asus laptop, custom built desktop, Samsung phone, and no name tablet and if any of the above treats me bad or gives me lousy service i can go elsewhere with minimum of fuss. Know how hard that would be if I had everything counting on just a single device?
Lets face it the ones ones really pushing for this are frankly greedy corps who i honestly couldn’t care less what they want. Is your phone so heavy you can’t lift it and a laptop or tablet? Then why would you want to limit yourself like that? iFixit just labeled the Surface pro virtually unrepairable and gave it a worse score than even the ipad…we supposed to want everything tied to a company that tries to make X86 into a throw away tech?
Personally I’m just sick of it. I’m sick of everybody saying the only thing that counts is cellphones because OS corps make a mint off of stupid 99c games on the things and their disposable nature, I’m sick of crap like the Surface that try to be jacks of all trades and end up masters of none, I’m sick of a swooning press that seems to want nothing more than a single device because apprently having more than one is too hard for their wittle bitty press brains, I’m sick of being told the future is a device that is worse in every way, from freedom to choice to fixability, than what we have now.
I’m just sick of it and if the future is one device to rule them all you can let me off here, thanks anyway. Oh and try not to forget the last line of the one ring since everyone keeps stealing the “one device to rule them all” bit which was “and in darkness bind them” which is quite apt when you are talking about ever more centralized control and disposable devices that cost like durable goods.
Regarding the non-repairability of tablets:
You have warranty. When that expires and the tablet breaks down it will probably be already obsolete or on the verge of becoming so. Should it be possible to have it repaired the costs tend to be too high compared to buying a new tablet.
Yes, it sucks when a device that used to work fine has to be thrown away instead of having it fixed, but it doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of money on it getting it fixed when for a few dollars more you have a brand new device that is better in every way.
This applies to tablets and phones. Laptops and certainly desktops are easier to repair and the costs are more likely to be more worth it than buying a new one. A desktop you can often repair yourself.
I guess it’s something you have to take in to account when buying a tablet or phone. Be prepared that the device will only work for the warranty period and after it probably has to be trashed once it breaks down.
In case you ain’t noticed friend the trend with warranties are going down down DOWN so that you pay all this money and are lucky if you get a 1 year warranty on the thing. Once upon a time many things had 3 year warranties, heck hard drives even had 5 year warranties, now unless you pay out the nose you are getting a lousy year which when we are talking about devices that cost upwards of a grand in some cases is just pathetic.
And sadly friend its getting to the point that laptops are more like phones than desktops, I have a pile of laptops that most likely will be going in the garbage because the cost of parts will be more than you can ever get off selling the thing. This push for disposable devices is not being followed with the major drop in price that one would expect from disposable devices and we shouldn’t put up with it, 1 year warranties on high ticket items is an insult!
I guess if we don’t like it we don’t buy it.
Here in Europe expensive electronics have a longer warranty, no matter what the seller says. Apple got in to trouble about this as they had a warranty that’s shorter than the one set by law.
The gist of it is if you pay so much money for something you can expect it to last at least a couple of years. Paying $1000 for something that breaks down after one year and one day is ridiculous, so the company that sold it can’t claim the warranty just expired.
I once has a MacBook battery replaced. The guy in the shop said I was lucky, because it hadn’t reached the number of full charges Apple had set as the limit. Had I gone over it they wouldn’t have replaced it for free. Even though this was good news for me I still wanted to punch that guy in the face.
Well sadly I live in the United Corporate States of America so that don’t help me none, here you have the choice of paying through the nose for an extended warranty that in many cases make you jump through so many hoops to file a claim simply isn’t worth it or end up with a device that if it survives for one year and one day, even if they had to rig the device like HP did by cranking the fans to 100% on the bumpgate laptops just to reach that year and a day? tough luck throw it away.
OTOH phones and tablets seem to be quickly approaching “good enough” like PCs did a few years ago – more recent models will be able to longer remain useful. Reliability (or good warranty) will become ever more important, in a way.
Edited 2013-02-17 16:48 UTC
But don’t you also have a hidden agenda, why you’re against “post PC” future? IIRC, don’t you run a small PC shop?
I often propose a slight modification of the terminology: “fog”
Fog would be a better term.
I dislike the term “cloud”, because it kind of suggest you don’t know where your data is and it magicaly finds your device. But the data is on a server that’s connected to the Internet and it already was before it all became the “cloud”.
I think Paul Thurrot is an insightful person but I think he’s really suggesting an eventuality, and echoing a sentiment I’ve made known before: Microsoft is letting intra-division politics put Windows Phone at a disadvantage.
Windows 8 is firing on all pistons, the bulk of the engineering effort is behind Windows 8, and it shows that some of the brightest minds in the company had input into its developer platform.
WinRT is basically the WinDiv’s interpretation of Silverlight and its brilliant.
The problem with Windows Phone is that it doesn’t (or didn’t, until WP8) reside or have key architectural components residing in WinDiv proper.
WP7 Kernel was in-house CE spin off that they had to maintain and improve on
WP7 .NET CF was a spin off of 3.5 (named 3.7) which they also had to maintain
Silverlight 4 for Mobile was their SL4 spin off, which again, no one else used, so the brunt of maintenance was on them.
The same goes for XNA, their OS telephony and 3G/4G stacks, a lot of their API surface, etc.
There was a tremendous duplication of effort. Why maintain a CE fork if NT is developed by the brightest minds in the room? Why use .NET CF 3.7 if CoreCLR is being used on Windows 8 and maintained by the official .NET team? Why use Silverlight when WinRT and XAML have been pulled into WinDiv?
That explains a lot of the moves in WP8. Moving to the NT Kernel, moving to CoreCLR from .NET CF, and starting to move away from Silverlight to WinRT.
While all of this puts WP8 on interesting ground architecturally, Microsoft can’t keep promising that they’ll get it right tomorrow. Tomorrow they will have missed the boat, again. What happens when Apple or Google or someone makes their next powerplay? Microsoft will be too busy catching up in Phones to even notice it.
WinRT on Windows Phone needed the WP team’s input from the start. WinRT regresses from Silverlight 4 in a few meaningful ways which I think would’ve been re-prioritized and avoided if they had input from the start.
That said, the WinRT platform and Silverlight Mobile on WP8 aren’t really that far apart in performance. In fact, Silverlight on WP8 is the ONLY Silverlight run time to run on DirectWrite and Direct2D (much like WinRT) since Mango. That’s an impressive feat for such a (relatively) small team.
Looking forward to WP vNext, I imagine a lot more alignment. I expect to see the Windows Store and Windows Phone Stores merge, if only architecturally.
There’s no reason why my Windows 8 app should certify in one day and my WP8 app takes three to five days. There’s no reason why the Windows Phone Store has private beta tests and the Windows 8 store doesn’t. There’s no reason why they both use two different (but similar) dev portals for app submission. There’s no reason why I need to pay $99 for Windows Phone, then I think $40 again for Windows 8. It should be one payment.
I think Microsoft just got caught at a bad time in the midst of a transition. Its still going on, and will likely still be for a while.
WinRT includes telephone and SMS APIs as part of Windows 8, so to me, it seems that at least someone was trying to think things all the way through but got scuttled by last minute shipping deadlines.
Still, it is important to look back at the Windows Phone team and all that little team accomplished, against the odds. They operated much like a tiny start up within MS, given that they had to reinvent the wheels for a freight truck.
Edited 2013-02-12 18:50 UTC
Windows Phone 8 currently neither supports VPN connections nor connection encryption using EAP-TTLS which are often mandatory when using your smart phone in an enterprise network at a company or university.
Microsoft should first get the basic features working before porting Solitaire to their phones.
Adrian
Yes, they CAN, but they WON’T. Why? Because that would make too much sense, and MS rarely does anything that makes sense. If they were going to do this, they would’ve done it years ago. Instead, as best I can tell, they are busy trying to figure out which is the best way to run the company into the ground. Nobody who wasn’t hellbent on destroying that company would’ve ever allowed the clusterfuck that is Windows 8 to ever go past the inception stage.
I just think he’s too idealistic. While the goal of sharing a platform between the two is ideal. Running the SAME uncompiled apps is not, in my opinion.
That would be a disaster for Microsoft. Instead I think they should strive to create “Bundles” where by if I buy App1 on WP and its available on the Windows Store, I should automatically receive it.
Storage between the two apps should be unified, support for roaming profiles, In App Purchases should carry over, etc.
I don’t think Microsoft won’t do it, just that they haven’t and likely wont do it in a timeline that makes sense to me and other developers. There’s so much potential. Hopefully now that a lot of the blood letting is over after the WP7 to WP8 transition, we can see much more parallels drawn.
I don’t think Win8 is a disaster, but I understand that a lot of people in tech circles will see it like that for the duration of its life. Then Windows 9 will come along with minimal tweaks (None of which include bringing the Start Menu back) and people will suddenly fall in love with it. Perception is a funny thing.
Look at Windows 7, very very marginal improvements over Vista yet people went crazy over it like it was the best thing ever despite it being a “Meh” release in many respects.
You had the Vista haters suddenly mum on the same things they crowed about in 2006. “OMG DRM, OMG DWM, OMG AERO, OMG I HATE THIS NEW START MENU”
now in Windows 8 its “OMG I MISS AERO, OMG I MISS MY START MENU” and DRM never materialized into the doomsday scenario the FSF and RMS envisioned.
This is why its hard for me to take a lot of the criticism people levy seriously, especially when it seems that everyone parrots each other. Do a search on this website for “jarring”. I guarantee you a majority of the hits will be Windows 8 comments. Its peculiar that everyone uses the same exact verbiage to demagogue the same feature. People just repeat what they’ve heard.
If I break down the Windows 8 criticism its two categories:
– Complaining about minor things Microsoft has done. Removed Start Menu, made Hot Corners, Full Screen apps, etc.
– Complaining speculatively about the future
Omg but what if Microsoft removes the Desktop in the future?
Which to me is in the same vein that Vista hate was in. People complaining about minor things (Start Menu, DWM, etc) and people speculating on the future (DRM is evil).
This too shall pass. Microsoft will sell hundreds of millions of licenses like they always do, release Windows 9, and suddenly everyone has amnesia about why they disliked Windows 8 in the first place.
I really wish some people would’ve been here through the absolutely hilarious hysteria that was the Vista release cycle. Then seen the almost 180 by the SAME people during the Windows 7 release cycle. People are fickle.
Why? Just like properly written Android apps have different UIs depending on if you’re running them on tablet or phone, there’s no reason why this concept couldn’t be extended to desktop as well.
And I agree with you wholeheartedly on Windows 7. Having gone from XP to 7, it’s quite underwhelming, when you consider about 9 years went by between the two.
I mostly agree with you about Win8 as well. If you leave Metro out of the equation, it’s actually a better desktop OS than Win7; easily worth the $40 upgrade price I paid, IMO. But Metro in Win8 is a big ass burger with a side order of fries. I’m guessing it works better on a tablet, but the integration with ‘classic’ desktop Win32 (or lack thereof) seems very scatterbrained and poorly thought out. They probably should’ve held it back until Windows 9.
I found WinXP largely unusable for most purposes on a netbook. The thought of Win8 (and all it’s glory) on a much smaller screen with no keyboard makes me cringe just thinking about it.
Also, in what way is taking Windows wholesale and adding a Phone app to it, taking the mobile phone seriously? That sounds to me like completely giving up on mobile and claiming that the Windows desktop UI is the mother of all UIs that will work on anything, even a phone… if you throw in a phone app. Horribly backwards thinking that I thought the last 5 years had handedly disproved.
You don’t have to run the same OS on both in order for both to run the same apps, as long as it has mostly the same internals. They wouldn’t be 100% the same across the board, nor would they necessarily be 100% compatible. For example, a phone probably doesn’t need to handle printers, DVD drives, scanners, etc, and I doubt anyone would want to run Visual Studio on it either.
No shit, but that’s not what Thurrot’s proposing — that’s exactly what Apple has done (95% of the low-level internals, including the programming APIs, with customized apps and general UIs catered to the form factor.
Or, you can run the exact same OS on each device, with interfaces that are optimised for each screen. Afterall, that’s exactly what Linux + KDE allows you to do via plasma (plasma-workspace, plasma-netbook, plasma-active).
Granted, you would need to update the UIs of the apps in order to make them switch between “mouse/keyboard” and “touch-optimised”. But the OS doesn’t have to be different for different devices.
Except that Linux is a kernel, not an OS. The Linux that runs on desktops is not the same Linux that runs on phones, even though they probably have most of the same internals. So that’s more along the lines of what I was talking about
Except that they are the same. Not the same binaries, but built from the same sources.
The Linux kernel running on Android is built from the same source tree as the Linux kernel running on my desktop PC (although there may be extra patches added on).
The busybox userland running on Android is built from the same source tree as the busybox on my desktop PC.
The KDE environment on the Nexus 7 is built from the same source tree as the KDE environment on my desktop PC.
And so on.
You can run Ubuntu on a desktop, on a laptop, on a tablet, on a smartphone. Same software, built from the same source trees. There are other variants of Linux OSes that can do the same.
I’m not a developer, but I would think that two things compiled from the same sources doesn’t mean they’re the same. Like, if you’re compiling for phones, do you need code in there to access an x86 CPU? Would you need to include code to handle an LTE chipset or auto-rotation into the desktop version? Would the phone version need a driver to access a Sound Blaster card?
All I’m saying is you don’t need to have an IDENTICAL feature set between phone/tablet/desktop versions. Seems that the OS’s would be a lot more efficient if they were modularized for the platform they’re going to be installed on, even if they still have most of the same internals where it really matters.
I would disagree, i initially had the same thoughts but i weighed up with what i wanted to do with my netbook.
I own a MSI U135DX which is a Atom N455 @ 1.66Ghz, i upgraded the RAM from 1GB to 2GB and also changed the HDD over to a SSD 60GB.
Personally with my netbook, i needed something small, pretty light to bash out work whilst i commute on the train. The first thing that struck me was a way to improve battery life, of course Windows 8 is designed around low power and most importantly tries to get the CPU to an idle state as soon as possible.
My apps are MS Office 2013, inc Visio and Project. Skitch, Evernote, Adobe Reader, Xmind (which requires Java) and a couple of image editors (PSP7, etc..).
So my choice was between Windows 7 and 8.
Linux was out of the picture as i couldn’t get the battery life or reliable wifi, also getting out of sleep and hibernation was a little tricky. This machine i decided was not a tinker machine, it had to be a pick up and forget stability and consistency (and i do like linux, i tried ubuntu and debian on it).
When weighing up the choice between the two windows, i did go with Windows 8 mainly due to the low power, the start screen was not a big draw, however this is actually one of the biggest pluses.
The U135DX has a 10.1″ screen, the start screen actually makes using the netbook a lot easier as the icons are not small and easy to hit when im traveling and having to use the small trackpad. (On a side note i think this is where MSI got it right, they sacrificed the trackpad size for a decent sized keyboard which is my primary input method, moreso than the mouse).
The start menu works so well on a netbook, Microsoft really skipped a potential market here, it might have kept some of the netbook people around. Coupled with the excellent power management, easier/cleaner UI which again is a lot easier to navigate (a lot of the buttons are touch optimised which means they are also easier to hit with a small trackpad).
The other thing i would have to give kudo’s to microsoft for is the memory management, i don’t know how they did it but Win8 will consistently boot using only 400-500Mb RAM, this may not sound much of an achievement in the linux world, but in the Windows world it’s incredible that after two iterations the hardware usage is still shrinking.
The boot up speed is also very incredible, i know this is helped by the SSD, but i owned a Samsung ARM ChromeBook (one of the new ones) and Windows 8 is on par or sometimes only a second slower at booting, something i think could be improved even more if my MSI didn’t have a BIOS but UEFI instead to create a faster POST.
The only thing you can’t do is run metro apps, which is definitely not a negative, ive gone through the app store on my desktop computer and they are pretty rubbish, i think the weather and train times are the only ones i use on my desktop computer, the rest are slow, poor, almost beta/alpha versions with a massive lack of functionality (thats a separate rant)
I would really highly recommend considering/trying Win8 on your netbook, it’s really incredible, it’s improved the performance and battery life of my netbook which originally had XP Starter edition on it.
(slightly off topic) the experience was so positive that i gave Windows 8 another go on my desktop, i ignore the metro apps (as above) it’s actually a good experience, the start menu is not great but ive come to accept/understand it so it doesn’t trouble me, however whats kept me on it is the performance, it’s noticeable faster and just more efficient than Windows 7, which i thought was already quite a well optimised experience.
Because there’s an entire layer between the Model and the View which needs adaptation, and while it may make sense on paper to re-use this plumbing across apps, it doesn’t work that well in practice.
Windows Phone and Windows 8 have different navigation paradigms. They’re both page based, but with differences in some key areas which affect how you cache data and handle events from the View.
In addition, Windows 8 comes with different interaction models in mind (Mouse+KB in addition to Touch) and if you’re doing any Mouse/KB specific coding (meaning you move beyond the generic Pointer events) then that bit will need to be rewritten too.
Basically, I think we’re pretty close on opinion, just state it differently. YES you can reuse the Model, and no I probably wouldn’t re-use my ViewModel but I’d re-use a lot of the supporting classes in the VMs and a lot of the supporting classes in my Views. Its not so cut and dry, in my experience.
Still, the end result is like 80-85% code re-use, today, already. My criticism is that this could be more like 90-95% with some common sense improvements to the code base.
There will always be that 5% that has to be rewritten, and it’s often not entirely View specific.
The problem becomes worse if you’re porting to a platform with wildly different characteristics (like iOS) where it doesn’t really make sense to use MVVM and MVC is much more prevalent and a more natural fit into the Core APIs. So it means you only really keep your Model and maybe some helper classes.
Android is an even wilder beast all together.
I can agree that some of the Metro-Desktop interaction points can be better. For sure. I expect them to get better too, BUT I don’t think they’re as bad as people make them seem.
They don’t make your PC unusable, or make you dramatically less productive, or whatever. They just take some getting used to. And you know what, going back to Windows 7 for me is a chore because I’ve gotten so used to what Windows 8 affords me in convenience.
I think they should’ve reprioritized some things, freed up some resources, and made a better Windows 8. But this is what we have for now until we see how Windows 8’s first interim release plays out.
I’m sorry but I have to take issue with the popular misconception of Win 7 is just Vista with a few tweaks because i have run both and Vista was a bad joke, it would be like saying WinME and XP are the same OS because hey, they are both Windows right?
Oh Vista how I hated thee, let me count the ways: Networking: Shares would just disappear and it ONLY be gotten back with a hard reboot…really MSFT? Your new OS is more like Win95 than XP? Networking again: play music or video and watch the downloads slow to a crawl..again more like a single tasking OS than a modern one so i guess Vista and 8 have something in common there. File System: Why you thrash my hard drive you stupid thing? i turned off search, used every tweak on the net, have plenty of RAM yet you keep pimpslapping my hard drive, so much so in fact that Vista killed a new 400GB through nothing more than 24/7 HDD thrashing. OS Design: You seem to be losing your sanity, cancel or allow? Argh shut up shut up shut up! I launched that program not 4 minutes ago and told you to shut up so shut up already! Argh!
So I’m sorry but Vista, like Windows 8, is a joke and a bad one at that. Windows 7 didn’t thrash, could keep network shares no matter how long the OS ran, didn’t ask me cancel/allow every 4 seconds, didn’t need to be rebooted all the time, and didn’t suck down resources like a drunk at a free wine tasting. BTW if you don’t think win 8 is a joke I urge you to watch this, this tech writer explains in detail the problems better than I ever could.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTYet-qf1jo
Something like the Ubuntu Phone?
And Ubuntu for Android.
Have a VPN app and the “Jump Desktop” app. Connect up to either a Windows with RDP or *nix with VNC with this app for a while and it works great.
That was to be the next stage of Sinofsky’s empire building project. It would have made him very powerful within Microsoft and a real rival for SB so he had to go.
Wouldn’t this be Windows CE? That definitely took the world by storm a decade ago.
Thurott is so ingrained in Microsoft-think that even he can’t get away from the no compromise/Windows is the most valuable property in tech/just add to it and protect the golden egg thinking that he’s recasting the WP8/Win8/Metro schizophrenia problem and coming up with exactly the solution that failed a decade ago (and, sadly, it probably is a better plan than the current one). No wonder Microsoft is nearly irrelevant in this decade.
Edited 2013-02-12 21:24 UTC
Did anybody else notice that Win 8 is just WinCE done backwards? With WinCE you had MSFT trying to force a teeny tiny desktop complete with itty bitty teeny tiny start button on the phone, so when that fails utterly they go “I know, we’ll just reverse it!” so now you have a cellphone single tasking OS being jammed onto the desktop…sigh.
Even though I don’t own any Apple devices i have to give them credit for realizing that running OSX on the iPhone would have just been dumb so they kept iOS and OSX as two distinct OSes. Sure from what I’m told they work nice together but its not like they just slapped one on the other where the form factor makes no sense for the OS.
Finally MSFT isn’t the problem, its Forbes worst CEO Ballmer that is the problem. I mean look at the man’s track record, he’s had one and a half hits (Win 7 and Xbox 360 is the half as it cost them 2 billion thanks to Ballmer pushing it out the door too early) now look at the failures, Zune, Kin, Sidekick, killing the profitable playsforsure for Zune market, Bing, Vista, that ad company they ended up having to write off billions over, and from the looks of it we can add Surface and Win 8 to that list by the end of the year.
Lets face it, the guy is a trainwreck. No wonder all the old guard like Ozzie and Allchin jumped ship, his entire “strategy” seems to be “What is the other guy doing? Well lets do that but poorly” which is naturally chock full of fail. i swear the longer he is in the big chair the more he reminds me of Dilbert’s PHB, following trends he doesn’t understand and playing buzzword bingo while not knowing what the buzzwords mean, he is just a disaster.
They have already failed, why hunt a even slimmer target. Why not focus on the “still” majority plattform. Mobile visits to sites (which most apps are anyway) is still dwarfed by even linux+osx desktop. Mobile is a fad, and so is facebook and social even though it has survived longer than i thought.
you know, you have a windows system that has been functioning perfectly and legally for months and suddenly it declares
“This copy of Windows is not Genuine”
Probably because it has not been able to ‘phone home’ for some time to get the ok from the Redmond Mothership or something equally as stupid.
If MS were to do something like this then I wouldn’t put it past them to make the phone incapable of being used when ‘The WGA computer says No’.
Pah. doomed to failure if you ask me but there again, I’ve ditched my smartphone and gone back to a simple Symbian based nokia without even a camera so I don’t really care anymore.
They already have a Windows 8 based phone OS. And it’s not doing any of that. It’s actually the opposite of Windows on the desktop: minimal, easy to use, fast, and not annoying.
“Simple” & “without even a camera” sounds more like some S30, maybe S40 Nokia phone …which are not Symbian.
Just dock your phone – android already does this:
1) just look at Asus Pad Phone.
Or
2) Dock any android phone with a dock that supports both HDMI and USB, or at least HDMI + bluetooth mouse and keyboard, all high end android phones support this
And there is Ubuntu for android and Ubuntu Phone – still waiting for actual phones.
Also stock android can be hacked to use ubuntu for ARM (but it is a ugly hack involving VNC).
I don’t say that this all works perfect, just that we are closer than ever to your desires, and MS has nothing to do with it.
If Blackberry puts something like Razor-Qt on their phone and packs a few decent desktop apps, you can plug it in when you come home and use it as a desktop computer.
With all the other OS platforms it will be harder to get there.
As Tomi Ahonen has pointed out again and again, the carriers hate and fear Microsoft because of Skype. Microsoft will never be a big player in phones for this reason alone.