Windows 8 - Deeper Impressions

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Microsoft Explains Why to Buy Surface Instead of iPad ( Tom's Hardware 2013-10-26 )

Surface 2 Buyers In For An Ugly Surprise ( NJN Network 2013-10-25 )

Buyer Beware In the fine print, Microsoft is restricting Office on the Surface RT from being used in charities, in a small business or in any occupation that earns money

Buyers of the Surface 2 will be in for a surprise if they read the fine print of Microsofts conditions on their license. Surface 2 owners cant use Office for anything that makes money or even in a nonprofit unless they pay another $200 plus to Microsoft for a full license to Office.

That little stroke of the MS Office pen takes away $220 from the price of a Surface 2 effectively killing the re-launch of last years least popular tablet. We are checking with people in power at Microsoft but no positive word yet. Stay tuned.

That 2nd article I found in the comments at the 1st article at Tom's Hardware still discussing the remarks by Frank Shaw. There sure is a lot of talk about how Microsoft's toys are much more productivity based than competitors. It's all talk, because the sheeple want to buy toys. Here's more proof ...

Official Facebook app zooms to first among free Windows 8.1 apps ( NeoWin 2013-10-26 )

It was less than 10 days ago when Microsoft not only launched Windows 8.1 but published its long awaited official Facebook app. It was immediately popular, with mostly positive reviews. and now Facebook has zoomed past all the other free apps in the Windows Store to take first place.

I'm fully prepared to accept this at face value, statistics like this do not lie. The Microsoft Store is now officially a social marketplace and Microsoft Tiles is officially another consumption toy rather than the productivity platform that they keep trying to convince the world of. Therefore they bring nothing new to this 3 year old market after all, and are stuck competing against the iPad and other toys in a battle they already lost long ago. Both the paid apps and the free ones are led by consumption titles. Bring back the dance commercials!

[JorgeA]

BTW, and going back to the "Top Ten companies" chart, I'm not sure what the first column in the chart represents. At first I thought it was for total (gross) annual revenue, but then I see that Samsung's gross in the 3Q alone was $55.59 billion, so I'm not sure how the 3Q revenue could be bigger than that for the whole year (unlesss they had a ton of losses in 1Q and 2Q, which I doubt). Maybe I'm missing something.

Maybe I need my coffee.

That was the ranking by Interbrand first mentioned at NeoWin ... http://www.neowin.net/news/apple-google-microsoft-among-10-most-valuable-brands

This is the current Interbrand list from 1-100 ... http://www.interbrand.com/en/best-global-brands/2013/Best-Global-Brands-2013-Brand-View.aspx#

And their page about methodology is ... http://www.interbrand.com/en/best-global-brands/2013/best-global-brands-methodology.aspx

Yeah, it's confusing because it is not a straight ranking of capitalization or ROI or earnings/profits or total assets. It is a complex weighted ranking from multiple analysis.

I should have used better wording though. Top Ten "Most Valuable" according to Interbrand :

Oh, I see. It's a different measure altogether in that first column.

Thanks very much!

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

Just for you Charlotte.

The Win8 fans are protesting

Pretty funny.

It'd be amusing for the sound in that video to play as one scrolls down the comments over at Neowin...

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

Microsoft provides fix for battery issues found by some Surface RT owners ( NeoWin 2013-10-26 )

A number of people who own the original Surface RT tablet (now known just as Surface) have not had a lot of luck when it comes to updating the tablet to Windows RT 8.1. Microsoft pulled that update from the Windows Store a couple of days after it was released because it was bricking some Surface RT devices. Microsoft put the update back in the store earlier this week.

Now, Microsoft has stated that some owners of Surface RT have experienced a decrease in the tablet's battery life after installing the Windows RT 8.1 update.

[...]

5: At the Administrator: Command Prompt, enter the following: powercfg -setdcvalueindex SCHEME_CURRENT 19cbb8fa-5279-450e-9fac-8a3d5fedd0c1 12bbebe6-58d6-4636-95bb-3217ef867c1a 3

6: Then enter powercfg -setactive scheme_current

Hmm... can anybody imagine instructions like these being followed (at all, let alone correctly) by the type of audience that would be using this kind of device?

--JorgeA

[Formfiller]

Yep, the fix is clearly in. It seems Google got their hands on Cameron and he somehow influenced Merkel. And what else could be expected? Those 10 or so companies making up Big Corporate Data plus the 20 or so major ISP's are now the preferred class, the feudal nobility. They are the sheepdogs that the government farmers use to corral the sheeple. There is pretty much no chance for anything of substance to occur on either the spying or privacy front. Why would government care about privacy? It directly conflicts with their one and only need to maintain their position of authority over the bourgeoisie and the peasants. The ruling class and its favored aristocracy are in it to win it. They are carving the world into private little fiefdoms. Big Data makes tons of money, kicks some of it back to politicians in lobbying and golden parachute board jobs, and government looks the other way as long as they cooperate by letting spooks access the works.

It's a Brave New World that even Orwell wouldn't believe. Only The Matrix even comes close, but with a fair bit of Idiocracy mixed in.

Yes, it's crazier than Orwell, but on another level. Governments and corporations want power, that's expected and the rule of the game. In Orwell's world the people are forced to abide and the secret police will use you as target practice if you dare to turn off the telescreen.

But the reality is a lot more cynical: People love big brother freely! They are literally in love with their plastic gadgets, no matter how creepy all the default settings are, and they feed the facebook database with things they wouldn't confess to a priest ten minutes before the gas chamber, even though they KNOW that all these internet services are literally bugged to hell and back (this was common knowledge even before Snowden). And they will turn into mad dogs defending their masters.

Orwell was just not cynical enough. You don't need opression to opress people: Apparently, they melt already when you give them a blinking piece of plastic. Not even Brave New World was this cynical: At least Soma is a literal drug.

[JorgeA]

Microsoft Explains Why to Buy Surface Instead of iPad ( Tom's Hardware 2013-10-26 )

Surface 2 Buyers In For An Ugly Surprise ( NJN Network 2013-10-25 )

Buyer Beware In the fine print, Microsoft is restricting Office on the Surface RT from being used in charities, in a small business or in any occupation that earns money

Buyers of the Surface 2 will be in for a surprise if they read the fine print of Microsofts conditions on their license. Surface 2 owners cant use Office for anything that makes money or even in a nonprofit unless they pay another $200 plus to Microsoft for a full license to Office.

That little stroke of the MS Office pen takes away $220 from the price of a Surface 2 effectively killing the re-launch of last years least popular tablet. We are checking with people in power at Microsoft but no positive word yet. Stay tuned.

What a brilliant way to encourage people to buy your product. Imagine if Toyota or Ford were to adopt this idea:

"Yes, our new base models sell for $23,000, but you may not use them for charities, in a small business, or in any occupation that earns money. That may or may not include commuting to work; after all, our car IS helping you to make money, right? (BTW, the built-in Cloud GPS will send us a constant stream of data as to where you're driving and where your car spends time parked, so forget about lying to us about what you're really using the car for.) If you want to use the car for charitable or business purposes, the price of the base model goes up to $34,000."

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

Sorry Microsoft, Surface sales are still not good enough

Surface is the tablet market's laughing stock. Microsoft has introduced the two-slate lineup in an attempt to steer consumers away from Apple's iPads and the myriad of Android tablets, by luring them with Windows and its services. In theory, the idea sounded great when the lineup was unveiled in June, last year, showing plenty of promise from the get-go but, as it turns out, most people only want Windows on their desktops and laptops, and not on tablets. The lineup has yet to make great strides in the business segment also.

An incisive analysis of the sales figures (such as there are) follows. But here's an interesting related point:

The confusion between Surface RT and Surface Pro did not help either, as consumers had (and may still have) a hard time figuring out why Windows RT cannot run the same software as their desktop or laptop; this was aided by a weak differentiation between the two models on both software and hardware levels (visually Windows RT looks like Windows 8, and the tablets had pretty much the same exterior design).

[emphasis added]

So, Microsoft's obsession with a unified UI may actually have contributed to the failure (so far) of Surface.

Like PCs vs. tablets, "RT" and "Pro" are different products for different purposes. They need to look and act differently, lest you run the risk (borne to fruition here) of confusing the h3ll out of customers.

EDIT: Another pertinent analysis from the same site:

Apple inflicts major Surface damage on Microsoft -- probably doesn't even care

Matt Rosoff, Editorial Director of the IDG property CITEworld, was an analyst for ten years at Directions on Microsoft, and doesn't see the Redmond tech giant winning any battles against Apple anytime soon. In fact his vision for Surface 2 is one of doom and gloom. As he told me yesterday, "The original Surface did not fail because of bad hardware. It failed because of an unclear use case and a lack of apps. So in order for the Surface 2 to succeed against the iPad, it must be significantly better or cheaper. It's not. The fatal flaw of Surface RT and Surface 2 is that they run Windows RT, which means they can't run any traditional Windows programs. Microsoft's sales pitch for Surface is that it comes with Office, but people who really need Office tend to work on a laptop anyway, and getting a full Windows 8.1 laptop or Surface Pro 2 offers the flexibility of running traditional Windows software".

--JorgeA

Edited October 27, 2013 by JorgeA

[Formfiller]

Microsoft Explains Why to Buy Surface Instead of iPad ( Tom's Hardware 2013-10-26 )

Surface 2 Buyers In For An Ugly Surprise ( NJN Network 2013-10-25 )

Buyer Beware In the fine print, Microsoft is restricting Office on the Surface RT from being used in charities, in a small business or in any occupation that earns money

Buyers of the Surface 2 will be in for a surprise if they read the fine print of Microsofts conditions on their license. Surface 2 owners cant use Office for anything that makes money or even in a nonprofit unless they pay another $200 plus to Microsoft for a full license to Office.

That little stroke of the MS Office pen takes away $220 from the price of a Surface 2 effectively killing the re-launch of last years least popular tablet. We are checking with people in power at Microsoft but no positive word yet. Stay tuned.

What a brilliant way to encourage people to buy your product. Imagine if Toyota or Ford were to adopt this idea:

"Yes, our new base models sell for $23,000, but you may not use them for charities, in a small business, or in any occupation that earns money. That may or may not include commuting to work; after all, our car IS helping you to make money, right? (BTW, the built-in Cloud GPS will send us a constant stream of data as to where you're driving and where your car spends time parked, so forget about lying to us about what you're really using the car for.) If you want to use the car for charitable or business purposes, the price of the base model goes up to $34,000."

--JorgeA

Office Home and Business costs 220$:

http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Office-Home-and-Business-2013/productID.259321600

Imagine if business would just buy Surfaces and no Office suites any more! They would make a huge loss.

Funny - that's one true leverage they have here ("get a Surface for your business and you don't have to pay for Office!"), but their greed is just too big to let it happen.

[jaclaz]

There is another aspect if we go at car/layman comparisons

What a brilliant way to encourage people to buy your product. Imagine if Toyota or Ford were to adopt this idea:

"Yes, our new base models sell for $23,000, but you may not use them for charities, in a small business, or in any occupation that earns money. That may or may not include commuting to work; after all, our car IS helping you to make money, right? (BTW, the built-in Cloud GPS will send us a constant stream of data as to where you're driving and where your car spends time parked, so forget about lying to us about what you're really using the car for.) If you want to use the car for charitable or business purposes, the price of the base model goes up to $34,000."

--JorgeA

The point is also like if Ford said in the 1970's:

"Ok, our Pinto model has some issues with catching fire in case of relative light collisions, we revised all safety reports, listened what the users said about it's terrible looks and even worse handling/power/speed and thus decided to insist on selling them, with exactly the same defects/issues."

Hey wait, this is what they actually did .

Quick reminder (this was almost exactly one year ago):

http://www.zdnet.com/businesses-cant-use-office-on-windows-rt-tablets-7000005882/

jaclaz

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Just for you Charlotte.

The Win8 fans are protesting

OMG! Thread Winner right there!

And that must be Dot MetroTard herself there in the foreground. I can tell because of the constant pacing and blabbing and how all the other sheep are looking at her in astonishment.

So what is the guy yelling to all sheep? Can anyone make out the words?

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Could someone please notify the PC, in no uncertain terms, about its official defunction? For it remains largely unaware of its own passing away, boy what a stubborn resistance to change:

http://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=61

Anyway its fate is sealed and doom is impending: Notice how it has lost A WHOLE ONE PER CENT since last year, ha. At this abrupt rate of descent it will be completely extinct in no time, by 2101 AD give or take.

[/sARCASM]

Great info right there. I have already assumed that many people who never really needed a full-blown PC would make the transition to small devices and some would use all form factors. The real question is how many?

Considering that 100% of computing was done on full-blown desktops, barring the fits and starts of early "mobile" computers like this one here in the mid-1980's of which I saw quite a few ...

(inside this thing was a 1st generation IBM PC-1 )

... so maybe 99% was the correct number. 99% of all personal computing since the mid-1970's for at least two decades was on desktops by necessity because there simply was nothing else practical ( just like 99% of all computing two decades before that required an entire room ). Naturally after so many years of Moore's law and other miniaturization breakthroughs the "mobile" form factor would finally become practical. And laptops were the first real inroads made, with iPods and other specialized devices also pulling away some of those ill-fitted customers, people that never wanted or needed a desktop for their email and Facebook ( or playing their music collection ) naturally moved to a much more appropriate fit for their needs. NOTE: this is this point where emotionalists and logical-underachievers like Thurrott and all the fanboys make their ridiculous leaps of logic by suggesting the sky is falling and the PC is dead or dying ( such a quote should rank right up there with "640KB" ). Now according to the above sample shown by TELVM we can say that the transition thus far has peeled off just over 10%. We're currently seeing 90-10 or 85-15 distribution to be generous, and that somehow merits all the idiocracy coming out of Thurrot's columns and Microsoft's strategy geniuses.

The real question is where will this end-up after another decade or two? Certainly not the desktop Armageddon that those nitwits predict. I believe that no less than 1/3 of all computing will always be done on stationary, powerful desktop computers that can do anything asked of them. a maximum 33-66 distribution desktop-mobile, but that's a long, long way down the road from now. And even that is not Armageddon.

So this chart will be a good one to monitor. I'd be surprised if it moves at even a couple of percent a year. And it would be moving even slower if Intel had their act together and didn't freeze performance a couple of years ago, and especially if Microsoft hadn't lost their minds and sold a pure Workstation OS.

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Apple inflicts major Surface damage on Microsoft -- probably doesn't even care

Matt Rosoff, Editorial Director of the IDG property CITEworld, was an analyst for ten years at Directions on Microsoft, and doesn't see the Redmond tech giant winning any battles against Apple anytime soon. In fact his vision for Surface 2 is one of doom and gloom. As he told me yesterday, "The original Surface did not fail because of bad hardware. It failed because of an unclear use case and a lack of apps. So in order for the Surface 2 to succeed against the iPad, it must be significantly better or cheaper. It's not. The fatal flaw of Surface RT and Surface 2 is that they run Windows RT, which means they can't run any traditional Windows programs. Microsoft's sales pitch for Surface is that it comes with Office, but people who really need Office tend to work on a laptop anyway, and getting a full Windows 8.1 laptop or Surface Pro 2 offers the flexibility of running traditional Windows software".

I agree with that. They still are "refining" their tablet strategy, nibbling around the edges, tweaking prices, but it won't matter. They lost this war years ago. According to IDC in Q2 2013 it was a 50:1 ratio of iPads sold to Surface. They would need a miracle to reduce that to even 25:1. They'll never get to 10:1 which ironically is about the reverse of the Windows versus Apple desktop ratio. And in cellphones it is even a worse case for them. Currently they are still premium priced devices with high profit margins and will stay there for a while longer but eventually they will be among the cheapest of all popular mobile commodities which means Microsoft is toast here as well.

They will have gotten "their act together" just in time to start bleeding money as phone devices appear in shrink wrapped packages in drugstores. The fat end of the profit curve is at the front for most hardware - Apple's strength ( quite the opposite of software really - Microsoft's strength ), once it gets mainstreamed and mass produced by the lowest paid workers in the poorest countries they can only recoup on big volume. Software famously is a burden on up-front development costs and usually becomes highly profitable later. That is unless you are incompetent like Microsoft, who have all the R&D into Windows XP in the past and could whip up a Workstation release in no time at all and reap huge profit at almost no cost ( yes, I know they built so many planned obsolescence bugs into the kernel of Windows 6.x, but that was their own doing, an act of suicide ).

And by the time of phone saturation and consumerization and the race-to-the-bottom ( tablets too, which will most likely occur first ) Apple will have moved on to the next thing, and the next thing beyond that. Apple-envy is such a stunningly misguided business model, and would sink anybody except for Microsoft who happens to be diversified enough to weather this mistake. However, if those other areas like servers, tools, back-end services and cloud also get pinched they will just as capable of falling as many other before them.

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Office Home and Business costs 220$:

http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Office-Home-and-Business-2013/productID.259321600

Imagine if business would just buy Surfaces and no Office suites any more! They would make a huge loss.

Funny - that's one true leverage they have here ("get a Surface for your business and you don't have to pay for Office!"), but their greed is just too big to let it happen.

I agree. And that's yet another great illustration of the difference between a hardware company versus a software company where so many things are opposite.

Imagine if Apple released their Mac OS to the general public, presumably with no service or warranty, just the software and you're on your own. They have been on x86 for quite a while now and have been surprisingly good at it ( well I was surprised, I remember all the Motorola years and could not imagine them making the switch ). Also imagine if they got their hands into the system building OEMs like Microsoft has done. It is not hard to envision substantial penetration of user share, 15%, 30%, maybe even 50% someday ( I would never personally want it except for curiosity and experimenting ) because its reputation is very high among creative people and Windows is seen as fragile crap. Head-to-head it would be quite a battle indeed. But this is entirely an illusion. There is no battle, never was and never will be ( at least now without Steve Jobs who might have considered something like this in retaliation against Microsoft ).

The real reason Apple would never do this is because it would completely remove any purpose of buying Mac hardware. It's not the main selling point ( I would suggest that OOBE, reputation, warranty, and prestige rank higher than the OS ) but it is one selling point. Inversely, porting Office to every platform ( more completely than it is thus far ) and placing it into the cloud removes any purpose of buying Windows.

Microsoft really is flirting with suicide by even considering using Office as bait because of exactly what you said: "Imagine if business would just buy Surfaces and no Office suites any more! They would make a huge loss.". Office and Windows have been cash cows and the mere consideration of breaking that formula smells of desperation and shows great recklessness in Redmond and maybe is evidence of very bad information they have but we don't know. Perhaps its a consequence of tampering with these two that has caused their stellar reputation to wear thin. There is some evidence ...

Short Takes: October 25, 2013 (Microsoft Earnings Special Edition) ( Thurrott 2013-10-25 )

Microsoft Earnings: Office 365 Home Premium Hits the 2 Million Subscriber Mark

The consumer version of Office 365, called Office 365 Home Premium, has hit the 2 million subscriber mark, Microsoft said. This comes just five months after it hit the 1 million mark back in May. (The service first launched in January, so this is pretty consistent growth.) But here's a weird one: Consumer Office revenues still declined overall this quarter, though Microsoft said it expected that. A tremendous value at $99.99 per year, Office 365 lets you install the full Office 2013 Professional Plus suite on up to five PCs in a household, so it works for multiple users in a family. And for the record, that's a much better deal than Apple's supposedly free iWork suite, which only works on that firm's high-priced Macs and iPads. No need to spend through the roof to get office productivity, folks. You can get the superior solution from Microsoft, and it's bargain-priced.

I just don't understand their optimism, it's almost crazy because those numbers are abysmal! 5 months to get to one million, 10 months to get 2 million! TWO MILLION? This article from two years ago said they sold 31 MILLION copies just of Office 2010 by that time, and also that Office is used on ONE BILLION Windows computers in total. Thurrott and NeoWin are seriously off their rocker.

A real board of directors would locate the CloudTards in Redmond and tar and feather them in front of the entire campus on a hot summer day as a lesson to warn others of why you don't mess with success.

[TELVM]

... The real question is where will this end-up after another decade or two? Certainly not the desktop Armageddon that those nitwits predict. I believe that no less than 1/3 of all computing will always be done on stationary, powerful desktop computers that can do anything asked of them. a maximum 33-66 distribution desktop-mobile, but that's a long, long way down the road from now. And even that is not Armageddon ...

There is this much quoted prophecy:

http://www.statista.com/statistics/272595/global-shipments-forecast-for-tablets-laptops-and-desktop-pcs/

Hardly an "extinction event for the PC", even assuming the augur nailed it.

But the seer (who may have been a little predisposed to the toys for whatever the reasons, who knows ) might have not nailed it:

IDC Lowers 2013 Tablet Forecast

As one commenter puts it, we may well be at the dawn of "The Post Tablet era" .

[jaclaz]

I wonder if anyone correlated the above data with population and income growth (in less-industrialized countries).

Basically they are saying that (2014 over 2010) and (trend for 2018 over 2014), the amount of PC's (in different formats) will double in 8 years (and increases by 50% in 4 years) over 2010's sales.

Also this should be seen with actual "life" of the devices.

Sure in the "normal" home or "normal" office the life of a device has been in the past on average more than 4 years, but - as we have seen with the longevity of XP possibly even more than that.

Most devices were in the past shipped anyway with an "OEM" OS pre-installed, but tablets are right now 100% like that, thus the life of the device will be more "likely" to determinate the life of the OS.

I mean, any PC with a Windows OEM installed (or like 90% of them) since 2006 shipped with Vista and since 2009 with Windows 7.

Same happened for Windows 8 since late 2012/early 2013 (though in this case the amount of "downgrade rights" actually implemented - legally or otherwise - seems much more relevant than before).

Now, what could we do to increase the "turnover" of the OS?

Idea #1: let's start selling hardware that is either NOT serviceable or economically not convenient to be serviced, let's engineer it in such a way that most devices will fail right after 1 year (in countries where the Law requires one year warranty) or 2 years (in countries - like EU - where the Law requires 2 years for consumer goods).

Idea #2: let's convince people to put all their data in the cloud, and as such reachable by *any* device, as this is also a way to make sure that data is not lost in a local device crash/failure.

Idea #3: let's give them a small amount of free cloud data storage and let's bloat everything, without any real need, to grow and grow in size so that soon they will exceed the size of the free storage so that we will be able to make them pay for it.

Idea #4: since the above device turnover will produce peaks every one or two years, and the amount we will get from cloud data storage won't be much significant as other companies may offer the same service at competitive prices, let's see if we can "regularize" the company's earnings by little by little making customers pay a flat fee every month (after all this is what all telecommunication companies have managed to do everywhere) in order to use our software.

Please consider how those ideas are more or less what any villain from SPECTRE is about in James Bond's movies, world domination and stuff.

jaclaz