Windows 8 - Deeper Impressions

[JorgeA]

Being one of those days where my understanding of English is somewhat lacking, this sentence:

http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-AU/storage

Even with this powerful operating system and suite of core Microsoft apps, you'll still have space to add content and store personal files

sounds to me as being condescending and/or presumptuous.

You read the sentence correctly. It's like one of those hybrid automobiles that has the big electric battery in the rear taking up most of the trunk space, and the auto manufacturer telling you that "you'll still have space for your groceries, handyman projects, or Christmas presents."

Basically, this is how they're pitching the situation:

You'll still have storage space!*

(*) Just not as much space as you might expect.

Having Excel without Macros/Add-ins , what would be next, power drills with no chuck but a fixed 6 mm steel drill bit, adjustable wrenches fixed to 13 mm?

An excellent analogy, IMHO.

--JorgeA

[Joseph_sw]

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/home-and-student/office-home-student-rt-preview-FX103210361.aspx

If you already use macros, add-ins, InfoPath forms with custom programs, or other custom programs in your PC or Mac version of Office, you will not be able to use them in Office Home & Student 2013 RT.

Having Excel without Macros/Add-ins , what would be next, power drills with no chuck but a fixed 6 mm steel drill bit, adjustable wrenches fixed to 13 mm?

jaclaz

somehow i got this feeling that MS would said the crippled Office-suit decision were based on (dubious) 'telemetry' result.

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

NeoWin article that actually points out two examples of Microsoft playing fast and loose with the facts. It concerns a new video that Redmond has launched and is aimed at developers to convince them to write apps for Windows 8 ...

"Generation App" video makes a case for making Windows 8 apps ( NeoWin 2012-12-10 )

This is the NeoWin author John Callaham writing and the quoted Microsoft claims are in bold ...

The video also stops at two points to throw out some stats that are interesting. One says, "Over the last 2 years, more Windows licenses have been sold than Android, iOS, and Macs combined." That's certainly true, but those licenses were almost all for Windows 7, not Windows 8, and there's no way to really predict how many of those older Windows 7 PCs will be upgraded to Windows 8.

The second stat that's thrown out is also a bit iffy: "A worldwide app store with over 1 billion potential users!" The word "potential" is the key one. Again, there's no way that all the Windows users in the world will ditch their older OS for Windows 8. In fact, it could take years for Windows 8 to be installed on a majority of PCs.

This is exactly why everything they say, particularly the recently discussed bogus "sales" figures, must be taken with a grain pound of salt. Truth is no longer an option.

[jaclaz]

Isn't it fun how everyone sees the relevant parts differently?

From the same link:

The effort comes in the form of a new YouTube video that shows a number of already released third-party apps in action, including the Kayak travel booking service, the Howstuffworks.com app, the Major League Soccer app and more.

It's years I have been waiting for such an app , a dedicated app for booking travels or read simple explanations on how thing works, a sensationally new paradigm shift......

In the old times we called those "bookmarks" .

jaclaz

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

True story about How Stuff Works ... Years ago when we were still in the dial-up modem era I downloaded a lot of their excellent pages and compiled them into a nice CHM with all the flash videos embedded and working. Came out nice and it was essentially a working app in itself. Those pages were a real pain to load in a browser when clicking on links, but locally it was instantaneous. All the HTML and CSS needed to be tweaked of course, but it was simple work. Now we have promoted this ( I won't call it programming ) webslinging HTML+CSS into glorified Windows 8 apps.

So I must be the world's first Windows 8 app developer!

[jaclaz]

So I must be the world's first Windows 8 app developer!

BUT, unlike on the Surface, you had local storage available to keep that huge compilation locally....

A good idea could be to have several (cheaper) Surfaces, each one with 16 Gb of storage total, somehow (like by writing good, lean code) reduce the space occupied by Office to have the Howstuffworks stored locally, another one for the writings by William Shakespeare, another one with pictures of all the paintings by Picasso .... no , wait, these latter already exist, they are called books ....

jaclaz

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

... another one for the writings by William Shakespeare, another one with pictures of all the paintings by Picasso .... no , wait, these latter already exist, they are called books ....

Funny you should mention that. I actually did the same thing with Picasso ( and another for Dali ). They are static though, no flash, just bitmaps. And they are big. Never had the urge to touch Shakespeare though.

Yeah, CHM is a nice container format ( lossless too ), it's only real shortcoming is that the contents are scrambled so there is no useful information to latch onto via a brute-force find or search utility. Even a ZIP file will cough up filenames and other hints ( unless it is encrypted I think ).

PRE-EMPTIVE DISCLAIMER: no, I would never distribute things like this! These were more of a learning experience in localizing files, editing HTML+CSS, embedding multimedia, etc.

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Apropos of alleged sales numbers vs website usage statistics ...

Surface makes a small blip on the web traffic radar ( NeoWin 2012-12-11 )

In a nut shell, the Surface took .13% of the web traffic generated from the ad impressions across the Chitika network while Android took .91% of the market; Chitika states the sample base was in the tens of millions.

That is a decimal point there in that 0.13 % or less than one seventh of one percent. Yeah, it doesn't mean much now. And there is no doubt that Windows 8 ( of which Surface represents only a subset ) itself will chart eventually. I mean how can it not? The user market is much larger now than six years ago, and they are literally forcing it into the world through the OEM channels ( again ). Plus, now we have billions of phones also. The real question is whether it will get as high as Vista did ( I believe it was 20% at it's peak ) before the bottom drops out once and for all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_market_share ... 2012-12-12 ... Windows 7 = 41.35% ... Windows XP = 21.29% ... Windows 8 = 0.32%

I wonder if it will ever even pass Windows XP. We should check back periodically and compare the current numbers to this snapshot December 12, 2012. ... Hey! 12-12-12 using two-digit years! This annual number anomaly must be important to somebody out there. ...

Edited December 12, 2012 by CharlotteTheHarlot

[jaclaz]

As I see it there are great possibiltiies that the millions of people that bought the Surface at the time of the "share" data collection had either:

• spent all their money buying the thingy and cannot afford to pay an ISP for connection
  
• used it to play Simon
  
• had yet to understand how to go online
  
• only and exclusively connected to the Microsoft Apps store and to networks not connected with the Chitika one
  

in other words it is a bit too early for those web traffic results to represent *anything*:

http://insights.chitika.com/2012/november-tablet-market-update/

To quantify this latest study on the market as a whole, Chitika Insights examined a sample of tens of millions of tablet impressions from the Chitika Ad network. This study was drawn from a date range of November 12th to November 18th 2012, and only includes traffic from the U.S. and Canada. This week was chosen in order to eliminate any Black Friday-related traffic spikes which could skew the results.

and it is very possible that the Chitika network (WHO? ) and it's customers offer contents that appeal the iPad and Android users but not the Surface ones, we have a "study" conducted by a non-independent firm, citing senselessly and vaguely "a sample of millions of tablet impressions", limited to 6 (six) days just two weeks after the Surface launch.

Those reports, without the exact methodology used are m00t by themselves, additionally they were made at a time there was possibly NO meaningful number of surfaces sold.

So they are absolutely meaningless.

jaclaz

[jaclaz]

Still on the OT/Tablet/Surface theme, the good MS guys seemingly lost a very good occasion to have a rather influential testimonial/endorsement:

http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/12/3754574/pope-benedict-xvi-first-tweet

http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/12/12/the-pope-on-twitter-and-6-other-holy-milestones/

jaclaz

[dencorso]

http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/computing/software/is-windows-8s-lack-of-windows-a-mistake

[JorgeA]

Great find, dencorso. I can hardly wait to read this, but it's getting late even for me.

The interview looks really promising, elaborating on the article that Nielsen wrote recently and which (I think) was linked to in this thread a few days ago. This is the first thing I'll look at in the morning!

--JorgeA

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

That IEEE piece is a good article that expands upon the earlier Nielson comments on the GUI, but I think they are approaching it from the wrong angle IMHO.

The key problem is not really being addressed in these articles at all because most of these experts approach Windows 8 as a new product. These critiques start from the proposition of how to design an OS that handles both scenarios - power-unlimited desktop with big screen space and power-limited mobile with tiny screen space. And does this product successfully accomplish this. That is a false start because the former scenario ( unlimited-power large-screen desktop ) was already handled and only required minor tweaking ( or nothing at all ) to keep the 700 million or 1.3 billion users happy. It was already done! It already exists on those 700 million or 1.3 billion installations.

So they said "hmmm, there's this popular thing called mobile, let's redesign everything to accomodate it". The problem with this short-sighted ( and in this case, late ) thinking is that there are many opportunities to make this mistake yet they mostly avoided it. For example, before the web and in the early days of the web, FTP was all the rage. Many people lived in this environment exclusively. Before that, and overlapping it was USENET and company intranets loosely linked through Compuserve and other access points. One could easily see this current brainless management saying "redesign Windows to be like an FTP program, or as Newsgroup reader". Really they kinda took a similar step a little later towards the new WWW when Windows 98 came out and they showed their desire to blur the differences between online and offline, but not fully. Other similar trends are Twitter or Facebook and one wonders if they have this up their sleeve to morph into Facebook later. The point is that chasing trends or worse, fads, is ridiculous. And I am talking about redesigning everything around a trend or fad ( Microsoft Store ) rather than just addressing it sensibly.

Ironically, what they decided to finally do on the mobile side could in fact have been a fresh start if they chose too, but actually it is just a slight variation of earlier WP anyway. So they iterated the WP GUI and then inexplicably and mercilessly attacked the traditional already-working desktop GUI. Then glued them together and called it a day. Yay.

Truly, we had it nailed way upthread long ago by pointing out that the Metro interface just needed to be dropped in as an application like Media Center. But instead of that excellent solution, more nefarious motives ( pardon the pun ) surfaced, the arrogant need to force their "vision" and their Store onto their monopoly victims worldwide. So, they have managed to antagonize and alienate all segments of their customer base: Developers, Users, and Corporations. All this to simply gain a few percentage points ( eventually, but not yet ) in the mobile space. That is more than a gamble, that is pathologically reckless.

[jaclaz]

Still on the OT tablet topic:

http://mvardon.com/2010/01/22/lost-17-years-apples-tablet-specs/

http://www.pratikpramanik.com/2012/06/industry-contrarian-microsoft-surface-and-why-the-industry-still-hasnt-figured-out-tablets/

And a nice image from the above:

The article above includes a couple interesting links to the almost forgotten (and canceled) Courier project.....

And (yet another) article about the Surface being what?:

http://www.zdnet.com/surface-rt-hands-on-not-a-good-tablet-not-a-good-laptop-7000007830/

jaclaz

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

And a nice image from the above:

Clever image!

Maybe the thing was designed in the Southern Hemisphere where as we know, everything is done backwards and upside-down ( or is it counter-clockwise, I can never remember ).

So if down-under they use the built-in camera to take a picture of the moon, they can flip the Surface upside-down like a laptop and the moon will look like ours?

/sarc