Windows 8 - Deeper Impressions

[JorgeA]

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

Very good, this analogy works too.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

Microsoft admits their image is a net consumer negative

Microsoft has failed and while some think it is blissfully ignorant of that fact, the XBox One shows that the company is indeed aware of its plight. How aware is it that its reputation and name is indelibly tarnished? Deeply.

Check out the article for the visual demonstration of that point...

The problem is twofold, corporate identity and what they sacrificed to get here. First is the corporate identity issue. At the moment, Microsoft is desperately trying to force its way in to phones and tablets by making a common UI for both mobile and desktop. In theory this allows one to have a common set of apps, a familiar interface, and impart the ability to move from PC to mobile and back with ease. One UI to rule them all, one UI to in the darkness bind them.

Unfortunately what they gave up to make this Hail Mary play was far more valuable. By putting their inappropriate for the use case OS on the desktop, worse yet forcing it on users, they destroyed sales. Not content with 2-3% of mobile sales they also did the unthinkable and moved the same UI to servers, it seems losing 30%+ marketshare over 5 years was not a sufficient clue.

XBox One too (pun intended) was not immune to this UI, this whole top to bottom UI familiarity was one of the main reasons the XBox division was not spun off a while ago. Once again the idea was to have a brilliant UI in all devices from top to bottom that people saw, used, and were comfortable with, even teen-aged gamers. Except the UI wasn’t brilliant. And people didn’t love it. And it didn’t spur sales. And there was no backup plan. And Microsoft is still shoving it down buyer’s throats, or at least trying to.

The net result of this brilliant plan? Windows 8 drove PC sales down by double-digit percentages every quarter since release, a stunning number for an ~300M unit market. There are no signs of recovery anywhere and unfortunately the competition is still doing a brisk business. Macroeconomic issues are not the culprit as some deniers contend. Similarly servers have lost more than half their market share in the last five years but that is unquestionably not tied to the new UI. SemiAccurate’s anecdotal evidence says that this share loss has accelerated since the release of Server 2012, something that is quite likely due to the new UI. Phones too have gone from ~12% market share pre-Windows Phone 7 to <3% marketshare now, again something that is directly attributable to the new UI.

Once again, SemiAccurate is right on target.

--JorgeA

[TELVM]

... One UI to rule them all, one UI to in the darkness bind them. ...

Edited October 29, 2013 by TELVM

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

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" .

If the only metric that matters to them is "shipments" then we can kiss everything goodbye. It becomes an easy self-fulfilling prophecy to predict a downturn, screw the product up and kill it, and then watch the "shipments" metric magically

fulfill their stunning prediction. "Shipments" is what concerns Wall Street, to our own detriment. They seem to forget that it is possible ( and formerly normal ) to have no growth in "shipments" ( i.e., same exact number of customers as last release ) and still keep the business humming along successfully. Could you run a business that sells say 200 million OS copies every three years? Of course. Same for computer hardware. The "growth" or "stagnate" or "slumping" or "declining" shipments nonsense is drummed up by analysts that sit on their butts watching spreadsheets and making grand pronouncements about the future based on a view that growth must be continuous regardless of the customer wants and needs. Isn't it good to know that tens of centuries of craftsmen who built and sold things to a close customer base, and who listened to and answered to them directly had it all wrong for so long. These fools have us on the fast-track to mass assembly line economics where everything is fungible and nothing lasts, and customers are faceless entities that deliver payment upon demand. The only thing we're still missing is a Soylent Green assembly line for the end-stage of the customer life to ensure an orderly transition back into the system once we are completely useless.

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Microsoft admits their image is a net consumer negative

Microsoft has failed and while some think it is blissfully ignorant of that fact, the XBox One shows that the company is indeed aware of its plight. How aware is it that its reputation and name is indelibly tarnished? Deeply.

Check out the article for the visual demonstration of that point...

The problem is twofold, corporate identity and what they sacrificed to get here. First is the corporate identity issue. At the moment, Microsoft is desperately trying to force its way in to phones and tablets by making a common UI for both mobile and desktop. In theory this allows one to have a common set of apps, a familiar interface, and impart the ability to move from PC to mobile and back with ease. One UI to rule them all, one UI to in the darkness bind them.

Unfortunately what they gave up to make this Hail Mary play was far more valuable. By putting their inappropriate for the use case OS on the desktop, worse yet forcing it on users, they destroyed sales. Not content with 2-3% of mobile sales they also did the unthinkable and moved the same UI to servers, it seems losing 30%+ marketshare over 5 years was not a sufficient clue.

XBox One too (pun intended) was not immune to this UI, this whole top to bottom UI familiarity was one of the main reasons the XBox division was not spun off a while ago. Once again the idea was to have a brilliant UI in all devices from top to bottom that people saw, used, and were comfortable with, even teen-aged gamers. Except the UI wasnt brilliant. And people didnt love it. And it didnt spur sales. And there was no backup plan. And Microsoft is still shoving it down buyers throats, or at least trying to.

The net result of this brilliant plan? Windows 8 drove PC sales down by double-digit percentages every quarter since release, a stunning number for an ~300M unit market. There are no signs of recovery anywhere and unfortunately the competition is still doing a brisk business. Macroeconomic issues are not the culprit as some deniers contend. Similarly servers have lost more than half their market share in the last five years but that is unquestionably not tied to the new UI. SemiAccurates anecdotal evidence says that this share loss has accelerated since the release of Server 2012, something that is quite likely due to the new UI. Phones too have gone from ~12% market share pre-Windows Phone 7 to <3% marketshare now, again something that is directly attributable to the new UI.

Once again, SemiAccurate is right on target.

--JorgeA

That's nicely done. The moves by Microsoft in the past three years still require much more criticism. They embarked on this suicide right around the time the iPad came along ( who knew it would be so easy for Steve Jobs to destroy Microsoft! ). They whipped up that early mockup of Microsoft Tiles and began the back-end strategy of inventing NuMicrosoft, even green-lighting the sacrifice of Office and Windows along the way. The biggest sacrifice however is ultimately the respect of Microsoft that so many had.

Not enough can be said the GUI shenanigans too. They violated everything they ever documented and wrote about user interfaces and guidelines. The abstract hiding of things in the GUI has been underway since Vista, and was bad enough, but going whole-hog into chromeless, invisible, mystery screens was a Herculean step, even for them.

I'm not sure everyone is getting the entire picture yet though. Microsoft and many others are intent on destroying the PC entirely, leaving only a consumption tablet in its place for almost all scenarios. And to do this they will violate every rule in the book, legal, moral and ethical.

It's about the GUI, but not only the GUI. It's about the cloud, but not only the cloud. It's about DRM, but not only DRM. It's about privacy, but not only privacy. In total it's about who owns what, and what can they do on it. Big Data sees the Big Hollywood and Big Media system as something they want to re-engineer for themselves. The long-lived "push" paradigm of Hollywood to Broadcaster to Customer model has shoveled tons of money to Big Hollywood and Big Media. So Big Data will design their own playground from the ground up with portable Orwellian devices that feed the sheeple IP that Big Data is controlling. That other model, PC's living happy independent lives sometimes connected but almost entirely a "pull" paradigm. Big Data will change this to a "push" model as fast as they can. Microsoft made their first attempts as far back as Windows 98 with active desktop channels. It's no secret really, but for some reason all the critics are still nibbling around the edges of the big picture.

[Tripredacus]

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.

The main difference between a tablet/phone with an OS and a desktop/notebook computer you buy from the store or online is that the desktop computer has a noticeable cost of the operating system. Most people can tell the price of the OS, as you can buy it separately or you can get a computer without an OS on it or build it yourself. With a mobile device, there is no discernable value placed on the OS. You can't go buy the OS that is on an iPhone or a Droid. I think then people don't actually care about the OS on their phones like desktop people do.

Windows RT doesn't follow the mobile OS model. The price is fairly evident of it. Since Microsoft still hasn't released RT, its unknown what the actual cost of the OS is per product, but I suspect it is somewhere around what a Windows Embedded OS costs.

But another part of your quote is the life of a device. In the US this is tricky. For the most part, mobile devices are purchased through a wireless carrier. The device has a customized OS from that carrier. So something I can relate to personally, where my wireless carrier is the one who has decided the life of the phone that I have. While there is a newer OS version available, the wireless company has blocked my phone from being able to get it. If I want to get the new OS, I have to buy a new phone. There is nothing wrong with the one I have. In the past, we had the ability to "root" a phone that let you put whatever you want on there, but now that is illegal. If Microsoft succeeds at the mobile market, will they also join into this trend in order to force people to buy new devices?

[jaclaz]

But another part of your quote is the life of a device. In the US this is tricky. For the most part, mobile devices are purchased through a wireless carrier. The device has a customized OS from that carrier. So something I can relate to personally, where my wireless carrier is the one who has decided the life of the phone that I have. While there is a newer OS version available, the wireless company has blocked my phone from being able to get it. If I want to get the new OS, I have to buy a new phone. There is nothing wrong with the one I have. In the past, we had the ability to "root" a phone that let you put whatever you want on there, but now that is illegal. If Microsoft succeeds at the mobile market, will they also join into this trend in order to force people to buy new devices?

Not exactly.

At least here you don't actually purchase the mobile device, you "lease" it or more properly you subscribe to a service with the carrier that includes the use of the device.

I believe that the legal issue is not with "rooting" the device, it is about "rooting a device which you do not "own". (and this is not so slightly different).

jaclaz

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Off-Topic ... NeoWin mentioned another Firefox update, v25, so I went to grab it. Then I noticed something weird in the FTP servers. I've been using this for a while now ...

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

... but Opera is now complaining ( "The server requested a login authentication method that is not supported." ). Not believing that message at face value I then tested it in Firefox and sure enough, it displayed just fine, but the releases stop at v24 beta. Trying this one instead ...

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases

... works fine in Opera and has all releases ( v24 and v25 included ). Did they switch servers just before the v24 release? Notice that the only difference is that extra subfolder ( or an alias link maybe? ) with an extra "mozilla.org" inserted ...

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases

[GrofLuigi]

"The server requested a login authentication method that is not supported."

It does that under heavy traffic. Just hit refresh a few times and it will show. I've experienced it a few times in the last year or so.

GL

[JorgeA]

Mary Jo Foley uses Microsoft's old way of reporting sales to uncover some uncomfortable trends regarding Windows 8:

These charts make it a bit easier to see that Windows struggled during the quarter, as did Entertainment & Devices. (Online Services is still losing money, but less.) Windows client income was down 20 percent, compared to the year-ago quarter, which was right before Microsoft launched Windows 8. Income from Entertainment & Devices was down 171 percent compared to the year-ago quarter.

Woiuldn't you know it, they're doing the worst precisely in the areas where they're making the biggest "consumer" push.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

And now for some (possibly) good guys:

How one small American VPN company is trying to stand up for privacy

Of course, one of the biggest problems is that there’s essentially no way for me to verify PIA’s (or anyone else’s) practices. Lots of VPN firms claim not to log, and I’d like to believe them, but there’s really no way for me to know for sure that Lee can’t see that I’m loading Ars about 100 times a day.

Lee also told me that his firm has spoken with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other related groups to try to come up with a third-party audit system that would attempt to alleviate this exact problem. That way, ordinary consumers like me would at least have a little bit more of a reason to trust that no logs are being kept.

--JorgeA

[ricktendo]

Found this quite funny

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19512174.aspx

[Tripredacus]

Found this quite funny

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19512174.aspx

I feel bad if that one guy actually put his cat down if that turns out to be true.

[JorgeA]

Found this quite funny

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19512174.aspx

You're right, that IS pretty funny... and weird!

H'ere's one comment that caught my eye:

Dell Engineering and our suppliers have been analyzing a captured unit and are close to a root cause. A biological contaminate/health hazard is not suspected at this time. We appreciate everyone's patience and hope to post more information within a week.

Umm, so I guess they had to go out into the woods with a .22 to "capture" one of these critters...

[jaclaz]

For no apparent reason:

http://dynamics.org/Altenberg/CURRENT_AFFAIRS/CHINA_PLASTIC/

jaclaz