I think it's a little early to say that Windows 8 will only make for an adequate tablet interface. Windows Phone shows they know what they're doing when they put their heart into it.
I don't think Apple wants to sell desktops at all. I think they'd like OS X gone in 5-10 years.
Except Windows 8 is a bad user experience for Desktop. Great for mobile, and even though it is a 'full-fledged OS', it actually makes things HARDER for users, so much so that they continue to lose Desktop market share, even in corporations. They have got to get it through their heads that a mobile/desktop hybrid does not mean 'One UI for all possible devices'. That seems obvious to me, but it sure hasn't happened.
And Microsoft was trying to push a tablet YEARS before the iPad came along and wowed everyone. They just did it really, really badly and didn't market their efforts well. Kind of like what is happening with Windows 8. If history repeats itself, Apple or Google or Someone New will come along, present the public with the SAME CONCEPT as Windows 8 but do it right and everyone will again claim Microsoft was late to the party. They've never had a lack of vision, but always have had problems with execution.
Apple seem to be in the same state of denial now that Microsoft were when Windows 8 came out. They believe touch-screen tablets are the future, and the way computing should be done, and ignore the desktop and laptop paradigm works much better for getting work done for a lot of people.
Microsoft realised their mistake and came out with Windows 10, which works well across both tablets and desktops/laptops. Apple seem to have doubled-down. The future looks prettier for the former.
Assume Windows 8 turns out to be a massive success. Suddenly everyone expects the same apps to run on their tablets and their desktops. Everyone expects to have proper multi-user support on their tablets, full productivity suites on ARM, and the option of buying an ARM laptop with 10+ hours of battery life. They expect these things because Windows 8 proved them possible.
Now what does Apple do? They've bet on single-user tablets, Intel laptops (with better-than-average but still not great) battery life, separate tablet and desktop ecosystems, and tablets that have only basic productivity apps. How do they bridge this gap and pay this debt?
I think Windows 8 is a very nice platform, and though it has some quirks, I think if people try it they will love it. I'm a Microsoft employee, though, so I'm probably biased.
A year or two ago I would have sided with the dominance that the iPad exerts in the market and felt that Microsoft was doomed without a tablet available until Fall 2012, but honestly -- I'm about to switch from my iPhone to Android and purchase a Galaxy Note II as soon as I can get my hands on it and frankly I've got a Mac and several Windows PCs and I still prefer the clusterfuck that is Windows 8 over OS X. Interestingly I think Microsoft still has a chance.
Apple are excellent designers. They've designed a pretty solid interface that is very specifically not OSX. MS tablets run Windows.
I believe that's the difference between the two and why Microsoft will never have a successful product in this space. That's the same reason Apple ate Palm and Windows Mobile's lunches: Windows Mobile is trying to be Windows on a small screen.
I'm sure Bill and Steve B sat in board room meetings patting each other on the back for making Windows run on a cell phone. Everyone knows the Windows UI so it can't fail! Think of all the enterprise customers!
Microsoft and other companies focus on protecting their empires. Apple focuses on making more usable products. A hardware manufacturer isn't going to be able to fix Windows/PCs enough to compete with the iPad.
This whole article got me excited! Maybe Windows 8/RT and Surface aren't a miserable failure. I'm hopefully because at the very least, this will force Apple to innovate harder.
Back when Windows 8 was announced I used to wonder why didn’t they choose the path of Apple, thus making one operating system for the desktop and a different one for mobile devices (smartphones and tablets). I think that they invested too much on the Surface tablet, hoping to produce a tablet that will have comparable capabilities with a desktop PC. In such a device the traditional Windows OS is not enough because we need gestures and a mobile OS is also not enough cause you need the file-system support and all of the facilities you’ve come to think as fundamental in a desktop OS. That’s where Win8 fits. If Surface had succeed I think Windows 8 would have justified its existence. But now it looks like a product without a context.
Why did they chose a path of an enhanced tablet? Probably because they didn’t want to compete with Apple in the $500 price tag. Or because they thought that there is market in the high end of tablets.
The thing is that their tablet strategy has failed and along goes a line of products designed for it, namely Metro, Win RT and Windows 8. Add their inability to penetrate the smartphone market and you begin to realize why Microsoft is considered irrelevant these days.
The only aspect where I read interesting news from MS is their development platform. Perhaps they should stop jerking around and return to their core, aka make software for the enterprise.
Even if integrating desktop, tablet, and phone in a way that has never been envisioned is a good idea at all (and I can't say). I feel that Windows 8 will either be way too soon to do it well, or they will way take too long to ship Windows 8. We haven't even got one proven good iteration of anything Windows on phone or tablet yet.
I suspect they're waiting for Windows 8 before making a big push. A unified desktop/tablet/phone platform is probably a lot more interesting, promotion-wise, than yet another smartphone.
Well they still have two OS versions (although Windows Phone 8 now shares the Win 8 kernel). The real question is if Microsoft's long bet on tablets and touchscreen PCs being the future of desktops is a good one. For once, I think Microsoft is aiming big with its OS, and that's something to be admired. It's going to piss of techies, but it has a real shot at making tablets and hybrid PCs more useful for everyone else.
Also, it seems pretty clear to me that Win 7 is going to stick around for a long time, perhaps even longer than XP. That'll likely be the go-to OS for techies and people building desktops down the line.
The important question is: What will they change, add or subtract? It’s obviously not in principle wrong to take a desktop OS and turn it into a tablet OS (Apple took OS X and turned it into iOS). I will, however, not have high hopes if Windows 8 on the desktop looks and behaves very similar to Windows 8 on a tablet.
Yup, no one uses Windows. The half-a-billion Windows 7 users will all stop buying Microsoft and their 95% marketshare momentum will come to a complete halt overnight. I believe Microsoft will be bankrupt this time next year.
Or do you think it's more likely that your average user (the same market that is abandoning the desktop in favor of the iPad) doesn't share your fear of a new, more friendly (to them) interface? Remember, the Internet pooh-poohed the iPad as just an oversized iPhone. That really hurt its sales.
Weirdly this is exactly what Microsoft is doing with their tablets.
iOS is much more hampered in terms of doing 'real PC things' at this point so Microsoft has a good head start, even though Windows 8 isn't exactly the epitome of polish yet.
As a consumer, it's a sad thing to see what Microsoft does with the "Surface Pro", in my view a product that would take the ultrabook segment by storm.
Microsoft obviously has struck some deals with pc producers and committed to hold the product back until after the holiday season. They probably even make more money that way.
It's just a matter of time, until Apple is going to counter the Surface with their own ios/macosx hybrid, which I think is the future. I would not be surprised to see the first hint for this "surface" sometime early next year, after the holidays, and before the actual Surface Pro hits the stores.
Microsoft is betting for Apple to not pull this off so quickly, but if they are wrong, the Windows market share will continue to shrink at an accelerated pace next year.
Microsoft had their shoot this Christmas season to do something bold and go big with Surface RT AND Surface Pro, but they choose to give in with the OEM's.
The thing which attracts me to windows 8 (or maybe 9) is that it will run on everything. If I want to build giant wall sized touch apps, I can.
I hope Apple releases a headless iOS box (some kind of AppleTV descendant?) at some point so that arbitrary touch surfaces can be powered by iOS. (I doubt Apple will release a software only iOS to compete with Windows, so this is the best I can reasonably hope for).
Remember at that time Windows 8 was the MS solution for tablets and MS was getting killed in the tablet space as iOS took off. Windows 8 wasn't officially out until a year after the first iPad. They had to get it out asap.
MS isn't going after Apple. It probably can't, but it knows that if it delivers tablets and phones that can integrate with AD, Exchange, and other enterprise services and be a lot less locked down, they can steal Android's lunch and create a business friendly phone/tablet ecosystem.
If Joe and Jane Public buy those, that's great too. Oh, and they will because they'll feel comfortable with Windows, especially if they are told "Oh btw, you can have Windows on your phone and tablet as well as Office now, why bother with whatever Android is or that Apple stuff."
Its also a little silly to expect MS to not try to compete in these areas. Their Win8/Tablet strategy is big and risky and may or may not pay off, but conceding that realm to Apple and Google seems foolish. Personally, I like the idea of a "super tablet" that replaces my laptop entirely as opposed to this odd device that kinda sorta fits between my phone and my laptop.
I would love to see a Windows 8 review by someone who understands both tablets and PCs... but this isn't it. The author has so bought into the Microsoft view of the world that I genuinely wonder what they've been doing for the past five years.
We are now entering the post-post-PC era, and its focus is the PC. A new, smarter, more versatile PC. A PC that lets users browse the web casually in bed and work with massive databases in SQL Server. A PC that can run a $0.99 news reader as well as it can run proprietary $99,000 CRM software. A PC that is as ideal for playing Angry Birds as it is for running a modeling environment that allows its user to build schematics for a skyscraper. This is the future of computing.
Er, no. No it isn't. That was the model that MS were pushing for a decade or so with 'Tablet PCs'/UMPCs and it has failed utterly. Most people DO NOT WANT a single device that can do all that, because the necessary design trade-offs produce a device that isn't very good at anything. Apple's realization of this fact (and their execution) is why they're the biggest company in the world, and why Windows Phone and Windows 8 are playing catchup.
The machine I tested Windows 8 on is a pre-release dockable Samsung tablet with a 1.6GHz Intel Core i5 processor and 4GB of RAM. Yes, it’s a tablet with a fan. It’s also a tablet that can run your existing desktop-grade enterprise software, consumer software and lightweight Metro-style apps. Get over it.
A Core i5 in a tablet? What's its battery life? I bet it sucks. People aren't going to 'get over it', they're just going to buy iPads.
It's nice to see MS executing again. Windows Phone looks great. Windows 8 looks promising, if they can negotiate the backwards-compatibility waters of a new architecture. But I hope MS can see what they've been doing wrong for the past decade better than this guy, or their further decline is assured.
I don't think Apple wants to sell desktops at all. I think they'd like OS X gone in 5-10 years.
reply