Ballmer's off...

Housey said:
Very few, but the adoption rates for Windows 8 across the market place are appalling at this stage compared to Windows 7. It's merits as an OS are utterly irrelevant if people aren't buying it and the same goes for their pad things and various other failed launches. That is why the board have helped him resign, they see the numbers not the tech, which is all quoted companies and their shareholders give a flying **** about. Techies will argue right and wrong all day, see this very thread, but business is based on sales and it isn't, like the slate thing, selling, fact.
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One os that had a very different birth at a very different time. They aren't realy comparable. When w7 was released most where still on old hardware and running XP a decade old operating system. This is not the case for w8.
So yeah it's not doing as well as w7 but then again w7 did far better than any other os in history for a lot of reasons that didnt exist for any other os.

He's had the support of the board, if they did not move towards what they have achieved in win8 they would be in a far worse position. Win8 is the foundation to move forward, it takes time and money to break into the markets.
There has been plenty of mistakes as I highlited earlier though, which shouldn't of been there. IMO that's due to MS still being a historic goalith and not moving with the times. All there there programming has come forwar, the rest of the business hasn't and that is what needs to change rapidly.
 
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Glaucus said:
One os that had a very different birth at a very different time. They aren't realy comparable. When w7 was released most where still on old hardware and running XP a decade old operating system. This is not the case for w8.
So yeah it's not doing as well as w7 but then again w7 did far better than any other os in history for a lot of reasons that didnt exist for any other os.
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Again I am well aware of that, I've been in the tech business for 30 years. What you are actually saying is Microsoft has again misjudged what the marketplace wanted or needed. For years they have got that right, they have lead the marketplace but sadly for the last few years they have not and the man at the helm has to take the responsibility for that. So I come back to my point, it has not sold and is the wrong product at the wrong time and moaning that the 'world has changed' does not get much airtime with shareholders, they expect wins not loses.
 
Housey said:
Again I am well aware of that, I've been in the tech business for 30 years. What you are actually saying is Microsoft has again misjudged what the marketplace wanted or needed. For years they have got that right, they have lead the marketplace but sadly for the last few years they have not and the man at the helm has to take the responsibility for that. So I come back to my point, it has not sold and is the wrong product at the wrong time and moaning that the 'world has changed' does not get much airtime with shareholders, they expect wins not loses.
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Yep they massively misjudged I said that earlier. It certainly is not the wrong product though. It just needed to be released in 2010 as it wasn't, it will take time and money to turn around, that is unavoidable as its late to the game. Being so late there is no quick fix to be had. They could release any os and it would sale the same. What they messed up was there hardware, availability. Price, advertising, tutorials etc.
 
Glaucus said:
Yep they massively misjudged I said that earlier. It certainly is not the wrong product though. It just needed to be released in 2010 as it wasn't, it will take time and money to turn around, that is unavoidable as its late to the game. Being so late there is no quick fix to be had. They could release any os and it would sale the same. What they messed up was there hardware, availability. Price, advertising, tutorials etc.
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In business it absolutely the wrong product at the wrong time. If it wasn't, it would be selling in bucket loads and Ballmer would be loud on telly again. As a business you don't get the luxury to keep getting it wrong to this extent and then taking a technical angle to educate the world about its benefits. The good business does the education up front, times it brilliantly, understands the next 2 years and releases it to lines of people in tents all over the world and enterprises all pushing to be first with it. Apple have stolen the batten on that one, though they are also starting to drop it. IBM did the same, they were the utter Gods of tech when I started, then MS took over, then Apple and Google and now we await who will be next. It's exciting stuff.
 
It realy wouldn't be selling by the bucket load.
Unless they can magically go back to 2010. They missed it and any product they release now wouldn't be selling by the bucket load, these aren't cheap consumables, even rolling out just a new os is hugely expensive, let alone new hardware.

So yes huge mistakes where made I totally agree with that, I totally disagree that a different os released in 2012 would have sold any differently. Although as I siad different other factors would oof helped.

It always goes round in these circles, apple is now very much on the declining trend. bB has pretty much and it, android is top gun and MS is fighting back albeit it at a slow rate.

Most big archaic companies just aren't good at doing anything speedy and that isn't down to one person, who can and will be blocked from making the wide spreading changes needed as the Baird will be scared and wil want to keep hold of what they have left, even though that's totally the wrong thing to do.
 
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W8 hasn't really taken off because of hardware in a lot of cases.

The best thing about w8 is it's touch stuff. Now, even Android tablets are struggling to break Apple's dominance at the moment in the tablet market (I think, although I think they're making some headway).

As for Windows 8 itself, I tried out the Beta, and the biggest thing putting me off it right now is still that they haven't yet implemented a start key back into it. The gf currently has a W8 laptop (she bought a new laptop, it came with W8), and she is currently using IE because of software issues between Chrome and 8, whereby Chrome kept crashing. Whilst I haven't looked into this problem myself, and done any research, stories like this put me off slightly, and I remember plenty of them at launch time as well. Which knowing Microsoft have probably been ironed out. But right now, everything I own works on 7, and there's no real reason for me to upgrade to 8, so I'm staying on 7 until something revolutionary comes along.

The biggest factor, in my mind however, is touch. It would work amazingly on a touch screen. In fact, as someone with a touch screen, the beta was pretty fun. This brings out two major problems though. 1: I don't want finger prints on my computer screen. Phone and tablets, that's fine, 23" screen that I do my photo editing on - no thanks. Also, because my screen is a few years old, all the multi touch gesture support isn't there, which brings down some of the appeal. Now, most people don't even have touch screens on their PC. This means the navigation and such like, has nowhere near the same fluidity to it that it could with W8. Whilst in some ways people might argue it's behind the times, personally I think it's ahead, because the hardware to best use it isn't out there yet.

I also see W8 as being great on media PCs. The new 'start menu' would work well on a large display, and along with other companies who are making the move over to pushing stuff that would look good on a TV screen (Steam, Big Picture, I'm looking at you), there is definitely a push to try and get more people to be hooking up PCs of some kind to their TVs. Which ties in with the fact, that generally speaking, smaller form factors (mATX and even mITX) are becoming much more popular both in stores selling them, and in parts for enthusiasts (the Prodigy did wonders for this, but mobos have made leaps and bounds in support in these areas as well).

Personally I feel W8 is more ahead of it's time rather than behind it. That said, without pushing software out there that can be used in such a way, I doubt the hardware companies would make such an effort to put something out there that may maximise the potential of W8.

kd
 
Android tablets finally outsold iPads in q2, mainly thanks to the extrem budget versions, but a sale is still a sale and they still run the google store which is the main part for google.
It's just a lot of people still think of ipad when you say tablet, that can't last long with them being outsold though.

I agree with media centre and yet another mistake by MS.
NUC-win8-kinect 2 would be great
However the rumours are kinect 2 for windows won't be out till q2 2014 and it will still be an SDK, why on earth is it still an SDK. They need to make it retail and bake in kinect support for operating win8.
 
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Glaucus said:
Android tablets finally outsold iPads in q2, mainly thanks to the extrem budget versions, but a sale is still a sale and they still run the google store which is the main part for google.
It's just a lot of people still think of ipad when you say tablet, that can't last long with them being outsold though.

I agree with media centre and yet another mistake by MS.
NUC-win8-kinect 2 would be great
However the rumours are kinect 2 for windows won't be out till q2 2014 and it will still be an SDK, why on earth is it still an SDK. They need to make it retail and bake in kinect support for operating win8.
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Ah, haven't kept up with tablet sales recently, but yes, people still say tablet, and think ipad...

Kinect could be a great way of integrating it into media TV to be fair. I think the reason it's still SDK is because they're probably wary of destroying the Xbone as the media centre, which seems to be what they're trying to make it...

kd
 
I think it's more to do with being to conservative. They want developers to develop. But it's chicken and egg, who's going to develop for something that public isn't realy meant to buy.
Xbone is great but the live account puts me off it, but yeah they said they wanted a pc in every living room and xbone carries on from xbox360. Which had loads of media focus as well.

Not that I think it would be a good seller for media, it's to geeky, still it would keep people like me happy and sell units and start getting kinect out there more. For next to no cost, they allready make them, it should allready be baked into win8, I'm not sure if it is or not. Would love to know if kinect works at all straight from the box. Get someone like xbmc to integrate controll and you could get a nice little inroad.
 
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I've been using Chrome on Windows 8 since it was released, never had a moments trouble with it, wife uses it on her W8 laptop too so I'm not sure it's Windows 8 that should be getting the blame there KD :)
 
Gilly said:
The fact that you call server OS desktop shows that you don't really understand what you're talking about.
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Tell me about it! I used to enjoy helping/posting in Windows & Software before Glaucus suddenly branched into it as a Windows 8 expert fanboy with the typical unintelligible posts.
 
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I can't believe how many people think it's so easy to write an os from scratch. Don't worry, we can rewrite that in 2 years.
 
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We've gone round this old argument a few times so I'm not going through it in detail again but there's a lot more to stuff than "lol metro sux for companies". Windows XP, possibly the most popular desktop OS since the year dot goes out of support in 6 months. Enterprises have known this and with Windows 7 being a great release started deploying generally a couple of years ago. The upshot of that means that the vast majority of business customers have either just completed or are still in the middle of deploying Windows7, a process which costs hundreds of thousands of pounds, often millions if a desktop hardware refresh is done at the same time. They were simple never going to start again straight away or stop mid way and change.

Consumers outside of enthusiasts very rarely upgrade an OS, they get a new one with a new device. Again after waiting 7 years with XP lots of people updated with W7 and have reasonably up to date hardware/OS and so the adoption of 8 will be more gradual by default.

Just to be contentious I tend to think Windows 7 would have done no better than Vista if it had been released first (at the same time) because of the changes it introduced. Vista changed everything from the driver model to dropping 16bit compatibility and so took the hit when billys 10 year old scanner with ropey drivers stopped working. Yes there were some bugs but it changed the game for MS desktop OS and gets an unfairly bad rep. Think back to the old days of WinXP, Since Vista generally speaking when was the last time you saw a "blaster" type virus outbreak or the old days of a bluescreen once a day?

In my opinion (such as it is) 8 will do the same for 9 (or whatever it's called). When the next OS appears the press and comments will be "that's what 8 should have been, I'll use it now". Part of that will be the OS will have been refined, part will be time has moved on so people are willing to update 7 based devices and part will be down to a whole new generation of Windows (touch based) hardware being available.

Market share has changed because we now count the explosion in tablets devices, something that didn't exist in quantity before so with Windows not having a viable tablet OS (although Windows XP tablet edition 10 years ago was pretty good, there was just no hardware) of course the increase in new devices means a lower market share even if Win8 outsold WinXP. Whether Windows 8, 8.1 and 9 along with long overdue decent hardware reverses that trend remains to be seen, however with Haswell and Baytrail devices coming along with Snapdragon 800 and Tegra 4 it wouldn't surprise me to see Windows based tablets start to take decent market share. A rev 1 (touch based) OS and ropey hardware has meant a rocky start in that market although even there it's having some success.

There's a lot more to it than "lol, no one like metro derp".
 
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Macro said:
We've gone round this old argument a few times so I'm not going through it in detail again but there's a lot more to stuff than "lol metro sux for companies". Windows XP, possibly the most popular desktop OS since the year dot goes out of support in 6 months. Enterprises have known this and with Windows 7 being a great release started deploying generally a couple of years ago. The upshot of that means that the vast majority of business customers have either just completed or are still in the middle of deploying Windows7, a process which costs hundreds of thousands of pounds, often millions if a desktop hardware refresh is done at the same time. They were simple never going to start again straight away or stop mid way and change.

Consumers outside of enthusiasts very rarely upgrade an OS, they get a new one with a new device. Again after waiting 7 years with XP lots of people updated with W7 and have reasonably up to date hardware/OS and so the adoption of 8 will be more gradual by default.

Just to be contentious I tend to think Windows 7 would have done no better than Vista if it had been released first (at the same time) because of the changes it introduced. Vista changed everything from the driver model to dropping 16bit compatibility and so took the hit when billys 10 year old scanner with ropey drivers stopped working. Yes there were some bugs but it changed the game for MS desktop OS and gets an unfairly bad rep. Think back to the old days of WinXP, Since Vista generally speaking when was the last time you saw a "blaster" type virus outbreak or the old days of a bluescreen once a day?

In my opinion (such as it is) 8 will do the same for 9 (or whatever it's called). When the next OS appears the press and comments will be "that's what 8 should have been, I'll use it now". Part of that will be the OS will have been refined, part will be time has moved on so people are willing to update 7 based devices and part will be down to a whole new generation of Windows (touch based) hardware being available.

Market share has changed because we now count the explosion in tablets devices, something that didn't exist in quantity before so with Windows not having a viable tablet OS (although Windows XP tablet edition 10 years ago was pretty good, there was just no hardware) of course the increase in new devices means a lower market share even if Win8 outsold WinXP. Whether Windows 8, 8.1 and 9 along with long overdue decent hardware reverses that trend remains to be seen, however with Haswell and Baytrail devices coming along with Snapdragon 800 and Tegra 4 it wouldn't surprise me to see Windows based tablets start to take decent market share. A rev 1 (touch based) OS and ropey hardware has meant a rocky start in that market although even there it's having some success.

There's a lot more to it than "lol, no one like metro derp".
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Spot on!

Also the same as Windows ME then to Windows XP, prep the end user for change then release the improved OS, for example Windows ME to Windows XP, Windows Vista to Windows 7 and finally Windows 8 to Windows 9, spot the trend
 
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