Microsoft has failed - Their actions erase any lingering doubt

Semiaccurate ^ | Nov 14, 2012 | Charlie Demerjian

[tacticalogic]

Love or hate Microsoft a good bit of hardware innovation has come about because Microsoft stayed away from hardware design.

I've asked many an Apple fan who brags about Apple's "business model" if they think the industry would be better off today if Microsoft had adopted that same model of proprietary hardware. I have yet to have any of them say they think it would.

[ShadowAce]

But as far as something people can use... FAIL.

Shrug. I can't help it if you can't learn it. But it does work extremely well--both as a server and as a desktop.

[Future Snake Eater]

We have some Linux at the server level and even a few Macs sprinkled around my current unit, but at the BCTs, especially, it’s MS all the way (unless you count VMWare).

[Greysard]

Try this and you’ll love it: http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/download.asp

It was terribly buggy when I tried it. Didn't work well at all.

Win8 has so many stupid design decisions that the only sane answer to it is downgrading to Win7. I don't want to list here all the problems with Win8, there are many helpful web sites on the Internet that will tell you more than you'd ever wanted to hear on the subject :-)

For purposes of full disclosure, I have a modern (but not touch) notebook here that runs the latest free -RC. It will expire in January, and then I will just install something usable there - perhaps Win7, perhaps Linux Mint, perhaps the latest Fedora. Win8 will not be considered - even if it is free. I'm not willing to lose productivity just to play MS' marketing games. What idiot there decided to replace hierarchical menu with a flat one, to begin with? But I promised to keep the list of stupidities secret, so I'm done here :-)

[ShadowAce]

Yup—it’s still the major corporate environment. It doesn’t mean that it’s the only viable one, though.

[M-cubed]

I’d love to fail like MS has failed. The fact is MS has positioned themselves quite effectively as a necessary evil. Yeah almost nobody actually likes their apps or OS, but you’re gonna use them <<

Yup!...My Great-great Grandfather owned one of the better Buggy whip business’ in the Northeast...I remember my grandmother telling me.....MY!..My!...How things have changed.../s

[M-cubed]

I’d love to fail like MS has failed. The fact is MS has positioned themselves quite effectively as a necessary evil. Yeah almost nobody actually likes their apps or OS, but you’re gonna use them <<

Yup!...My Great-great Grandfather owned one of the better Buggy whip business’ in the Northeast...I remember my grandmother telling me.....MY!..My!...How things have changed.../s

[zeugma]

But as far as something people can use... FAIL.

Fail? In what way? I hooked up a friend of mine with Linux about 2 years ago with Fedora 12. After the inevitable confusion with something new, he's doing fine with it. I recently asked him if he wanted me to upgrade him to F16, and he declined. He's happy with it, and doesn't see the need to upgrade because it does everything he wants, and then some.  BTW, he's a 60 year old non-geek. I'd not call that a fail.

[for-q-clinton]

works great for me.

[for-q-clinton]

works great for me.
Oh wait you don’t have the full version of 8? There’s a huge difference between the two. That can explain the issues you had.

[Greysard]

Oh wait you don’t have the full version of 8? There’s a huge difference between the two. That can explain the issues you had.

Perhaps. There was no release until a couple weeks ago. I did my testing before that. If I come across the released Win8 binaries I might test that. But, as I heard, they haven't removed the Metro UI yet :-)

[for-q-clinton]

I have a surface and love the metro UI there. For desktop though I have the start button back, so I have the best of both worlds.