Posted on 10/28/2012 6:20:02 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Microsoft is onto something. With Windows 8 it's better positioned than both Apple and Google to ride the coming laptop-tablet convergence wave.
It might even eventually give Microsoft a shot at the all-important smartphone market. To understand why, let's count the ways in which Windows 8 is best.
Laptops and tablets are converging. And only Microsoft has an OS that's fit for that coming unification of devices.
Apple has no convergence strategy at this time. That's because it fiercely guards product-specific profit streams and just doesn't go in for making things that cannibalise its own sales.
So, Mac Mini is hobbled to protect iMac. iMac is hobbled to protect Mac Pro. And iPad isn't allowed to wander into MacBook's territory.
Likewise, Chrome OS isn't a fully viable notebook OS. And nor is Android. Windows 8 is the only OS that's a genuine goer for both tablets and laptops.
The interface formerly known as Metro and now labelled 'Modern' is quite literally the most modern of touchscreen UIs. It's not perfect. But it's fresh. It's contemporary. And it's polished.
It combines the responsiveness of Apple's iOS with the power and configurability of Google Android. And it looks better than both.
You can argue the toss over the advantages of ARM vs x86 processors. Will ARM continue to have a power efficiency edge? Will the raw power of Intel's x86 chip eventually win the day?
It doesn't matter because with Windows 8, Microsoft now supports both.
OK, there's an x86 compatible version on Android out there, too. But for now it's more of an experiment than a serious play in the market. Meanwhile, when it comes to ultramobile operating systems, Apple's iOS is ARM-only..
Multi-tasking is something that Windows has always nailed, from thread management at the kernel level to the way the UI presents presents multiple apps.
Now it's even better than ever thanks to a choice between old-school task bar application management on the desktop and app "snapping" in the Modern UI.
Microsoft has also added some gesture-driven app switching to the Modern UI. Put simply, Windows 8 is miles ahead of iOS and Android for multi-tasking and app switching.
OK, this bit only applies to the regular x86 version of Windows 8 and not the ARM-compatible Windows RT, flavour. But only Windows 8 offers you a fully contemporary, touch-enabled ultramobile OS that also supports the huge ecosystem of legacy PC applications and delivers powerful multi-tasking.
It really is one OS to rule them all.
Windows 8 isn't perfect. Limitations abound, including the peculiarly neutered desktop mode in Windows RT. Then there's the pitiful number of touch-enabled apps compared with Android and iOS.
But there's plenty of time to get forensic with Windows 8's shortcomings. For now, let's focus on the fact that it's a huge step forward for MS.
For you, it means the prospect of genuine device consolidation. Tablet and laptop combined in one device that's more than the sum of its parts.
If merit counts for anything, here's hoping Windows 8 will make a tangible dent in both Android and iOS.
Why yes, they did. They also mentioned that Microsoft mentioned they had "limited supplies" which were sold out after a week of ore-orders of the unseen product. On the day of actual release, the again "limited supplies" of the Surface were sold out within 24 hours. That is nowhere close to seventeen minutes it took to sell out the available iPod Minis.
The Yahoo! News article on the sell out of the Surface had all of twenty comments on the subject. . . Most referencing the limited supply the purchasers ran into!
And recall, Microsoft apparently felt it necessary to offer a $100 spiff to attract buyers. Apple has never had to do that for a new product release.
Yeah. I heard they only made 3 million of them, and the $100 coupons were only for the first 100 customers at each store. They were probably all gone in the first 30 mintues. What time did these “pundits” go visting?
I actually agree with you. Last week I went to a user group meeting and only took my iPad to the meeting because I knew I could manage 99% of problems through it either using Citrix interface or VPN.
Good one!
That “0.00003% of the world used...”?
Heh.
Your words are running through cisco boxes and my code right now, Sparky. In effect, you’re using it, you’re just too ignorant to know you’re using it.
That said, Microsoft’s “innovations” aren’t. They’re poor attempts to ape other market innovators. Since Gates stepped back from leading engineering at MSFT, they’ve done precious little innovation. That’s the #1 problem Microsoft has now. Microsoft has run their snout down one blind alley after another, pissing away time and engineering resources when they tried to cram Windows into places it wasn’t going to go. Windows has pretty much all the features it ever needed - and one could argue that it did as of WinXP. Office has done precious little in the way of innovation, and for Mac users, Microsoft forced a gratuitous UI change down on users which didn’t impress anyone. When you’re used to moving through an Excel spreadsheet on your keyboard, you’d better leave the hot keys and menus alone for users... but they couldn’t.
As it is, Microsoft’s path is somewhere between an industrial company and a utility... from a purely business perspective, they’ve become a cash-flow generator, not a growth company. They’ve build up a huge wad of excess cash (like $66B), and pretty soon investors are going to do what they’ve done to other cash-generating tech companies like Intel, cisco, et al: force them to disburse that money in dividends. If Microsoft won’t do that, then there will come a point where the stock isn’t worth owning, because without growth, they’re not returning value to the shareholders.
But the worse part of the stock problem is that a flat share price becomes especially destructive inside a company where the comp plans were based in large part on stock appreciation. Because the share price doesn’t appreciate significantly, the only path to higher compensation inside MSFT (or similar companies) is to move into management. So you get a bunch of engineers who go into management... which results in more bureaucracy, more meetings, more approvals necessary to do anything, etc. The go-go cultures of all these tech companies dies shortly after the upward trajectories of their stock prices level off. And Microsoft’s trajectory has been flat-sideways, rattling between the low 20’s to low 30’s for a decade+ now. WIthout throwing off a huge dividend, stock option grants aren’t rewarding performance by hot engineering staff to put in the death march hours to come up with something insanely aggressive.
But that’s not going to happen inside MSFT now. I have some buddies who have worked at MSFT in the last decade. The corporate culture they describe inside the engineering departments at MSFT is horrible. Everyone is working on short-term goals to make sure that they don’t get fired - as a result of MSFT’s employee ranking system. Let’s say you have a team with 10 people. Managers are told that there will be only two reviews above-average, seven average and one employee they have to finger for dismissal. The result of this system (which came into being in some form or other in many tech companies after the crash) is that engineers spend way too much time politicking and brown-nosing with management (or trying to get into management, which is relatively immune to these hard-quota review systems) instead of innovating and coding.
The result are products like Zune. How hard is it to build a MP3 player? It’s trivial hardware. It has a very limited software base. Apple made a killing on these devices, and more importantly, the follow-through revenue from iTunes. Microsoft? They shot themselves in both feet: first, when they didn’t grok the product space, second when they’ve just killed most of it in the last couple months. A whole lot of money and effort, down the drain.
The big growth is downwards in size - the mobile market. Apple and Google copped that clue, Microsoft is very late to the game. They bumbled WinCE and phones in a big way. Now they’re betting on WinRT and Surface. Maybe it catches on... the history of how MSFT’s stuff actually works in the mobile space, however, doesn’t inspire confidence. Once again, they’re late to market, they’ve allowed others to set the bar and gain traction. Real innovation requires you to be first, not second or third.
The best thing Microsoft could do now is take their hottest engineers, do a spin-out with a pre-packaged comp plan that says “If you deliver product X by time T, you will be compensated with $C amount of CASH (not stock, CASH).” And they’re going to have to put seven figures on that number, at the very least, considering how far behind the curve they are.
I needed a good laugh tonight after driving 5 hours in the rain. Thanks for posting.
“The new Microsoft Windows incarnation, like the ribbon interface before it, is a solution to a problem that people weren’t complaining about.”
On tablets, they were. MS tried running Windows of all kinds on tablets for a decade - and got pretty much nowhere.
Apple figured out how to do tablet interfaces right, and now MS is trying to mimic that without looking like an also-ran; not knowing what the actual secret to the tablet UX is, they’re failing out of the gate.
Others have pointed out to me real problems with having the phone be the main unit. But I still strongly believe the pad will eventually become merely a larger screen for the phone.
Desktops and laptops may still have a separate existence, but I suspect they’ll be used mainly for specialty or heavy-duty purposes. The phone will be the primary.
And I absolutely stand behind the idea that an OS working seamlessly on all platforms will win out. Presently a lot of people are having to learn three OSs: phone, pad, PC.
That’s just nuts.
Thanks for an excellent post.
I think your scenario shows pretty clearly that tech companies more or less by definition have a limited lifespan, at least in the lead. It is not possible to grow exponentially indefinitely.
Apple has so far managed to do so, but they’re the exception that proves the rule. And it is likely their doing so was based pretty much on Jobs. It will be very interesting if they can keep up the same pace over the next few years, but I doubt it.
In my house, we have two Macs, one PC, one Asus transformer and an iPad. My preference is Win 7, Android, OSX, iOS.
I’ve sat down and used the new windows interface and I must says that in order I like win 7, android, OSX, iOS, then Win 8.
Here’s looking forward to Win 9.
I seriously doubt that notebooks and desktops will disappear in 5 years for the business users. For mass consumption? Maybe.
A lot of light-duty users are already shifting to phones or tablets as their primary Internet device. A similar shift already took place in 2008, when laptops started outselling desktops. They are "good enough," but phones will never replace laptops which will never replace desktops for simple reasons of physics: Space and power.
No matter how good the processor in a phone gets, a laptop can have ten of them, and a desktop fifty (or the equivalent in fewer chips). Anything a phone or tablet can do, a laptop or desktop will be able to do faster. Until someone comes up with a micro-fusion reactor that produces unlimited power in nearly no space and weight, larger machines have a permanent advantage.
I think Apple is onto something with Siri -- not the voice commands, but the way it processes them. The phone is essentially a terminal that offloads the heavy processing tasks to a remote data center. Even with fast networks, that won't do for anything that requires real-time responses, but it could expand the tasks available for portable devices.
... and just like that, the "why doesn't Microsoft..." question answers itself.
This is typical Microsoft, they just do whatever they want to do, and the customer and the industry be damned... similar to IBM back in the day, we can do whatever and the customer will just take it, we control the world... reality is that’s not so true anymore.
Why anyone would run a windows OS on a Server of any type is beyond me, Give me a flavor of Unix anyday when dealing with servers.
Lets just clear a few misconceptions up.
1) It does not take “MONTHS” to get permission to sell an application. This is a flat out lie. Typical approval for a new application to be sold via the AppStore is 2 weeks. This does vary based on number of submissions etc, but its a 2 week window, not months.
2) As to developers, developers are people, they are looking to make money and they go where the money is, period.
3) MS Store for phone is a wasteland, because there is no money to be made there. Don’t believe me? Simply ask why Angry Birds skipped the platform? They had a certified hit, making over 50Million in gross sales in just a few weeks and they completely skipped MS.. because they knew the effort for the reward wasn’t there.
4) Visual Basic was probably the worst piece of crap ever unleashed in the development arena. BASIC stands for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. MS doing what they did with VB set out gobs of developers who really had no clue what they were doing and to this day caused more headaches than its worth. In a world where OO was clearly the movement, MS ensured that junk code would live on for decades.. Thank you for that MS. Thank you.
5 The single greatest thing Apple has done, is not the iPhone, it is indeed the app store. As a software developer and vendor who has sold software for well over 20 years the App Store made selling and distributing your app simple as pie. That is what revolutionized and commoditized software! Prior to the app store existing, you wanted to sell software, you needed to get bogged down in minutia that had nothing to with your software... Get a vendor account set up with your bank and a credit card company, (or paypal account) pay all fees, deal with chargebacks, fraud, distribution issues, etc etc etc.. It was a pain in the but. Apple offloaded all of that, and for 30% of the gross, you can simply publish your app and deal with marketing it.. nothing more.. as someone who did all the rest of that crap for years, It was a bargain. I can now not waste my time and energy on that nonsense, and just focus on making solid software and marketing.
MS moving into tablet is interesting, and certainly idea of buying 1 machine that is both.. MONITOR is the tablet and the computer .. could be a game changer, since spending $400-$500 for one device that can be both is a monetary incentive for them.. still though if they aren’t usable WHO CARES.
The tiles interface for windows is a fustercluck, it certainly will get adoption and could shift the market, but I really don’t know how much. Tablets and even Laptops have to be compact, effective, light, etc. The idea of lugging around a 15 or 17 inch monitor that is also your tablet and weighs in a multiple lbs I don’t think is going to be enticing to many people.
Its going to be interesting to see how this goes, MS’s bread and butter has always been the enterprise, and frankly they are incredibly late to the game to stem the opening of this market. The BYOD model is being adopted by even the staunchiest of industries, as it is a huge economic boon for them.. let the employee use their own thing rather than us spending $500 each to buy something for them... this means the argument to adopt a single solution isn’t what it once was.
I do agree that MS arrival could change the landscape, but the reports about this interface are almost entirely negative... and that’s a problem. USEABILITY is key... and a huge learning curve and reliability problems won’t help MS in this space.
Just like Android can do more low level things than iOS lets you do, yet apple owns the tablet market and is the single biggest hardware smartphone seller, bar none.
The day of the geeks driving consumer and even to a lesser extent enterprise tech are over. The typical person expects usability simple and intuitive... Obviously there are niche’s where this doesn’t apply.. but the typical user wants to do what they want without a huge curve... and I don’t think MS is there.
“I think Apple is onto something with Siri — not the voice commands, but the way it processes them. The phone is essentially a terminal that offloads the heavy processing tasks to a remote data center.”
That’s nice if you live in a metro area but those of us in fly over country and flaky coverage want as much happening locally as posible.
The interface looks like it is meant to appeal to a generation if fast-food cashiers, dependent on a visual touch screen to make selections... Very odd.
Well, understand that Apple nearly died.
It isn’t common knowledge, but when Jobs was brought back... Apple was really in a for-real death spiral. The board was at a point where they thought “What’s the worst that could happen? Jobs re-boots the company and it comes back... “
because if Jobs cratered the company, that wasn’t any different than where it was going the day before they brought him back. Bringing Jobs back was a Hail-Mary long shot, and they pulled it off. And Apple’s death was literally only a couple months out at that point. They were bleeding cash, sales were crashing, there was no confidence inside the company that management knew their ass from a hot rock.
I sincerely doubt that Apple will be able to continue on their trajectory without Jobs. Some people like to pooh-pooh Jobs’ contribution, but the guy had a knack for seeing the future, then telling Apple’s engineers “invent this or else.” Sometimes, he was a royal jerk, but the results show that he wasn’t stupid. His time at NeXT was a very useful education for him, and (in hindsight) what Apple needed when they failed two or three times at a “next generation” MacOS. Apple has adopted large chunks of NeXT’s software architecture and the rest, as they say, is history.
One of these days, I’d like to find a NeXT cube in good shape. In their day, they were a super-sexy workstation, albeit a tad slow due to the DPS stuff.
The other problem for the US tech industry is that management thinks that Indian and Chinese engineers are interchangeable with US-bred engineers. Having been in many meetings with engineers from all over the world, I can tell you that what Dick Feynman observed in Brazil in physics education (rote learning with no understanding of the practical implementation or consequences) is true in Indian and Chinese engineering staff. They have no cultural gestalt to “break the rules.” They’re the perfect bureaucrats who, if you give them a perfect specification, will crank out lots of code that might do what you want... if you perfectly specified your problem.
If you didn’t... good luck with that.
If you were trying to invent the future... you’re going to be waiting a long, long, long time for these guys who think “outside the box” and create it.
I’d like to observe one more thing:
I LIKE the fact that Apple takes a couple weeks to give someone permission to sell an app in AppStore. Wanna know why? Because in those few weeks, Apple is checking out the app, and more importantly, they’re checking out WHO WROTE IT.
This is a security detail that most people are overlooking. One of the problems with the shareware/freeware ethos in software is that the vast majority of the people downloading and running apps don’t have the technical know-how to detect an app that is going to steal your credentials, run up your phone bill or data bill. They have no idea who is actually behind most of these apps. They have no idea what the app is actually doing on their computer or phone.
Apple’s investigation into the app and the developer is a Good Thing[tm] IMO.
As for Visual Basic: I rather agree with you. The problem is, there is a demand on the desktop for a scripting/programming language that can create macros for Office, scripts for repetitive tasks on the OS, etc. Microsoft has had little to do with any of the scripting or interpreted programming languages that have come out in the last 10+ years, and they have a huge NIH syndrome going on there.
re: the App Store. I agree with you vehemently. People who have never written s/w don’t know that there are hundreds of thousands of clever, smart and eager s/w developers out there who can’t get their apps noticed and don’t want to just give them away as shareware/freeware. The real barrier to starting up a s/w company isn’t the brainpower to create a good app out of a good idea - it’s the marketing, sales and support issues that come into view when you finally ship. In some startups I’ve worked at, when we were writing the s/w, there were three of us engineers... and when we finally shipped, the company grew to nine people overnight, and the other six people were all of sales/marketing/support/accounting/shipping. Literally in the space of two months, we had to hire all those non-technical people.
With the App Store, a bunch of those people aren’t needed. It’s sheer genius that really understood the s/w market.
Thanks for this post. I remember the Gil Amelio years at Apple (mid 90s) when the company was lost in the wilderness.
I also agree (sadly) with your assessment that the company will not long survive its founder. I hope I am wrong and that another visionary will take the helm. When Jobs died, someone wrote that Apple had five years’ worth of his ideas in the pipeline yet to be implemented. So far I’ve seen (lately) a larger iPhone and a smaller iPad. They’ll run through those ideas fast. Then what?
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