5. Stop trying to look like Apple.
Stop it from crashing ...for starters.
Go back to DOS.
Advise the free market beneficiary CEO to stop sponsoring communism.
The tablet and phone operating systems (Windows Phone OS and Windows RT) should LONG LONG ago have become ONE unified OS. They keep saying they’ll do it but it’s YEARS late.
I don’t hate the idea of MS having apps, but there should just be MS APPS! Exact same app on phone, tablet and if you choose to fire it up on your desktop ok!
Just doing this, and only this, will fix almost everything wrong with their market placement.
Then they can focus on making the desktop a better DESKTOP and separately focus on making their apps work on and integrate with everything INCLUDING OPTIONALLY THE DESKTOP.
How hard can it be after this many years?
I like Windows 8. I’m one of the few. But they need to push the desktop as “it can also run apps if you need it to.” Not “you all need to be running apps.”
If they focused on the first instead of the second, they’d murder Google and Apple in the blink of an eye.
Microsoft is the GM of software.
I carefully avoid both in my quest for things that work.
What Microsoft should have done was kept it, and made it available as an OS for those with little or no computer experience, and bundled a free version of the Office suite with it.
Instead, they rushed out Vista, which was pure crap.
In the heyday of IBM - say the 1960s customers paid millions for hardware (mainframe hardware generally) and the software was sort of thrown in for free.
Then came the 1980s and MS’s heyday and they realized that the hardware was relatively cheap and now the real money was to be made in software. And MS made truckloads. And IBM suffered.
Now fast-forward to the 2010’s and the business model has again shifted. Money is now being made in “apps”, in “eyeballs”, “clicks”, and in some cases by selling specialized hardware that fills a niche like phones, tablets, game consoles and the like. Or in some cases by selling an integrated HW/SW experience as in Apple.
Just like IBM before them MS is fighting a paradigm shift and a tweak of their UI or their pricing is not going to be enough to change this trend. Nobody wants to fork over big $$$ for either just an OS or for an office suite. And moreover, the culture in Redmond is apparently not good - because the Microsofties have read the writing on the wall.
Figure out how to disconnect a USB hard disk. Most thumb drives can be ejected most of the time, but I have rarely had that work on an actual USB hard drive. Sometimes by killing windows explorer I can get it to let go of the drive, but other times I just have to pull the cable and hope nothing crashes. Even if I have nothing else using the drive, Windows will grab hold of it and not let go.
Good article actually. I got to play with a Surface last week. My son was given one by his boss cause he hated it. I could see why after playing with it for a couple hours.
A good, well-reasoned analysis. In the end, I think M$ is going to have to decide whether it’s going to be a hardware company, a software company, or like Apple, a content-experience delivery company that happens to do both. Apple can give away software if it wants to, as an enabler to making money in one of the other two ways. M$ is still clinging to the old model which between linux and Android, will take them into the death spiral in the end.
Offer a supported XP. I would gladly pay an annual fee to keep operating XP safely rather than continue to struggle with the 8.1 nightmare. I’d even remove 8.1 and put XP on my new computer.
2. Make Windows for tablets freeIOW, give away your product. No can do.3. Release touch-first Office, bundle it
Apple can do it - because it sells the hardware. Recommendations 2 and 3 can only be done by a hardware vendor. If so, MS will be operating on AAPL’s business model rather than its own.
Liquidate
This is the age of devices, as evidenced by going to any public place and seeing people passing time using digital pacifiers in the form of smartphones and tablets. Everywhere you look, someone will be communicating over the net with one. It’s a multi-trillion dollar market segment. Microsoft should get a clue that absolutely nobody is using a Microsoft product to do any of this. No. Bod. Dee.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever seen a human being using a Windows phone or a Surface tablet in public with your own eyes. See? Nobody raised their hands.
Microsoft responds to this by announcing the Q4 2015 release of Windows 10.2.a Service Pack 3 for big rectangular sheet metal home desktop Grandpa boxes. You know, the machines you need to burn all your CD-ROMs on. It’ll only cost $199.00 every year of so, assuming you only need the ‘Home’ version that is.
Hysterical and sad.
Before MSFT can fix anything, the author of this piece should fix the grammatically incorrect heading.
#1 — Provide the first formally verified consumer OS.
#2 — Provide formally verified compilers for said OS.
#3 — Stop the focus on ‘looks’ and go with quality; see numbers 1 & 2.
#4 — Provide verified libraries for cryptography and security.
#4 in particular should *not* be produced in C (or a C-like language), but instead in something where correctness and maintainability were design-goals of the language. (Ada and Eiffel are the ONLY two languages I know of that have ‘maintainability’ as a design goal; and both have correctness as a design-goal as well.)