> "To distance itself from the Windows 8 debacle, Microsoft is currently planning to drop the Windows 8 name and brand this next release as Windows 9."
I... I don't...
As opposed to what? Windows 8 2? Or Windows 8 SP2 I suppose. Still, one of the most ridiculous sentences I've read in a while
(edit: didn't realise they released 8.1, thought it was SP1. I guess I partially retract how stupid I think the sentence is)
Technically they could have, but do they have any history of doing that? (edit: didn't realise they released 8.1, thought it was SP1. I guess I partially retract how stupid I think the sentence is)
The sentence would have made a bit of sense if they had gone back to vista style naming, and called it windows <name> or something. But the last 2 releases have been called 7 and 8, is 9 really distancing itself from 8?
Yes, I would consider a full version increment to be a distancing. Most press that I've seen had been considering Windows "Threshold" (codename) as Windows 8.2. https://www.google.com/search?q=windows+8.2
Windows Phone went from 7 to 7.5, and then to 8. It's possible that they could have gone with Windows 8.5, too.
So, this is a blog post, quoting a blog post, describing rumours of an operating system release that is over a year away, with no specific features quoted, just a name and a bunch of "it may ___s?"
Hacker News, you can do better than upvoting this garbage to the front page.
Microsoft is in an unlucky spot. They sell to businesses and are trying to transition to something closer to Apple's business model, which is kind of a tricky proposition. Consumer and business have totally different buying cycles and expectations.
Also, Apple spent like a decade rebuilding their business to make it work before the iPhone happened. It started with the iMac, then iPod, then iPhone, then iPad, but with each one they learned something, killed some businesses, started new businesses, and in general worked to keep getting better at what they do.
Microsoft is only a year or two maybe into trying to do the same and until recently they haven't had the same kind of singular focus on it because they are just so freeking big. Apple was big, but Microsoft is a company of 99,139 people.
Think about moving that many different interests in the same direction. That takes time.
I hear no end of non-techie people cursing Windows 8 and its metro interface. As a latest example, one of my friends said he wanted to buy a new Windows laptop, but walked out of the store after being really confused using Windows 8 (quote was: "I don't know how I will be able to get work done in this.").
Personally, just the sheer learning curve to help someone set up a new Windows 8 laptop was ridiculous. I had to search the web for answers on things like locating the control panel.
Whereas Vista had quality and "annoyance" problems (new security UI), Windows 8 seems to have all the quality, but behind a blunderous user experience.
This tells me that Microsoft has really screwed this up. We techies quickly learn the new UI and adapt to it, figuring out how it works. It seems like the new UI was developed with a techie mindset, and but people outside of tech don't get it.
Or perhaps there's a simpler explanation. The Windows 8 UI really is an awkward meshing of "tablet-like" and desktop-like experience, with both experiences compromised. And it's filled with bad decisions, such as Metro-only Skype that requires you to convert your existing Skype account to a Windows login. Don't want to mess with your Skype account? Then you install "desktop" Skype. Two Skypes. Two different experiences. Seriously? You have gotta be kidding me. How could you ship that?
Hit windows key, type in 'environment'. Where the hell is change environment variables?
A lot of the really important techie menus items are missing from Windows 8, it's actually pretty useless as a techie interface without modding vanilla, which I'm not a fan of because I use so many different machines.
Also try using server 2012 with a remote desktop connection. Nightmare.
NB: This was true last time I was using a win 8 machine, may have changed now.
You're right, it sucks for a techie too. I'm just surprised at all the "Windows 8 ain't so bad" comments around here, so I assumed I might be missing something.
People skeptical about Windows 8.1 should try one of the new 8-inch tablets ( I tried a Dell Venue 8 Pro). The Modern UI just makes so much sense on it. Very satisfying experience once you spend 5mins getting used to it ..
I must be a really weird person, since I like Windows 8 a lot and I actually liked Windows Vista (albeit I used the later in the SP1 iteration and with a decent machine)
What you're not getting is a not-invented-here scripting language with idiosyncrasies deeply coupled to .Net.
If only they had just improved the command line...rather than force every admin to learn a throwaway scripting language that adds no long term value once you use any other platform.
As a CLI it's hideously baroque. It brings in all the mental overhead of OOP without the tooling needed to make OOP comfortable to work with. OOP is pleasant in .NET languages thanks to the relationship between Visual Studio and all information the .NET framework has about classes and assemblies - all the documentation around the object you're manipulating is right there.
The lightweight-but-still-too-heavy Powershell ISE leaves the user completely in the dark about the .NET framework.
So are we now seeing the confirmation of the anti-Star Trek Curse[1]? Windows 9 will be OK, 10 will be terrible, 11 will be OK, and so on...
Microsoft's new leadership needs to start thinking about resigning itself to being the stable operating system choice. Nothing fancy, nothing sexy, no major "rebirth" to keep up with the Jonses ever other version. They are an enterprise operating system for 95% of businesses out there, and businesses don't want rapid change. They will continue to buy Windows in huge numbers as long as they can rely upon it. It's too expensive to switch to anything else. If MS wants to keep turning over the apple cart to try and stay in the consumer market, they're going to upset their true core audience (IMHO).
I can see your points, but this is EXACTLY how Nokia and RIM went down the drain.
They both thought that as long as we just churn out new iterations of the same thing, it'll keep people on.
Look how that went...
I get the impression that Microsoft is trying as hard as it can to be... hip and sexy? They're not very good at it, though, which is unfortunate for them.
Maybe one of their core problems is the fact that the market in question is, well, not a market. They are only competing with themselves and they don't even need to compete. Why would I care about Windows 8? It doesn't do things that Windows 7 can't do, save for the modern UI, which I'd probably try to stay away from in the first place (because it is aimed at a different type of machine than the one I'd be running it on).
So what's left for them? How are they going to convince ME that their newest operating system is worth buying because of how much better it is?
I don't know. The one thing that seems to have made Windows 8 innovative over Windows 7 was also a reason it's not being adopted and the only reason for its current adoption rate is because it's simply sold on new hardware, whether we like it or not. The other features MS added to Windows 8 were mostly catching up with the rest. I'd seen things like one dialog for all copying actions years prior. The same goes for allowing an actual task bar on your second monitor.
They're throwing away so much money on marketing something that I don't know if they need to market it in the first place, and if they care to, they might want to consider replacing the whole marketing department because when Microsoft's marketing makes the news, it's not in a good manner...
The difference is that there were plenty of competitors whose commodity products were overtaking even the premium, business-friendly features in BlackBerry gear, just as generic PCs eventually made dedicated high-end workstations obsolete. Right now, the only credible competitor to Windows for a user-facing business PC operating system is OS X, and even then a lot more of the serious business software is better on Windows today so Apple's penetration seems to be mainly laptops for management and sales roles.
There are plenty of ways Microsoft could develop Windows that would play to their existing customer base and their established strengths; I've argued at length in previous posts that Microsoft are the best positioned business in the world to push a "private cloud" trend, for one possible example, and that they could offer genuine benefits to businesses that would justify upgrading their installations. All they have to do is regain the focus they had a few years ago and play the cards they've been dealt to best effect, and as far as desktop Windows goes, I believe that means not rocking the boat trying to be too clever and "consumery", but instead building out the technical strengths under the hood and making them easy and familiar to access.
But if their next desktop OS is another turkey, I suspect their luck will start to run out. It will take them several years to even try a different strategy, and by then I expect at least one major competing platform will have reached enough maturity to take them head on and start stealing away the big business software market. Apple could do it -- they have the technical smarts, the war chest, and the scale to pull it off -- but I don't think they will under their current management team. I suspect a more direct challenge might come from a start-up with a big name backer building something on Linux. While "year of Linux on the desktop" is still a running joke, the likes of Android phones/tablets, Chromebooks, and probably soon Steam Machines show it can work as a non-geek's OS given the right front-end. Looking 3/4/5 years from now, around the time Microsoft's next-but-one generation user OS arrived, a huge amount could have happened in an industry this fast-paced.
Apple wasn't a competitior to anyone in the phone industry, right until they made the iPhone and blew everyone out of the water. My point still stands.
Apple didn't blow BlackBerry out of the water overnight, though. The BB phones available around the time the original iPhone hit the market were competitive. The brand was strong. They had technical innovations like a high resolution, full colour display several years before Retina iPhones arrived.
Then they dropped the ball even harder than Microsoft when it came to the mobile Internet, persisting with a proprietary browser with insufficient market share and other non-standard tools for far too long. They also released some ill-timed new products that fell behind the curve, such as the Torch that still had a "normal" resolution display when everyone else was doubling up.
In short, it wasn't BB continuing to churn out the same kind of products that led to their downfall because the iPhone arrived, it was them falling behind the curve and putting out inferior products for several years even after the competition had arrived and started to become established.
Right now, there is no iPhone-level disruption in the end user PC operating system market, but if someone started the ball rolling this year and made their entrance to compete with Windows 9, they could be a serious competitor by the following generation if Windows 9 chokes the way Vista and Windows 8 did.
Businesses don't want rapid change, which is why taking risks every-other release is fine- businesses aren't going to upgrade the OS every four years anyway.
Idunno, the idea of unifying a tablet/phone UI seems to be a good idea with the massive shift to mobile devices. MS stands the risk of being completely left behind.
I think the Metro UI could've worked if they'd bolted a taskbar/start-menu onto it, as a concession to the fact that notebooks/desktops aren't tablets and have enough screen-real-estate for such things and aren't really a good fit for "hot corners".
I don't think users give a crap about the Windows Store - the only people angry about that are developers, and maybe the 5 people who bought a Windows 8 RT device.
Yeah, when you prevent the developers from developing for your runtime it results in barren wasteland. When your new and celebrated platform is barren wasteland the conversation about your OS devolves into the barrens chat. Which is exactly what happened with win 8
The constant churn is frustrating. Since Vista almost every release has had vast sweeping UI changes, and it just feels so pointless.
To me, the perfect example is the MS office icons - in 7, MS dropped the text-labels off the taskbar entries. This would make sense if they had any kind of consistency, but MS office has had a complete makeover with every release, not even sporting a consistent color-scheme.
Major new releases are hardly inappropriate. There's still a lot of change in computers. Recall XP had no wireless support until SP2, and it hasn't been until Win7 or so that SSD's have been handled optimally (TRIM and so forth)
There really haven't been many major changes to the x86 architecture since the 386, with the notable exception of 64-bit recently. Pretty much everything else should be handled with driver updates or at worst a service pack.
I wouldn't even object to paying for those kinds of upgrades, if I needed them, if I could take them without getting a bunch of unwanted tinkering with the UI and toolset.
I eventually gave up on Windows as my primary OS because of many small, incremental breakages like changes to the batch language (without really fixing any of its serious shortcomings), it becoming impossible to do a simple file search from Explorer, then it becoming impossible to change file associations without a 3rd-party tool. But hey, if you want an animated dog for no reason, that's no problem!
I still need Windows 7 for some things (3D software is still almost exclusively Windows-only) and I still find certain things about OS X a bit clunky, but overall I'm rather happy that I no longer have to care about what Microsoft might mess up in Windows 9.
There really haven't been many major changes to the x86 architecture since the 386
CPU architecture is hardly all that matters to the core OS
Pretty much everything else should be handled with driver updates or at worst a service pack.
Driver updates work fine for adding support for a new model of graphics card, but when you introduce a whole new kind of device (e.g. WiFi, SSD) the implications reach into the OS itself. They managed WiFi in a service pack for XP, but it was both a pretty unprecedented level of change for a service pack, and always felt kind of tacked-on.
Oh, I forgot to mention threading in my other comment. Windows 7 was the first time the OS seemed to do a good job of both scheduling userspace AND core OS functions across N cores. I'm guessing that would be outside of the scope of a service pack.
As long as OEMs pre-install Windows, and ISVs make binaries for Windows, people will "buy"* and use Windows. But times are changing. Consumers don't upgrade PCs as often as they used to, or they switch most home use to tablets. And most software used by consumers these days are web applications.
Anecdote: I'm a software engineer who develops using Windows. But at home I rarely turn on a computer. I do most everything from my iPad. Though to be fair I often do most of my digital errands from work on my PC.
* Most consumers never directly pay for a Windows, or any OS really. They get whatever the hardware vendor installs.
I believe they should get rid of different versions and just make one. That'd also be great when ordering custom laptops where some features somehow depend on which version of windows you pick (i.e. 'Fresh start' on Sony).
If they dont do that they should at least make a list of comprehensive differences between the editions. The page for comparing versions seems to be made by the marketing dept and is mostly fluff. I found out the hard way that professional versions dont support multi monitor RDP and NFS shares. You need to buy enterprise for that. Try finding this out ahead of time using the website.
I agree in that they need to leave the UI the hell alone unless there is a concrete benefit, but metro? Fine for everything except getting real work done, that is.
I like Windows 8 but there is like 10 people using it. Most of the people are still on 7. I really don't see the need for a Windows 9 that will just bring driver troubles, incompatibility and inconsistency.
I like Vista SP1, but there's like 10 people using it. Most of the people are still on XP. I really don't see the need for a Windows 7 that will just bring driver troubles, incompatibility and inconsistency.
Was 95 a dud? That's not how I remember it, although it was a huge change from 3.x. You also miss Windows 2000 which was a very good OS though not really sold to consumers.
2000 wasn't server only, it was an iteration of the NT brand that got merged with the Chicago (9X) line since XP. Windows 2008 was in fact a server only version.
I wonder if MS would have less trouble if they were doing the integration of windows brands in the same way that they did with NT and 9X.
