Windows 8 takes a kick in the head.

[Link: news.yahoo.com]


The last few lines of the story are the most interesting to me.  Never thought about it, but if you worked in a big corporate environment and IT installed Windows 8, you'd have to literally shut down parts of the company while you provided extensive training just for simple navigation of windows 8.  

Never thought of it because I'm not in that environment, but certainly interesting. Interested to see how this play out in the future. 

What I find even more interesting are teh comments below the article.  Microsoft seems like a rutterless ship.

Windows is really good at dropping the ball but this article is a little light on reality. At the bottom of the article...

"Nielsen says he plans to stick with Windows 7 until Windows 9 is released. He has an especially unfavorable view of Windows 8 for "knowledge workers ... in the office". This may be the group least likely to see Windows 8 anytime soon, however, thanks to years-long corporate support contracts and conservative IT departments. "

Corporate America stuck with windows 2000 when "XP was garbage". They stuck with windows XP when "Vista was garbage". Most waited until Windows 7. Corporate America doesn't switch operating systems every time a new one shows up. Windows 7 is fairly recent and good. IMO corporate America won't be switching operating systems until Windows 9 anyway. Nielsen and the "Knowledge workers...in the office" will be upgrading at the same time.

Microsofts problems IMO :

1.They have never really done anything insanely innovative since the first windows OS that started the monopoly ball rolling.

2.The guy with the passion...the one who started it all...is busy saving lives these days. He isn't working closely with engineers making the product great.

3.They have a 20+ year old pile of crap code/software that they have to keep building on for backwards compatibility. They never got to fail like Apple, throw everything in the trash and start over. They really need to just "shut that whole thing down" and start over from scratch.

How many of you use D-Tools? Did you see how awesome it got when they trashed the old code and start over for the latest version? Not only is it light years better...they can fix bugs and make changes super fast now because they are working with modern code/tools.

4.The "PC" is going to disappear. Its being replaced by the smart phone. Microsofts days are numbered if they dont get this right. Any company can create a light weight OS and put it on smart phones and have apps developed for it. The OS monopoly will never occur with smart phones now. There are already 2 companies at the front Apple and Google. Rim and MS are both in the game. None of these companies will ever command the users attention like MS did. This makes the market very tough.

Microsofts approach seems to be "put windows on a mobile device". This is what they have been doing for a decade. Apple just created iOS and Google created Android. New platforms for a new way of doing things. Windows should have just created a mobile platform and kept working on it until they got it perfect. THEN start combining it with your PC OS.

They are doing it backwards. Pushing the "surface" OS on to PC users forcing them to learn to use it before its ready for prime time. Each time they fix or change something the user is forced to relearn it.

Good news is that they only need to get it half way right to stay in the game. They still have enough market share. People don't want to learn new things. If i were them i would sell (subsidize) the windows tablets and phones at half what Android and iOS devices are selling for. I would spend spend spend on an apps/media content store. Maybe give developers 100% of all revenue (for items sold thru microsoft store) for 5 years. Maybe even subsidize app creation. I would make it so that people are using phrases like "no brainer" when choosing a windows mobile device.

"Force" windows mobile into everyones pocket/backpack while continuing to work on the merging/morphing of the mobile & desktop platform. Spend the billions to stay in the game while you still have them. Don't wait until the war chest has a couple hundred grand left in it thats ear marked for the CEOs bonus when they file chapter 11.