We are working with large enterprise clients (big pharma). Last two years they practically all adopted iPads for their field forces. Went with single device policy, which created a lot of pain for IT - no Office, no deployment tools, no AD, etc.
MS and Intel then start a marketing blitz in those IT departments, hey, enterprise, we love and understand you. Cool, IT guys fall for it.
Problem?
MS wants enterprise to adopt Win8 Pro on Intel devices. Which practically all are around 1000$ and have a battery life of 4 hours.
Enterprise IT wants something similar to the iPad, for even cheaper. They want an iPad with sane deployment tools and MS Office. Cheaper. Because their people in emerging markets have limited budgets.
Enter Windows RT. It is just like an iPad, cheap, better power efficiency on its devices. Awesome, right? Except that it does not offer the deployment and management tools needed. It is practically an iOS device in that regard. The MS Office on it is Home/Student Preview edition, which seem to be upgradeable if you have the right CALs. But it runs like shit. Buzz is that the whole thing was a very late add once they realized that MS' main selling point was Office. Late, panicky scramble.
And now add the fact that MS seems to be launching MS Office on iOS soon.
And then we have Modern UI. Nice for consumer apps. Facebook looks cool. But enterprise tools? On iOS we have freedom. On Modern there are guidelines, horizontal swipe and pagination is key. You're used to high information density, utilization of screen real estate to show as much as possible on one screen to avoid a user needing to navigate away? Forget that on Modern UI. Whitespace rules, it is like the GMail redesign on steroids. No wonder they need Classic UI to make MS Office available - Modern UI in its current strict incarnation cannot scale to offer this kind of functionality.
So yeah. Intel is not in a good spot. Microsoft neither.
The next 6 months will be decisive. Lots of pilots going on, Samsung has a good enough Win 8 Pro device out there, Surface Pro still not here. Surface is not even launched in Japan, might not be till late next year.
Whoever is in charge of platform strategy at MS should be made to go away. With access to those resources they should be kicking ass.
> MS and Intel then start a marketing blitz in those IT departments, hey, enterprise, we love and understand you. Cool, IT guys fall for it.
Serious question here; is it that much different in the US? At 'big whatever' I have been in the EU (besides, strangely enough(?), France), the 'IT guys' don't like Windows/MS and would not choose it if it was up to them. I see Ubuntu, BYOD Mac OS X, iOS for management and force-fed Windows (with a lot of complaining).
People working mostly on Excel (or other Office components) would pick Windows, but those are not 'the IT guys'?
My experience is that it's a love/hate relationship. Often the IT management prefers to run with Microsoft if they can because it's already interated into the existing infrastructure. And Microsoft has very good salespeople that can tell these managers how well a new product integrates with their existing Windows platform.
Any new platform threatens to add more support and more work and contains lots of unknowns.
The "lower parts" of IT often knows more about the pain points of certain Microsoft products and have more hate then love, or at least are more open to consider alternatives.
Microsoft has a _lot_ of enterprise software that is not easy to replace for a big company, not to mention third party software that runs on Windows. And some of that software works pretty well.
Microsoft screwing up their mobile strategy has now shown the IT departments at most major companies that iOS and Android devices can work just fine, and this is the beginning of the end for Microsoft dominance in the enterprise.
Enterprise IT as in systems for end users (you can call it Commercial IT). The IT guys themselves will not use Win 8 Pro / Surface of course. Just the business users. But Enterprise IT departments make the purchasing decisions.
It all depends on scale. Once you have 50k employees worldwide, Ubuntu does not cut it. OS X might, but no one has tried so far. MS Office is the killer here, if you can't run it, you're dead. That's why MS was caught so surprised when the iPad took off, against all logic.
Windows 7 is perfectly suited as an enterprise solution. Based on how many companies still use XP - I think we've got a good 10 more years of use from win 7.
Once it is no longer tenable to use it, you'd better hope microsoft have developed a usable windows version for offices, because I don't think live tiles updating me on my social network is exactly a selling point in an enterprise solution...
Yes, that makes sense. I was thrown of by 'IT guys'. But in 50k employees worldwide corps in the EU at least I see a lot of business guys doing a lot of their work on iPads and Macbooks now. Anecdotal: a few business friends of mine working for energy and pharma now make their presentations on the iPad directly in Keynote and present it from the iPad. They don't touch PPT anymore. The Windows machine (or Macbook) only switches on for Word (hardly ever) or Excel.
Same with finance sector. Everyone has iPads. We spent the majority of the last year optimising our web app so it works nicely on iOS. We're even doing offline apps soon for data collection.
People don't even use Excel now - our platform is powerful enough to cover all of the normal use cases in the financial sector.
I work in the financial sector, 80000+ employees. Office, Visio, Project, Active Directory, SQL Server, Server, etc. all play a huge role in our PC structure and end user environments.
We also have massive IBM deployments including MVS and Unix (z/OS, AIX, DB2, Oracle, etc.) that run most all of the back-end banking.
Microsoft in the front-end, IBM/Unix in the back. Gotta say, the front end, although more complicated, is more easily managed and deployed. I could never see a replacement for it, not yet anyway.
Edit: No, iPads won't play nicely with this setup.
> Once you have 50k employees worldwide, Ubuntu does not cut it.
Tell that to Google.
> OS X might
For LDAP and Kerberos, OS X is much less configurable than Linux and the number of tools is less. So if Linux is not good enough, how could OS X even stand a chance? Because of Office for Mac? It's much worse than the Windows version, many documents are not rendered correctly, VBA works poorly, especially for Excel, Exchange support is not on par with the Windows version, many features are missing and Mac users hate the program.
| If Microsoft decides to kill a feature available in Excel 2010, you still can use it.
Individuals with that version installed can use it, but you can't get new licenses for more employees, and you won't be able to upgrade to get new features. You might also be wary of applying bugfix patches in case your key feature gets zapped. Also, user support for your feature will dry up eventually.
"Once you have 50k employees worldwide, Ubuntu does not cut it" - yep, it costs too much. No... wait, it's free. There's no deployment tools... no... wait, there are... There's no good office softw... nevermind. No one has ever... wait, there's that town in Germany. I give up. Why isn't Ubuntu suitable? It even comes with an RDP client so you can use Windows-only programs remotely...
Arguably management tools for all those devices, but that is very rapidly changing. The real reason is that no body has done it and said "this is how you do it" and not that many IT guys are in a position to decide to try it and take the risk. The only technical reason would be custom apps built for window or .net, otherwise all of the pieces are there to do it for most businesses.
LibreOffice/OpenOffice doesn't work as well as MS Office. Google Docs doesn't replicate all of the functionality that MS Office offers, and doesn't work as well. The productivity difference[1] would easily be worth over $200/person/month for people who use Office a lot.
[1] From features that Google Docs and to a lesser extent, LibreOffice, don't have or work poorly, and speed especially vs Google Docs.
the only area where I can see this as being a problem is with Excel. For the others, use a web-authoring tool. Why create a MB document in Word, to attach to a SharePoint page, then send a link to every pointing out the new document? Excel has some specialized math functions (and data presentation abilities) that are beyond LO/OO. But I think it's such a small percentage of people that need that functionality, you could replace MSO w/ LO/OO and most everyone would say 'meh' and go back to work.
This is hearsay but what I understood is that there is no suitable large scale alternative for MS Active Directory and that it doesn't play well with Linux setups as it does with Windows. I didn't see this mentioned, so I thought I would, maybe someone with more experience in this kind of management can chime in.
from personal experience it is a bit harder (or was, last time I checked) to manage file permissions vs Windows. As far as AD, Linux has had LDAP (which AD is based on) for quite a while.
I think all the people that used to be responsible for platform strategy have been fired already. That's part of the problem.
They also botched their enterprise mobile business with the WP7 and now WP8 launch. All my friends working in pretty conservative industries such as oil and banking used to have WM6 or BlackBerry, now they use Android or iOS.
Unless Microsoft pulls out a magic trick, I think they've already lost their dominance. The cat is out of the bag now that all major enterprises allow iOS and Android devices.
"And now add the fact that MS seems to be launching MS Office on iOS soon."
I think this really sums up the long term fate of Microsoft. This happened to Sega several years ago. They eventually gave up on the console business only to focus on software for other consoles. If Microsoft has any chance of long term success, they need to start building apps for iOS and maybe even Android. This is how Sega has survived over the years. They make games for Xbox, Nintendo and Playstation and have even licensed their characters to Nintendo to share the spotlight with their one-time rivals. Microsoft is sinking and they need to start forming some alliances with their one-time rivals.
>On Modern there are guidelines, horizontal swipe and pagination is key. You're used to high information density, utilization of screen real estate to show as much as possible on one screen to avoid a user needing to navigate away? Forget that on Modern UI. Whitespace rules, it is like the GMail redesign on steroids
Hold it there. They are called guidelines [1] because they're guidelines. You don't have to enforce them! That said, they're there for a reason! The reason is that you use your finger on tablets, not a high-precision mouse device. Seriously, have you tried operating Excel on a touch device?
Second, who says enterprise apps can't be made with this kind of UI? Some guys succeed [2]. You just have to think new. Of course Office in its current form can't be made for Win RT.
well, here it gets tricky. we are working closely with MS, they are guiding us. Visual Studio also only allows you to deviate so much from the UI sets.
Notice how it is all about horizontal scrolling? Looks nice, right? How does the user know, where he is? Each "page" has a different meaning, function, but they are a fluid horizontal canvas. Notice something else? Surface is a 16:9 device, MS is using this as a standard. this emphasis the horizontal even more than the vertical. I am not convinced this works for complex apps with data entry. The BI app is more for consumption, you flip through your reports. Notice how they shoot you out to their online dashboards?
Discoverability is a key issue I have with Modern UI. Some buttons can be exposed directly, but the guidelines are pushing you into button bars which only appear through swipes (from top or from bottom).
Colleagues have tried it with their kids. iOS, Android? No problem for a 4-year old to figure it out. Modern UI? Frustration. And yes, I am comparing the typical business user to a 4 year old when it comes to patience in learning a new UI scheme.
Yet, iOS has a much higher information density than WinRT and still works very well. Of course you can ignore the guidelines, if _most_ apps follow the guidelines you will end up with a platform that looks very good in product demos but isn't as good to use for actual work.
> MS wants enterprise to adopt Win8 Pro on Intel devices. Which practically all are around 1000$ and have a battery life of 4 hours.
Not all devices will have 4 hours of battery life. For example core i5 Acer Iconia W700 is reported to have 7 hours of battery life by engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/12/14/acer-iconia-w700-review/. Also intel clover trail is also reported to have good power efficiency. We will know the truth in next 6 month I hope.
Uhm, really? Surface availability is limited to some countries, so good luck with global rollout. Asus (not Google!) on other hand makes N7 available anywhere.
My god, give them a break. Can we get at least one positive article about Microsoft on HN? It doesn't matter what Microsoft does they always get ridiculed for it. Any effort, no matter how good, gets completely obliterated. Microsoft hasn't been the most innovative company lately but they're slowly adjusting their line of products to at least try to get somewhere. Yes, Surface doesn't stand up to iPad, but it's a very solid product nonetheless. Yes, Windows 8 is a big deviation from norm, but it is an innovative move forward that needs a bit more work. Yes, C# and the entire .NET ecosystem isn't as popular as Rails and gets absolutely no love on HN but it is an incredibly powerful environment. For fuck's sake, stop hating Microsoft just to hate it and embrace their efforts to move forward and compete just like you do Google and Apple.
I think you will find there's lots of people on HN who would love to see Microsoft hit a home run. Surface was highly buzzed-over, as were Windows Phone 7/8. There is genuine interest in the developer community for a really good alternative to the Apple & Google duopoly.
The problem is that Microsoft isn't providing a really good alternative. The buzzed-about products have all followed a depressingly similar trajectory: highly interesting on the drawing board, but then crippled on launch by some element of the product that MS just didn't get right. Windows Phones were hard to find on some carriers, for instance, and lacked apps. (This oversight was understandable for Windows Phone 7; less so for 8.) Surface manages to be too expensive to compete with tablets and too limited to compete with ultrabooks. And so on.
Say what you want about Apple and Google, but they at least know who their customers are and consistently nail the things those customers care about. Apple customers are consumers, so their products are heavy on style and sex appeal. Google customers are carriers, so their products are heavy on customizability and adaptable across a lot of form factors and spec sheets.
Microsoft's non-developer customers are... well, Microsoft doesn't really seem to know, and the products show it. They're a mishmash of interesting ideas and half-baked execution. Which makes them hard to cheer for, or to justify buying.
This is a matter of opinion, but here is my take: Microsoft has single-handedly delayed the progress of the Internet for over a decade. We have a very confusing environment, which we are painfully leaving behind, simply because they tried to own the Internet. What is the world GDP impact of trying to overcome the incompatibilities of IE?
And they have tried to tamper with my individual rights to use the computing platform I choose. Remember "Linux is a cancer", and bullying of manufacturers not to offer Linux? Where are my Linux laptops, please? I attribute 90% to the blame to Microsoft (and yes, I have a Linux laptop, no Microsoft tax attached. But the choice was very narrow)
For these reasons, even if tomorrow Microsoft announces the cure of cancer, I will despise them with all my strength. For decades to come. For the rest of my life.
There is no undoing the harm they have done to humankind. The only positive outcome, from my point of view, is for them to disappear as a company, and for their products to die (obviously, a very long death). Microsoft will never offer a product I want. It is really that simple.
No thanks. When you recall their once-titanic power, their vicious business culture, their decade-long seizure and stagnation of the entire web, the way they openly eat their own with gusto, and the incalculable amounts of money and effort thrown into the boundless swamps of their fetid platforms, you realize that watching them tumble and smash on the rocks below is never, ever, ever going to get old.
God forbid. At least Microsoft didn't control our hardware. If Apple gets the same kind of monopole as Microsoft over computers, tablets and smartphones, they would basically control the entire field of technology.
As for the prices, people pirated Microsoft, which kept their prices pretty low (otherwise no one would buy it). With a monopole for hardware, Apple can dictate its prices (already very high) however it wants and people can either pay or go for the small non-integrated OSes.
And you'll be waiting a long time because their motivations aren't even remotely similar. You know what a monopolist does to competitors? It gives products away for free to bankrupt the competition. Or it buys the compeitor out and shitcans the entire operation.
Apple is sitting on $100B in cash. If it really wanted to it could do a lot of damage with that much cash (not even talking about equity or assets, just cash). But it doesn't, it selectively invests while the tech journalists write articles about what Apple should be doing with that money.
All you guys going on about the hardware are missing my point. The vast majority of my tech support calls to family and friends are trying to work around Apple's Digital Restrictions Management on iPhones, iPads and similar.
Then there was the whole Apple/Samsung thing.
And the App Store policies. I've seen people come crying to HN time and time again because their app got pulled or they can't update it any more.
I don't consider them a nice company and I don't find their stuff nice or usable. So you can keep the rotten fruit away from me, thanks.
Yes, fully agree. Additionally the decline for Microsoft is good for us all, as it results in vendor diversification which bears choice, robustness (no single target), faster rate of improvement and competitive market dynamics.
Vendor diversification? As in Apple has diversified into computers, phones, tablets, TVs, music players, music sales, software sales...? If it's vendor diversification you like, you might want to hope that Microsoft manages to become a player in phones, tablets, etc., too, because otherwise we'll be stuck paying Apple-sized margins on hardware, software, and services.
Of course, my first choice would be to see Linux become a major force on more platforms in a power user (not consumer) form. Watching Apple, Microsoft, and major chunks of Linux in a race to convert all platforms to the "I don't understand folders, I just want my Facebook and buttons to poke to buy my entertainment" market makes me wish for someone to target the power user machines for getting work done market that everyone else is getting out of.
C# and the entire .NET ecosystem isn't as popular as Rails
Is that true? I mean, I'm sure there aren't a whole lot of .net people on HN, but I always assumed that there's a pretty large "silent majority" of enterprise devs that use .net exclusively.
And also, MS got some serious love the other day when they released TypeScript (and rightly so). FWIW even though I'm a java/javascript guy I got my start in visual studio and it's a great toolset, and C# really is Java++.
.NET may not be popular on HackerNews, or for building your startup, but step into any bank or big-business company and you'll see nothing but .NET (it has slowly been taking over the area that used to belong to Java 5-10 years ago).
It's a shame how some people view .NET as a closed platform and not open source friendly, when Microsoft has been making a BIG effort to push .NET into the open, especially ASP.NET. Let not forget things like Nuget, which has completely changed the way most .NET programmers work. Then there's Mono, which is just getting better and better every month (Host ASP.NET MVC web sites on Linux... now you can, thanks to Microsoft open sourcing MVC and Mono supporting it)
All in all .NET has become a very embracing platform for open source. I use it for just about any job, with great success.
> It's a shame how some people view .NET as a closed platform and not open source friendly
That is a shame. Because Mono has advanced so far since a few years ago, and software such as Unity prove that robust, fast code can be written for the CLR and be relatively easy to port cross-platform. Its really an amazing feat.
Diving further into the rabbit hole with WPF/WCF, which as far as I can tell hasn't been implemented in Mono, was an absolute awesome experience developing an application. I would take that over iOS/Android platforms any day of the week.
It's not popular on HN for a reason. Even if you run everything on Mono, for practical reasons you are tied to Windows as a development platform and that's a major issue for just about anyone who does their development on other platforms.
Goodwill is earned, not given. In what way has Microsoft earned any in the last 20 years or so? Burned bridges don't spontaneous get rebuild just because one don't carry torches anymore.
I must also object to call windows 8 a innovative move forward. I have yet to see any evidence to suggest it's anything but a move backward. The question one should ask here is, if one put the same energy to polishing windows 7 and windows 8, who would come out on top in usability, stability and security? My money would be on windows 7.
> Why the hell is Microsoft making an ARM-based hardware platform in the first place?
Same reason as everyone else. People want devices with low power consumption. Until x86 can deliver that I would say it makes great sense to make ARM-based hardware. I keep hearing atom etc will be on par with ARM, however, I have yet to see devices who deliver on that promise.
> Same reason as everyone else. People want devices with low power consumption.
People want cars with good fuel economy and tasty, nutritious lunches, too, so why don't we see Microsoft Motors or The Microsoft Café?
I'm not focusing specifically on the ARM architecture, but merely pointing out that using ARM is just another quality of this product that fails to make use of any of Microsoft's existing advantages; the broader question is why MS decided to release any tablet at all in the first place
Yes, C# and the entire .NET ecosystem isn't as popular as Rails
That's a very bold statement. The .NET ecosystem is massive. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the PHP ecosystem is even much larger than the Rails ecosystem.
I'd actually go so far as to say that the PHP ecosystem completely dwarfs the Rails ecosystem, and until my mom can upload a Ruby file to any cheap shared server and just have it work it always will.
I'm a really big fan of the .NET environment but you have to admit there is something wrong with the end-user products in recent years.
Looking at the modest success of the Surface RT, one might think it will end-up like WP7. You cannot recommend to buy a product like this for Christmass
The article has a very specific complaint - that Windows RT isn't Windows inasmuch as it doesn't run most Windows software and that this is confusing since Microsoft has trained us to expect that "Windows $FOO" will run Windows software. This has been the basis of their branding since 1995 at least, and a serious strength of that product line.
I'm not hoping for MS to die. I'd love to have some competition on the market and I'd love them to show some amazing products that inspire everyone.
That being said the writing was on the wall. Microsoft is blindsided by two cash cows and they're not willing to reinvent themselves.
Microsoft has Windows and Office that make them money. Everything else is secondary and helped them control that market. It's a Napoleonic approach to business (read Bill Gates' biography to understand that).
How Microsoft made its initial money was by undercutting everyone and selling a licence for their first OS to IBM so Big Blue had to spend less money per machine sold. It worked so well that MS became the richest and most powerful high tech company.
Now the open source community releases powerful office suites for free, Apple releases an amazing office suite for 1/5th of the price of MS Office and Google releases something essentially free that works online!
When everyone else is moving ahead... it's hard to have anything to say that is positive about the stubborn MS.
> Can we get at least one positive article about Microsoft on HN?
No we cannot. Anything non-critical of Microsoft(even a product announcement) usually gets flagged off the front page if it manages to reach it. Same with many articles critical of Google. I agree MS has dropped the ball in regards to Windows RT branding but the HN front page is a joke when it comes to Microsoft related stories.
I enjoy using Windows 8. There are problems. Shutting it down isn't obvious. Selecting "Lock" will bring up a sign in screen. Putting your computer to sleep won't... its all a bit strange. Like I said though, it is a fairly enjoyable experience.
I haven't used the Surface. I don't see myself getting one. I have the iPad2. I only use it to surf the web. I don't need a replacement. Maybe in 2-3 years.
I think Microsoft has got a branding problem. The Surface is obviously running something different to Windows 8. I only get it because I know what ARM is... its impossible to explain to my parents. "It runs on a different type of processor so is different" is met with a blank face or "But its runs Windows right?"
There is also a fear, especially with my parents about Windows 8. They have just about mastered Windows 7. A lot of this fear is misplaced. There was a lot of talk of Desktop UI and Metro UI. It would have been simpler to say "The start button has been removed and instead has its own screen making programs easier to find and use."
Instead they banged on about different UI's. Different types of applications. All very confusing. Then you have the lack of branding. I still call Windows 8 app's "Metro". I think it is a good name. I don't know what they are called now. When I enter the store in Windows 8 it isn't obvious what the new name is either..
Microsoft made a big mess of branding and advertising Windows 8. Someone should be fired because it is harming the take up of what is imperfect but pretty good software.
> And, since Windows RT doesn't look or feel like prior versions of Windows and doesn't run applications written for them either, why call it Windows at all?
This is called "brand extension". Brand extension is a crime against marketing and against common sense.
The reasoning goes like this:
- we have a strong brand
- we have a new product
- no one will know this new product exists unless we spend huge amounts of advertising to inform the public about its existence
- oh but wait! we have this strong brand! why not attach the new product to the existing brand, to jump start it?!
- (and BTW, our strong but old brand can only benefit from this hot new cool product being attached to it)
At first it seems to work: the new product grows faster with brand extension than without.
But very fast, people become confused about which is which and what does what, and prefer two uniquely branded and well-positioned competing products against the whole "line offering".
The "hot new product" usually ends up polluting, weakening, if not killing the parent brand, instead of rejuvenating it.
This is exactly what is happening with Windows RT.
Microsoft isn't the only culprit however. "Google Play" is a similar move. It hasn't started to hurt Google yet, probably because it didn't catch, and people continue to call the Android app store... well, "the Android App Store".
"Brand extension is a crime against marketing and against common sense"
Agreed and it's an example of something Apple has gotten very right. Apple is the banner brand.
What is Apple? It's a hardware device manufacturer with mostly excellent software and services. You buy an Apple X and you're buying (post Mac but still applies):
iPod.
iPod smaller.
iPod much smaller.
iPod with a touch screen.
iPod with a touch screen and phone.
iPod with a touch screen, internet and much bigger.
iPod with a touch screen, internet and slightly bigger.
Some thinner, some fatter, some with cameras, some without.
They've almost never stumbled in extending the brand and creating new sub-brands because the initial umbrella brand isn't 'used in vain' or diluted.
What is Google? Google is an ad supported AI interface with occasionally excellent hardware, and genius software services. You buy a Google X and you're buying? It remains to be seen (although I suspect it's coming) what exactly the 'Google Nexus' is.
What is Microsoft? Microsoft makes Windows and Office, enterprise software and is a sticker on the side of other people's products. When you buy Microsoft Windows X you get??
I'd say the iPod Nano is the only device Apple has really screwed up in terms of a consistent message. First it has a clickwheel, then it doesn't. Oh look there's a camera, and now it's gone. It's small enough to stick in a watch wristband - but wait, now there's a touchscreen and it sorta looks like it runs apps except it doesn't.
Totally incoherent. I loved the first few generations with a clickwheel, they were great to use on the go. I have no idea what the point of the latest model is.
Red Bull had that problem, they created Red Bull Cola and everyone thought it is a mix of Red Bull and cola.
It actually is just a cola, and a pretty good one with 100% bio ingredients. People just didn't get that, the caffeine junkies were disappointed and other people didn't try it.
Such an obvious mistake, "Red Bull" is synonymous with the drink.
And for more fun:
-- C:\Windows\System32 contains 64 bit binaries, while
-- C:\Windows\SysWow64 contains the 32 bit ones
(that is on a 64 bit version of Windows)
Then the naming of $(Platform) $(PlatformShort) in MSVC IDE.. Explore for yourself - it's fun, it's even more fun when the windows sdk, dxsdk, and other ms's sdk's use different naming conventions for the same things.
Or the WinDir vs SystemRoot
it's something about Microsoft creating too much confusion with their naming
These are hardly problems. Users don't generally encounter system directories or identifiers in IDEs, and these patterns have emerged from MS's traditional dedication to maintaining backward compatibility, which is usually much more important to developers and power users than having directory names be completely descriptive of what's in them.
The problem with Windows RT is exactly the opposite: they've broken backward compatibility, severely, and created a product that bears no resemblance to what the vast majority of users recognize as Windows, yet they've decided to call it "Windows" anyway.
most often, it's us developers becoming users of some other software. And real users are puzzled sometimes, there were at least couple of emails to the sqlite mailing list about missing sqlite3.dll from users. In one case it was some tax program installing it in the system32 folder, messing it up with another one (why would they do that is another matter), also as someone posted below, there is Program Files, and Program Files (x86), but there apps that do not follow that convention (internally they have their own bin32, bin64 folders), and it comes to users again - usually plugins for various creative suits - audio, video, etc.
WoW64 stands for Windows 32-bit on Windows 64-bit. It's a subsystem that allows backward compatibility. Windows on Windows allowed 16-bit software to run on 32-bit Windows. At the time there was no need to call it WoW32. I suppose Microsoft could have called WoW64 W32oW64, but they didn't.
They deprecated every major Mac hardware and software transition into a virtual machine.
* Mac OS 9 to Classic Environment
* PowerPC to Rosetta
Apple brands, changes brands, and moves forward. Microsoft makes Windows proper compatible with the new. They have done an amazing job both from the tech and marketing front.
And yet, computing is now the rest of us, not the "enterprise". We have amazing computers in our pockets. The enterprise changed, allowing and adapting to iPhone and Android devices.
Our phones do more interesting things than our Windows desktops.
As a developer working with Microsoft products I have a very mixed feeling about what the company is doing right now.
The tools and products for developers and professionals are amazing. Visual Studio might be the most visible example but there are really tons of great tools and libraries (and many are actually open sourced).
The problem is that I cannot see any of this greatness translated into end-users killer-apps. LOB apps surely benefit from it and other ecosystems (OSX, iOS or Android) will not catch-up for a long time.
For me there are two Microsoft: one for the developers and headed by Scott Guthrie and the other for consumers. This last one does not have a clear vision and is just trying to catch up with Google and Apple.
I used to using visual studio and thought it was good. But after using emacs, I donot think it is good any more. and the libraries/APIs seems not well designed too now.
When talking about VS and libraries/APIs you really need to be more specific.
VS lets you work with very different technologies from native C++ to .NET languages, including web stacks.
The user experience may vary but if we are talking about the .NET world I think it is a very strong package.
The only equivalent I can think of would be the Eclipse/Java combo.
Windows RT (Run Time) - it's the best product name since Windows NT (New Technology). While all those other bad software companies waste your time with OT (Old Technology) and CT (Compile Time), Microsoft gives you the NRTT (New Run Time Technology) you deserve.
Which should be called modern since Modern (uppercase M) refers, in the world of art, literature and architecture, to Modernism, which is not at all modern.
I'm in the minority who believes that Microsoft's tablet strategy is reasonable.
Their long-term goal is to provide tablets that look more or less like the incumbents (8-10 inch, light, 10 hour battery life, 9mm thin), but can also run any Windows app you want. But that's not possible for another 2 years or so of advancement by Intel and other hardware suppliers. So what do they do until then? Just wait? No, they release two devices: an ipad competitor that's not a hybrid, and an ultrabook competitor.
They may both have modest sales, but the Windows store will start getting populated with apps, and Windows 8 will become familiar, so that when they CAN actually build a 'perfect' hybrid, all the other pieces will be in place.
I'm not the biggest fan of Microsoft in the mobile world, but until they launched Windows 8, I actually thought the idea of the "hybrid" device might work, and may be the future of both tablets and PC's. You can use it as a PC when you need it, and as a tablet, when you don't. Best of both worlds, right?
Wrong. When I started using Windows 8, I realized it's actually the worst of both worlds. If you want both in the same package, then you have to live with a ton of compromises. Here are some of them:
1) You can't have a large screen, if you want to use it as a tablet, too. Maybe 11" at most, and that includes hybrid devices more like Surface, with light weight tablet parts, and detachable keyboard. The ones like Lenovo Yoga are completely unusable as tablets, unless you intend to use a "tablet" on your desk all the time, at which point, what's the difference compared to just using a touchscreen laptop?
2) Then 10-11" screens are not very usable for real work as a PC, so you have to compromise a lot in that, too.
3) 10-11" is pretty large and heavy for a tablet, and it seems most people are starting to gravitate towards 8" or smaller tablets, which makes it even more likely that people will want the tablet and the PC as 2 different devices in the future.
4) If you want a "hybrid", then you're forced to use x86 chips, and unless you want the performance of a netbook, you need Core chips inside. These have 3 major drawbacks: low battery life, heat/noise, and high price tags.
5) Windows RT devices, while a bit better on the tablet part, because of the ARM advantages (better battery life and more competitive prices), can't seriously be called "hybrids". They only have Office for PC use.
6) 13" or higher "hybrids" are also a joke, as you can't seriously use them as tablets.
7) You're still forced to use or avoid the "touch mode", even when you want to use it as a PC. I consider Windows 8 worse for a PC user than Windows 7. I brings a lot of new stuff that are there to annoy the PC user, not help him. Whatever small benefits it has over Windows 7, they are not worth it for the worse user experience. And this is for the more "techie" of the PC users. For "normal" mom and pop users, they are going to find it even worse, after using XP/Windows 7 for so long, and now having to basically learn and unlearn a ton of new stuff, which is not easy for this type of user.
So whichever way you go, either more towards the PC part, or the tablet part, you're going to run into major compromises, if you want to use a single device as both PC and tablet. So I don't think anymore that hybrids are the future, as they seem to do either one part pretty badly, or be mediocre at both. You're better off keeping these two type of devices separated.
I assumed that (not now, but in 5 years time), you'll bring your 7" or 10" tablet home, plug it into its dock (a-la laptop docks now), which will hook it up to your full size mouse and keyboard, and your 27" high resolution monitor.
It'll have enough processing power to do what most people need from a machine, and when you need to go out, you grab it out of its dock, and all your programs, files and settings are with you, running on their tablet-optimised version.
This is the end game as I see it and I'm pretty convinced this is what Microsoft is planning for. If that's the way it goes, they have a huge head start over Apple who are insisting on keeping OSX and iOS separate.
when you need to go out, you grab it out of its dock, and all your programs, files and settings are with you, running on their tablet-optimised version.
This was what the future looked like 10 years ago until cloud-provided software and storage became an option. This was the videos Microsoft showed us and it all looked fantastic.
Now I'm wondering why on earth would I lob files manually around? It's as old-fashioned as synching your phone via USB and iTunes. You did that 5 years ago. Not now. It's a stone-age solution created by stone-age approach to computing. We demand better now.
Now I have one Google doc document, which is a live document. It's always the latest version, with all the latest collaborations, and I don't need to bring it with me. That's great. I don't know which documents I'll need. And you can't be realistically expected to bring them all with you always, just to be covered.
The "future" you are painting sounds old fashioned and I don't want it. That is Microsoft's main problem now: Their future insist we should keep things which are obsolete (like local files) at all cost, and they are doing it to attempt to keep the relevance of their OS as it used to be.
In services like Office 365 they are very explicit about not creating a "document", you are creating a ".docx-file". This is 100% orthogonal to the way they tried to do things on the desktop (hide the extensions at all cost, because they were "confusing").
Now they are back-pedalling hard. Now people must know that they are creating a MS Word file. In the cloud. As if that makes sense.
They are either confused, conflicted, panicking, a mix of those, or just appearing to be entirely uncoordinated right now.
Even as a .NET developer I am seriously starting to doubt Microsoft's future, at least as far as client-platforms go.
"Now I'm wondering why on earth would I lob files manually around? It's as old-fashioned as synching your phone via USB and iTunes. You did that 5 years ago. Not now. It's a stone-age solution created by stone-age approach to computing. We demand better now."
AT&T and Verizon's monopoly on wireless spectrum called, they want their $50 a gigabyte.
That's a US problem which the rest of the world is not constrained by. It's not going to stop technological progress.
Especially not when wifi and wired internet is completely and utterly untouched by it. That's how 99.99% of the business market is deployed.
And you have governments to regulate monopolies. Demand action from your government instead of complaining about it online. That has worked out pretty well for Europe.
Are you kidding? I don't want to sound ethnocentric but what technology has taken off on a global scale that didn't at least work in the US? It isn't even about GDP, it is that the US accounts for between a third and half of major 1st world consumers.
A great example of the inverse is how most major streaming services only serve US customers. The rest of the world can take it in stride and just pirate all the media, though, so progress on that front doesn't really slow. However, if you tried using truly cloud based computing with everything remote, it would never work in America because the internet coverage is way too bad (it is also really bad in a lot of other first world monopoly telecom nations like the UK, Canada, and Australia though).
> Now I'm wondering why on earth would I lob files manually around?
I regularly work with, modify, and generate 50+ GB files at home. I doubt that there's any hardware I can purchase that will synchronize my changes quickly enough with "the cloud".
"Now I'm wondering why on earth would I lob files manually around? It's as old-fashioned as synching your phone via USB and iTunes. You did that 5 years ago. Not now. It's a stone-age solution created by stone-age approach to computing. We demand better now."
To keep the government from reading your files at will.
This is the end game as I see it and I'm pretty convinced this is what Microsoft is planning for. If that's the way it goes, they have a huge head start over Apple who are insisting on keeping OSX and iOS separate.
I don't see much of an advantage for Microsoft here. Metro is another world than the traditional desktop, and Metro applications are only really fit for tablets and phones. So, a hybrid will probably keep a desktop/tablet UI separation.
Since iOS and OS X build on the same technologies, Apple could, if they wanted to, release a hybrid system in no time. In fact, the iPhone/iPad simulator already uses Cocoa Touch on the same architecture and platform as OS X.
Besides that, Apple has an App Store filled with tablet apps and desktop apps. Not just tablet apps.
>>"Apple who are insisting on keeping OSX and iOS separate."
Is this the case? I see OSX and ios slowly merging into eachother. Just look at the launchpad screen or whatever it is in osx, it looks and swipes over just like an iPad, with all your apps right there. I would be very surprised if these worlds didn't converge.
This has already been tried by OQO in the early 2000's. Verdict was: it was a nice concept, but ultimately didn't work real well. The OXO ran a full copy of Wondows, so you theoretically had the same experience with the small built in screen and the full docked mode. Unfortunately, getting things switched from tablet to PC mode didn't seem to work real well. Ultimately, the tablet was too big and the docked PC was underpowered.
If you want a dock able experience, I think we'll see something closer to the Linux transformer tablets. It is an ordinary tablet, but when plugged into a dock, the dock has a more powerful processor (and more energy hungry) and takes over. In this mode, the tablet isn't much more than an external hard drive. I think it was Lenovo that made these, but I can't remember.
Like others have commented, Apple could release such a device in no time. You can already hook an iPad up to a monitor and keyboard, so Apple just needs to add the OSX desktop. Looking at the Windows 8 reception, I doubt they are going to do that..
What Apple is betting on (and what Microsoft is betting on as well with SkyDrive and unified sign-in) is program data and state being synced seamlessly through the cloud, so that you can have a stand-alone high-performance PC on your desktop (maybe like the iMac).
If Microsoft is indeed betting on "all apps and documents localized on one device", they are betting on the past.
So (conceptually, because iOS doesn't allow keyboard-only navigation), you just tell it to zap on the biggie screen and drop it somewhere nearby, and start typing on the keyboard (hell, merely typing could make it zap to the screen, skipping the first step entirely). No cables, ma.
Keeping them separate has meant that no compromises are required. The touch iOS interface can go in one direction, and OS X, still very much geared towards mouse-pointer and physical keyboard, can go in another.
Microsoft, by trying to unify not only power-user desktops but casual tablet and even XBox and phone interfaces under a single banner is making something nobody wants. A unified experience is like one-size-fits-all underwear, not comfortable at all for anyone.
> you'll bring your 7" or 10" tablet home, plug it into its dock (a-la laptop docks now), which will hook it up to your full size mouse and keyboard, and your 27" high resolution monitor.
Why stop there? The dock will probably have its own processor that can run the tablet apps faster, possibly enabling desktop features. Microsoft could really push this because they own the desktop market but have a weak toehold in the tablet market.
I actually thought the idea of the "hybrid" device might work, and may be the future of both tablets and PC's. You can use it as a PC when you need it, and as a tablet, when you don't. Best of both worlds, right? Wrong.
Replace "PC" with "Android-powered netbook" and that works out pretty nicely for me and my Asus Transformer. It's my favourite hack-pad these days.
Not saying the rest of your post is wrong, but it's the OS (Windows) which is the problem and not the transformation of form-factor.
# 1 is Windows' part in the disruptive innovation curve which I think touch OSs are clearly following. In the beginning new technology is not directly competing with other players in the category. It is drawing marketing share from non-consupmtion. That's been most of what mobile has gobbled up to now. Then comes low & mid end consumption come next. We're seeing some of that already. People bringing a tablet on business trips when they would have brought a laptop 2 years ago.
Windows seem to be trying to "catch" tablets on their way to "high quality use" on the disruption curve. "Primary computers" used by professionals, students & such. Current Android/iOS devices are not really ready for these uses so they have some time. If they can get enterprise on to Windows machines, they may be able to build a moat (or at least some basic battlements).
# 2 is Microsoft's lipstick-on-a-pig marketing. Marketing fundamentals like product segmentation, branding, naming, pricing. MS have never been smooth with that kind of stuff. "Windows Home Office for Students (noncommercial use only)" has always felt like a contrived afterthought. I'm sure it's well researched and functional, but it's not elegant. When you don't have the elegance at the more fundamental level of marketing it's harder to communicate. So Windows RT/Metro/Surface/Phone/Touch/8 is not going to be understood by consumers until they start using is.
If it was another company, Id say they're doomed. But Microsoft are stubborn and resilient. They may do it.
MS is definitely confusing the market. Their ARM offering should be for tablets only and shouldn't be called Windows RT or Windows anything else. It should have been called Metro OS or some such. It shouldn't have included desktop mode, which serves no other purpose other than to confuse things.
No one would have been confused.
I don't believe I've used word "confused" enough times.
Confused isn't strong enough. I see utter bewilderment as I try to explain to my peers what they difference between RT and the bog standard Windows 8. Usually they get bored and wish they hadn't asked the question.
If it runs office and IE in the desktop, why can't I install games? What application store? What's ARM? What does RT stand for? Why would anyone want that?
Storm in a teacup. Its no different to Windows CE, or a plethora of other similar named products. Most people who would be confused will no doubt have a sales person to explain the situation. Most other people will have a clue and this won't be an issue.
To be perfectly honest this reminds me a lot of the PS3 vs Xbox reporting when they where released. PS3 couldn't catch a break, still sold OK, but nothing but terrible reviews. Eventually it came out of the woodwork was most media agencies where taking money from the gaming industry (and probably MS) to write anti PS3 articles, out right media assassination. My money is on the same tactic being used now.
If not its quite common, thats what PR companies do, usually they just do positive stuff, but when you have a lot to loose it can go negative.
Having worked in big media you learn very quickly that everything is paid for in one way or another. Sometimes quite innocently, free interviews on TV which involve the use of there company name. Other times more sneaky stuff, basically differing levels of bribery.
Generally its not to bad, an interview with a pop star releasing a new album, my friend however gets flown all over the world regularly to review movies and games. Everything paid for, thousands and thousands of dollars splashed on him... as long as he continues to write positive review... he'd hate to loose his free holidays in Germany or Las Vegas or London every 6 months or so. So he writes things in a way that keeps his perks. Judging by the lack of negative reviews I'd say the game industry has almost every game reviewer paid off.
The ones that annoy me the most are advertorials, paid stories about certain topics or companies. PR companies basically come in with the story finished, all the wording the way they want it and are willing to pay money to get it into the prime time news.
I'll admit 90% of the time they get turned down on there first try, but they keep trying, and generally they get there way as smaller agencies and especially bloggers will take the money forcing the larger companies to publish a story as well not to loose market share.
Some blogs have bene exposed multiple times for doing it, I believe engadget went on the defensive after being accused of these practices, and there has been a few other examples involving Google and Facebook I can faintly remember within the last year or so.
If you weren't aware of that going on I hope I haven't shaken your trust in the media to badly. But its all about money at the end of the day, and with dwindling profits more and more agencies are caving to PR money.
I have to agree about the lack of a compelling use case for the ARM version of Surface. The Surface Pro, which is non-ARM and runs the desktop version of Windows 8, so it can run "legacy" Windows 7 programs, but the drawbacks are that it has worse battery life and costs another $400 more. At that point why not just get a laptop.
I actually think Windows 7 is great, it is the most useful, customizable, business-appropriate, and non-broken version of Windows in a while. I was really impressed with Microsoft when I got my corporate box updated to Windows 7 and Office 2010. I thought they were on the right track. But with Windows 8 they tried to fix something that wasn't broken, and abandoned their core market in the process.
They really should have forked their OS product line. Windows 8 RT should have been called "Windows Touch" for tablets and phones, and they should have continued to iterate Windows 7 as "Windows Desktop" for business/productivity users. There is no need for Windows 8/Metro/Modern/whatever on a desktop computer, because vertical touch screens do not work ergonomically.
Never. Why would he? He's made all the money he'll ever need to make, and by all accounts is happy and fulfilled with his role in his non-profit. Why go back to MS to right a sinking ship, have his public image tarnished (again), and have to deal with the stress of being CEO? What would he gain from it?
Gates seems to be happier and more fulfilled (certainly better-liked) than he ever was while he was at MS. I just don't see the value proposition for him in returning.
Bill still owns a lot of Microsoft stock. He might not care about the money for his personal gain, but he does care about the mission and goals of his foundation. More money for Bill = more money for foundation.
I don't see Bill returning to Microsoft being a likely scenario but the value proposition is definitely there if he feels his ability to do things with this foundation in the future threatened.
That website is one dense concentration of crazy. Each of those links is to yet another article by the same guy where he does some ranting, then mostly misrepresents some aside in an article at another source, then "just asks some questions", then closes with some more ranting.
Which contains the same kind of information they are talking about:
> They're influencing governments in lots of different ways — and corporations, and really everybody else in society, and it's not just about writing checks
So clearly this isn't just a philanthropic effort - it's a political machine with real influence.
Don't you think it must be difficult for him to see his baby so badly mismanaged, starting with Vista, and now Windows 8 and Surface? He poured his life blood into that company, I can't imagine that he's unaffected by it's performance.
They ought to revamp their marketing efforts from square one, starting with figuring out who their customers are and what products those customers will want to purchase.
For the PC world, I'm happy with a 13" ultrabook running Windows 7 (Asus Zenbook UX31A).
At least I can get work done on it from the recliner and plug it in to an external 24" monitor and keyboard for more serious work.
In my opinion the greatest thing about Windows 7 (other than general stability and being less annoying than Vista) is its window key + arrow hot keys to move application windows around super fast on multi-monitor setups. (and to do exact right/left splits on single monitors)
There is nothing appealing to me about Windows RT/Surface or Windows 8 for laptop/desktop, they both look like they will just get in the way of creating or working on anything.
>In my opinion the greatest thing about Windows 7 (other than general stability and being less annoying than Vista) is its window key + arrow hot keys to move application windows around super fast on multi-monitor setups. (and to do exact right/left splits on single monitors)
As an Xmonad user I am simultaneously aghast and amused.
Also, this is available on Mac OS X and I use a utility to make available the same behavior.
I was actually considering adding "sad but true" to the end of that line... because... it is.
=)
Also what app do you have to use in Mac OS X for sane window management? One thing that bugged me about giving a 15" MBP a chance was how "maximizing" windows doesn't actually maximize them and that sort of thing. I guess I thought window management was supposed to be built into the OS out of the box.
I use Better Touch Tool [1] which is mostly about expanding defaults for multitouch gestures. I haven't gotten around to using the Better Snap tool which focuses on window management yet.
Apple UI paradigm is different to that of Windows. The windows of Windows are application based, while the windows of the Macintosh system are document based, hence the seeming "lack" a screen maximisation.
I don't get the "document based" label - in my opinion it's misnomer. It's anything BUT "document based" when you are working on a photoshop document and behind its window you see your finder, your desktop icons, your desktop background, your browser and so on. How is it that a "document based" UI philosophy?
There is no application window. Instead, each application shows one window for each document, plus tool palettes, etc in their own window. The application would take over the global menu bar when active.
This is in contrast to Windows 3, which had the "multiple document interface", in which each application had its own single window, with the application's main menu under the title bar, and containing a sub-window for each open document and tool palette.
There are pros and cons for each design. The Mac's document-based style is aimed at making it easier to work with several apps at once. This sort of drifted away with the modern one-window Apple apps. Now they even go fullscreen, which has been a decent way to use Microsoft MDI apps since the 16-bit days.
I second Moom and there is also Cinch (http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/cinch/) which I have used before. They do roughly the same thing, but I prefer Moom since it involves less hand movement, but it's a matter of preference.
Moom people also have Witch for window switching management on Mac. Personally it's not what i was looking for, but worth mentioning.
Windows RT has the desktop -- with the same task bar as Windows 7, littered with icons as it's always been back to Windows 95 if you so choose, plus the familiar shell apps like Explorer and Task Manager. All the Microsoft Office apps that come bundled with Surface also run in "desktop mode" -- they're not Metro apps at all.
The only difference between Windows RT and Windows 8 is that the only sanctioned way to install software on Windows RT is from the Windows Store, where all apps run on both CPU architectures.
Re: "...is from the Windows Store, where all apps run on both CPU architectures."
From the OP quoted article:
"While Windows 8 and Windows RT can both run so-called “Modern” apps (formerly known as “Metro” apps) designed for touch-sensitive screens, even those apps must be converted, or ported, to Windows RT, and not all Modern apps appearing in the Windows app store have been ported over, compounding compatibility issues."
If you write an HTML/JS, it will always run on all architectures.
If you write a .NET/XAML app, by default it will be compiled to a CPU neutral IL that runs on all architectures (you can disable this and target a specific CPU architecture).
If you write a C++/XAML app, by default Visual Studio will compile different versions of the app for each architecture.
For the vast majority of Win8 apps, "converting" to ARM is just a cross-compile. It is only when you are doing very specialized things that you actually need to worry about the CPU architecture your app will be running on.
Does that mean if there's an open source application you like, all you have to do to get it on your Surface is open the source code in the latest edition of Visual Studio, recompile it, transfer the files to your Surface, and you will be able to install and run it?
Unfortunately no because chances are this open source code is using some parts of the Win32 API that are not supported by WinRT, so you would have to replace the invalid API calls by the new (probably asynchronous) ones... Maybe even completely rewrite the GUI if necessary.
Linux for ARM supports legacy x86 apps. And I don't think there's any major performance penalty there. Sure, it's not very fast on pre-Cortex A15 hardware, but that can be said about Windows RT, too. Windows RT is actually a lot slower when processing stuff (up to 3x slower) than Android and iOS (not talking about animations, which are pretty simple and handled by the GPU).
Also in the Linux world they are working on improving the performance and battery efficiency with kernels 3.7 and 3.8, and they will keep improving them in future versions, as they are only at very early stages of ARM support. I think the 64 bit ARMv8 chips will get great support for Linux from day one, when they come out in 2014, as support for them it's already being baked into the kernels right now.
I'm a huge linux fan but I've never heard of this outside of some sort of processor-emulation layer and full VM which wouldn't give you the world's best performance.
Have I missed something?
--edit--
Did you mean support for older apps is (comparatively) easy because they can be rebuilt from source?
Also I'm not really sure what you mean by linux support for ARM being in the early stages. I've been running linux on a variety of ARM devices for ~8 years now, since the NSLU2 days. Good support for a huge variety of ARM SoCs has been in place for many years now.
Yes, sure, it is confusing for the user. But that is the whole point. Microsoft trying to use the Windows brand to get into the mobile market. This is the only advantage they can possibly have over Android and iOS
The problem is that whereas previously people would just stick with the 2.0 of Microsoft's previous generation; they are now switching to a competitors 1.0 that was better thought out than Microsoft's offering.
Os are becoming less relevant for "most" of uses , with cloud services ,and apps running on the browsers. Os will always be relevant for software requiring intensive computation ( games , complexe CAD programs , etc ... ). So Microsoft might lose some relevance , it is normal.
Microsoft has also a branding problem regarding public products.But is doing very well in Enterprise products.
I see the consumer market as a "lower-end" enterprise market, or the enterprise market as a "higher-end consumer market", just like I see the server chips market as a higher-end consumer market.
The problem is that when you lose the "lower-end" market, it's only a matter of time before you lose the "higher-end" market, too (5-10 years), according to Innovator's Dilemma.
I know it's not a perfect analogy because it's two companies instead of one, but Nokia losing the leadership in the "consumer smartphones" market, made it even more obvious that RIM will lose its leadership in the enterprise market, too, but with a several years of delay, because the enterprise world moves more slowly.
We are working with large enterprise clients (big pharma). Last two years they practically all adopted iPads for their field forces. Went with single device policy, which created a lot of pain for IT - no Office, no deployment tools, no AD, etc.
MS and Intel then start a marketing blitz in those IT departments, hey, enterprise, we love and understand you. Cool, IT guys fall for it.
Problem?
MS wants enterprise to adopt Win8 Pro on Intel devices. Which practically all are around 1000$ and have a battery life of 4 hours.
Enterprise IT wants something similar to the iPad, for even cheaper. They want an iPad with sane deployment tools and MS Office. Cheaper. Because their people in emerging markets have limited budgets.
Enter Windows RT. It is just like an iPad, cheap, better power efficiency on its devices. Awesome, right? Except that it does not offer the deployment and management tools needed. It is practically an iOS device in that regard. The MS Office on it is Home/Student Preview edition, which seem to be upgradeable if you have the right CALs. But it runs like shit. Buzz is that the whole thing was a very late add once they realized that MS' main selling point was Office. Late, panicky scramble.
And now add the fact that MS seems to be launching MS Office on iOS soon.
And then we have Modern UI. Nice for consumer apps. Facebook looks cool. But enterprise tools? On iOS we have freedom. On Modern there are guidelines, horizontal swipe and pagination is key. You're used to high information density, utilization of screen real estate to show as much as possible on one screen to avoid a user needing to navigate away? Forget that on Modern UI. Whitespace rules, it is like the GMail redesign on steroids. No wonder they need Classic UI to make MS Office available - Modern UI in its current strict incarnation cannot scale to offer this kind of functionality.
So yeah. Intel is not in a good spot. Microsoft neither. The next 6 months will be decisive. Lots of pilots going on, Samsung has a good enough Win 8 Pro device out there, Surface Pro still not here. Surface is not even launched in Japan, might not be till late next year.
Whoever is in charge of platform strategy at MS should be made to go away. With access to those resources they should be kicking ass.