OMFG TECH
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ParisLemon: If Microsoft Were The Inventors Of Facebook Home, They'd Have Invented Facebook Home Here we go again.
Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s head of communications, took to the company blog today to “congratulate” Facebook on the launch of Facebook Home. Except that he’s not really congratulating Facebook, he’s passive-aggressively signaling the old “WE DID THIS FIRST!!!” whiny bullshit…
It’s all about execution. MSFT executed badly, as they have done on every product for the last few years.
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"Windows 7 was a lie." Paul Thurrott:
It’s not pat to say that the Windows PC market went for volume over quality, because it did: Many of those 20 million Windows 7 licenses each month—too many, I think—went to machines that are basically throwaway, plastic crap. Netbooks didn’t just rejuvenate the market just as Windows 7 appeared, they also destroyed it from within: Now consumers expect to pay next to nothing for a Windows PC. Most of them simply refuse to pay for more expensive Windows PCs.
Well stated. Microsoft’s problem isn’t just that Windows 8 is a confusing mess of a product that offers little upgrade incentive (though I’d argue that’s a big one), it’s all the elements surrounding it as well. Thurrott rightly points out a massive one not often talked about: netbooks. They inflated Windows 7 numbers while destroying the margins of the PC business, which in turn is now badly hurting the Windows business. It’s the classic short-term gain for long-term pain scenario.
It’s a perfect shitstorm, really.
Interesting. Good commentary by Siegler.
I love that Paul Thurrott aka Mr. Windows aka Nº. 1 fan is being honest and shitting on Microsoft a lot for their poor decisions and product of late. It’s good to see him being unbiased.
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The Verge: It’s time to drop the Windows name.
“I think Microsoft has abused the Windows brand so much that it has lost its cachet,” says long time Microsoft watcher Paul Thurrott of Supersite for Windows.
I could not agree more with this viewpoint. When Microsoft first unveiled Windows 8 I felt they should have called it something different. Even more so for Windows Phone. I think that both of these should have debuted under the name Metro OS.
…But, of course, they didn’t. Microsoft doesn’t know how to be cool, nor how to sell, anymore.
My favourite quote:
…end users struggling with their Windows laptops would regularly ask “why doesn’t this just work?”
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Steve Ballmer’s Nightmare is Coming True.
(I had to include the image - yet another great picture of Ballmer.)
Windows 8 doesn’t seem to be reasserting the dominance of the PC. Windows Phone is not a viable third platform. Bing is still burning money. The Microsoft nightmare scenario is actually becoming a reality.
Some if the “analysis” is a little simplistic and aggressively generalises. It would be nice to have more numbers and less opinion, but the general message is absolutely right.
Gruber summarises the point perfectly:
In a nut, Microsoft is losing relevance. That’s deadly.
Yep.
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I Got Bugs Nate Waddoups, Senior SDE at Microsoft answering “What is so great about Microsoft?” on Quora:
The Windows team invests a mind-boggling amount of time, hardware, and people into maintaining compatibility. There are bugs in Windows that could have been fixed years ago, but can’t be, because that would break applications that (deliberately or accidentally) depend on those bugs. Bug-for-bug compatibility is a problem, but breaking backward compatibility would be a much bigger problem, so even as the lowest layers of the operating system are revised and rewritten, the layers that applictions talk to (the application programming interface, or API) are carefully tested to ensure that no changes are visible to the application.
Bugs as a feature. Can’t imagine why so many of us ditched Windows years ago.
This is such warped logic.
What a nightmare.
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Sinofsky leaves MSFT The future looks really bright for Microsoft’s management team.
NAHT.
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"Windows 8-style UI" Instead of Metro?
Seriously?
You can’t make this stuff up.
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Microsoft Just Lost Money For the First Time Ever It won’t be the last.
MG Siegler beat me to the punch in his prediction of MSFT’s future:
Windows 8 will be out in the end of October. When it comes out, it will shoot far past Servers & Tools again, and probably even past Office. But for how long? In my mind, the trend is clear: Microsoft is quickly transforming into a full-on enterprise company.
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Firefox Mobile OS Breaks Cover I know competition is great for innovation, but seriously? Mozilla? Why?
File this under Dead on Arrival.
