I work on the Windows team and was front row at the big Win8 planning meeting. It was good fun with Steve Ballmer shouting right in front of me (I'd never experienced that before... he's amazing at getting a crowd going).
I can't say much... but these slides are laughable (and if real, designed for some other company's execs/marketers) I joined Microsoft this past September having never been a Windows person. I've done most of my professional development on linux, and you can pry my macbook pro from my cold dead hands.
With that in mind, Win8 is looking awesome and it's something that I want to use right now. Microsoft is really getting their shit together. Win8, if it's even a fraction of what is planned, is going to change things permanently. This is a good thing considering Steve Jobs seems to have given up on the desktop as of this most recent WWDC.
>Microsoft is really getting their shit together. Win8, if it's even a fraction of what is planned, is going to change things permanently. This is a good thing considering Steve Jobs seems to have given up on the desktop as of this most recent WWDC.
Honestly this kind of thing is exactly what makes me think they don't "have their shit together". They're going to run out and say "look everyone! We have a desktop OS that's slightly better than OSX!" right as most people have moved off desktops.
Seriously. Look at what most people do. How much time does the average computer user spend consuming? And how much time producing? Just from the hip I would put this at 80/20 but it might be even more slanted than that. So does Grandma really need a whole PC to email her bridge group and surf the web for recipes? And one that has a "reset this PC" button? Why does she need to know any of this stuff?
What Steve said wasn't that Mac will be giving up on the desktop. He was just acknowledging that in the future it's going to play a vastly smaller role. It's still going to need to be really good because those of us that produce on it will be powering the mobile/appliance devices. I don't want to develop on an iPad but I like consuming with it.
Microsoft just doesn't seem to grasp this somehow and keeps trying to win a battlefield that everyone else realizes will just get less relevant as time goes on. Are they just concentrating on business users? MS had them at NT.
You can say "oh but we've got that covered, look at the new <insert newest MS mobile OS here>" but it doesn't exist right now. All the buzz I see/hear is about iPhone, Anroid and Palm. Is MS really committed to mobile to the level they need to be? If it is I don't think they're getting it across very well.
Funny enough, MS does have a nice install base of a an appliance device: the X box. Are they planning an App store for it (not a game store, an app store)? Can I purchase songs that sync with my media player?
The thing about Windows is they don't really have to do very much and they'll still sell a boat load of copies. Windows 7 has sold tens of millions of copies. I would consider that a resounding success in such a short period of time. But the fact is, attention is quickly shifting away from desktop operating systems. So while it will be do doubt successful, I still wonder when Microsoft is going to step up their game on the mobile front.
While that's all true (one minor correction, 150 million Win7 licenses have been sold).
If you haven't taken a look at Win7 mobile, you might want to. It's a pretty decent and novel approach to mobile UI. Microsoft has stepped up it's UI efforts in the past year or so. You're starting to see this in most of their products. They finally got a kick in the nuts after resting on their laurels for too long. Win8 shouldn't disappoint.
Having looked through the slide deck I can't help but to draw the parallels with similar plans for Vista. "It will have this, it will have that, 3rd and 4th" and in the end all that left was the protected media path and the windows-tab gimmick.
Perhaps MS has changed, but frankly given the history and considering its size and the amount of office politicking involved I find it fairly hard to believe.
Don't get me wrong, I think people will continue to buy "desktop" class computers for a long time to come, and in great numbers, so I believe Windows on the desktop has a long and prosperous future ahead of it. But so far as where the growth is these days, it's all in mobile.
Au contraire, Steve Jobs responded to a mail asking him if the Mac was dead with "You couldn't be more wrong." and a "Stay tuned" type phrase (can't seem to find the link right now).
I haven't gone through these slides thoroughly because I'm done with Microsoft peddling vapourware and getting our hopes up (coughCouriercough) only to sack the entire team (or whatever they did recently), but whatever I saw showed me a tighter integration with using the cloud as storage. The problem here is that Microsoft is trying to make a faster, leaner and better looking truck (to borrow Jobs' description) because it has lost the mobile game; at least for now. They're trying to maintain the status quo, but nothing in the last 10 years has shown me anything that tells me they will succeed. I don't believe in their ability to execute.
Sorry but Jobs had similar things to say about the latest iPhone leading us all to believe something huge was coming. All we got however was an updated iPhone with a few new but under-whelming features. The moral is I wouldn't read much into what Job's says as he'll always be touting his next announcement as "huge" even if it's not.
The first iPod, iPhone and iPad were game changers, the subsequent updates were not. The only revolutionary place that OSX can go is the way of the marketplace/app store and I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Jobs only said there was no chance Google would leapfrog them, and that WWDC would not disappoint (which it didn't). No one expected iPhone 4 to be more of a game changer than the first iPhone.
Btw I don't think there's evidence that Apple has given up on the desktop. Only that their last few big product releases have been in the iPhone/iPad space. Like any company (and perhaps more so than Microsoft) they have a finite number of internal staff, especially in key roles and with key talents (eg. 1 Jobs, 1 Ive), and I'd bet that there would be some internal decision to focus and do something like a product/release sprint. Plus, there's probably a lot more room for innovation in the phone/tablet space than in the desktop space, so it seems reasonable to want to strike while the iron is hot. If you can link to some quote where Jobs has said something equivalent to "we're giving up on the desktop space", I'll retract my argument.
If most of your pro experience has been with Linux, and you seem to love your Macbook Pro, I'm really curious to know why you went to work at Microsoft? This is a serious question.
Without getting into too much detail, I had previously worked at Google (which was a great experience, I recommend everyone does that at some point). I eventually found myself back in my hometown (Philadelphia) for a bit and my girlfriend and I decided we wanted to check out what was going on in Seattle.
I had a bunch of offers but mostly looked at Amazon and Microsoft. I chose Microsoft because they are doing some amazing things internally right now. They also have some ridiculous talent (and their hiring changes over the past few years have only made it better). There is nothing better than working with other brilliant engineers.
In the end though, it was just about interesting work. Microsoft has acknowledged that they need to step up their game, and convinced me to come along for the ride. I've been there for 10 months now and so far they've stayed true to their word. It is a lot of fun there. I wasn't sure how it'd compare to Google, but Microsoft has surpassed my expectations. The only thing I miss is the free food.
It was never about what operating system or programming language, Microsoft offered me the most interesting challenge. So I took it.
Yes but there are other important things in life other than simply solving technical problems. And there are plenty of problems to solve that do not involve Microsoft or Windows. And choice of technology mix has a big impact on things like personal productivity and quality of life.
If you want to touch the lives of as many people as possible, you can't go wrong working for Microsoft. They might be evil, but if I can help out some percentage of their users, that's quite a bit of good done for the world. I won't say that's my biggest reason for working there, but it helps.
That means, among other things, that their products need to be hard to both clone and/or be compatible with.
Microsoft systems then need to have too much complexities and oddities to be bug compatible with. It should be hard to clone APIs etc as parts of other operating systems. And so on.
The implementations also need to vary over time and be replaced periodically.
Just look at their "open" document standards of thousands of pages...
The thing about Microsoft, speaking as a fan of Linux and Mac, is that it doesn't really matter if they get their shit together. Mac and Linux already exist, and they can beat Windows in the premium/shiny and cheap/utility departments, respectively. Those two right there are going to satisfy a lot of people's needs. About the two biggest factors in Microsoft's favor remaining are (1) selling home consumer PC's to folks who want/need something cheaper than a Mac, and (2) legacy application inertia. iPad and Linux desktops can somewhat attack (1), and the advantage of (2) will slowly wear away over time I think as more and more ppl/bizs find acceptable replacements on Mac, iPad or Linux.
>>Mac and Linux already exist, and they can beat Windows in the premium/shiny and cheap/utility departments, respectively. Those two right there are going to satisfy a lot of people's needs.
Mac, yes. Linux? No. The key word that Linux distros (including Ubuntu) still miss is usability.
That's a popular point to harp on but I think that Linux desktop environments are just fine for usability. There are a few quirks (like "Unmount, Eject, Safely Remove" in GNOME), and frankly it's surprising that they haven't been ironed out, but for the most part I think that Linux is just as friendly as anything else.
The real problems with Linux are much lower-level -- its vital desktop infrastructure has been ignored for too long. Look at X; there is a concerted effort to change it now, but rather late to the game if you ask me, and it still is very neglected for how important it is and all the work that's left to be done on it. Sound is the same way, and other vital components for desktop.
The biggest factor in favor of Microsoft is (and will be for some years at least) the bulk of orders from BigCos that are placed for hundreds of HP or Dell machines with Windows preinstalled. Apple's (or Linux's) share in the corporate segment is still tiny.
> Apple's (or Linux's) share in the corporate segment is still tiny.
Yes, but ever since the iPhone it's growing. My old Java/.NET corporation now has teams doing iPhone/iPad applications. This is huge! Long ago it was all Windows with Linux/Solaris on the server. Now they are actually buying macs for developers.
What's funny is that further down the page they present Push Button Reset, for when your Windows installation deteriorates to the point of being unusably slow. Instead of fixing their OS they decide to burden the user with re-installing the system and then all of their apps. I would face-palm if I weren't laughing so hard.
I wonder if they did any market research on that feature. Every time I tell someone non-techincal that they should re-install Windows to fix their problems the answer is almost invariably either "You can do that?" or "No, that sounds hard."
I guess it makes the local/family geek's job easier when we have to help someone out though. If it's 100% reliable.
In any case piling more hacks and bloat on top of the OS is not the way to mimic Apple. To be fair they would probably need a much bigger reset than the one in 2006 to fix such deep problems.
OK, let's be fair here for a second. If you read Apple's support docs you will quite often run into documents that advocate backing your files to time machine and doing a complete reinstall of OSX.
I don't even need to search too hard. A few weeks ago I wanted to install bootcamp but found out that the bootcamp helper refused to partition my drive because it couldn't find a contiguous 30gb slot on my 80gb free drive. Oh! I could just defrag, I thought to myself... but not so fast, Yuri, Apple does not support defragging because Apple knows best. What do they recommend?
"Another option is to back up your important files, erase the hard disk, then reinstall Mac OS X and your backed up files." (source: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1375)
Anyway, personally, I think the push button reset is a natural progression from the System Restore Points, which are great.
>not so fast, Yuri, Apple does not support defragging because Apple knows best.
Well, they designed and implemented the system, so they should know best.
And they do support defragmentation. Read that page again: "In this case, you might benefit from defragmentation, which can be performed with some third-party disk utilities".
The reality is that few users ever have to worry about fragmentation of their HFS+ drives. And if you are concerned about fragmentation, I suggest 'hfsdebug', a free command-line tool.
I try to be fair, I really do. Of course I'm biased - I grew up using Windows and can't help being bitter about it - but I try to keep things in perspective. Push Button Reset is great for geeks using Windows, but it's a bandage not the cure.
My experience is that Windows' performance deteriorates over time just by using the OS normally. Installing programs and using them, etc. That's one of the things that drove me away from Windows several years ago. Vista and 7 may have changed this but Push Button Reset indicates to me that's not the case. While I agree that the solution to the Bootcamp problem is lame, the situation is quite different. Apple is not recommending you reinstall just to be able to use OS X normally.
Maybe it's not that different, maybe my bias is too strong for me to see it clearly, but I don't think it is.
I use an iMac at work. I like it. (I prefer the way my mouse feels in Windows but aside from that, I enjoy the iMac a great deal).
Still, I think Win7 is the best consumer OS i've ever used.
And specifically to the point you're making -- I got used, with the iMac, to keeping the box up for ages, 30, 60, 90 days at a time. Just by habit I've done the same with my Win7 box at home. Wasn't even stunning to me until I realized one day "Oy! I've got a Win box that's been up for 40 days and feel as snappy as day 4."
I tell you what, you can hold on to your bias or not, your choice, but this is a great OS and a great starting point for them in Redmond for Win8.
Fair enough, I'm glad to see them improve. I don't hate MS or anything of the sort I've just traditionally had bad experiences with their products. I used Vista SP1 for 8-9 months in 2008. It never crashed (when I wasn't OCing) and was great for surfing the web, listening to music, and gaming. I still programmed in a Linux VM though. Cygwin and coLinux don't quite cut it.
It's way too late for me now. I prefer Unix and there's no going back to Windows. I'm a command line junkie. :)
Hmm. I agree with what you say here, but for the opposite reasons.
That is:
I think any OS will deteriorate over time with use. The question is how the OS deals with this fact. The Windows method of memory management and defragging is... passable, but not nearly flexible or versatile for modern machines. For one thing, it's horrendous at dealing with boot configurations. And that reminds the user that Windows (up to 7!) doesn't appear to have any sort of actual boot configurator that even a hard-core geek could use.
What's more, while I see where you're going, and I agree with the thrust, I actually disagree with you that "Push Button Reset is great for geeks." It's the opposite of great for us; what we'd like to do is be able to manage clean reinstalls, and most of all to be able to partition hard disks to our liking. Considering that Windows 7 offers less partitioning options and capabilities than Windows 95 did (seriously, think about that for a moment) and that Vista was the first in a decade even to allow partitioning, we're far from a Windows which affords actual control over the machine or the media that goes into it.
That's really the thing here to me, as a geek. What does Windows 8 have to offer me to impress me and make me happy as a user? The ability to partition seamlessly; the ability to force a partitioning over errors if I want to; the ability to reinstall seamlessly as many times as I need to, to burn reinstallation software as many times as I need to; the ability to easily and directly configure boot parameters, and to make a boot sturdy and permanent for all users on a machine running multiple partitions with differing encryption levels; finally, direct manipulation of inodes/indexes. These are all things which are still, so far as I can tell, flatly impossible within the context of Windows; and where any of them is possible, it's only with the help of expensive software. Whereas a person with a free, burned copy of Knoppix on a disk can do all of them in five minutes with any computer she choose.
I'm not even saying Windows is evil here, or anything like it. It's just that it doesn't in any way meet what I need out of an operating system; there is no control over even the slightest thing, like indexing or bad-sector flags or defragging or partitioning or anything. And I sometimes wonder how Windows developers convince themselves that they're producing a powerful system.
Maybe some of them can answer this; I know they're reasonably intelligent. Do any of you know why Windows won't offer these things? And what we're supposed to do in a world where more and more operating systems do?
> That's really the thing here to me, as a geek. What does Windows 8 have to offer me to impress me and make me happy as a user? The ability to partition seamlessly; the ability to force a partitioning over errors if I want to; the ability to reinstall seamlessly as many times as I need to, to burn reinstallation software as many times as I need to; the ability to easily and directly configure boot parameters, and to make a boot sturdy and permanent for all users on a machine running multiple partitions with differing encryption levels; finally, direct manipulation of inodes/indexes. These are all things which are still, so far as I can tell, flatly impossible within the context of Windows; and where any of them is possible, it's only with the help of expensive software. Whereas a person with a free, burned copy of Knoppix on a disk can do all of them in five minutes with any computer she choose.
Then use Knoppix. Seriously. You just described yourself in the top 1% of computer geeks, and geeks are not part of Microsoft's core market anyway. You want to directly manipulate indexes and inodes?!?! Come on; Microsoft has no time for you, nor should it.
Of course things like different encryptions for different users of the same machine might make sense (although probably not, since that is pretty enterprisy, so probably happens on a server), but low-level disk partitioning is not the right way for Microsoft to handle them, even if they chose to handle them at all.
> Maybe some of them can answer this; I know they're reasonably intelligent. Do any of you know why Windows won't offer these things? And what we're supposed to do in a world where more and more operating systems do?
1) They don't want your business. 2) You're supposed not to use Windows.
Because that's how hard drives work. You move and copy - often very large files nowadays - and fragments of data are left behind, muddying up the system. The question is how the system deals with it.
I actually believe that Windows 7 represents a real improvement on how memory and fragmentation are managed. Vista wasn't bad, either. They both do pretty well.
I think it's more that the registry and filesystem get bloated and crufty. You can defrag an older installation and it'll still be slow.
It happens on new systems too. I've done it dozens of times, install Windows and be happy about the fresh, fast installation. Install some apps so you can use the machine and it slows down. Office was always the worst, even on a brand new install.
I can. I've borked several Linux partitions by installing incompatible versions of libraries, etc. Any highly-configurable system carries the risk of falling into an unusable (for you) configuration.
Partitioning an already heavily used disk for bootcamp is probably the closest any relatively normal user would ever get to needing to degrag an OS X volume.
And pretty much the only time a normal user would ever need to reinstall OS X is if something went seriously wrong with the system files. It's a very abnormal thing to encounter. And even if you somehow need to do so, the option to preserve user information has been in OS X for a long time.
Not to get all tangental, but these are reasons why something like iOS is the probable future of consumer computing. There is so much crap that people deal with on a day to day basis with computers that they should never even have to know about.
It looks like this slide isn't intended for internal Microsoft use, so likely they are trying to get across the intentions/direction of focus to the audience.
More specifically, I think they are trying to convince Dell/HP that they can build an Apple-like brand without leaving the Windows ecosystem (e.g. in favor of buying/building their own OS, e.g. via Palm). That's what the hardware-manufacturer-branded app stores are also about.
FTA: "Of note, these slides were apparently leaked or inadvertently released after being given to one Derek Goode at HP. Likewise, many of the discussions throughout the slides address HP."
take a look at powershell, seriously, when i move to a linux desktop in the near future at work, my default shell will most likely be http://pash.sourceforge.net/
Instead of piping text from one command to the other, you pipe entire objects back and forth. A lot of bash commands are aliased to Powershell commandlets out of the box. And, as of Powershell 2.0, you have remote scripting similar to SSH.
I choose to do Python Web development on Windows, and I spend my whole day on the PS command line, and I'm really pleased.
That's my problem with PowerShell. No matter how good it may be, I don't really feel like relearning everything just to accomplish the same things, only on Windows instead.
I'm right there with you not wanting to learn a new shell, however PS is written against the .NET Windows API. The new stuff you'd have to learn would be Windows specific, sort of like learning AppleScript. Also, PS has traditional unix shell commands built in now, like grep and ls.
I like relearning. I don't have much use for re-learning... I'd rather learn to do something new. The "to accomplish the same things, only on Windows instead" is the crucial qualifier. I'd rather spend my time, I don't know - learning to configure nginx or doing Haskell tutorials than learn someone's proprietary shell, given that shells aren't particularly exciting and I already know enough about the shells that every other platform offers to be satisifed.
How does that whole "pipe entire objects back and forth" thing work? I mean it seems that there must be some huge machinery to facilitate that kind of thing. For example, if I pipe object from my program to another, how does the other program know what to expect? It must have some sort of type information available, which imposes some pre-planning.
Also, when I pipe an object to another program, can the receiver call methods on it and are the changes visible to the sender?
I'm not sure how they do it and I've only used the basic features of powershell. That said, commands in powershell are .NET classes that define a method ProcessRecord. Inside this they can call WriteObject to write an object to the output stream. So it seems that they can just implement this without any parsing by passing objects around in the .NET runtime.
Bash sure, but why would Microsoft build an X server? They already have remote desktop technology that works fine. The only thing one would possibly need an X server for is to display unix applications on the windows machine. Why would they spend extra effort for something like that?
it would be very easy to add a simple x server. If windows had a solid gcc, bash, and x server (and case sensitive file system) there would be none of the typical frustration I get when using it to do anything serious.
Ugh. Visual Studio is a superior development environment to anything you can get on Unix (with the only exception being Smalltalk environments and Slime to an extent), and case sensitive file systems are a mistake that came about from laziness. A file system should be case preserving but case insensitive. Full Stop. Do you know how much money has been lost in the business world because some idiot on a unix box thought differentiating different files with case alone was really cool?
iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 .... naming means nothing, every company gets wooed by slick marketers and pro naming people who mess up any consistency.
I thought it was telling that many of the slides are full of the same kind of meaningless waffle you see in management or sales/marketing presentations at other big companies. I'm actually a little surprised at that. For all its past transgressions, Microsoft does have a reputation for hiring smart technical people, and in recent years a lot of the technology it has produced has been respectable again. I somehow assumed the people running the show would be of the same calibre, with clear ideas and well structured plans for realising them, but that doesn't appear to be the case if whoever wrote the presentation(s) used here is representative.
It looks even worse when viewed in that light. Is "we're going to try to rip Apple off, badly" really the pitch they're giving HP and their other OEM's?
Oy. I'm _so_ sick of people talking of one software company "copying" another as if it's a bad thing.
Look around in the rest of the world mate. Look at the checkout lines at Target! They're exactly like Walmart! Which are exactly like Safeway! Look at the layout of every grocery store you've ever been in. Look at each boutique in the shopping mall. All the same!
When people say "intuitive" they mean "familiar." They may not realize it, but that's what "intuitive" _actually_ means.
You've got an e-commerce site? You should liberally borrow/steal from Amazon's checkout process. You've got an OS? Take from Apple who've been setting a baseline for OS usability.
Christ. "X is copying Y" is about as inane as it gets to me.
It's not the copying that's the problem. It's the part where they're doing it badly.
If the best Microsoft can do is to struggle to keep up with what Apple was doing two years ago they're not going to look very impressive to OEM's like HP as they decide to move forward with their products, with our without Microsoft.
If that's the case then it's just a question of implementation. Why does the "copying"/"stealing" meme even introduce itself? It confuses your point IMO.
However, your "doing it badly" is a matter of opinion, no? I use a mac at work as I mentioned elsewhere. I enjoy it a great deal. It's hard to go back and forth between the Mac there and Windows at home because the way the mouse moves is just... different. But I do it...
I was planning on dumping my Vista laptop at home for a macbook but then I gave Win7 a try. You can scoff at my experiences if you'd like, but Win7 is the only OS i've ever purchased. I think Vista is one of the worst OS experiences I've ever had (2nd to ME) and hands-down I think Win7 is the best.
It's built-in keyboard shortcuts for moving and docking windows across multiple monitors are invaluable to me. I installed the 3rd party app to give me similar function on my mac and it was... dismal.
My Win box is as reliable as my Mac. I restart them both on average once a month or so.
There are several places Mac kills Win7. Tasks like adding a network printer, for example. But those are rare, relatively speaking.
The Win7 taskbar is no doubt inspired by the Dock but it's far more useful IMO. The context menu per taskbar item is brilliant.
And once my cache is warmed (a day after restarts maybe) it's faster to/from Hibernate/Sleep than is the Mac.
If you've not used Win7 and you're criticizing, eh, you're entitled. But as an analytical guy, as a software developer, it seems odd to me.
Wait some months and see if the experience is still the same. Much to my surprise, a lot of people still say that windows 7 has the age old "bit rot" problem of Windows 95, i.e. the longer you use it without rebooting the worse it starts performing.
Except there are almost no Apple features listed in this deck. The only thing they really copy from Apple is to create brand loyalty. I'm not sure any company in the world would argue against trying to get the brand loyalty that Apple has.
Windows seems to happen as a bottom-up thing. Feature teams conceive, design, and implement features, and a bunch are put together and shipped. Thus, any top-down view will be necessarily meaningless until the details float in from the teams actually doing the work.
At the same time, you need some top-down direction. You can't just tell a team of thousands of engineers to go build something, and expect it all to have a unifying theme, and work well together.
It works well for small teams, but breaks down pretty quickly as team size grows.
I can't say much... but these slides are laughable (and if real, designed for some other company's execs/marketers) I joined Microsoft this past September having never been a Windows person. I've done most of my professional development on linux, and you can pry my macbook pro from my cold dead hands.
With that in mind, Win8 is looking awesome and it's something that I want to use right now. Microsoft is really getting their shit together. Win8, if it's even a fraction of what is planned, is going to change things permanently. This is a good thing considering Steve Jobs seems to have given up on the desktop as of this most recent WWDC.