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Customer culture

marco.org

The question isn’t whether Metro will be good: it probably will be. And that’s a huge accomplishment for Microsoft that they should be commended for.

But how will their customers react?

The way Metro is implemented vaguely reminds me of Windows Media Center PCs (simple front-end interface). When I read this question by Marco, I couldn't help but think of my experience with MC which was generally a move to disable/not use it entirely. Not to say that this will happen with everyone, but I'm curious to see how it is adopted and whether or not users will be evangelists or expect something more/better. Great article.

"The Windows message is much more palatable to corporate buyers, committees, middlemen, and people who don’t like to be told what’s best for them..."

"[P]eople who don’t like to be told what’s best for them" sure ended up in some strange company there.

Further, I would have thought that "Think Different" would not have welcomed, and not (I guess) repelled, "people who don’t like to be told what’s best for them".

“You can do whatever you want, and we’ll attempt to glue it together. It won’t always work very well, and you might not like the results, but we will do exactly what you asked for.”

Sounds a lot like Facebook right now actually.

In 2000 MS killed their consumer-oriented OS: Windows 95/98/Millenium and focused on a more business-facing product, based on Windows NT.

It looks like they are now introducing a for-consumer version again, this time probably with a really consumer-friendly setup, where there should be not too much for the end user to worry about (and change).

Ehh. You really think Windows XP is a "business-facing" OS? It accounted for the overwhelming majority of all home computer installs during the time it was sold. The internals of the OS aren't what makes it "business-" or "consumer-" facing. iOS's internals are more sophisticated than Win2k's were.

networking and account management is what makes XP more pro-business than pro-consumer. And all the servers - Windows 2000 to 2008 are based on the same kernel basically.

Account management had everything to do with security & privilege containment.

People got tired of every exe running in ring-zero and wreaking havoc. To authorize actions they needed authentication, so .. accounts.

Multi-user operation and remote access were just fringe benefactors of the security. The system itself needed delegation of roles to operate safely. The fact that networking was becoming so widespread forced them to go for a full account management, instead of BeOS style dual-user mode.

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