Hacker News Reader

Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

What's so infuriating about Win 8.x is where it improves over Win7 it's clear, however, MS went out of their way to positively screw it up in whole new ways, such as Metro. It should never be the responsibility of the end user to tweak things to decent defaults - defaults should be right out of the box.

Take Metro etc. out (or, better, have it as an app launched from the desktop, and completely uninstallable), sort out the start menu and a few UI tweaks and they would have had an easy win on their hands, but their efforts to do things no one wants are causing them to fail, even to the point of giving people like Google an in with the latest Chrome for Metro aping a full screen Chrome OS like experience which, ironically, is more Windows 7 like than Win 8 is.

MS really need someone that understands not only what they're good at but why people have stuck with MS software at their helm.

View on HN

Call me cynical but I don't really think unifying the desktop/laptop/mobile OSes was the point here.

I think the (unspoken) point of their whole "app" idea is to make people transition into a subscription model instead of a single-payment model; the unification reason was just an excuse.

Could anybody please explain that ?

I mean think about it: people at Microsoft aren't idiots. There's no way in hell that they didn't realize people hated Metro. So why would they still force it upon people even though it means they know people would hate Windows that way?

The only reason is if there is an overriding goal worth the short-term loss of money, and this is the most plausible explanation I could come up with: even if you make people hate your product, if you can force them to move onto a subscription model, they probably won't be able to go back.

But where's the subscription ? isn't 8.1 a regular purchase?

The OS is, the apps aren't necessarily.

The most plausible explanation is the explanation MS gave for creating Metro:

They want to unify destops and mobile, so that they can extend their desktop dominance at the mobile market.

They could've done that without Metro, though, so your hypothesis doesn't really fit the evidence any better than the alternative.

Yup. Imagine a world, where you are still getting all these cool linux kernel improvementds but you are stuck to say "Ubuntu Unity's" ui and nothing else.

MS really need someone that understands not only what they're good at but why people have stuck with MS software at their helm

Microsoft realizes the end of the PC-era is here. (Almost) nobody is buying PCs and OS-licenses anymore, so Microsoft can't gamble it's future on those petty things.

They realize that the future belongs to services spanning several devices and multiple platforms, among which Windows can be one player. That's why you can have Microsoft-software for iOS and Android these days.

But for Windows to be a player in the future, people must want to have it on their shiny, portable touch-devices with long battery-life due to apps running in a controlled environment.

Nothing from the desktop-era Windows fits into that picture. Nothing. For Microsoft to be on those devices that just needs to go.

You and I may hate it, but Microsoft is literally forced to make this "new" Windows-model if they want to remain relevant in the future. Microsoft is upping its service-game, and it will do so at the cost of everything the PC used to be.

348.7 million PCs were wold in 2012. Never make absolutes, except that you shouldn't make absolutes. They make your opinions look dumb.

But the sales in 2013 declined in 11% .

Still higher sales than tablets.

Edit: Also, 2013 figures shouldn't be out until March (if I remember right)... where are you getting these numbers from? Is that a quarter decline?

Just some rough internet search. Others talk about 10% , and mid year predictions we're similar.

> nobody is buying PCs and OS-licenses anymore

Yet, almost everybody is still using PCs and regular desktops, either at home, or at work. Even with the explosive growth of mobile devices, the PC market is still bigger - and I suspect that the reasons for why people aren't buying so many PCs anymore is due to (a) lack of innovation and (b) PCs have a long life and a 4-year old PC or laptop is working just fine for most people. What's really over is the upgrade treadmill. Either way, I'm glad that all kinds of wankers think the PC-era is over, maybe we'll finally have some real innovation in this space.

> They realize that the future belongs to services spanning several devices and multiple platforms ... Microsoft is literally forced to make this "new" Windows-model if they want to remain relevant in the future

Actually there is only one platform that is slowly but surely cannibalizing every other platform, the open web, making the concept of an operating-system irrelevant for the purposes of achieving lock-in the good-old fashioned way. In fact, I bet that Microsoft wants a future dominated by app stores, because that's a future they know how to control.

Nothing from the desktop-era Windows fits into that picture. Nothing. For Microsoft to be on those devices that just needs to go.

One word: Surface

Microsoft's strategy is not based on the idea that nothing from desktop OSes belongs on tablets. To get an ecosystem that is built from that idea, you need to look to Apple's offerings. Microsoft's approach has been to attempt to meld the tablet and PC experiences. Which seems to have failed miserably, because as you observe they really don't fit together very well. The end result has been an offering that's received a lukewarm-at-best reception in both the desktop and the tablet spaces.

> nobody is buying PCs and OS-licenses anymore

Is this because nobody is using PCs anymore or because consumer grade PCs currently have an expected life of 5+ years?

To a large extent, yes. A decade ago you needed to significant upgrade every couple of years to stay current but now a machine can stay useful for the basics and beyond[1] for considerably longer.

There is also competition from the consoles, cheap media players and portable devices: instead of upgrading their PCs many home users buy those devices instead and leave the old PC for when they need to crank open a MS Office document. And having not spent money on new hardware, they resent paying for an upgrade to Windows (which traditionally the cost of was hidden in amongst the cost of that new PC).

[1] even games if you don't mind not playing the latest graphics fests, especially with the growing indy circuit[2] and the growth of mobile devices[3].

[2] which is supporting older hardware better than the big players

[3] because once you are optimised to the point where the game works on cheap tablets, that old PC will probably play a port of it quite well too

Sales have been plummeting across the PC business for a couple of years now, and Windows has reached a point of "good enough" leaving people little incentive to upgrade outside of HW replacement cycles.

And to paint a even bleaker picture you still have 30%+ of the worldwide Windows user-base still running XP, i.e. while PC-users on the Windows platform, they haven't actually paid for a OS license in over a decade.

The business of selling a licensed OS either shrink-wrapped or to OEMs is seemingly much less profitable than it used to be, and clearly not an area where future growth can be expected.

You can't blame Microsoft for trying to find something else to base future growth on.

The interesting part is that both PCs aren't going away, and there is a huge market at the backend. MS is simply throwing those markets away, trying to get into the shiny new thing.

At the same time, the shiny new mobile market is getting more and more similar to the desktop interface MS is trying to throw away. (Android alread has multiuser support, file navigators are getting more Windows(7)-like, status bars are getting more complete, tablets are gettng keyboards...) And mobile devices will get good enough quite soon, then their sales will also go down.

By the way, I'm behond hate here, I'm not participating in any way. I'm just watching the train wreak.

The users are going to learn to like it or stay with Windows 7 for the next 6 years. Microsoft doesn't mind leaving them behind because what is the worst they can do, buy a Mac?

A significant amount of Windows PC users stick with Windows because they're gamers. However, the number of recent and current games for the Mac is steadily increasing (for example, just under half of my Steam library is Mac compatible). Also, the "Mac tax" (ie extra amount paid for a Mac over the cost of the hardware) has greatly diminished.[1]

If Microsoft doesn't release a worthwhile successor to Windows 7 within the next few years, then yes, some consumers will buy a Mac.

[1] http://bgr.com/2013/12/26/mac-pro-windows-diy-cost/

As a matter of fact, yes. I've been using Windows since version 3.1. I've used every version except Vista. I'm building a hackintosh and am moving to Mac OS X. I could have bought a Mac Pro had they been like the previous Mac Pros (e.g., internally expandable and reasonably priced). I'd be using Linux if Adobe Lightroom worked on Linux.

In fairness, for the spec, they are pretty reasonably priced. Compare them to the equivalents from say HP, the Z420 and they are in fact cheaper.

Obviously if you're building your own then you'll save a hell of a lot, but if you're looking for a prebuilt machine you could do worse.

The HP you reference is a lot cheaper:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?gclid=CIvD7qzOnLw...

$1,629. It would need a nice video card, I think, but let's call it $2,000. Now, it still better than the Mac Pro, because if you have a bunch of disks, you need to spend, for the Mac Pro, between $1,500 and $2,500 to hold the disks. That makes the Mac Pro a LOT more expensive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com