Windows 8: Not even Microsoft thinks businesses will use it Like Thelma and Louise, executives at Microsoft's Windows division have no doubts about which direction they want to point the car. It's pedal to the floor, and over the cliff as fast as they can drive. Last week the latest Windows 8 public preview confirmed what many had expected and feared: there will be no compromise on the …
From the Microchip website
MPLAB® X IDE is a software program that runs on a PC (Windows®, Mac OS®, Linux®)
I've never had to "mess" with compilers just to run an application and Linux is all I use. From my 17 year experience of Linux, both at home and in research in a big pharma Linux has been a valuable desktop for years. Indeed at work, ~8 years ago, I only used Linux and Unix desktops as the extremely expensive protein modeling software programs were ONLY available for them.
If it is running win98 as a server, try locating a copy of Lotus SmartSuite if you can figure out what format the proprietary db is able to export to. It would be tragic if nothing is usable, especially since Approach can import some 10 or more format types. Is that db GUI or DOS-based? Is it in Lantica/Sesame? Borland Paradox? Other?
IWCTW, see if you can find a hacker/cracker who can get the db into RAM, then use a hex or memory reader to grab the data. Won't be cheap, but it could be costlier ($ and emotions) if that ancient machine decides to give up the dust and bite the ghost.
The cost of _finding_ a skilled reverse-engineering developer who is willing to undertake the work on contract is a challenge for a small business owner, let alone budgeting for the legitimate costs that the developer will incur while doing the work.
In addition, even if the base formats were to be reverse-engineered, if the original developer decided (for understandable IP protection reasons) to put in any amount of encryption (or even some well-placed obfuscation of critical code, parameters, or key data structures), then the reverse engineer would be faced with yet another set of hurdles, and the costs would go through the roof.
I could easily see such an effort, undertaken by a single developer, to run to $10k or $15k, or perhaps even $25k or more.
In my judgment, the best thing to do is to find some expert systems software assistance (which, while costly, will be far less so than an entire reverse development effort), and virtualize that Windows 98 machine so that it can easily, safely, and forever be run on a modern hypervisor.
Alternatively, hire a cheap offshore data entry team (or put it up for Amazon's Mechanical Turk) to rekey all the data into a modern application.
Being an iPad owner who does a fairly limited amount of things on it, I really can't see why anyone would want to operate a full blown computer with such a limited interface. I think Windows on ARM is going to suck and x86 tablets will run too hot to put on your lap or run slow to prevent this.
To operate a tablet computer on your lap you really do need multi-touch and a touch screen UI. I've remotely accessed a Mac with my iPad and found it slightly frustrating to use to day the least. But touch screen interfaces can never be so powerful as a mouse and keyboard.
Firstly the mouse and trackpad is the couch potato's friend, you can move a mouse pointer around a large screen accurately with very little in the way of movement. Physical keyboards are also loads better than on-screen keyboards as you can reliably use more than one hand and use multiple fingers too.
The saddest thing of all in the computer industry right now is all the pioneers are dead or no longer involved in technology. Bill Gates isn't in charge of Microsoft, Steve Jobs is dead and Google are hardly innovate, choosing to replace Microsoft in the role of cloning and cheapening the competition.
Picture the scene at MSFT HQ.
One thrusting young VP says that if Microsoft embraced the whole new tablet-cloud-mobile-multimedia scrumptious we could be just like Apple. And remember what happened when we ignored that internet stuff back in the 90s
Another greybeard says - our core strength is in the enterprise desktop, don't change anything, just make things more consistent and easier to manage.
Which button does Blamer press to drop one of them into the shark tank?
We tend to overlook that Enterprise licensing is calendar-based. Which Windows os is merely an implementation detail.
Integration over three screens is Microsoft's play these days. Correction, the promise of the best integration when all the kit is ready and purchased is today's message. When tomorrow arrives, we'll see if the world didn't know what it was missing.
I think what is really sad is we don't have the tech to download all those brains into a hub for later "resurrection". But, imagine the pattern buffer/bit-muncher mixing up Jobs, Gates, and Ellis into one "stream". They might be one HELLUVA "Hybrid", producing the worst of "altered-egos"..
But, maybe in 15 years, when brain-mapping is further along, we may once and for all reap or strip or sift brains of their unconscious 1s and 0s "brainary" equivalents...
Where'd my Program Manager go? How can I run Windows 3.1 again? The Start Menu sucks. Why can't I use Trumpet Winsock anymore? Microsoft's being anti-competitive again...
How about Product Activation in Windows XP... remember that old chestnut? That was supposed to drive millions of ex-Windows users to Linux.
Nine years from now you'll all be trying to save Windows 8.
Oh god...the f***ing ribbon. I don't think MS realise just how much retraining and redocumentation of procedures is required when they do shit like the ribbon (and Metro) especially when they don't make it optional. Funnily enough one of the most used ribbon add-ons is the 'classic menu' :-) That should have told MS something.....but nah! They know what's best for you.
Both the ribbon and metro belong in the IT graveyard.
Do you not know the routine by now... good, rubbish, good, rubbish. I refuse to go through the list. It's the turn for rubbish.
9 years from now, we'll be trying to save Windows 7. Sheeesh. Code activation doesn't drive users away; stupid UI decisions do though.
I remember the routine - Win 3.11 for workgroups - win95a sucked - win95b was stable and had big hard drive support - win 95c was gui upgrade to make it look like win98 first edition - win 98 sucked was flaky - win 98se was stable and somewhat reliable after all the patches - winME was crap - win 2k was decent but they dropped directX support for it forcing me to winXP - Vista was crap I never used - Win 7 is crap I do not use - winXP in classic mode is now as stable as 2k was and with firefox or chrome, openoffice, and winamp who cares if the newest IE or media player or office will not work on the old XP?... I swear to use winXP until I cannot use it any more! <I should go buy a bunch of blank HD's and install/activate windows XP then put them on a shelf to use after the 'activation server' is taken down> I still miss win98se because I could set bootgui = 0 and go to true dos and run win whenever I wanted... (They killed the progman.exe in winXP, I tried copying the one from 2k but they went out of their way to block that...)
On top of all these versions of windows I put LiteStep and never changed my interface / gui for any of the OS's they threw at me until VISTA came along and when I shut down it went 'OMG your shell has shut down what ever should I do now?!?!?!?' and that is why I never left XP.
> Code activation doesn't drive users away; stupid UI decisions do though.
Perhaps for the consumer market. For business, they'll either just skip Win8 or deal with it.
What really drives businesses away is application incompatibility coupled with licensing issues. MS isn't daft enough to do both of those at the same time.
Replacing applications is a major headache. App deployment and migration is a major headache. Compare the costs of lost productivity due to UI with a switch to a different OS with the same type of UI and you'll see why businesses will stick with MS, even of they don't go with Win8.
@Gordon - You are right - I remember running Win95 in "3.1 mode" for months until I was forced to admin that, actually, you know, this new menu thing is quite good. Ooh, did I slag it off at the time though. I'm not going to fall for that again, I'm going to try it out and make up my own mind, rather than listen to the vocal ones on the Internet, many of whom have a track record in slaging MS.
Only Windows 95 wasn't reducing an expensive computer into basically a phone.
The only way that it may drive users to Linux/OS X is when people decide that they don't like the look of 8 and wonder what else is actually out there. It might be like that scene in The Simpsons when all the kids go outside and play when the Cable is out.
I agree that Windows 95 was the beginning of the serious rot.
Before that - Win3.11 did what it was supposed to do - and didn't crash. Also, a Win3.11 PC could be rebuilt by Format /s of a HD - and copying all the files back from a network backup. I know this as did it myself.
Windows 95 came in - suddenly we had OS crashes (at the time, an original WTF?) and suddenly the only way to rebuild a PC was to re-install the OS from the CD (again WTF?)
Windows were close to sorting themselves out with the fairly lean WIndows 2000 - but then in came the truly dreadful, bloated WinXP. (It still amazes me how people think XP is any good - have they not tried a decent Linux distro or a mac?)
What I miss:
IRQ conflicts in the middle of a error ding/bell. "Deeng-neng-neeng-neeng-neng-neeng-neeng... bmung-bmung-bmung-bmung-bmung-bmung....
and, "DUNDT". Sometimes, it's funny to hear it on the BART terminals, when the ticket machine goes tits-up with the win logo on screen.
Sadly, when BART upgrades its trains, it won't be hurling ms/win to the trash heap in favor of an OSS/FOSS/GNU OS...
While the "skipping the business cycle" theory does make some sense, isn't it more likely that Microsoft execs continue to suffer from business myopia where their products are concerned? It's one thing to innovate in ways that help users (i.e. Win3x -> Win9x), but forcing the tablet GUI on non-tablet devices makes no business sense at all for Microsoft.
It sounds like they want to manage one client OS codebase for all devices, regardless of platform. That could make some sense, though I think it could be argued that it brings its own level of complexity that washes out any savings over multiple OSes. To take that leap one step further by defaulting to the tablet GUI and eliminating 15-year-old desktop conventions in the process is unthinkable. That's not innovation, that's just stupid.
"isn't it more likely that Microsoft execs continue to suffer from business myopia"
I wouldn't have thought so. Microsoft is itself a major corporate user of Windows. I had rather hoped this might save Windows 8 - Microsoft's internal users would decry it as unusable - but this doesn't seem to have happened. I don't get it.
Don't get me wrong, I hate Microsoft far more than the average man and have done since I was saddled with Vista. But Microsoft aren't choosing to skip a business cycle. They just know full well that businesses choose to skip MS Upgrade cycles. Whatever MS did with 8 the businesses were going to skip it anyway, so it seems like the right release to put the consumer shit into.
On everything else though, I agree, it looks turd and will probably die a painful death. Thankfully I will never see it as the only place I use windows is at work.
Interesting, for what do you use metro?
I have no interest in the weather in small town USA, nor the USA stock market, I hardly ever watch a video on my PC and Win 8 cannot play DVDs natively anyway, clouds are something that rain on me. I do use outlook, word, excel, Firefox and the like in fact they and the TV are open and ON SCREEN now, but I never found a use for any of the dis-functional metro toys, which I could never close once I found them useless. Shut down was a nightmare till I found the big shiny button on the front did a nice rapid power off - was that the idea or not.
My Windows (H)8 experience will draw to a close as the latest release has been crippled to not run on my spare, non production 3 GHZ pc.
" "I believe that the software giant is taking a pass on businesses for this release, a calculated risk that enables it to more firmly focus on the consumer market that's on the cusp of slipping through its fingers thanks to Apple and, to a much lesser extent, Android," he writes. Well, you read it here first."
Surely not, since you are quoting another website...
Well said Andrew !
Been running W8 preview for some time now and in it's current form it is the most disastrous UI decision MS has ever made for the DT environment. I don't know what idiots they employ to do market research but they clearly have this wrong.
Should have two windows versions - Windows Metro and Windows Classic
Where Metro is solely for touch and new hardware interfaces (can see it working well here) and Windows classic for DT use with the option of Metro as a bolt on layer.
My advice to anyone on the current evidence is to avoid W8 at all costs, wait until W10 after MS has had a few kicks in the nuts and eventually listened to the market putting things right.
This sort of crap from MS is one of the Major reasons I like Linux, I have plenty of UI's to choose from if I don't like something.
What you are missing of course, is by making Metro optional, nobody would use it, and then Microsoft couldn't cream 30% of apps sales.
This is why Metro is being forced upon you are the default interface, so you can rebuy all your apps again, in cutdown crappy metro versions where Microsoft can cream of 30% each time.
Windows 8 is just a vehicle for that.
> This is why Metro is being forced upon you
I have seen a Microsoft message that was: 'Metro will soon be the most familiar UI'.
It seems that MS has projected the growth of iPads and the decline of desktop PCs and of WP7 and concluded that in a few years everything will be tablets and/or smarter smartphones and will miss out because of Apple and Android.
The only way forward is for users to demand a different UI. The way to do this is to get them familiar with Metro. Once they find that it is easy to use they will stop buying the clunky old Apple and Android way and will _want_ Metro on their tablets and phones.
ie if it is forced down their throats then they will grow to love it.
Having the option of turning it off, or not buying Windows 8, will not achieve this aim.
Making desktop, tablet and phone all working the same way will ensure that users buy all 3 devices, plus want Metro on their TVs and cars.
The alternative for MS, in their projections, is decline in PCs, more loss of mobile to Android and reduced revenue. As the business plan is using stock price rises to pay part of the staff costs then this would lead to rising expenses and loss of profits leading to a spiraling decline.
Metro will save Microsoft, and only Metro will do that, there is no Plan B. OEMs _will_ ship it without the option. You _will_ use it, you _will_ like it.
OEMs will also not ship anything else. MS has made HP dump WebOS like it made ASUS dump Linux Netbooks. Others will follow. Expect Dell to dump Linux ARM stuff (or lose 'loyalty discounts').
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