Microsoft touts Windows 8 fondleslabness Steven Sinofsky has touted Windows 8 as one Microsoft's most significant redesigns since the arrival of Windows 95 more than 15 years ago. On Tuesday, in Anaheim, California, Sinofsky used the opening keynote of the Microsoft's BUILD developer conference to show off the current Windows 8 build, the forthcoming Windows Store, …
"The opportunity is with Windows. Applications will run on all new Windows 8 PCs, laptops, tablets. Any Windows 8 PC is your target customer - so the market could be 400 million people on launch."
Errm if Win 7 has just got to 450 million people several years after launch, seems that the launch numbers are out by a factor of ten or even 100.
Be great to see some proper cleaning up of the messy interface and more importantly the messy underbelly, sadly I only expect more of the current trend of dumming down, build it for monkeys thinking. (There is a difference between treat everone as idiots (current programmer styles) and treat everyone as humans who learn, like to understand but can get confused with inconsistency and random behaviours).
.............2 years old. How did you manage to ramp that up to "several years" after launch? Given that they in fact reached those Win7 license figures at 1 year and 11 months it is just possible that his "guesstimate" is not *that* pony.
"All software capable of running on Windows 7 will work on the new OS, he promised, and it will require less hardware to do so. As an example, he showed a first generation Atom-powered netbook running Windows 8 using around half of the memory of Windows 7 and fewer permanent processes."
How many first-born children did Microsoft have to sacrifice for that miracle?
I'd say all the DOS x.0 and Windows x.0 up to 3 plus 95 & 98. I'd add ME but I believe that was a result of a drunken bender by 98SE went ashore on leave and a similar looking ME got back on the boat but it was clearly different; perhaps the result of ill advised surgery performed by doctors who have mail order degrees.
What, I can hope right?
I'll give them credit for one thing... At least they didn't use that lame attempt to "leak" the Windows preview into the open and then start blaming "hackers" and "warezers" for it like they've done a couple of times in the past.
And yes; I'm curious enough to follow the "hype" a bit; MSIE 9 sits on the background (this environment is SeaMonkey which I prefer) and with 1.2Mb/second my 32bit ISO is coming in.
Credit where credit's due... Either people don't care that much OR MS has indeed braced for impact. The download speed is not bad at all.
Ironically enough; /this/ is why I've come to like Aero so much. By looking at the MSIE icon in my taskbar I can see that the download is approx. 1/3rd on its way. And this is why I'm really not looking forward to that Metro interface. BUT... I will give it a try. I can easily run Win7 within my MS Virtual PC so if Win8 really is all that better it should run smoothly as well.
Interesting times... Not exciting, interesting. But I still fear for a second Vista disaster. Which would be a shame (but well deserved) because I really think MS have come a long way with Windows 7.
They have had a decade of dark years. At home I personally ran exclusively LINUX from 2002 until Win7 turned up and I went through all the distros and all the hassle because frankly XP needed rebuilding every few years in just the same way that all previous versions of Windows did - because of Windows ageing. I even spent 2 years with the luxury of a LINUX desktop at work (RHEL4 if you're interested.) Now at home I'm using Win7 on my main desktop machine, I have my big laptop and netbook running fedora and ubuntu respectively but I'm finding fewer compelling reasons to not buy Win7 licences for the pair of them, it's slick and reliable and everything I need. Also, I'm becoming more of a .NET convert with every new C# application I write.
Windows 8 and it's associated frameworks might just be the killer blow that Microsoft need to get that lock in that they used to have, and obviously that's quite concerning. Most corporates that still run XP are finding the reason they needed to upgrade with Win7 and are all testing it hard. My inner Open Source evangelist is starting to fade with age and laziness and boredom with all the people reinventing the wheel for little apparent reason...... the FOSS world should be a bit worried right now, especially with the counter-productive fragmentation that's permeating their world. You only have to look at all the People's Front of Judea / Judean People's Front stuff that's historically happened with the repeated forking of LINUX and is now being repeated with the forking of Android.
I know that writing this won't change a thing, since I've been writing the same thing for sometime.
This store will have to be regional free, I understand that language, currency and price control is needed. But that only works when MS (or Apple) have interest in the local market and is willing to open the store (ex. UK Microsoft store vs German Microsoft Store vs US Microsoft store). The problem here is, what about those _other_ countries where company doesn't have an interest or big enough user base to open a local store?
Individually, those _other_ countries are small in numbers, collectively they are bigger then any of the EU _local_ markets. So while the US store might not want to sale to someone in the EU since they _already_ have their local store selling in Euro, the same can't be said about someone in Africa. So why not allow people from those _other_ countries to buy from the stores that match their language?
the current regional lock used by stores work with is the "allow list", if you are from a country that isn't from the "allow list" then you will be blocked. Why not change this list to the "block list", this way if you are not from one of the countries that are blocked (ex. UK since there is already a local store serving that country) then you will be allowed to make a purchase!
I hear the claims about boot time. Will they be rendered moot by the preinstallation of the standard boatload of cr@pware?
WIll Microsoft finally stop letting their "partners" totally deface their product before it reaches the customer?
In a nutshell: if it comes with Symantec software preinstalled, forget it. The party's over before it begins.
Are we going to get a dozen different versions, at a dozen different prices?
I hope (optimistically, and with a dashing of naivety) Microsoft take a leaf from Apple's book and have a sensible policy. One operating system, two versions (ARM, x86), one price for end-users - a price of $35 (£35, good old Blighty..) At that price my machines might ALL get proper licences, rather than just the ones I use for my business.
Is this the chance Microsoft has been looking for to reduce piracy of their OS?
That was enough. A thoroughly hostile UI and a bugger to use. Took far to many clicks to get to basics (e.g. an actual Control Panel, shutdown etc), the random switching to/from the desktop is irritating and distracting and it just makes using a desk PC painful.
It actually manages to be *worse* than Unity; that takes some effort!
"Sinofsky promised, with each Windows 8 user getting a SkyDrive account to allow data to be shared between applications and devices"
Well - that'll kill it for use in corporates unless it can be switched off - is SkyDrive the new IE? ("The OS isna gonna take it Capn")
I know that any UK public body IT person seeing that is going to have heart failure - their nice documents living on servers outside the EU? Ain't gonna fly!
I've got all our email etc in the cloud and find W7 a better interface than OSX - don't even start me on Gnome and KDE now.
BUT Microsoft billing makes me want to jump down the phone line and strangle whoever designed the stupid, bloated, inefficient, infuriating bloody system. If this new store sorts that out it will be a godsend.
I'm not holding out any hope. I still think enterprise billing will be awful.
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