Windows 8 sales fall short of Microsoft's internal projections - Page 3

"Microsoft doesn't believe sales have been affected by the software itself. Instead, the thinking in Redmond, Wash., is said to be that PC makers have offered 'lackluster' designs, along with limited availability."

This begs the question of Microsoft:
Is this just math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better or is this real?

This bumbling response of blame-laying, deflection and denial for self-inflicted failure sounds familiar. It's what happens when an organization drinks so much of its own Kool-Aid that they're fully invested in their self-delusional model of the real world.

Microsoft had the arrogance to develop a desktop OS that throws 20 years of collective user conditioning in OS GUI behavior out the window, and they're shocked -- shocked! -- to find that the marketplace's response is mass befuddlement and corporate resistance to adoption.

Then they stubbornly double-down on their it's-not-us-it's-you arrogance by spouting preposterous babble like this.

The ironic thing is, had they simply added an autohide Windows button to the interface that could be enabled or disabled by the user, people would have embraced the new Windows 8 UI model with gusto. Many users would never even touch the Windows button again -- just knowing in the back of their minds that it was available would give users enough psychological confidence to abandon it.

It's the law of diminishing returns. If you are using Windows 7 and are happy, why upgrade to 8? Seems the techies like to believe everyone wants the latest and greatest, but with enterprise, that is not the case. The BYOD (bring your own device) is really catching on, and more people prefer Apple products than Mr Softie's.

Microsoft is right, a lot of the devices launched around Windows 8 are confusing. But it's their fault too: an OS that is half tablet and half desktop isn't going to be much fun on either device. It needs a big switch where you can switch to totally desktop mode or totally tablet mode.

 

Those are some nice number. A few things to bear in mind:

 

1/. The XBox division still hasn't broken even on the amount of cash poured into it over the years. 

 

2/. Microsoft has sold 70million XBox360 consoles in total. Apple total sales of iOS devices are near 400million. Even if you could prove your assertion that 'a lot' of IOS device have been thrown away, the chances are that the 'thrower' will buy a new iOS device to replace it. 

 

3/. In the last quarter, Apple sold more AppleTV units than Microsoft sold XBoxes, an increase of 170%.  Not bad for a 'beloved hobby'.

 

4/. Apple's iOS stuff alone makes more money than the whole of Microsoft.

I just bought my girlfriend an Apple TV, and she found it far more usable than her Xbox. Lets hope Apple can get some apps on that pronto.

I think that's the case - for the entire industry - and I've said so a number of times in recent months.

Back in the 90s, your computer was never fast enough. Even if you bought the latest, fire breathing monster, the software brought it to its knees. And even if your computer was 'fast enough' to keep you happy, all it took was one round of software upgrades and it crawled. Added to that was the fact that people were regularly doing new things with their computers. First, it was photo editing. Then video editing. These demanded regular increases in computer power.

Today, most people are not using all of their computers' power - particularly in the corporate world. Even my 5 year old MacBook Pro is fast enough 95% of the time and there's little incentive to upgrade for most people. Outside of a few geeks, upgrading is a pain so average people are not eager to do so without a good reason. Until there's some new application or software that demands far more power than the computers people are using, the market is likely to remain slow.

The exception, of course, is the tiny number of people who are power gamers and want every ounce of power they can get and a very small number of professionals who need massive power. But the numbers are far too low to keep the market happy.

The result is a PC market that has been flat or declining for some time now. Even Apple - which leads the industry in growth rates - has seen sales increases drop from previous levels.

Message to the entire industry:
If you want to sell more computers, give us a reason to buy. Simply "faster than the previous version" is no longer compelling.

 

I suppose you think anyone can speak Aramaic?

 

This is a bit unfair. The point of a Swiss army knife is that the individual tools are generally quite good. Microsoft has produced a US army knife.

Six weeks? Did the survey find they're all going to go rush and buy new machines real soon?


No problem. I need to replace an old Windows laptop, that needs to still be Windows, so I started looking around to find my options.


First, typical buyers ≠ all buyers. There are plenty of buyers with money that buy Windows machines for compatibility reasons (business, games, etc.) or personal preference, but Apple has taken the oxygen out of the high end market.

I'd say I'm a former Windows user, but that's not totally true yet. I still use Windows on my Mac, plus I have a laser engraving machine that won't run from Mac OS, so an old Windows laptop runs that pretty well, or at least did, I'm considering upgrading it because it's old enough to give me troubles.

But I think the point remains is that if you're a consumer buying a computer on price, you're buying a Windows computer. If the bottom half of the budget computer buyers drop out of the game because of economic uncertainty, that doesn't hurt Apple so much because Apple doesn't compete there.

MG Siegler just have a review of the slate. Not good. Not good. Not good.

How so?

Would you take the saw on a SAK over a dedicated tool for cutting down trees or branches? I wouldn't.
Would you take the fish scaler on the SAK over a dedicated tool? I wouldn't.
Would you take the screwdriver on a SAK over set of standard and Phillip screwdrivers? I wouldn't.
Would you use take the scissors in the SAK over a fullsized scissors for pretty much any project? I wouldn't.

I just can't imagine anyone saying I don't need dedicated tools for a specific job because I own a SAK. Well, I said that, but in me defense I was 9yo and thought the SAK was the coolest thing ever.

Window 8's new interface is a confusing mess.

meh

 

If they like their shiny toys then they might get a mac.  If they want computing horsepower then you get a lot more bang for your buck with a Win machine.

Don't get me wrong, I like Apples products  but with the exception of the Air, I wouldn't buy nor recommend their computers.  I think 90% of the market agrees with me.  Of course I do have to put up with Windows.

I think I'm taking it further off topic, but I don't know if the metaphor works for tablet or laptop computers. It does work well for phones though, because people actually do that. There are better flashlights, but the phone does well enough. There are better cameras, but the phone works well enough such that the compact camera market is suffering. There are better machines to do email and web browsing with, but they use their phone because it's easier to carry with them. It's a single device that does everything, even if it's not as nice as using the ideal tool, but no one wants to carry around ten ideal tools when a single tool does the job well enough.

A quick funny story of computing horsepower, a non-profit anti-child porn group needed a super computer to break passwords on websites, the computer they needed was $8000, they instead linked up 4 PS3s and got the horsepower they needed for much cheaper.

 

Microsoft is more like a plastic scissor than a Swiss army knife when compared with any real POSIX OS. 

As an Apple fan, it pains me to say that I think Windows 7 is actually a really nice OS. That being said, anyone who is happy with Win7 is not likely to upgrade to Win8 because it's a complete shift in "how things work." MS can't possibly believe that average consumers will give up everything (and by that I mean very little) they know about how to use the OS, and Enterprise will invite new headaches and support requests for an upgrade that does virtually nothing new other than invite support requests, simply to have the latest version. Can they?

 

I think it's great that MS is willing to try something new. But they really need to go either go ALL-OUT with it (much like Apple did with the MacOS to OS X transition), or leave well-enough alone and just add features and bug fixes to the existing OS until they're ready to make a big leap.

 

They really need to get beyond the "support everything we can possibly support" mentality with their OS compatibility. You can't truly move forward until you're willing to let go of the past.

Here's an interesting article I found that confirms my suspicions about Windows 8 's failed UI design.

 

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9233884/Windows_8_UI_strategic_mistake_argues_design_guru

Absolutely. I'd love to meet who the idiot is who thought putting formerly known as Metro interface on a server OS! I have spent a few hours in Server 2012 and still can barely get around. Those tiles are anything but easy to find what I'm looking for. This is a server, I'm there for very specific work to be done, and instead I spend most of my time trying to work through the scavenger hunt MS left me with to find what I need. I can only see the desktop playing out this way as well.

 

The only UI where Metro makes a hint of sense is on the touch devices, where again the desktop UI is a horrible place, as the market has proven for more the more than 10 years MS has been pushing it.

The cloud is primarily storage and not very fast storage at that, even at 100 mbs. Horsepower is what you need to open a 200 MB Photoshop file with a dozen layers, apply some filters and instantly see the results. Fortunately a relatively average iMac can do it.

Try video files,even a high end imac will choke.  An equivalent or better windows box can be had for about 50% the price.  But the intent of my original post is that there is still a significant market (perhaps even bigger than Apple's market share) for horsepower and that not everyone with a $1000 to spend is going to buy a mac.

No it won't choke. It works very well without even pre-render it plays in almost real time. I can export a 10 minute HD 1080 clip in less than 30 seconds

I don't see how a server in the cloud accessed at even gigabit speeds ($1000/month) is going to compete with local SSD, PCI bus speeds. If you are running an application that requires "horsepower" as in my example Photoshop, the latency would be a killer even if you could run it from a server. I've tried it at 100 mbs and it is almost unusable. I don't know what sort of CPU power Amazon gives you but I doubt it measures up to a dedicated i7 with 8GB ram. I have not looked into the details. Also haven't they been known for going down several hours at a time recently?

I have Windows 8 on an Asus Vivobook S200e and its actually a nice OS on specifically designed hardware. However, the only reason its actually nice to use is because the laptop has a touch screen and its a small 11" screen.

Without the touchscreen it just becomes cumbersome - I have it on a second partition on my MacPro and good lord I hate using it on there. No touch screen and the giant 27" monitor makes throwing the mouse pointer into the corners feel clunky; as does the alternative (the extra onslaught of keyboard shortcuts) - there are also countless other usability issues that even confuse me from time to time (and I'm a man who programs in Assembler for fun!)

For less technical people (the majority of the market) it's just scary and confusing for them. For business/enterprise users its just a joke that stopped being funny.

Apple has AirPlay mirroring, cords and more for people who want a TV for games, yet it doesn't require a TV, and does a lot more than video games on a long time ago dropped disk slot from apple. So how does Xbox defeat IOS. Admetiably Apple want defeat Microsoft soon,(both company's have lost there most important worker) yet Apple will probably kill there phoned and tablets. Probably eventually half the pc market with no chance.

I hate it when people go "Windows Computers are incredible% less than the equivalent iMac". Stop looking at the Gigahertz and look at the computer as a complete package.

 

An equivalent monitor to the 21" iMac costs around $300~$400. The equivalent of the 27" iMac's monitor is around $800+! Don't forget the USB Bluetooth, the PCI Express Wireless Card, the Infrared Remote Control Sensor, the 20watt speakers with Sub Woofer, bluetooth keyboard, multi-touch bluetooth mouse, HD WebCam, firewire, thunderbolt, noise canceling microphone, USB2/3 combination ports and studio quality low latency audio with 7.1 digital/2.0 analogue hybrid output. Don't forget that many of the business features of Windows can't be accessed until you pay extra for the Professional or Ultimate edition.

 

The Windows towers you can get from Dell, Acer, HP et al don't have many or any of the features listed above and have to be bought separately.

Wait don't answer. Now how much would you say Windows is worth? Ask Steve Ballmer.

 

If you say so, but virtually EVERYTHING you listed isn't of any use in compressing a video file, running math simulations or many other uses that need raw horsepower.

Try compressing a video file.  My son's I7 computer took 15 minutes while his schools Mac Pro took more than 7 hours.  I think the MacPro processor may have been slightly faster but it was cripped by the Mac's video card.  Trying to do this on a iMac would have been torture.

 

With such a big gap in your buggus benchmark only lead to misuse or software issue theory, It's easy to blame the computer when you don't understand how it work. Using handbrake I compress video pretty much at the same speed in Windows and MacOS on my i7 MBP.

Edited by BigMac2 - 11/20/12 at 4:05pm

Yeah that is what I meant when I said I exported a 10 minute HD 1080 clip in 30 seconds using Adobe Premier CS6 on an i7 quad core. I changed it from Pro Res to H.264 for Youtube.

Edited by mstone - 11/20/12 at 4:51pm

You obviously don't know how cloud apps work.  You don't need to transfer all the data back and forth, most of it stays on the server, only the visuals and input/output information is sent to you (and then you download the final product when you need it).  Cloud apps are generally also set up on large clusters with virtualized OSes and apps.  This means that you are accessing a cluster with thousands of cores and terabytes of RAM and storage, and processing power is shifted to where it's needed on demand.

 

Cloud services have always been good for me (not talking 'cloud' storage BTW), most providers are incredibly reliable.  

You're right I still don't understand it. Again with the Photoshop as that is something I know a lot about:

If I decide to paste a 100 MB worth of data into a new layer, I have to actually move that data to where the scratch disk is. If I am scaling it, rotating it, changing the histogram, I need instant feedback with no latency to make decisions. If I am going to pay $1000/month for gigabit ethernet, which isn't really that fast, to the server at Amazon, why shouldn't I just work local and spend way less on my own, cpu, storage and ram and get 1000 times more speed so I can actually be effective and efficient in my workflow? 

 

Cloud makes sense for server-like data as in websites but not for raw power of large data in a single user environment as it takes time to move the data across the Internet. And it is expensive.

You're apparently right. Your comment is news to me though. One method requires a registry edit, two others require running third party software to set it up.

Do you pay for your gigabit Internet? If not give, Cox or Level 3 or whatever, a call and ask for a quote from your business to their metro ethernet conection. In my case it is actually $1200 but I just rounded it to a thousand.

 

The way this discussion evolved is that there was someone saying you don't need high power in your computer because the cloud provides the power therefore you should only need a generic cheap Windows PC. I disagree with that premise and point out that traditionally Mac users are in large part of the artistic/creative community and cloud computing is contrary to their type of work flow as they tend to use large files which are not easy to deal with over the Internet.

Edited by mstone - 11/20/12 at 9:37pm

Please entertain us with the exciting things that you do with cloud computing. I only do boring things like photoshop.

LOOKS nice perhaps, until you watch it fall apart due to low manufacturing quality and suddenly discover that its not true multitasking and thus unsuitable for efficient and productive creative or "office" work. 

The major problem is Microsoft don't do regular, incremental changes to Windows. Instead, they make wholesale changes like Windows 8, then can't understand why the users find it too much to deal with. Windows users whine about Apple OSX updates not being major updates. Apples biggest change came with OSX from OS9. It was a huge gamble, they copped a lot of flack at the time, but is the single major factor for Apple being as strong as they are today. Each incarnation of OSX since have come with changes, but none so great that users have to relearn or rethink what they have done previously. One other thing about Windows is that serious users wait for the first or second updates before installing a new version. That says something about why the numbers would be down.

Everyone I've spoken to from the Microsoft camp equates windows 8 to vista. I suppose they are looking forward to windows 9. As for corporate desktops....fudgetaboutit! Any windows 8 inquiry is greeted with laughter.

 

Don't forget a very large number of those initial XBox's died via red ring of death.  One warranty provider put the number at 23%.  So how many of those XBoxes were sold as replacements to out of warranty units?

 

 

Also to the one poster that said they purchased a large number of Windows 7 licenses for future use, Microsoft does have a program that allows a user of any OS to down grade to a previous version of any supported OS.  That being said, I see Windows 7 as being the new XP.  I deal with several business that will be exercising the backward licensing option and have no interest in Windows 8.