Microsoft sets sights on providing an Apple-like experience - Page 3

Originally Posted by mbmcavoy

This is a pretty interesting statement. I think Ballmer almost gets it.
1) From a user perspective, I don't think the Mac is at all narrow; it is consistent.
2) The choice that Windows provides, in terms of hardware, is valuable. What other choice, provided by MS, does the user get?

Now, from a developer perspective, his comments make more sense.
3) If you want to develop for a Mac, you use Cocoa and Objective-C. Very complete, but that's just about it.
4) On a PC, you have C++, C# .NET, VB .NET, VBA, etc. See - CHOICES!!!

"In Windows, the choice makes YOU!" It seems to me, the selection of development language depends on your project. I started using VBA with Excel and Access. Then I made the transition to VB .NET, and now I'm working with C# .NET. I'd hardly say I mastered any of them, after several years.

5) Furthermore, there are often several APIs that you can use to accomplish the same task. See - CHOICES!!!

I've had a hell of a time figuring out how to work with databases. There are several different APIs that can be used, and they can't be mixed. ADO and DAO, I think. I've never been able to keep them straight. Which should I use, and why? Searching for help usually gets me an example that looks perfect, but after several hours I discover it's the wrong kind. More like DOA to me...

While this choice is perceived as value, it is so messy and confusing that it's detrimental to the novice and mid-level programmer.

Considering "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!", this is clearly where his mind is at, and this is a good thing to focus future Windows development.

But what about the users?

Originally Posted by rnaoncfixd

I feel that Apple has gotten quite cocky lately and has become too ambitious in providing things that are actually "like Microsoft but better". Mobile Me has yet to surprise anyone with quality. Every new update that comes out for Leopard seems to create more problems than fix. The new iPhone's launch was plagued with problems. There are incompatibility issues with some 3rd party plug ins (which is exactly the opposite of Microsoft actually, where I have specifically made products that crash and 3rd party products which work well). It seems that all Apple needs to do is have the blue screen of death instead of that spiny pinwheel of horrific catastrophe.

Apple has become lazy lately because of their booming sales. This is leading to poorer quality . I agree with others stating the claim that Microsoft should be successful to create more competitive business. I hope that the "zune phone" makes it and creates a shift towards progressive technology instead of regressive. When Apple sees it, maybe they'll strive for an even bigger push than they usually have.

Originally Posted by miniMoe

"...mimic the experience offered by the Mac..."

Microsoft's been trying to do that since Windows 1.x, for more than 20 years now.

Nothin' new here.

Originally Posted by jasenj1

Microsoft has a lot of VERY smart people working for them - maybe too many.

MS has a ton of great tech., years of experience doing software, and lots of very good people. They need to streamline their development process and leverage their vast experience and intellectual property to produce something GREAT! They just seem never to put people in charge who can recognize greatness, demand it, and keep the mediocre from gumming up the works.

As long as they continue to be a design by committee, make sure everyone is happy, let everyone's finger touch it shop, they'll be doomed to making camels rather than race horses.

- Jasen.

Originally Posted by wheelhot

In the future Microsoft logo will change to a pear with a bite mark on the upper left of the logo.

Originally Posted by Cicero

I completely agree. In fact, I have been saying this for quite some time now.

I have worked with many people who have worked for or gone off to work for MS and they have been some of the brightest people I have met/worked with. Those who have left the company have basically told me what Jasen is saying.

Too many chefs in the kitchen....

Originally Posted by city

Microsoft should stop focusing on capturing and dominating markets and actually invent something that will advance womankind. It all about "selling" to them. As such they are following the path of General Motors and their high profit impractical SUVs. People eventually wise-up with California leading the way. ("focusing on capturing and dominating markets"-is Bush in-charge?)

Originally Posted by thompr

Balmer said:

<...more comprehensive effort to redefine the meaning and value of Windows for our customers.>

This quote says so much. First of all, it says that Microsoft feels that it is necessary to define the meaning and value of windows to the customer. Shouldn't the customer just naturally sense the value, if the product is any good? I know with most good products, the value is inherently obvious from the get-go. If the company has to TELL me why it is valuable even after I have tried it, then the product most likely stinks.

The second thing the quote says is that Microsoft has to REdefine the value. In other words, not only do they feel it necessary to define in the first place, but they failed at it once and need to try it again... presumably with a different - but somehow better - definition.

Balmer STILL doesn't get it!

Thompson

Originally Posted by astrosmash

I welcome any improvements to "The PC Experience" and any other area of computer technology, but I'd much rather see these improvements happen through innovation rather than through the "mimicking" of your competitor.

Originally Posted by inkswamp

You know what I suspect is the root of MS's problems? I'm willing to bet that most of MS's upper management and executives don't actually use Windows ... when I say that, I mean that they run Windows at work and on their home machines, but they don't actually use it.

Originally Posted by Cicero

That's funny... Apple was just trying to provide a Microsoft like experience with the launch of Mobile Me....

Originally Posted by nagromme

Ah, yes. Because providing a user-friendly, integrated solution across multiple hardware and software product lines is as easy as just saying so

All along, it wasn't that Apple was good at this stuff, it's just nobody else ever tried before

Originally Posted by Carniphage

One of Microsoft's mistakes has been to be a little too greedy.

They make four mistakes.
1) Windows will install and run on anything,

2) Any vendor can create drivers and release them
Rogue vendors ship drivers which break the OS, and steal resources.

4) Windows tolerates software which breaks the rules.

All Balmer has to do is grow a pair, and crack down a little.

Originally Posted by BocaBoy

Based on the last couple of weeks, Apple could use some stiff competition. The continuing unavailability of the 3G iPhone, the botched up launch of MobileMe, and the corporate-speak that Apple uses to not acknowledge that anything is awry is indicative of arrogance, not innovation.

Originally Posted by paxman

Apple needs to take a break and settle down to sort out all their bugs. You know, bring out a new Service Pack, kinda. At the moment I am not sure MS would be well advised to copy the Mac user experience. In fact its all a little MS-esque here in Mac land right now.

Originally Posted by minderbinder

30-to-1? What fantasy world does he live in where Apple has 3 percent market share and Windows 97%?

Originally Posted by stevetim

Perhaps someone should tell Mr. Balmer that Microsoft doesn't sell PC's.

Originally Posted by simont

Steve Ballmer looked completely idiot on the stage. For a CEO, he should have been calm and make a witty joke at his competitor. Oh! Isn't it what Steve Jobs do? Sorry! There is stupid and stupid... looking at him, a monkey would have done it better.

If Microsoft wants people to have a better opinion of its products, then they should fire Ballmer first, then concentrate on products that appeal to people and that go away from that "Social experience" mind. The Zune is a failure, Vista is a failure on all the line, and everything else they are doing just s***.... maybe except the 360, and even in that field, the hardware isn't working that well and the interface is clunky...

In fact, why bother rebuilding this company? Shut it down, give the money back to the investors and save the face...

Originally Posted by PhillyMJS

...is the one they should copy the most: Admit their OS isn't cutting it anymore, build a new one from scratch, and add legacy support for the old OS into the new one for a few years until application developers make the transition from old-and-busted Windows to new-hotness Windows.

Windows is a bloated piece of crap, spaghetti code, ready to collapse under its own weight. They need to throw it out and start over, they just refuse to admit it to themselves. That's why Vista took so long to come out. Actually they did sort of do it, in typical half-assed Microsoft fashion, a few years back-- when they decided to throw out what they had done and rebuild Vista on the newer Server 2003 codebase. That was a start, but there's still too much legacy crap weighing the system down, and the proof is in the fact that you need a pretty beefy machine with a ton of RAM to even hope to get performance comparable to XP on older hardware.

The funny thing is, I think Microsoft is in a better position to do this sort of thing than Apple was back when they did it. Microsoft owns Virtual PC, and that coupled with today's virtualization technologies ought to make running the "classic" Windows and apps in a sandbox on top of a revamped OS a pretty painless exercise.

~Philly

Originally Posted by parksgm

Amazing thought process.

Microsoft should stop focusing on capturing and dominating markets? That is the point of a corporation - to make the shareholders/investors money by capturing and dominating markets. It's wonderful if a corporation has other goals...but the corporation can't fund those goals without making money, and to make money they must attempt to dominate whatever market they are in. Basic economics.

Your political comment doesn't follow either - while you may disagree with the reason for the war in Iraq, the United States is not "capturing" or "dominating" Iraq in any way. Troops are actually being withdrawn *right now* as peace and stability in the country continues to increase. The widely stated purpose is to ensure that the Iraqi people have a stable, democratic (or whatever they want) government and functioning social system when the withdrawal is complete. How is that "capturing" or "dominating"?

Finally, General Motors makes "high profit impractical SUVs"? The MILLIONS of Americans who have purchased them specifically for their utility since the introduction of the Ford Explorer ("first" SUV) in ~1990 prove that they were in fact very useful, practical vehicles.

Originally Posted by bpatton

From the Memo: "Looking ahead, I see an incredibly bright future for our company. As I said at the June 27th Town Hall for Bill, we are the best in the world at doing software and nobody should be confused about this. It doesnt mean that we cant improve, but nobody is better than we are. Nobody works harder than we do. Nobody is more tenacious than we are. Were investing more broadly and more seriously than anybody else. Our opportunities to change the world have never been greater."

Huh? Did he wake up thinking he was working for Apple?

Originally Posted by jasenj1

The problem with that is then you alienate some people and have the potential to lose marketshare. MS thinks more features = appeals to more people. Put enough in there and everyone will like some part of it. They don't understand that too many features = a confusing mess to the "average" customer.

- Jasen.

Originally Posted by samurai1999

Amazing - that's Ballmer's Big New Idea that's going to turn Microsoft round & save his job
- Copy Apple!
- the man's a genius!

Originally Posted by jasenj1

Microsoft has a lot of VERY smart people working for them - maybe too many. I've heard/read that Vista was a design by committee nightmare with multiple levels of managers second-guessing, turf-battling, and other such petty things during the design & implementation.

...

As long as they continue to be a design by committee, make sure everyone is happy, let everyone's finger touch it shop, they'll be doomed to making camels rather than race horses.

- Jasen.

Originally Posted by zoetmb

The satires actually show more respect for Microsoft than the conference video of Stevie B does. If Jobs had ever run around the stage at a convention like an immature drunken tourist at a strip club, he would have been criticized as not being in touch with the conservative conventions of corporate America.

On one hand, you have to acknowledge that Microsoft has been and continues to be one of the most successful companies in existence. By most financial and market penetration measures, whether fairly achieved or not, they completely outflank Apple.

But on the other, if you ignore market success and evaluate their offerings solely on the quality of the software from a UI, technical and productivity standpoint, just about everything Microsoft offers is crap.

I suppose one can argue that the original DOS and perhaps Windows 98 were good products. But just about every product since is embarrassingly bad, in my opinion. It continues to shock me how annoying it is to use Vista and how bad the UI is in Word in spite of the fact that Word is on almost every PC in the world. And IE7 seems pretty lame even compared with the AOL Browser (which uses IE as its core, but has far superior functionality).

Microsoft has never gotten it right. They've been successful by manipulating the market into providing a near-monopoly for them and the result is that their applications and OS don't have to perform. Users do not enjoy using Microsoft products, rather they put up with Microsoft products because they're there and it runs on cheap hardware. When corporate America buys hardware, UI Experience is not one of the items they're checking off.

It's sort of like living in an area that only has fast food restaurants. They're easy to get to and they seem cheap and after a while you define those places as what a restaurant comprises in your own mind and you don't think you need anything better.

Apple certainly has its flaws and arrogance has hurt some of their offerings. But they get the user-experience right a lot more often than they get it wrong and for the last few years they've mainly been hitting home runs and it's finally paying off for them.

Originally Posted by guinness

Pretty much, it's only taken Apple and Microsoft about 30 years to truly figure things out.

Really, it doesn't matter how awesome a product is, if it doesn't fit the needs of its intended audience. Apple and Microsoft have had their share of screw-ups, but I view them as targeting 2 different sectors most of the time. Apple sucks for business use, and most of their products aren't business-oriented. Whereas Microsoft understands businesses a lot better, but are beginning to confuse the consumer, with overly wizard driven setups and burying other functions.

Apple currently has nothing to counter Windows Server/VS/Direct X/Exchange/Office, but Microsoft can't compete with iLife/iWorks, etc, general ease of use, and UI, and the closed system model (although I don't like closed systems that much), ie stuff that matters to most consumers. Each have the pieces to improve on their weaknesses, but it will take time.

Originally Posted by mbmcavoy

Now, from a developer perspective, his comments make more sense.
3) If you want to develop for a Mac, you use Cocoa and Objective-C. Very complete, but that's just about it.
4) On a PC, you have C++, C# .NET, VB .NET, VBA, etc. See - CHOICES!!!

Originally Posted by lundy

Java

Originally Posted by powderdust

Microsoft need to reformat their company and download some free cheap nasty software to stop them fouling up all the time. Then they can de-frag monkey boy. Oh and while they are at it - they can find that missing .DAT file.

Bunch of Loosers. "I know, let's copy Apple" - must have been a real forward thinking brinner (brunch and dinner) meeting to come up with that sh*t.

Microsoft are like their operating system - over-complicated, boring, and a f*cking wast of time and effort.