What everyone is forgetting is that Microsoft has a reputation to uphold. They alternate good operating systems with crappy ones:
Windows 95 - bad
Windows 97 - OK
Windows ME - bad
Windows XP - OK
Windows Vista - bad
Windows 7 - OK
Windows 8 - must be bad to keep up their pattern.
Hate to be pedantic, but it was Windows 98, not 97. Windows 98 was the reason why Bill Gates was shot in the South Park movie - Bigger, Longer and Uncut.
Of course he's got an agenda, but this particular point is only relevant for drawing in new customers. Steam has an integrated social platform with a loyal community, and Valve's games have brand recognition.
Of course. Valve wants to make a console, and they should. If you read all my posts, I talk about how rubbish PS3 and Xbox360 is relative to where we are now, in the middle of 2012. PS3 and Xbox360 have 2004-quality hardware. Game developers though, are gearing up to completely eclipse movie and TV studios in so many ways.
Just look at Deus Ex: HR, Mass Effect and Assassin's. Immense, remarkable storylines that put traditional media to shame. Educational too... Show me a tourist brochure for Florence and Venice and I can recognise quite a number of them! And I thought I was having fun!
So that said, let's look at PS3: 720p graphics, which iPad will easily eclipse in 2015. Xbox360: same. Unit sales: iPad will outnumber them.
The field is rife for someone to make a decent console that is a controlled ecosystem (or worst-case "walled garden" like, oh, the PS3 and Xbox360) that can run the demanding games this world now needs. Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft aren't going to do it, they're busy trying to push obsolete hardware through millions in marketing and stupid namby-pamby "motion detection" nonsense and even more Mario... Hitman Mario, Need For Speed: Mario, Avengers vs Mario, Team Fortress: Mario, Mario Mario Mario, who cares, we don't need to come up with anything original... (actually the above suggestions would be good Mario mashup games, not the generic stuff, which, while fun and Mario is well-loved, Nintendo needs to get sensible for a while).
All someone needs to do is this:
Create unix-based platform using OpenGL as a console
Brand it (Valve, Steam, whatever)
Make App Store for it
Make OpenGL stop looking crappy and make it look like DX11
Make console and sell it outright without annoying "exclusives" and hand-waving garbage
Put this into it and sell it for $399 ~ easy I tell you
Intel Core Duo 1.6ghz equivalent
120GB HDD (enough for games, download from cloud etc)
1GB RAM
1GB DDR3 VRAM
8600GT-class GPU
1080p DX11 Unreal Engine 4-quality graphics
Hint: The above is so, so bl**dy cheap that nobody wants it anymore ~ you can find the above hardware in junk piles. Obviously you need new components but the standard they need to meet to push 1080p DX11 Unreal Engine 4-quality graphics is extremely, extremely cheap.
Personally, I think Win 7 is the disaster. I have to use it at one of my clients and it's very problematic. Maybe it's configuration issues, but it drives me crazy. Whenever I have large documents in Visio or Word, the whole system hangs up every time it does an auto Save and it takes forever to do the autosave. If I delete files from my USB key, the filenames disappear right away as they always did, but if I delete files from the hard disk, the filenames stay up there until I refresh the listing. It takes forever to close a document, even after it was just saved. It also constantly "forgets" my mapped drives. No one of these things is a showstopper, but when you put all of these things together, it's a royal pain the butt and makes me NOT want to use that PC at all. I come home to my Mac and everything just works.
Perhaps you should change your windows 7 setups, as I have never had those issue. Now, on my mac, I do get a lot of those issues, especially mapped drives. Or the one I had the other day, copied file, saw it in the new directory, refreshed and it was gone... wtf
I wonder what percentage of Windows machines are still using XP?
This chart from Wikipedia on OS installed base is including all OSes. It was just for Windows then XP would be much higher. Of course MS has to support it just as Apple supports XP with iTunes.
Note that this is only looking at a percentage, if we look at the more relevant stat of the number of installations then you need about 15x as many Mac OS version installations to equal Windows versions for the same percentage between OS types. Of course, Leopard will be a much lower percentage than XP so we're probably talking about at least a 60:1 difference in unit numbers.
Was this pie chart created by someone completely devoid of intellectual curiosity with regard to Apple? No consistency at all there… Except for Apple, everything is defined by Operating System, and/or Operating System version… come to Apple, and suddenly it's defined by hardware product line?
How about using their Operating Systems as well? iOS and OSX?
Do that and it shows that about 17.4% of the overall market is using an Apple OS… 9.98% using iOS, 7.46% using OSX… more meaningful than dividing iOS by device would be a breakdown of iOS and OS X versions in use (like with the Windows divisions), but this is obviously more about comparing recent versions of Windows...
Perhaps you should change your windows 7 setups, as I have never had those issue. Now, on my mac, I do get a lot of those issues, especially mapped drives. Or the one I had the other day, copied file, saw it in the new directory, refreshed and it was gone... wtf
This sounds like rubbish...
You're using OSX? What does that mean, 'saw it in the new directory, REFRESHED…"? I don't know what that means, 'refreshed'… what did you do *exactly* to "refresh" a directory listing? Using a Finder window? Which version of OS X??
Without details, I guess I have to throw the same advice you gave right back at you:
"Perhaps you should change your OSX setups, as I have never had those issue[s]."
Huh - he views touch screens as kind of a stepping stone between mouse and in-the-air gestures. That's interesting because gestures could be retrofitted to both iDevices and Macs, since they both have webcams. And companies that have a lead in the touch screen space would have a head start. And the kinds of "reactions" the GUI has to a touch would be even more important to an in-the-air gesture, so frameworks like Core Animation become even more important.
Conceivably Apple could release gestures purely as a software update.
Hate to be pedantic, but it was Windows 98, not 97. Windows 98 was the reason why Bill Gates was shot in the South Park movie - Bigger, Longer and Uncut.
Sorry, '97' popped into my head - probably from Office 97. Doesn't change the story, though.
I wonder what percentage of Windows machines are still using XP?
This chart from Wikipedia on OS installed base is including all OSes. It was just for Windows then XP would be much higher. Of course MS has to support it just as Apple supports XP with iTunes.
Note that this is only looking at a percentage, if we look at the more relevant stat of the number of installations then you need about 15x as many Mac OS version installations to equal Windows versions for the same percentage between OS types. Of course, Leopard will be a much lower percentage than XP so we're probably talking about at least a 60:1 difference in unit numbers.
I call BS. According to these figures, the Mac OS X installed base is larger than the iPhone and more than twice the size of the iPad? They're selling 25 M iPhones per quarter - somewhere around 100 M per year. Assuming that the average iPhone lasts 2 years before being discarded (which is almost certainly too conservative), there would be 200 M iPhones in use.
They sold 4 M Macs last quarter - so call it 16 M per year. Even if that rate had been unchanged and the average Mac was in use for 10 years, that would mean 160 M Macs in use. That is probably too generous, so the actual numbers would be lower.
So even overestimating Mac installed base and underestimating iPhone installed base, their numbers are clearly wrong.
In addition, they show the iPad as being almost half the installed base of the iPhone - which again doesn't match up with sales figures.
You can also run two apps at once on the screen, haven't seen iOS do that. Looks like you lose.
iOS runs on small screens, not on a computer monitor. Not sure I see the utility in seeing multiple apps at once on a small screen. If what you are after is rapid awareness of simultaneous feeds of information, well, that's what notification center is for. On the desktop, when I have multiple applications open it's usually because I'm authoring some code or producing some serious graphics. Who does such things on a smartphone or tablet? Sure, you can do some cool art with tablet apps, but I'm talking about using multiple windows in Adobe Photoshop, or some such.
This is just an example of Microsoft not understanding "use cases". Metro does not belong on the desktop (even if it didn't suck, which it does). And full-bore preemptive multitasking and screen sharing of apps does not belong on a small mobile device (with energy and screen size constraints).
It seems to surround the requirement to have Metro-enabled apps in the Windows Store thereby making them susceptible to the 30% fee, cutting into their margins.
Excellent points [B]tribalogical[/B] and [B]jragosta[/B]. Since my point was focused on difference in versions of Windows I paid very little attention to the entire chart. The image is from Wikipedia.
After the immediate success of the Metro interface on the smartphone, Microsoft will continue to build upon the success of Metro by shoving it down Windows 8 users throats.
This ethos continues on from the success of forcing people into Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player and the worldwide popular Comic Sans MS font.
I'm going to jump in here...
We're talking about three different issues:
1. Windows 8 UI
2. Valve's "App Store" that predates both Apple and Microsoft's
3. DRM.
As far as the UI is concerned, I hate it on the Xbox, it's basically 60% of the screen real estate dedicated to ads. This is not what I want on the desktop. I think Windows peaked on the UI front with Windows 95, and should have left it alone instead of bolting on layer after layer of eye candy. If Microsoft succeeds with this, well that's fine. But what's really going on is we're all going backwards (even on the mac) to a time when you could only run one application at a time, full screen. It may not seem this way, but the only thing different about this and pre-1994 UI's is that the applications aren't being unloaded when you switch away. Even on the Mac, It's sometimes rather loathesome to try and figure out where an application was installed to, because this is something that has been getting worse with the increasing amounts of disk space. The entire process of "installing" is a waste of time. Applications should come like they do on the Mac, packaged and moveable anywhere you want it. If you want to take your Photoshop to another Mac, it should be a simple matter of clicking and dragging the photoshop icon to the USB drive, and that's it. But all the dependencies and "integration" applications like CS3+ and Microsoft Office do, make it a huge pain to do this. If I want to switch to a new mac, it should be a simple matter of "plug it in, drag everything to the new machine." This is where Windows has traditionally failed time and time again. I loathe having to reinstall windows because that means I have to activate it, and dozens of other applications, and if I missed deactivating an app, and already erased the drive, I have to beg adobe over the phone to fix it. A huge waste of time.
Now, Valve's App Store, is not quite as damning as Adobe or Microsoft is. As long as you aren't sharing the login with dozens of your pals, you can pretty much go to any computer, install steam, download your games, and off you go. What Valve fails to take into account (and anyone else with DRM) is that there are users who like to trade games and movies once they're finished playing it. One of my parents, hates steam so much that he creates a new steam account for every game, plays the game to completion, and then gives it to his buddy, steam account and all. This is hugely annoying and something that Valve needs to rectify. (Gifting games already purchased/played) When you buy a physical copy of a game, you should not have to deal with steam at all. You don't have to do this with the Xbox360/PS3 versions of games. Playing games on the PC is in decline because it's a hugely obnoxious process brought about by the war between DRM and piracy.
If Valve wants games to be available on the PC/Mac/Linux/whatever and not have to compete with the Apple/Microsoft app stores, it needs to do what these stores don't do.
Apple lets you run all software on any machine that has been authorized. You can't do this with Steam, if you login to one machine, it kicks it off the other. Valve also needs a way to add games that are in it's library (like iTunes Match) that are already installed on the computer (eg via GOG.com or EA's "Origin" ) so that the user doesn't mistakenly buy games they already have.
Ahh... but the iOS user can see more of what's going on with a single glance and/or page flip:
20 apps -- iPhone
25 apps -- aPad
35 apps -- Mac
There is also the matter of using white space to separate items and focus interest.
So, while you are correct that two can play -- only one can win!
Wait I can see what's going on when I glance at my iPhone's home screen? All I see are three notification badges on three apps -- I have no clue what's going on.
I mean, the damn weather icon STILL doesn't update with the actual weather!!!!
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by jragosta
What everyone is forgetting is that Microsoft has a reputation to uphold. They alternate good operating systems with crappy ones:
Windows 95 - bad
Windows 97 - OK
Windows ME - bad
Windows XP - OK
Windows Vista - bad
Windows 7 - OK
Windows 8 - must be bad to keep up their pattern.
Hate to be pedantic, but it was Windows 98, not 97. Windows 98 was the reason why Bill Gates was shot in the South Park movie - Bigger, Longer and Uncut.
Quote:
Well is sure as clown-vomit *looks* like one . . .
http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/1713.jpg
http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/1685.jpg
http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/1704.gi
Loved the cartoons!! Very awesome!!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mazda 3s
This is the same guy that said this about Apple last year:
"They build a shiny sparkling thing that attracts users and then they control people's access to those things."
That's 100% true, and being Da Boss of Valve, he definitely knows a lot about controlling people's access to stuff.
Of course. Valve wants to make a console, and they should. If you read all my posts, I talk about how rubbish PS3 and Xbox360 is relative to where we are now, in the middle of 2012. PS3 and Xbox360 have 2004-quality hardware. Game developers though, are gearing up to completely eclipse movie and TV studios in so many ways.
Just look at Deus Ex: HR, Mass Effect and Assassin's. Immense, remarkable storylines that put traditional media to shame. Educational too... Show me a tourist brochure for Florence and Venice and I can recognise quite a number of them! And I thought I was having fun!
So that said, let's look at PS3: 720p graphics, which iPad will easily eclipse in 2015. Xbox360: same. Unit sales: iPad will outnumber them.
The field is rife for someone to make a decent console that is a controlled ecosystem (or worst-case "walled garden" like, oh, the PS3 and Xbox360) that can run the demanding games this world now needs. Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft aren't going to do it, they're busy trying to push obsolete hardware through millions in marketing and stupid namby-pamby "motion detection" nonsense and even more Mario... Hitman Mario, Need For Speed: Mario, Avengers vs Mario, Team Fortress: Mario, Mario Mario Mario, who cares, we don't need to come up with anything original... (actually the above suggestions would be good Mario mashup games, not the generic stuff, which, while fun and Mario is well-loved, Nintendo needs to get sensible for a while).
All someone needs to do is this:
Create unix-based platform using OpenGL as a console
Brand it (Valve, Steam, whatever)
Make App Store for it
Make OpenGL stop looking crappy and make it look like DX11
Make console and sell it outright without annoying "exclusives" and hand-waving garbage
Put this into it and sell it for $399 ~ easy I tell you
Intel Core Duo 1.6ghz equivalent
120GB HDD (enough for games, download from cloud etc)
1GB RAM
1GB DDR3 VRAM
8600GT-class GPU
1080p DX11 Unreal Engine 4-quality graphics
Hint: The above is so, so bl**dy cheap that nobody wants it anymore ~ you can find the above hardware in junk piles. Obviously you need new components but the standard they need to meet to push 1080p DX11 Unreal Engine 4-quality graphics is extremely, extremely cheap.
Yeah, he's also talking about the Valve console hence bashing Windows. But Windows is rubbish anyway regardless of Gabe's motivations.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jragosta
What everyone is forgetting is that Microsoft has a reputation to uphold. They alternate good operating systems with crappy ones:
Windows 95 - bad
Windows 97 - OK
Windows ME - bad
Windows XP - OK
Windows Vista - bad
Windows 7 - OK
Windows 8 - must be bad to keep up their pattern.
Where is Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3, 3.1 and Windows 2000 on this list?
and 98 not 97
Quote:
Originally Posted by zoetmb
Personally, I think Win 7 is the disaster. I have to use it at one of my clients and it's very problematic. Maybe it's configuration issues, but it drives me crazy. Whenever I have large documents in Visio or Word, the whole system hangs up every time it does an auto Save and it takes forever to do the autosave. If I delete files from my USB key, the filenames disappear right away as they always did, but if I delete files from the hard disk, the filenames stay up there until I refresh the listing. It takes forever to close a document, even after it was just saved. It also constantly "forgets" my mapped drives. No one of these things is a showstopper, but when you put all of these things together, it's a royal pain the butt and makes me NOT want to use that PC at all. I come home to my Mac and everything just works.
Perhaps you should change your windows 7 setups, as I have never had those issue. Now, on my mac, I do get a lot of those issues, especially mapped drives. Or the one I had the other day, copied file, saw it in the new directory, refreshed and it was gone... wtf
Quote:
Originally Posted by jragosta
What everyone is forgetting is that Microsoft has a reputation to uphold. They alternate good operating systems with crappy ones:
Windows 95 - bad
Windows 97 - OK
Windows ME - bad
Windows XP - OK
Windows Vista - bad
Windows 7 - OK
Windows 8 - must be bad to keep up their pattern.
You're equating Microsoft to Star Trek movies?
Quote:
Originally Posted by cycomiko
Where is Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3, 3.1 and Windows 2000 on this list?
and 98 not 97
WinNT as well, but, that was kind of related to win2k wasn't it?
Quote:
Originally Posted by SolipsismX
I wonder what percentage of Windows machines are still using XP?
This chart from Wikipedia on OS installed base is including all OSes. It was just for Windows then XP would be much higher. Of course MS has to support it just as Apple supports XP with iTunes.
Note that this is only looking at a percentage, if we look at the more relevant stat of the number of installations then you need about 15x as many Mac OS version installations to equal Windows versions for the same percentage between OS types. Of course, Leopard will be a much lower percentage than XP so we're probably talking about at least a 60:1 difference in unit numbers.
Was this pie chart created by someone completely devoid of intellectual curiosity with regard to Apple? No consistency at all there… Except for Apple, everything is defined by Operating System, and/or Operating System version… come to Apple, and suddenly it's defined by hardware product line?
How about using their Operating Systems as well? iOS and OSX?
Do that and it shows that about 17.4% of the overall market is using an Apple OS… 9.98% using iOS, 7.46% using OSX… more meaningful than dividing iOS by device would be a breakdown of iOS and OS X versions in use (like with the Windows divisions), but this is obviously more about comparing recent versions of Windows...
Quote:
Originally Posted by cycomiko
Perhaps you should change your windows 7 setups, as I have never had those issue. Now, on my mac, I do get a lot of those issues, especially mapped drives. Or the one I had the other day, copied file, saw it in the new directory, refreshed and it was gone... wtf
This sounds like rubbish...
You're using OSX? What does that mean, 'saw it in the new directory, REFRESHED…"? I don't know what that means, 'refreshed'… what did you do *exactly* to "refresh" a directory listing? Using a Finder window? Which version of OS X??
Without details, I guess I have to throw the same advice you gave right back at you:
"Perhaps you should change your OSX setups, as I have never had those issue[s]."
When I played with it, it seemed like a proof of concept. I didn't think they would really dare ship it. But, lol, they just might.
Stop worrying about MS and get to work on Half-Life 3! What a joke that it's taken this long to create it.
Huh - he views touch screens as kind of a stepping stone between mouse and in-the-air gestures. That's interesting because gestures could be retrofitted to both iDevices and Macs, since they both have webcams. And companies that have a lead in the touch screen space would have a head start. And the kinds of "reactions" the GUI has to a touch would be even more important to an in-the-air gesture, so frameworks like Core Animation become even more important.
Conceivably Apple could release gestures purely as a software update.
Sorry, '97' popped into my head - probably from Office 97. Doesn't change the story, though.
I call BS. According to these figures, the Mac OS X installed base is larger than the iPhone and more than twice the size of the iPad? They're selling 25 M iPhones per quarter - somewhere around 100 M per year. Assuming that the average iPhone lasts 2 years before being discarded (which is almost certainly too conservative), there would be 200 M iPhones in use.
They sold 4 M Macs last quarter - so call it 16 M per year. Even if that rate had been unchanged and the average Mac was in use for 10 years, that would mean 160 M Macs in use. That is probably too generous, so the actual numbers would be lower.
So even overestimating Mac installed base and underestimating iPhone installed base, their numbers are clearly wrong.
In addition, they show the iPad as being almost half the installed base of the iPhone - which again doesn't match up with sales figures.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ITCrowd
You can also run two apps at once on the screen, haven't seen iOS do that. Looks like you lose.
iOS runs on small screens, not on a computer monitor. Not sure I see the utility in seeing multiple apps at once on a small screen. If what you are after is rapid awareness of simultaneous feeds of information, well, that's what notification center is for. On the desktop, when I have multiple applications open it's usually because I'm authoring some code or producing some serious graphics. Who does such things on a smartphone or tablet? Sure, you can do some cool art with tablet apps, but I'm talking about using multiple windows in Adobe Photoshop, or some such.
This is just an example of Microsoft not understanding "use cases". Metro does not belong on the desktop (even if it didn't suck, which it does). And full-bore preemptive multitasking and screen sharing of apps does not belong on a small mobile device (with energy and screen size constraints).
Thompson
http://www.videogamer.com/news/windows_8_gabe_debate_not_awesome_for_us_either_says_blizzard.html
It seems to surround the requirement to have Metro-enabled apps in the Windows Store thereby making them susceptible to the 30% fee, cutting into their margins.
But usability is still a problem all by itself:
[VIDEO]
Quote:
Originally Posted by GalaxyTab
Total hogwash Gabe!
After the immediate success of the Metro interface on the smartphone, Microsoft will continue to build upon the success of Metro by shoving it down Windows 8 users throats.
This ethos continues on from the success of forcing people into Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player and the worldwide popular Comic Sans MS font.
I'm going to jump in here...
We're talking about three different issues:
1. Windows 8 UI
2. Valve's "App Store" that predates both Apple and Microsoft's
3. DRM.
As far as the UI is concerned, I hate it on the Xbox, it's basically 60% of the screen real estate dedicated to ads. This is not what I want on the desktop. I think Windows peaked on the UI front with Windows 95, and should have left it alone instead of bolting on layer after layer of eye candy. If Microsoft succeeds with this, well that's fine. But what's really going on is we're all going backwards (even on the mac) to a time when you could only run one application at a time, full screen. It may not seem this way, but the only thing different about this and pre-1994 UI's is that the applications aren't being unloaded when you switch away. Even on the Mac, It's sometimes rather loathesome to try and figure out where an application was installed to, because this is something that has been getting worse with the increasing amounts of disk space. The entire process of "installing" is a waste of time. Applications should come like they do on the Mac, packaged and moveable anywhere you want it. If you want to take your Photoshop to another Mac, it should be a simple matter of clicking and dragging the photoshop icon to the USB drive, and that's it. But all the dependencies and "integration" applications like CS3+ and Microsoft Office do, make it a huge pain to do this. If I want to switch to a new mac, it should be a simple matter of "plug it in, drag everything to the new machine." This is where Windows has traditionally failed time and time again. I loathe having to reinstall windows because that means I have to activate it, and dozens of other applications, and if I missed deactivating an app, and already erased the drive, I have to beg adobe over the phone to fix it. A huge waste of time.
Now, Valve's App Store, is not quite as damning as Adobe or Microsoft is. As long as you aren't sharing the login with dozens of your pals, you can pretty much go to any computer, install steam, download your games, and off you go. What Valve fails to take into account (and anyone else with DRM) is that there are users who like to trade games and movies once they're finished playing it. One of my parents, hates steam so much that he creates a new steam account for every game, plays the game to completion, and then gives it to his buddy, steam account and all. This is hugely annoying and something that Valve needs to rectify. (Gifting games already purchased/played) When you buy a physical copy of a game, you should not have to deal with steam at all. You don't have to do this with the Xbox360/PS3 versions of games. Playing games on the PC is in decline because it's a hugely obnoxious process brought about by the war between DRM and piracy.
If Valve wants games to be available on the PC/Mac/Linux/whatever and not have to compete with the Apple/Microsoft app stores, it needs to do what these stores don't do.
Apple lets you run all software on any machine that has been authorized. You can't do this with Steam, if you login to one machine, it kicks it off the other. Valve also needs a way to add games that are in it's library (like iTunes Match) that are already installed on the computer (eg via GOG.com or EA's "Origin" ) so that the user doesn't mistakenly buy games they already have.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum
Ahh... but the iOS user can see more of what's going on with a single glance and/or page flip:
20 apps -- iPhone
25 apps -- aPad
35 apps -- Mac
There is also the matter of using white space to separate items and focus interest.
So, while you are correct that two can play -- only one can win!
Wait I can see what's going on when I glance at my iPhone's home screen? All I see are three notification badges on three apps -- I have no clue what's going on.
I mean, the damn weather icon STILL doesn't update with the actual weather!!!!
LOL I've long, long given up.