“Next week, Microsoft will finally pull the covers off on a new OS,” John Brandon reports for Fox News. “And despite what Microsoft wants you to believe, the next version of Windows might be more icing on the same old cake.”
MacDailyNews Take: No “mights” about it. It’s just more lipstick smeared all over the same old bloated pig.
“Michael Silver, a vice president at research firm Gartner who studies personal computers, exclusively told FoxNews.com that many companies have what he calls ‘migration fatigue’ and will skip Windows 8 entirely,” Brandon reports. “‘We … expect most companies to skip it,’ Silver told FoxNews.com. ‘To the extent that the market expects companies to adopt Windows 8 in large numbers, it may be disappointed.'”
Advertisement: Limited Time, ends Sept. 20th: Students, Parents and Faculty save up to $200 on a new Mac.
Brandon reports, “But there’s a silver lining to Windows 8, Silver said, a word that gives consumers goosebumps: tablets. ‘The market is obviously waiting for Microsoft to have an OS that can run on a tablet that can compete with the iPad,’ Silver told FoxNews.com. ‘So far, most of the Android tablets have been less than successful. Windows 8 will be another measure of whether there is a tablet market or just an iPad market,’ he said. With Windows 8, Microsoft has its guns aimed at the Apple iPad.”
“There’s a swift transition taking place to portable devices, and given the high sales figures of Apple products, Microsoft had better take note,” Brandon reports. “‘Apple is certainly coming on strong with both Mac OS X and iOS,’ Silver told FoxNews.com. ‘Users are requesting Macs more frequently… iOS devices are making the PC relatively less important and putting a lot of pressure on Microsoft to respond,’ he said.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Roberto” and “Antonio Buford” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
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Researchers: Apple’s Mac OS X Lion is the king of security – July 21, 2011
Microsoft developers horrified over Windows 8 preview – June 13, 2011
More good news for Apple: Microsoft previews Windows 8 (with video) – June 1, 2011
Windows 8 will likely be as successful on tablets as Windows Phone 7 has been with mobile phones. Why would anyone expect any different outcome?
Meanwhile, over in the PC market, Windows 8 will serve to alienate current Windows users. Based on what has been demo’ed, Mac OS X Lion will probably feel more familiar to existing Windows users compared to Windows 8.
Windows hit its peak of usability with Windows 95. It’s been going downhill backwards since then. I dread when I need to provide tech support for someone using Windows Vista or 7 because their interfaces are getting more obtuse when Mac OS X is getting more refined.
What ya smokin? Win95 was MS’s first GUI consumer Operating System. It was barely functional, it was pure crap. It was common to have to reinstall that garbage every few months. Win98se was the best of the Win9x era and it was used my many until around 2004.
Windows7 is easily the best MS has ever done – yet its works very much the same as WIn95/XP. MS is still soo old-fashion that Win7 still uses the same Drive-info window from Win95 (ugly blue and purple thing).
Windows8 being skipped by many corporations is not shocking or abnormal. Skipping OS versions is standard. XP has been around for 10 years, Vista sucked balls… so Win7 was the way many went. Win8 focusing on Tablet and a whole new interface style is a good idea. And besides, that interface can be TURNED OFF and it’ll look like Windows 7.
Considering that MS started out with that horrible MS-DOS, its amazing and a joke it has taken them this long to get where they are today. Apple only has to support a few types of computers, Windows have a much more vast eco-system.
I wouldn’t say Windows is a vast ecosystem.
It’s more of a half-vast ecosystem.
That’s so funny.. am I the only guy that caught that?
Nope. Caught it too. Funny…………
Umm, excuse me? What about windows 3.1? You need to go do your homework dumbass.
Windows 3.1 was not an Operating System. It was a graphics shell that ran ontop of DOS. IE: You CANNOT install Windows 3.x by itself without MS-DOS.
Learn how to speak like an adult before you call people names.
W95 was just as much of a shell running a DOS kernel as Windows 3.0. They just packaged the DOS with W95, NT was different.
Silly kid.
@me:
Er… if you get to the nitty gritty, ALL GUI OSes have a CLI in their heart. The GUI isn’t really the first thing that loads – even if its the first thing you see… including OS-X.
Win9x was an actual OS. It did multi-tasking, it did work (when it wasn’t failing) in ways Win3x and older never could. The DOS-Prompt function of Win9x was tied to the GUI end. Killing off Win9x (include WinME) couldn’t happen fast enough. But how else to get people off the worlds #1 supported OS which was also the #1 worst mainstream OS?
For me windows 2000 was the high mark.
It was solid, stable and was the last windows OS that strictly followed MS’s own UI guidelines.
Ditto…ish
(my post responding to demsign and ipad1, had I read you’s I might not have bothered posting…)
Win 2000 was really NT5, and it was the most stable as Microsoft OS ever.
You are both smoking crack….
95, 98, 98se & ME were all very unstable and mostly crap interface, NT4 was at least stable (though it still had a crap interface)
The current generation(s) of windows are descended from WinNT not 95/98, the best version of windows is defiantly Win2000 (after NT4 and before XP) it was useful and fairly stable (though like all windows has a fragile registry) and not bloated (though butt ugly (looked like w98)
Windows 2000 was the first GUI OS MS made that was stable and didn’t tend to blow up in your face. But it wasn’t anywhere near user friendly like OS-X…. so the direction they went with XP was correct.
Win9x was a process of getting people OFF of crappy MS-DOS systems (including not an OS, Windows3.x) as it had very good MS-DOS modes. Which, was a useful function when the GUI screwed up. By the time we hit WIn98se, they ironed out the bugs, but no way to fix its design flaws.
NT4.0 was a horrible OS. Install a SP, and it’ll kill the iOmega driver, re-install the driver and it would wipe out the SP.
It was easy enough to turn XP into the Win2000 look. But seriously, with 1GB RAM, XP runs fine for most people. When XP came out, many people were still used to 64mb~128mb WIn9x systems… when XP needed at least 256mb (back then) to be usable. After SP1 came out, XP became reliable.
“What ya smokin? Win95 was MS’s first GUI consumer Operating System. ”
Uh, no. Microsoft’s first consumer GUI OS was Windows 1. Windows 95 was their fourth.
I also think it was the best version of Windows, hands down. It easily had the nicest user interface, it had the best DOS compatibility, it was (relatively)simple, it had no DRM, no phone-home bullshit, no online product activation, no permissions, it had low hardware requirements, it didn’t bombard you with hundreds of warnings and pop-ups and dialogue boxes every time you tried to do something even vaguely technical, it was relatively simple to troubleshoot…
Then with every subsequent version of Windows, Microsoft began brutally butchering the user interface, entwining it with Internet Exploder, adding bloat, crippling the already questionable speed and memory performance, reducing DOS compatibility until it basically vanished, adding increasingly outrageous DRM, adding layers upon layers of extra complexity that had no conceivable payoff whatsoever to anyone except the programmers who either had to look like they were busy at their cubicles or get demoted/fired, adding thousands of new bugs, locking users out of their own PCs by restricting what they can do to an absurd degree, completely annihilating the already barely extant security to the point where undetectable and/or unremovable rootkits can be installed(while adding miserable new “security features” that allegedly make your PC safer and don’t, at all), making troubleshooting a hair-pulling, hours or even days long nightmare, etc. etc.
Case in point, here are a few Windows programs I need to use and I either have the choice of running them on Windows 95 slowly emulated through Virtual PC on this old PPC Mac, or I could run them on my vastly faster and newer PC laptop with XP. I choose Virtual PC for usability reasons. And I don’t mean that the programs have trouble running on XP.
“Windows8 being skipped by many corporations is not shocking or abnormal.”
What!? Corporations are a major slice of the Windows profit pie. Traditonally, they’ve slavishly upgraded to the latest and “greatest” version of Windows. The icy corporate reception of Vista and 7 has been seriously alarming for Microsoft. If they resist swiching to Windows 8 as well, or outright shun it completely, it’s major panic time in Redmond.
If they aren’t “upgrading” to the next version of Windows then when it comes time that they absolutely have to upgrade their fleet of PCs, then what exactly will they upgrade them to? Linux? Macs? iPads? All of the above? That’s to say nothing of the lost Win8 licenses and the licenses of all the expensive programs that require it.
Again, Windows 1~3.x are NOT Operating Systems. They required MS-DOS to function, otherwise – there is NO WAY to install Win 1-3. They had all the horrible MS-DOS limitations with 8.3 file names.
Windows 9x was a shoe-horned OS that had strong MS-DOS ties, it had something like a “translator” what allowed long file names (like on Mac, Amiga, Unix) but in DOS mode, you still viewed files as 8.3 but with a “~” for longer names. There were some advantages of having this, but it was flawed never the less.
Butchering the GUI? Just like MacOS, MS needed to enhance the look of the interface. Hey, nothing keeps you from running win95 look and feel if you want it. Yeah, the DRM, activation crap sucks… part of that is anti-piracy the other is DRM control of content, this has a lot to do with Hollywood for future streaming of content. I don’t like it then or now. But even Win95 had its own DRM and it stored way too much user info. Overall, Win95 was garbage, it was a crash factory and MS’s first “Plug N Play”, a feature that Amiga and Macs had since the 80s.
XP is far more stable than any Win9x… and Win7 is easily a better OS than XP in stability and performance. My ThinkPad has never been rock solid until I replaced XP with Win7.
I don’t know what your “usability reasons” are, but whatever works for you. Sometimes older stuff does work better. I still use FileMaker4, its from 1998 or so, but its mostly stable but its transportable (on my USB flash key) which makes it very “usable”.
Corporations spend 6~18 months validating an OS. They didn’t touch Vista because it was pure crap that offered very little to nothing over XP. It drank memory because their flaws in how they addressed memory, etc. yeah, a decent Vista PC required at LEAST 6~8GB compared to a 2~4GB Win7 system. With the two years of staying away from Vista, companies are having little issues going with Win7. Notice the Mac Ads about Vista a few years ago? They were funny, fun and somewhat true. Angered a lot of MS fanboys who can’t take a joke or take an honest look at the issues.
Honestly, who knows how Win8 will do. Many Win7 users are saying NO, before they even use it. We’ll have a year to play with it, iron out bugs or stupid functions… who knows how it’ll be in the end. For the most part, other than the metro-style interface, Win8 *IS* Win7.
Windows is losing market share to MacOS (slowly) and iOS (quickly) with iPads sales taking over netbook & notebook sales. Other than the ability to run MS-Office, there isn’t much of a reason to actually NEED MS-Windows.
So… MS needs to innovate, Win8 maybe the right direction for the future. No matter what, 10 years from now, we WON’T be using computers like we are today.
Between Windows 95 and Windows XP, Microsoft was the one calling the shots. Other companies, including Apple, were reacting to Microsoft’s moves.
Before Windows 95, Microsoft was playing catchup to Apple. While Windows 95 was not great, it was good enough to take on Macs, and Microsoft kept improving it incrementally.
After Windows XP, Microsoft had lofty goals with the Longhorn project, but Apple’s resurgence and constant goading (especially with the Get a Mac commercials) caused them to give up on Longhorn; Microsoft hacked together Vista instead because they just had to release “something.”
Apple also manipulated Microsoft into taking their eyes off the ball in the mobile space. Windows Mobile was actually in a leadership position for smartphones, but Microsoft essentially ignored it while frantically working on Vista. Meanwhile, Apple was secretly working on iPhone during the time that Windows Mobile languished.
When iPhone was released, Microsoft went into “denial mode” initially, but then panicked and threw their resources at what became Windows Phone 7. That was more Apple manipulation. Microsoft had been working on tablet computing for most of the decade, but Windows Phone 7 became the obsession. While Microsoft frantically worked on their answer to iPhone, Apple was secretly working on the REALLY BIG deal for the next decade, iPad. Microsoft had a bloated OS (Vista and then Windows 7) for full-sized computers and a PDA-class OS for smartphones (Windows Mobile and then Windows Phone 7). Unbelievably, Microsoft had NOTHING suitable for tablet computers, as redefined by Apple’s iPad.
NOW, Microsoft’s latest obsession in answering iPad with Windows 8. More Apple manipulation of Microsoft? I’ll bet Windows Phone 7 is getting less internal attention. And I’ll bet the non-tablet (“desktop”) component of Windows 8 is not a high priority either (“Win8 *IS* Win7”).
SO… I’ve got to believe Apple is again secretly working on something new (the next BIG thing) right now and it will be unleashed just as Microsoft finishes Windows 8. And then, it will be time for Microsoft’s next panicked obsession.
@ken1w
Interesting points… and I agree with most of what you said. But Win9x didn’t really catchup. Installing XP onto an HD… is a DOS environment, its horrible. Every time I did this (since I work in the PC business), I shake my head… Since 1990, with AmigaOS – you’d boot a floppy into a fully functional Desktop GUI OS. You go into HDTools (icon), setup your Hard Drive and then click a button to install the OS to the drive, that’s it. Even Win7’s setup tools are VERY limited in comparison… 20 years later.
MS-DOS and Windows, logically should NOT have been market leaders, the tech has been so sub-standard until the past few years. 🙁
I don’t think Apple did much, if any manipulation… MS is capable of doing its mistakes all its own. WP7 is an excellent piece of work by them… and they are STUPID to not make a tablet version and put their eggs into a full blown OS. I can see some advantages of having a FULL OS on a tablet… maybe it’ll fly.
But that makes the iPad and other mobile-OS tablets work well is that they are small OSes without the bloat and complexity of a full blown OS. I can see Win8 tablets locking up… how do you press CTRL-ALT-DEL? They require at least 10GB of storage space for the OS… which means slow hard drives, etc, etc… I see more problems than advantages with this route.
Don’t you know that Windows 8 is Ballmer’s love child born when he had sex with Windows 7 on his one functioning nut.
Would that be the Right One?
ROFLMAO!
@ balmers left nut.
Too effin funny.
What a contrast…Ballmer spastic hype versus Steve’s annual fireside chats about the new magic produced within the Apple design factory. Is there even a question about which is preferable? I’ll take the impassioned conversation with Steve anytime.
This is just another example of why Microsoft is hopelessly lost and in decline. Only the legacy of the Windows/Office monopoly is giving Microsoft the appearance of still being relevant.
His poor wife. That’s who I feel sorry for.
Repulsive doesn’t cover it.
I’m sure his bank account always makes her pain go away.
My god, what a slimy pig.
Windows 8 just bought Apple 3 more years.
Microsoft to Self: Well, at least we still have Office, right?
Right.
LOL
“The market is obviously waiting for Microsoft to have an OS that can run on a tablet that can compete with the iPad…”
Is the market obviously waiting for that? I don’t think so. I think the market has made a decision and the market is buying iPads as fast as they can be made.
I have not heard one person, nor read any article/blog, in which someone said they were waiting for Microsoft to release a tablet OS before they bought one.
The only recent articles have only made mention that Windows 8 may –– and I stress MAY –– give Microsoft an OS which can run on tablet hardware. Of course, actual real-world results will determine that.
oh I bet it can. but how many people want to lug around a 35lb tablet?
Oh come on now. It doesn’t have to weigh 35 lbs. Microsoft can do a tablet that weighs only 10lbs.
Afterall, the public has been waiting for a tablet that can double as a boat anchor so it has some function after all those windows malware and Microsoft designers have crippled the software.
I work in computer retail, and I’ve talked to plenty of customers that want a Windows tablet so that they can run all their familiar programs. Whether they have a clue what that would actually mean or how much it would suck is a whole other question, but there’s definitely (naive) demand for it.
It would redefine the term “run”…
Windows 8 on ARM will have to emulate the Intel instructions and I expect the battery drained before the splash screen of Word disappears.
Microsoft released a tablet OS over 10 years ago. 0.25% of Windows users have already said thanks with their purchases.
Microsoft is now going to refresh that 10 year old tablet OS.
Microsoft should be working on an iPad OS like Google did. But no, Microsoft has decided to remain 10 years behind their potential customers.
Companies have a history of skipping generation of Windows. Upgrading is a not very useful expenditure of their time & money. Although, there are two exceptions.
1) Windows ME was avoided. Then Win2000 was followed a year later by XP. When XP came out, a lot of companies had spent the past year evaluating 2000, so at first they avoided XP.
2) XP was around forever. MS was not aided by the stinker that was Vista. Now that Windows 07 has been out for over a year, some companies are still in the process of upgrading. Of course they’re not looking at Windows 08.
At the state u where I am, our IT dep’t is only now finishing upgrading Windows users to 7 this fall. Mac users are still waiting for them to finishing testing Lion. (Except for those of us who do our own support and ignored the “thou shalt wait for our blessing for us to load Lion on your machine” missive from IT which likely won’t come until January.)
Just don’t attach via SMB to an EMC NAS via Lion. Nice way to really tick off your IT department; spontaneous reboots of NAS devices are not, not, not cool.
I imagine this is more EMC’s fault than Apple’s, but it does illustrate why forging ahead on your own is not particularly good corporate citizenry.
I know what you mean, so I have a Snow Leopard partition for attaching to any IT hosted service on the rare occasion it’s useful to me (except email via imap) — I run Lion as a separate entity. (By the way, their NAS offers less than 1 GB per user, so most of us ignore it anyway. I wonder if that was their design :lol:)
The reason to wait is because there is not much expected in the desktop explorer shell. I mean they changed things but the vast majority of the work went into making essentially 2 userland layers.
You’ll have metro or mango or whatever they are calling it and they spent a lot of time building that layer.
The few cool things are the explorer shell being seperated out from the kernel more fully. You can run in tablet mode without using the resources of the traditional windows UI being loaded at all.
Hyper-V is integrated into the client OS and its reported to boot ilup fast and support ARM.
While nice improvements those things do not bring much to the table if you are an enterprise with a lot of desktop machines on win7.
We’ll prob skip it only because we roll on a 3 to 5 year run on our desktops and we are just now closing in on going to win7 from Xp. We skipped vista
Microsofts new motto should be Fix the old crap before adding more crap.
Totally.
Windows 8 had better be good (for their sake). In a lot of ways it is going to be a make it or break it release.
I’m typing this on my brand new Macbook Pro. I have been a heavy user of Windows over the years and I could go either way in the future. I sure seem to use macs a lot more than I ever did.
MS better deliver or they’ll lose more users.
Best news I have heard in a while. Hurray to Corp America passing on windozer 8, 9 and 10.
The problem is Microsoft is now aping Apple’s more consumer oriented model with Windows 8 which will alienate their business enterprise model (that HATES all that consumer lipstick) and that in a nutshell is probably why Apple commands the consumer market in mobile devices. And is rapidly gaining on PC’s, though granted has a ways to go. But I don’t think anyone here truly wants Macs to dominate. 35% market share would probably be good enough. 🙂
BTW Apple uses no lipstick as MS does, just baked-in sex appeal.
Because it’s HILARIOUS fun!!!
Another major shift is in OS deployment. Apple’s new digital distribution of a complete OS for $29 is going to quickly make buying upgrades for hundreds of dollars or boxes of bulky packaging off a shelf seem arcane and cumbersome. More and more companies are going to be looking at TCO and factoring in semi-annual upgrades will definitely play a major role in those decisions.
“…a word that gives consumers goosebumps: tablets.”
All these researchers and analysts keep getting their terms wrong. Written correctly, that phrase is:
“…a word that gives consumers goosebumps: iPads.”
I have not heard a single person say, “Ooh, I can hardly wait for Microsoft’s Windows 8 tablet!” I don’t think anyone even cares.
They’re out there though, believe me.
Yes, but most would say that they “can’t hardly wait” . . .
Make that “cain’t hardly wait, by cracky” . . .
It has been a while since Balmer made any comments regarding Apple or its products. What is happening? Is he tired of being so wrong that he is afraid to embarrassed himself one again? I miss them, I miss Balmer making comments.
The market may be waiting, but are the consumers?
Steve has eaten Microsoft alive! It’s a delectable final stroke on his masterpiece of revenge even tho I’m sure he was driven by far more noble objectives! Microsoft must be having fits about the $150 million it invested in Apple! What goes around comes around! Apple is King!
Microsoft did not invest $150 million into Apple – they paid for the license to use Quicktime. It was not Microsoft’s decision – it was the courts. Apple was cash rich then (as it is now) when M$ paid the fees.
Yes. MS stole QuickTime code.
These are two different issues. Microsoft did steal QuickTime code for their media player software – the “copyright Apple” line was still in the distributed software from Microsoft. Courts ordered MS to pay up. (It was a contractor that wrote the code, but it sure was in there.)
The announcement was definitely phrased as an “investment” which gave a real PR boost to Apple.
But Apple was NOT cash rich – they were only a few weeks from bankruptcy. One of the first things Jobs did upon his return (as an advisor) was to have Fred Anderson, CFO, issue half a billion dollars of junk bonds to keep the doors open.
Now, 14 years later, Apple makes half a billion in profit every two weeks (Q3 FY2011)
Thank you Steve
How was Apple a few weeks from bankruptcy when they had little to no debt? Under what debt obligation were they struggling to meet?
Take a look at the numbers. Rather than no debt, they were burning through money at an amazing rate, market share had collapsed, and they had no significant cash position.
The Business Week summary:
http://www.businessweek.com/1997/34/roster34/aapl.htm
In that blizzard of BusinessWeek numbers I see $1.7 billion in cash reserve. Hardly “near bankruptcy”. That sounds more like the Wall Street market share myth that screamed to rule all criteria.
One of the last table identifies some of the critical information for 1997.
While Apple did have $1.745B in cash, it had $2.003B in immediate debt as well as $949M in long term debt.
Change in cash flow for the year was negative $659M – the first negative in many years. This was not a healthy company –
But the great news is now, 14 years later, Apple has close to $94B cash and long term securities on hand and no debt!
If the Moore’s law holds, it won’t be long before MicroSoft can fit a complete Windows installation on a tablet or phone.
Ahh that’s a day to look forward to.
Then Windopes can have all their viruses and keyloggers on every malware infested device, everywhere they go. There no downside really …. it’s simply like being at a casino where these techno-“winners” are free to roll the dice by clicking mere hyperlinks and risk their whole farm.
Microsoft is a dead horse that can’t even cross the finish line, much less win the race.
Windows 8? Hell, my employer still hasn’t started switching to Windows 7 and won’t have that switch finished until sometime next year.
We switched from Win2000 to XP in late 2004, three years after XP came out. We’ll be on Win7 by the end of next spring. With the degree of caution we exercise, there’s no way we’d migrate to yet another OS until 2015 at the earliest. And I don’t think we’re unusual for businesses of our size.
Microsoft gave up the ability to switch quickly from one OS generation to the next when they decided to concentrate on enterprise users rather than consumers.
——RM
Mine went XP only 3 years ago and only because one of the main software suppliers refused to take W2000 into account in the latest updates.
Eight is Enough
+1
The web has killed windows. As applications move from the desktop to a web server, the desktop market needs windows fir business less and less every day.
I run macs and Linux computers at home and no longer have a single program the requires I run windows.
At work all my applications that I develop are OS independent. We use windows 7 on the desktops but many of us spend most of our time in UNIX or Linux. The servers are windows but again they don’t have to be except for email, since we run exchange. Now that I think about it, exchange is probably microsoft’s last staple that binds users to windows in the corporate world.
Now Balmer wants to move their OS to the tablet? But not this year, sometime in the next 2-3 years. They just dint get it. Microsoft tablets have been around fir years. They are all failures, and the windows 8 tablet will be too.
People don’t want tablets, they want iPads. Just ask HP
If Apple disappeared, I wouldn’t be looking at Windows, I’d be looking at Android or, while it was still promising and relevant- Web OS. Microsoft will be around only as long as people crave mediocrity.
Mediocrity- there’s an app for that!
Mediocrity- there’s an OS for that!