“Windows has failed, PCs are dead, and the misery that is Windows 8 is to blame but why? There is one possibility that occurred to us that no SemiAccurate writer has seen posited yet, tablet OSes,” Charlie Demerjian writes for SemiAccurate. “From before day one SemiAccurate was critical of Windows 8 and Surface, we were the first to point out how serious ‘partner’ enmity was over that disaster was. Windows 8 can not compete in the tablet world for technical reasons, and will never be able to bridge the gap. Partners are in an even worse position, Windows tablets are financially untenable and they know it. With Windows 8, Microsoft has failed.”
“The main problem is that people HATE Windows 8. Worse yet this isn’t because of some dark conspiracy to slander poor defenseless and completely upstanding Microsoft, people hate Windows 8 because it is a fundamentally awful user experience,” Demerjian writes. “Everyone SemiAccurate has put it in front of has ended up buying a Mac or Windows 7 if that is still an option so it should come as no surprise that Apple Mac sales are more or less flat while PC sales are cratering. Coincidence?”
“Developers have been burned again and again, Phone 7.x, Phone 8.x, Windows 8 managed code, support, ads promises, and much more have left a decimated developer landscape for Windows 8 manged code aka Apps. What is left is pay to play, MS has to walk around with cash in hand to get most apps started and many developers won’t bother even when incentivized. No market is no market even if the development costs are somewhat subsidized,” Demerjian writes. “If you don’t understand how dire this state of affairs is, you might want to think about it long and hard. Microsoft is on the software death spiral already and is holding the line, barely, with buckets of cash. Any sign of weakness on their part and the little software support they can still manage to buy goes away.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Told ya so (and long before SemiAccurate or anybody else for that matter, too). Please see the two related articles below, each of which was published on the very day iPad and Windows 8 were revealed.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Tayster” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
Why I’ll be buying an Apple iPad – along with millions of others – January 27, 2010
More good news for Apple: Microsoft previews Windows 8 (with video) – June 1, 2011
Microsoft is far from dead. They still command a huge chunk of the corporate sector. I’m not a Microsoft fanboy by an means, however, the corporate world isn’t going to give up on them anytime soon and jump into the Apple camp. Yes, Microsoft has done a horrible job in the consumer market…..but it’s the business to business market that will them afloat.
The people who suffered under Hitler and Communism where the gullible masses who cheered them when they came to power.
Apple-masses (as compared to the original Think-Different users) are unwittingly cheering the demise of Apple, without one second’s thought of what an all-Apple dictatorship would look like.
I’d bet my house that MDN hasn’t spared a thought of what horrors the utopia will look like once Apple shoves Microsoft off the cliff.
Be afraid, minions, be afraid, for the monster you cheer to kill the Gates-meister will make you its slaves once it comes to power.
If you think an Apple-dominated world will be more fun and better than a Microsoft-dominated world, all I can say is, history repeats itself for the foolish masses who think themselves intelligent.
People like MDN are pawns in a power-broking game far larger than what they can conceive.
The new Dictator will discard the wastrels who brought it to power thinking they’d be rewarded in the new kingdom.
An all-Apple world will be darker than an all-Microsoft world because the second dark lord will not just control the OS but also the hardware of not just one platform (desktop) but also the platforms for mobile devices.
Think people, think. Or is that too much to ask the masses who are satiated on digital bread and circuses?
Chill, Microsoft is not dead, just reeling from a paradigm shift in technology, Apple isn’t positioned to move in for the kill, could not accomplish that and has no motivation to do so. Vocal outbreaks on blogs have no effect on actual economics. What will happen is a series of adjustments in the technology industries. There will be no apocalypse, this is not a literal war, only an emotional expression amounting to the joy of liberation from a cultural gulag. Nobody said Apple was the truth and the light, only that it was a glimmer of hope during a reign of crushing mediocrity. I mean, come on.
The tech industry would be a crappy boring place without Apple. Apple has been leading the way for over 30 years. Without Apple and left to its own devices, we’d still be typing in commands and running something that looks like DOS. just look at what Samsung’s phones looked like before Apple showed them the way. He’ll, they pretty much copied it verbatim and without shame or a second thought. Even with the advantage of Apple showing the way, Microsoft still can’t get it right. They actually seem to be going backwards. Windows 8 is turning out to be a bigger failure than anything else they’ve ever done. And they still actually think they can fix it and make it viable and attractive to users. Good luck with that. I like your strategy, I like it a lot.
“Incomptetent?” Seriously? Does the headline writer have some of Ballmer’s genes?