“Two of the people who saved Windows — Jon DeVaan and Grant George, who delivered Windows 7 from the jaws of Windows infamy — left the company earlier this week,” Woody Leonhard reports for InfoWorld. “Two more — Julie Larson-Green and Jensen Harris — whom many blame, er, ‘credit’ with the Office ribbon and Windows tinker toy tiles, have found new homes buried deep in corporate nowhere land. Former Windows chief Steve Sinofsky jumped ship more than a year ago, probably because he was denied Ballmer’s CEO brass ring. And Antoine Leblond of the original Office 95-2007/Windows 7-8 inner circle remains missing in action.”
“These departures/transfers not only solidify a complete housecleaning of the Windows effort, they mark the end of a ‘monolithic Windows’ era,” Leonhard reports. “It’s becoming clear that future versions of the Win7 desktop may get a nip here and a tuck there, but massive improvements aren’t likely. More important, the breakup of the old crew sends as clear a sign as any that the powers-that-be at Microsoft realize Windows 8 screwed up big time: The whole management team responsible for Windows 8 has just hung out the ‘gone fishing’ sign.”
Leonard concludes, “The wholesale dismemberment of the Windows 8/8.1 management team says in no uncertain terms that the higher-ups at Microsoft, whomever they may be, are extremely disappointed with Windows 8.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Good riddance!
The Dark Ages of Personal Computing are over! Viva la Renaissance!
Oh, yeah: We told ya so way back MacDailyNews on June 1, 2011, ont he very day Microsoft Windows 8ista’s new “user interface” to the world. If only Microsoft’s somnambulant BoD were smart enough to read MacDailyNews and take it to heart, they could have saved untold man-hours and billions of dollars:
Microsoft, in trying to cram everything into Windows 8 in an attempt to be all things to all devices, will end up with an OS that’s a jack of all trades and a master of none (which, after all, ought to be Microsoft’s company motto)… We simply do not see the world clamoring for the UI of an iPod also-ran now ported to an iPhone wannabe that nobody’s buying to be blown up onto a PC display.
From what we’ve seen so far, Windows 8 strikes us as an unsavory combination of Windows Weight plus Windows Wait.
Not to mention that probably no one on earth knows how much or what kinds of residual legacy spaghetti code roils underneath it all (shudder)… If Microsoft’s going to ask Windows sufferers to “learn a whole new computer” (and that’s exactly how they’ll look at it, regardless of how Microsoft pitches it), millions will simply say, “Time to get a Mac to match my iPod, iPhone, and iPad!”
As if they needed it: More good news for Apple.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
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Turns out, nobody wants to touch Windows 8 (and Microsoft is screwed) – August 20, 2013
Windows 8 continues to flop hard – June 3, 2013
Microsoft offers no apology for Windows 8, promises better with Windows Blue (Screen of Death) – May 7, 2013
Windows 8ista: Microsoft admits failure – May 7, 2013
Microsoft partners say Windows 8 caused ‘millions of customers’ to switch to Apple – April 18, 2013
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Steve Jobs’ revenge – April 12, 2013
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Gartner: PC Market posts 11.2 percent decline in Q113; Apple Mac sales up 7.4 percent in U.S. – April 10, 2013
More good news for Apple: Microsoft previews Windows 8 (with video) – June 1, 2011